A question I received: Is everything we are now reading in The Book of Zohar describing my present state or my future state?

My Answer: That doesn’t matter. There is no present or future; everything takes place here and now. If I am reading a novel, then I experience everything its heroes do. I feel as if I am really together with them on a ship amidst a raging storm. I am overtaken by worry and fear, when I suddenly see a beautiful, enigmatic island…

Am I really there or not? No – it’s just my imagination. When I close the book, I go back to the “real” reality.

However, when I read a book about the spiritual world and identify with its characters, forces, and qualities, then I am really there in my desire and I reveal my true self more and more through the reading. I reveal a new world where I really live.

The Zohar describes everything that takes place in your desire. If you unite with this book, you really go through the phases it describes. You are really living inside that spiritual reality, and you just might be swallowed by a hungry crocodile…

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I receive many responses regarding how people feel about reading The Book of Zohar. In the science of Kabbalah a person teaches himself; he is the child and the teacher at the same time.

We have to discover a whole new world where our development starts from scratch, from a total absence of perception. We gain an increasingly greater perception of it until we attain all of it, and in the process, we go through the same stages of development as children: we experience confusion, look at the world childishly, and perceive it strangely or incompletely compared to adults. We don’t really understand what we are doing and what’s the use of it all. But meanwhile, we develop.

We have to go through the phases of development labeled 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4; when we reach the fourth level (Behina Dalet), we attain our root, the primary cause. Then we understand “why and how.” We understand the path we went through and how we have to react to it. But this attainment comes only at the end.

That’s why you don’t show a fool a job half done, since halfway through it looks even worse than in the beginning. It’s similar to how pieces of material appear before they are sown together into a suit, or a car that has been disassembled into parts, or a patient’s body in the middle of an operation. We are unable to understand the final result since we must first develop the desires and qualities necessary for seeing this. It says in Item 137 of “Introduction to Talmud Eser Sefirot” that heroes are those who are patient, and they are the only ones who will reach the King’s castle and enter through its gates.

We have to accept all the stages of this path where we start out like small children, having no understanding of what we are doing and what is happening to us. Sometimes we feel new qualities emerging within us, and sometimes we feel completely empty. Throughout it all, we must remain patient and aim for inner development.

The science of Kabbalah is called the inner part of the Torah because it talks about a person who develops his own desires. When one’s desires go through the four levels of development, then on the fourth level one reveals the spiritual world. Therefore, all our attention and focus must be aimed inside ourselves. We must develop inner sensations along the four phases of desire, together with the mind that develops alongside.

Everything The Zohar speaks about is intended for developing our inner sensation. All our work lies in developing the sensation of the spiritual reality from the point in the heart. This point does not feel any spirituality yet, which is why we don’t understand the words and notions we read in this book. We are just trying, with the help of the “Sulam Commentary,” to imagine what we read in the form of three lines: the right, left and middle lines, and to discern whether something is higher or lower in the ten main Sefirot, whether it’s external or internal, Galgalta ve Eynaim or AHP, Tzimtzum Bet or Parsa.

If I don’t understand what these names mean, then I must at least try to see the geometrical relationships between them so that some kind of picture will emerge. In this way I gradually reveal the true perception of reality and understand that it exists only inside of me. I understand the significance of the material existence in relation to the spiritual one and find out which one of them is the true reality and which is just a dream.

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The four prefaces to The Book of Zohar help tune us to correctly perceive this book. These prefaces are: “Introduction to The Book of Zohar,” “Preface to The Book of Zohar,” “Preface to the Sulam Commentary,” and “Introduction to the Preface to the Wisdom of Kabbalah.” They are intended to teach us the language of The Book of Zohar so that we can understand as well as expect changes within ourselves as a result of its influence.

This is how we begin to understand that everything happens within our desire, and that there is nothing except our desire and the Light. Everything happens within our soul as we start to develop. Therefore, the prefaces are important because they direct us to the correct approach. Reversely, if we open The Book of Zohar unprepared, we won’t understand anything!

We should work together to understand The Book of Zohar. If we learn how to approach it correctly, continue to read it, and go deeper into this book, then we’ll travel through it like a wonderland; it will become our world because we’ll live in it. As we read and sense these adventures, we grow, gaining knowledge of the spiritual world and our soul which exists within it.

But first we have to enter that world. The most important thing is to break through and be born inside it. When we find our orientation within The Book of Zohar, we begin recognizing its language, such as father and mother, relatives and strangers, friends, enemies, and so on. We start to understand who they are by the forces they represent. There is nothing but forces which we learn to visualize correctly by finding the right approach.

