A question I received: You have said that the goal of human development, the reason we are born, is to reveal the Upper World inside us, to acquire His qualities and love for Him, as well as for the entire universe. Practically speaking, this means we must attain the ability to feel unconditional, infinite Love.

How will humanity be able to come to this end state if every person subconsciously operates by a strict calculation: how to fulfill his own instinctive needs to eat, drink, sleep (don’t worry about sex – it’s just extra work) and protect himself from others? Today a person may even let his own children and family starve, because he perceives even them as external and alien. For the same reason, people (especially youth) do not even fear death, because there is nothing to lose; this is no life. This is not anyone’s fault, but it’s a disaster!

Fear is no longer a motivator. So what can force all of this to change? In theory, the sensation of lack is what motivates a person forward. But how can one strive toward something he doesn’t feel, and therefore has no sensation of lack related to it?

My Answer: You will see that all of a sudden, people will start to feel the desire for spirituality, and will start to behave accordingly. After all, they are puppets, and are now experiencing a sensation of emptiness and lack of purpose. It is all happening according to the Creator’s plan. There is a time and a place for everything. And as for you, the next stage is already beginning to happen!

Our entire lives are a process of gathering the sensations necessary to come to feel the Creator. Therefore, resistance is useless. What we have to do is speed up the process. That is how everything will change. You will then acquire the same impressions, but without the suffering.

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A question I received: When a person crosses the Machsom, where does he sense this attainment?

My Answer: Everything is sensed internally. It is similar to how you sense yourself and this world today. You always feel either suffering or pleasure within. This is also how you will sense spirituality.

The method is very simple. You will learn what pleasure and suffering are, how you currently sense them, and how you can begin to interact with them, enjoy them and gain control over them.

After all, our material is the desire to enjoy, and the Creator is the pleasure that’s revealed inside this desire, along with the Source of the desire. This is why there is nothing besides the Kelim, and why you will sense the spiritual world in the same way that you sense the physical world. Don’t think that spirituality is far away or out in space somewhere. In Kabbalah, you are learning precisely about what is currently taking place inside of you, as well as what will take place in the future.

However, there is one big difference in spirituality. Today, I sense my life and my existence inside my small Kli. In fact, it is so small and limited that our lives can’t really be considered real life. Once we expand our Kli, however, we will feel life and existence based upon a new condition: that we want to use our lives as a means to help us pass pleasure on to others, to bestow, to love, and to come out of ourselves. Otherwise, if the Kli remains egoistic, the pleasure is negated within it.

In other words, even now you are filled with Infinite Light. But you neutralize this Light with your egoism, because when the Light of Infinity reaches a desire, it immediately turns off, as though it short-circuits between two opposite ends that have no resistance between them. You have to use your own egoism as that resistance, and then you will feel the pleasure. Otherwise, the pleasure is not sensed and leaves. What we are left with is this minuscule corporeal life, where all we sense is just a spark of Light in order to have something to cling to.

But the pleasure that is ahead of you is billions of times greater. There is no obstacle to getting this pleasure; you only have to expand your Kli. Everything depends on you. All you need is the Kli, but the infinite pleasure is sitting right in front of you.

What does “infinite” mean, and how can the Kli be infinite? When your Kli reaches the size initially intended by the Creator, it will feel unlimited pleasure. This is what an infinite Kli is.

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Spirituality takes the form you build for it out of your own desires. The only thing we receive from Above is an informational record, a Reshimo, but then we have to build the form ourselves. In addition, if we request it, we also receive from Above the strength and the intelligence to implement this.

Some people think that a ready-made world will suddenly come tumbling down on them from Above. But it’s pointless to wait for this to happen. We have to build the spiritual world through our own efforts. We have to draw this world ourselves on the background of the Light.

To the extent I make efforts, I draw the image of the Upper Level and it gradually becomes truer. I do everything in my power, such as imagining various forms. Sometimes I am better at it and sometimes worse, and sometimes I am mistaken. I create them and erase them over and over again until I achieve success.

In the process of this work, I suddenly see that the Upper Level begins to help me! It clothes into me like a hand in a glove, and works there. It helps me like a mother playing with her child, helping him to build a house out of Lego pieces. When I try to do something, and succeed, I suddenly feel that it is the Upper Level that helped me understand the proper way to do something, and that it was not the way that I thought was right.

