How Can We Understand Kabbalah?

Question: Why is it so difficult to understand Kabbalah?

Answer: If you try to understand it with the mind it is difficult, if not impossible, because to understand Kabbalah, life, and meaning you must change the brain and sense organs, and this is done by the Light due to practical efforts in the circle, in the earthly likeness to the upper property of bestowal.

Kabbalah is a practical method because it is possible to understand what it talks about only in the changed desires and mind

Conclusion: A person must surrender himself and participate in the group.

Baal HaSulam, “Introduction to the Book Panim Meirot U Masbirot,” Item 11: …On the other end, when we regard the order of existence and sustenance in the modes of existence of the whole of reality, large and small, we find confused orders, as if an army is fleeing the campaign sick, beaten, and afflicted by the Creator. Their whole life is as death, having no sustenance unless by tormenting first, risking their lives for their bread.

Question: What is the meaning of “sick, beaten, and afflicted by the Creator?”

Answer: On the one hand, we see that nature has prepared and arranged everything for us, all the laws that govern the life of the created beings. But on the other hand, everyone devours each other and everyone benefits from the troubles of others. Each animal thinks only about how to devour another to fill itself, for its entire life, it spends its time looking for food.

A person worries about food even more than other animals. Prehistoric man lived like the animals and ate whatever he could find. He had no way of keeping food and preserving it and therefore had to look for food and collect roots and fruit. This was his daily worry. He had no spare time to do anything else but that. Man lived like an animal and was constantly busy looking for food.

Then man learned to domesticate animals, and so he began to cultivate domestic animals like cows, dogs, chickens, and so forth. He developed agriculture and didn’t need to hunt for food anymore since he had a farm with animals living by his side. There was no need to look for plants to eat since he could harvest his crops in his field. People ceased to wander from place to place and began to settle on their lands.

But this didn’t make their lives easier. It seemed that they could live in peace, but wars and disputes over territory broke out and people began to enslave other people. Life became worse than a dog’s life. On the one hand, everything seemed to be ready on nature’s part, but the management of the still, vegetative, animate, and especially man seemed to be very confused.

Why is there no peace among all parts of nature, and why can’t the prophecy, “And a wolf shall live with a lamb, … and a small child shall lead them” be fulfilled? Instead, everyone devours everyone else. We don’t understand why nature is this way. We have gotten used to this kind of life, but it is wrong. Why is life so? This is where people begin to doubt godliness. Everyone thinks that he can manage the world better than the Creator because he sees the great disorder in nature.

However, we must change ourselves and then we will see that nature and the Creator’s attitude toward us is correct. We must only connect to the upper force, and it will fix us and make us equal to it, which means that it will make us human beings.

The moment we change, we will perceive a different world. This will be a world that is totally good. Suddenly the wolf will dwell with the lamb and will lick it as its own cub. The little child will come to play with them. Everyone will help one another. Then, I will see that life always has been that way, and only I saw that everything was the opposite because my perception of reality was corrupted. I looked at the world through glasses that were totally shattered and therefore thought that the world also was shattered. Now, I have been given new lenses and I see that the world is wonderful, round, beautiful, and pure. It seemed totally shattered before because of my perception of reality.

Therefore, our goal is to correct ourselves to such an extent that we will see the whole upper providence as good and benevolent—the only force that operates in reality, the attribute of love and bestowal.
[130859]
From the Preparation for the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/23/14

The Light From The Center Of The Group

Question: I don’t understand how I can connect with others if I don’t understand what this is. I can’t find any means for this within me.

Answer: You don’t have any means, but you have a teacher who tells you what you should pay attention to, and it is up to you to carry this out because the teacher knows that now it is time.

If it were not for the teacher, you would never reach this. So two levels exist, and there must always be a higher level that directs you upward. From your level, you cannot know where “north” is.

It is time for us to speak more about connection, and from day to day this is discovered more clearly. Some kind of thought about correction cannot appear in your mind unless you are a special soul, like the Ari or Moses, with a special role.

Question: So what depends on me?

Answer: How you make the efforts regarding connection depends on you. You don’t understand what this is, but you don’t need to understand. You need to carry it out, and the heart will be drawn after the deed.

Question: But I have carried out all kinds of actions and I thought that they were directed toward connection.

Answer: You didn’t think that you were carrying them out for the sake of connection with the group, to discover the Creator within this connection and to give Him satisfaction. You need to think about this more now.

We must understand that the spiritual world is revealed in the mutual connection between us called Arvut (Mutual Guarantee). This connection must move through all the stages: bestowing in order to bestow so at least that which you hate you do not do to your friend, and after that to receiving in order to bestow, that is, loving your neighbor as yourself, until the completion of correction.