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The wider I reach out to collect all parts of the broken common soul into a single unified whole, the stronger the force that I acquire which enables me to attain the system that The Zohar describes. It tells us how to attain unity and to build our common spiritual body out of all souls and desires. When all those separate and contradictory desires unite together, they form a new, living system of life because despite their differences, they start working in harmony for the sake of achieving one goal. This is when they attain spiritual life.

Each one works in opposition to others – one moves this way, the other moves that way. It’s just like an orchestra where each violin player moves his bow in a different direction and each drummer hits the drums with the sticks moving up and down at different times, but the whole orchestra performs in harmony.

We have to understand that we can attain spirituality only by connecting different, opposite parts for the sake of reaching one ultimate goal, the Creator. When they connect for the sake of this goal, they thereby attain spiritual life.

It turns out that everyone has their own place and a right to exist; all we need is correction!

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The Book of Zohar – Selections, Chapter “Bo (Come Unto Pharaoh),” Item 51
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The whole world is parts of my desire, of myself. However, I don’t feel that others are part of me and therefore I’m not concerned about them whatsoever. Let the whole world burn, I don’t care!

The science of Kabbalah teaches us to reveal the truth – to see that everything “outside” of us is us, our desire. What we perceive as ourselves as well as the external world must all merge within us into one desire.

The Creator created only the desire, which is where we exist. We cannot see or sense anything beyond that desire. We reveal the Creator within our desire, which is why He is called “the Creator” – Bo-Reh, “come and see.” This world is what we feel right now, and the world to come is what we will feel a moment from now.

Everything takes place within the same desire, but we begin to perceive more and more things within it. We experience countless impressions, but in fact, this external reality doesn’t exist; it is merely the various phenomena that appear within our desire. This place we are in, this world, and this whole reality are imaginary. Once we discover the world of truth, we will exclaim: “We were in a dream!”

We must reveal the truth in order to awaken to the true reality, much like a person awakens from unconsciousness. This is the purpose of the science of Kabbalah – to return us to consciousness. Until then, it’s no use speaking to a person because if he currently exists in an unconscious state, he must first be reanimated back to life.

Therefore, when we open The Book of Zohar, we must imagine that nothing exists other than our desire. This world, myself, and everyone around me – none of these things exist. They are all my illusion.

There is only one desire to enjoy, and everything that can possibly happen takes place within that desire. This world and the world to come, life and death, the still, vegetative, animate and human levels of nature – there is no other place for any of them to be other than my inner desire to enjoy.

The Book of Zohar allows us to enter a state of feeling everything within our desire. That is what the Kabbalists call the spiritual world.

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A question I received: I’ve heard you say that everything which I think exists outside of me are actually my inner desires. However, I see a particular picture of the world on the outside, so how is it that I’m supposed to connect this picture to my desires?

My Answer: Don’t start doing this under any circumstances! When you cross the street for example, you shouldn’t be thinking that the cars passing by exist inside you, or that all this is a game of the imagination – not at all! This is why Kabbalists wrote The Book of Zohar, which is a special book.

All textbooks contain exercises in addition to explanations. Well, The Book of Zohar is a collection of exercises as well. While reading this book, we need to constantly imagine that everything written in it exists inside of us, and to search for all these desires and qualities in us.

“Reading” The Book of Zohar means imagining everything that it describes as a world which exists inside us. Then the right perception of reality will come to us naturally. Yet, for the time being, we are only reading The Book of Zohar with a desire to feel and understand it inside us.

The Book of Zohar tells us about Cohens and Levites, about Aaron and Moses, about the Creator and creation, about various qualities, the Sefirot, the Partzufim, about a donkey and a bull, and so on. Instead of these items, we must picture only our inner qualities and nothing else. There is no person – our body does not exist.

There is no world or anything at all because everything has disappeared. So what is there? There is the desire and the book that describes what exists in our desire. However, this book uses names and titles that confuse us, since they rouse feelings from this imaginary world in us. We leave this whole world behind and don’t wish to think about it; it is as though we are hanging in midair and are made only of a desire.

However, these names remind us of our world. And through our effort to imagine only our inner desires and qualities instead of these names, we draw the Light that Reforms (or the Surrounding Light) to ourselves. Through this effort we begin to reveal our point in the heart (our desire, the embryo of the soul), and then to expand it. Suddenly we begin to make out the different qualities which The Book of Zohar tells us about, as well as the connection between them.

This takes time. However, after a few months of training, we begin to feel a sensory response to every word written in The Book of Zohar, such as “Aaron,” “The Temple,” and so on. As if out a fog, from complete lack of knowledge and feeling, things suddenly begin to be elucidated and we start to feel the connection between them and to understand what they signify. From a point, we begin to reveal a whole desire where all these parts exist in an interconnection.

This is how we reveal the whole of creation instead of this illusory picture currently illustrated in us, which blocks the true reality. Consequently, this false picture will vanish altogether. Therefore in its entirety, The Book of Zohar is a collection of exercises which we perform with every word that is written in it, helping us to identify the corresponding quality within.