However, all of this happens by virtue of my efforts, because I try to build something. The Upper Level elicits the beginning of my inner effort, but I am the one who has to continue it. I have to find the “sprout” and begin to work with it. This is the meaning of the verse, “I, the Creator, am the first and the last.”

The way to build the place where the Creator will be revealed is by building a connection with our friends. We thus build the “picture of the Creator” by using our own matter. Without this, He has no image. I project Him onto myself, onto my own desires, onto the part of me that I can make similar to Him.

Then, using this desire as the basis or as a screen, I begin to see a “picture” of Him. It begins to be projected onto this screen, like a photograph dipped into a developing solvent. This picture, which is shown on my screen, is called “Reflected Light.” This is how I receive two spiritual forces: the “screen” and the “Reflected Light.”

But all of this has to come from me. That is why time and a preparation period of about three to five years are required to enter the spiritual world. The time of concealment is when I make attempts to build this picture. And then, the spiritual world becomes revealed…

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What is the result of all our material development, which people value so highly? What have we achieved with all of our hard work, our “Egyptian labor with clay and bricks,” as one Kabbalistic text says about the Egyptian slavery, the exile from spirituality? The result is that we are now nearing the revelation of the spiritual world and are opening our eyes to the fact that people have been doing absolutely nothing of value in this world! People are doing things that are absolutely unnecessary to anyone! Yes, they invent all sorts of crafty gadgets, but could we really not live without all these things?

The more people develop, the more time they spend on useless activities, and the more they go beyond the bare minimum necessary for life. Today, if we reverted to spending time only on the things that are vitally necessary, most of us would be left with nothing to do. Only five percent of the population would have to work in order to provide all of humanity with the necessities. Alternatively, each one of us could allocate five percent of his time to provide for his livelihood.

All the leftover time would be dedicated to our spiritual development. And why not? You don’t get any benefit from spending all your time on material things. In fact, all you are doing by this is damaging the environment.

There is nothing more for a person to do in this world other than to work on his spiritual correction. Otherwise we would have the problem of what to do with the elderly who need to be provided for.  What would be the point of taking care of them if we believe that only the actively working people are of any benefit?

Indeed, our lives must follow the opposite principle. All we need is to give every person the method for his internal correction, and then there will be a place for everyone. Every person will carry out work for the sake of infinity, because the soul has no age. And it is precisely the elderly who will make some of the biggest corrections.

The more time we spend on “clay and bricks,” the more we advance toward reaching the realization that we are in slavery. And the weight of this realization will make people cry out to the Creator and thus rise to the “human” level. And that is the only benefit that we will get out of all our material development.

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In the News (from The Guardian): “No sex please, we’re British and we’re lazier than ever” – Despite a huge government push to encourage healthy living, Britons are lazier than ever, concludes the study conducted by Nuffield Health. One in six people would rather watch a TV programme they didn’t like rather than leave the sofa to change the channel if their remote control was broken. A third (36%) …would not run to catch a bus and more than half (59%) would not walk up two flights of stairs to reach their office, choosing instead to take the lift. More than half of dog owners (52%) did not walk their dogs, and two-thirds (64%) of parents admit to always being too tired to play with their children. The laziness epidemic appears to have spread to the bedroom, with almost three-quarters (73%) of couples saying they regularly do not have enough energy at the end of the day to have sex, with more than half (58%) blaming a lack of fitness … The nation has fallen into a vicious circle of laziness…

My Comment: Kabbalah says that there is no laziness, but only lack of interest, meaning a lack of desire. Now we are going through a stage where our desires are changing from material to spiritual, and this explains that apparent laziness. In other words, it is a lack of desire to fulfill those previous desires that we used to have, but are no longer tangible to us.

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Question: How can we educate children today, when they are surrounded by so many temptations? How can we help them avoid the influence of the environment on their small egos, and give them an education that will make spiritual development become the most important thing in their lives?

Answer: This is much easier than it seems. If we give children the right examples, then they will copy them onto their relatively pure matter. It’s written that educating a child is like writing on a clean sheet of paper, since he is still not damaged by all the social “garbage,” confusion and egoistical calculations, as is the case with adults.

Obviously, children are also egoists; they want to deceive one another in order to succeed. They make calculations very quickly and act for the sake of self-interest. But their behavior is natural and, therefore, it appears different than ours. With the same natural ease, they absorb our explanations about the system they exist in, about the world and the correct kind of relationships. Such explanations penetrate deep into their feelings, and thus you are able to build their inner system.