All the commandments strengthen the connection between us, and the Torah is the Light that Reforms that illuminates our efforts and implements this connection. It is up to us only to ask that the Ohr Makif (Surrounding Light) will influence and correct us.

But first we need to make joint efforts to feel what to ask for in order to discover the deficiency and a request for Light that will correct the characteristics that disturb us from connecting. To the degree that we yearn for connection, playing and speaking about this in front of everyone,  and making efforts, then the Ohr Makif will begin to influence us.

This doesn’t depend upon the merit of our intentions. Even if our intentions are the most egoistic, like those of Pharaoh, the Light will illuminate us from a distance. According to the nature of the Light, it illuminates through the center of the group. If you don’t make an effort to connect with others, you will not receive the Ohr Makif.

After all, the Ohr Makif is the Ohr Pnimi (Inner Light) that is supposed to be discovered; it is the Creator. The difference between them is only the degree of revelation. The Light of Infinity is concealed behind each and every level until it is absolutely hidden. We are in a state where it is absolutely concealed from us. But actually we are in the world of Infinity; its is concealed from our senses.
[131070]
From the Preparation for the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/27/14

Search For The Creator Within The Creatures

Question: Why did the Creator create a system of worlds of Tuma’a(impurity) against the system of the worlds of Kedusha (sanctity)?

Answer: The desire to receive was created because the creation can be only something that is outside of the Creator. The Creator has only the properties of bestowal, love, and everything good. There is nothing more in the Creator, and this property dominates and fills all of reality. The entire creation is filled with this kind of energy.

Therefore, the opposite property should be the black energy that receives and attracts the Light into it and only feels what is found inside it. The desire to bestow is 100% feeling the other. We don’t understand this. The Creator is a property that doesn’t feel itself and only feels others.

Man sees himself as a person: There is myself and what I feel, what I do. But for the Creator there isn’t any of this. So He has no image, only the property of bestowal, meaning, the feeling of others. He feels Himself as being found in the other. So there is no Creator without a creature. The Creator is the characteristic of love that is discovered outside of Him. He is in all of us, and it seems that He wouldn’t exist by Himself.

Now it is necessary to build a characteristic that is His opposite. It follows that the creature must be someone who feels itself and not the other, not the others. This feeling of oneself is called the “desire to receive for oneself,” and so this is the creature.

The desire to receive feels only itself and doesn’t feel the others in any way. In this state, this desire is very limited. Even when the Creator fills it 100%, his pleasure will be very small, for this is the feeling of his separateness, detachment, from that force called the Creator.

In this state the desire to receive is detached from feeling the other, from bestowal, and it cannot understand how wonderful this is. And it only enjoys feeling itself. This is called a “Nitzotz (spark)” of life.

To bring the desire to receive to the feeling of wholeness, like the Creator, we need to add to it a possibility of being able to work in bestowal, even though it only feels what happens in itself. Because it doesn’t feel the other, from its point of view, the other doesn’t exist.

In fact, we don’t see anything. We think that the world is what we see around us. But we don’t see the worlds, this entire space called the spiritual world because we have no possibility of feeling the other.

To save the creatures from this terrible separation, Tzimtzum Aleph (the First Restriction) was made, a Masach (screen), and Ohr Hozer (Returning Light) were created.

Question: What will happen to me when I acquire the power of bestowal? Will I also disappear?

Answer: You won’t even have any question about this. Even if you disappear completely, this will not concern you. Someone who thinks about himself is detached from the Creator, because the Creator doesn’t have such thoughts.
[130893]
From the 3^rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/24/14, Writings of Baal HaSulam

The Task Of Man: Become A Conduit For The Light

And bring thou near unto thee Aaron thy brother, and his sons with him, from among the children of Israel, that they may minister unto Me in the priest’s office, even Aaron, Nadav and Avihu, Eleazar and Ithamar, Aaron’s sons. (Exodus 28:1)

“Aaron thy brother, and his sons” are part of the higher desires of the person that he must raise and shape within himself in such a form so that with their help he renews contact with the rest of his characteristics and the Creator.

The Creator speaks only with Moses who becomes the conduit between Him and Aaron and his sons, and these in turn are used as conduits from Moses to everyone else. Everything is done hierarchically from above to below.

Question: When does a person become a conduit for the Light?

Answer: A person becomes a conduit when his personal point concerned only with connecting with what is above and what is below is revealed. That is, if a person has asoul, it is divided into two halves, and in the middle between the two halves is hisfreedom of choice.

A person’s freewill is that everything that above this point he must give upward, and everything that is below it, he gives below. And he is involved only in this, without wanting something for himself. And this is the structure called Adam (Man).