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The Book of Zohar, Chapter “Shmini (On the Eighth Day),” Item 98: “And the Lord (the main property of bestowal within us) spoke unto Moses (another property of bestowal) and to Aaron, (yet another property; in other words, there is a part between other parts within us, which connect), saying unto them: ‘…This is the animal that you may eat.’”

It writes Aaron because he always separates the impure from the pure (a property within us that separates pure desires from impure desires is called “Aaron”), since Aaron is Hesed and illumination of Hochma, Haya. The difference between an impure and pure Haya [animal] (in us) is only the Hesed (the property of Hesed is mercy, pure bestowal).

The impure cling to the left line, which is separated from the right, Hochma without Hassadim, from which all the darkness and judgments extend – where the right line means bestowal and the left line means reception.

In other words, if we have the Light of Hochma without the Light of Hassadim, we are in the darkness. But why is it dark if the Light of Hochma is present; after all, the Light of Hochma is the opposite of darkness? If it is received for the sake of ourselves and our egoism, then we feel darkness, which means that we don’t sense spirituality.

We are all currently submerged into absolute darkness and don’t see the spiritual world because we lack the Light of Hassadim, the Light of Love and Bestowal. Thus we are drowning in an ocean of the Light of Hochma in the World of Infinity, but don’t feel even a drop of this Infinite Light.

Why don’t we feel it? It’s because we don’t have the Light of Hassadim. As soon as we obtain the Light of Hassadim, the desire to bestow that has to be initiated by creation (us), then in that same instant the Light of Hochma will be covered by the Light of Hassadim.

All we need is the Light of Bestowal (Hassadim). There is an abundance of the Light of Hochma all around us, but without the Light of Hassadim we sense it as darkness, or in our case, as an unconscious state.

And the pure ones cling to the left line that is included in the right, when Hochma is clothed in Hesed, from which all the blessings and all the sanctities extend.

The difference between a pure Haya and an impure Haya is only the Hesed, the discernment of Aaron.

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We are now working on developing the right approach to The Book of Zohar. This is the greatest challenge facing us because we do not understand this book. We have to look at the narration differently than we’ve ever done before. After all, we have never looked inside ourselves, but always outside. We always pointed to something outside of us, trying to discern it and learn what it is. But now we have to conduct an inner observation and point inside ourselves, which is a very unusual thing to do.

When we read the words, “Job, Pharaoh,” and so on, we immediately think of history, geography, relationships between people, and all kinds of other external things. But Kabbalah says, “No, on the contrary, you have to look inside yourself and search for these things there.” Yet, we don’t understand how to do this and where to look for all of this inside us. It would be easier if we at least experienced some inner sensations while reading about “Pharaoh,” for example. But this doesn’t happen; instead, we suddenly begin to think about a person that lived in Ancient Egypt 5000 years ago. This is our problem.

In reality this false perception was arranged deliberately so that while imagining all of these things externally, we would force ourselves and make efforts to imagine it inside us. We go from the imaginary world to the world of forces, desires, and qualities by trying to look inwards of our own accord and searching for the Creator there. This helps us come out of our current, illusionary world and focus on the inside in order to see and reveal the Creator there.

Then we reveal that this world does not exist, and neither do Pharaoh, Bilam, Balak, Job, and all the other impressions that The Zohar evokes in us. None of it exists; these are all forces that the Creator awakens in us in order for us to recognize Him – the single existing force. Then all of these numerous forces and qualities disappear and you remain one on one with the Creator. To get there, however, you had to raise yourself, expand, and build yourself to such an all-enveloping size that enables you to understand Him, to feel Him, and to be fulfilled by Him.

This is the unity between the Creator and the creation which we have to achieve through equivalence of form. And The Book of Zohar teaches us all of this.

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A person must be his own spiritual psychologist; he always has to keep track of which way his “scale” is leaning – towards goodness or evil. As well, he must analyze all of his qualities and work on them. He must check every one of his qualities to see what it is and where it belongs because through these qualities, he will begin to feel the Creator.

The Zohar talks about the system that governs and controls our qualities. In this system, the Creator is the One who implements all the actions within these qualities. He invites us to get to know Him through all of these qualities, their actions, and this entire system. This is the only place where we can meet Him. In The Book of Zohar, He is telling us a story through which we can start to recognize Him, the qualities He created, how He connected them with one another, and how we can start checking them.

In this way we discern the system, its structure, and its functionality, as well as the force that operates it. This is how we will get to know the Creator, since this system is a connecting link between us and the Creator.

This system will disappear at the End of Correction because there will be nothing left to conceal and connect. There will be an absolute, universal connection.

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