It can be compared to a computer system. By itself, the PC is nothing but a piece of metal that is incapable of doing anything. But when you install a program into it, the program determines how all of the computer’s components will connect and how they will function. If you install another program into the computer, then it will cancel the previous one and instruct the components to connect differently.

In the same way, when you install a new program into the child’s “hardware,” he will live according to the program’s instructions. This is called “raising a human being,” and the outcome depends on the spiritual level of the adults that are raising the child.

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In the News (from Astronomy.com): “Venus Express searching for life — on Earth” Scientists using European Space Agency’s (ESA) Venus Express are trying to observe whether Earth is habitable. Silly, you might think, when we know that Earth is richly stocked with life. In fact, far from being a pointless exercise, Venus Express is paving the way for an exciting new era in astronomy. One thing has become obvious from the study of Earth using Venus Express: determining whether a planet is habitable is not going to be easy. Although the observations may not tell us anything new about Earth, they will allow us to unveil far-off worlds, making them seem more real than simply dots of light.

My Comment: Science is not yet capable of making conclusions about life in the universe. We cannot even detect life on our planet… It’s possible only to determine whether there are certain conditions for life’s existence.

At a certain stage of man’s development, he becomes interested in the existence of life in the cosmos. However, as his attention (desire) grows, he aspires to search for that which is eternal and perfect, something higher than the corporeal, beyond the animate level of life. In other words, he aspires to the spiritual world.

At that point, the question of whether other forms of life are possible in the universe disappears, as it becomes replaced by the aspiration to attain the next level of development – the “human” level.

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Two questions I received about humanity during the last generation:

Question: How will the new kind of humanity live?

My Answer: The new kind of humanity will be organized according to people’s development, rather than according to orders. Baal HaSulam describes this in the book, “The Last Generation.” In addition, this will only last until humanity completely corrects itself and attains bestowal at the level of the Creator. Then the physical world we see today will vanish.

Question: If a person remains in his corporeal body, then all his desires must also remain, including his animate desires.

My Answer: Every desire has a use. Our desires are not considered egoistic if they are necessary for our existence. When they are used for this purpose, they start to be perceived as spiritual. This is because food, sex and any other desire are the means by which we come to be like the Creator. They are the means by which we are able to become part of the common harmony of nature.

People will reach a state where the purpose of supporting one’s spiritual and corporeal body is to exist in the realm of bestowal and love.

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Two questions I received regarding relationships and the spiritual path:

Question: I got married in Peru. After a few years of marriage, my husband left me and our two daughters. Out of despair, I left to go work in Korea. There, I met a good man and we’ve been together 12 years, and have a son who is 9. Is it necessary for me to get an official divorce in order to form a Kabbalistic family?

My Answer: No. No method of registering a person’s marital status invented and performed in this world has any influence on your spiritual development.

Question: I have been studying Kabbalah for almost two years and have been actively involved in dissemination. My partner has also been doing the same. Since I started studying Kabbalah, I’ve come to understand that I want our relationship to be formalized through marriage and that I want to have children. However, he doesn’t feel the same, although he wants to continue living with me. Is my desire proper?

My Answer: You are right to demand marriage and children. Pass my opinion on to him. A person who is working on his spiritual correction has to do everything that regular people do in this world. It is said: “I dwell among my people,” (Be toch ami anochi echevet).

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A question I received: Changes are taking place at the White House, a new President has come to power, and the pressure on Israel has increased. This can lead to the intensification of conflicting views in our nation. Maybe we should concentrate our thoughts on this particularly?

My Answer: Politics is unstable and nonlinear; the public’s expectations of political figures very rarely match politicians’ plans; instead, they are aimed at particular goals. It is a complicated matter, which we shouldn’t try to penetrate.

However, it is necessary to understand that, to the extent that the nation of Israel delays carrying out its mission, the pressure on it will increase. We must lead people to understand and feel the need for correction. They must agree to play their role in the spiritual development of all of humanity. The nation of Israel should understand and accept this duty and realize its fault for what is happening.

The pressure on us will grow in order to wake up the nation of Israel. This is precisely what has happened to us over the course of history – starting with the Egyptian pharaoh and on present time. Prophets wrote about this; they said that if we don’t come to realize what responsibility is placed on us, we will need to go through very difficult trials.

The pressure that we experience is nothing more than the states that we have not yet corrected, and although we need to, we have not taken advantage of the opportunities that have been presented to us. To the extent that the pressure increases, we can judge our uncorrected states. However, the states themselves are revealed only to the extent of a person’s development.

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