After all, our physical body is not a man in the spiritual sense, but in the words of Frederick Engels, a proteinaceous form of existence.

Ultimately the role of every person in this world is to become a conduit for the Light. This is because only in this way does he gather the entire world into a single whole unit where nothing is left of each but a decision to belong to the past and the future. Through this connection, all people form themselves into the next state of nature called the soul. And what fills it is called the Upper Light or the Creator.
[125789]
From KabTV’s: Secrets of the Eternal Book 8/19/13

A Unified Family

Question: If there is some kind of problem in cooperation between the partners in a family, is it worthwhile to include the child as a judge in their relationship?

Answer: Leo Tolstoy said, “Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way” (Anna Karenina). After all, we are talking about human psychology, and here it is impossible to give any clear general directions, conditions, or rules.

Later, once the family stabilizes its integral mutual cooperation, there will be equality among all the members of the family , confirming that all happy families are alike. But the miserable ones are different.

Question: How would problems be solved through a family council? First examine them, then talk with each other about how good we are, and then look for ways to solve them?

Answer: It is necessary to try everything. After the parents have demonstrated a mutual integral relationship to a child, against his will, he becomes “cooked” in the integral pot. Then it is possible to bring him into this process gradually. The parents themselves will feel when, on what level, under what conditions, and in what aspects it is possible to bring him in as a third party. Also, this should be done gradually so that it isn’t begun with deep internal discussions about the purpose of life, but a discussion about small daily problems, for example, about where to spend vacation or other questions close to a child.

Question: Suppose that the parents dream of building a vacation home outside the city. Is it possible to discuss this with the child?

Answer: Certainly, gather the entire family together, present the project, and discuss the details. A child who is involved with the architectural design will begin to consider how he can help in this and begin to offer his own ideas.

However, we must be very careful that he is excited about your architectural ideas, that he will not lose his taste for the discussion itself, that he will be integrated with them as part of a complete integral unit, and won’t just begin imagining his drawings. The goal must always be up front and remain the main thing, and your communication and unity with as a threesome is just a tool.
[131205]
From KabTV’s “Conversations with Michael Laitman” 12/11/13

The World To Come, Here And Now!

Question: In what way is the world that I am seeing now in my life different from the world to come about which it is said: “You will see your world in your life,” (Berachot 17a)?

Now I am now alive and see what everyone sees, a world full of hatred. What kind of benefit do I have from this “immense” computer about which you speak, that brings the entire system to a state of separation, hatred, and distrust in our relationships with each other?

Answer: I see this entire gigantic, higher mechanism and how He plays with us to bring us to develop so that we will become like Him by rising to His level. It is said, “And the children will return to their father in heaven (the Creator),” (Vayikra Rabbah 1:3). Then I begin to justify Him, understand Him, and see in what manner I now need to behave in order to live on that level  at all times and not have to wait!

The moment I begin to study the wisdom of Kabbalah, I have the possibility of ascending to this level of the force that manages this.
[158743]
From Israeli Radio Program 103FM, 4/12/15

At The Turning Point Of History

Question: Why does human society develop the way it does throughout history? Couldn’t we have evaded all the great tragedies in our history? And now we are also in a state that no one can understand!

Answer: Everything was very clear… up until our time. From now onward everything is also clear except for the events that we will actually determine in the future, we humans, all of us, by our freewill, which is the reason that it is not predetermined. Up until now we had no choice and everything throughout history occurred according to strict and rigid laws of development on the levels of the still, vegetative, animate, and human.

From Kabbalah we learn that our world was created as a result of the creation of the desire to receive pleasure. This unique created being was shattered into many parts as a result of its evolution, and after the shattering, the parts fell into the level of our world and created its four levels: the still, vegetative, animate, and speaking.

These four forms of the desire have to unite from our lower (egoistic) world and ascend to their source, their root, where the one unique desire was created (born).

This is the reason that our entire history is a movement towards unity that is attained by wars, by mutual actions, art, commerce—by all our actions in which we connect and begin to understand one another better by adopting each other’s attributes and thus becoming incorporated in one another.

This unity (which is egoistic at the moment) took place in the last stage of development of our civilization, capitalism, i.e., under the mediation of capital, the development of industry and commerce, which was the basis for the establishment of global economic, political, and social relationships that led us to a global egoistic society. The development of egoism in people led to the development of industrialism, which has led all of mankind to unite egoistically.

Next we have to discover all the evil of egoism and decide whether to flow with the current it leads us along or to correct it by our proper unity.

This is the solution and our free decision. Until now our history was predetermined, but the moment we have to make a decision onward, we don’t know what will happen. To be more accurate, we know what will happen in each of the cases, but it is up to society to determine in which of them we will be!