Moving Forward Fueled By The Group

Question: I don’t understand how a person can despair of his own powers and cry out if I simply feel tired of everything and throw it all aside when things get tough? Where should I stop and feel despair?

Answer: We don’t know in advance where we should stop. If the outcry is planned, then it isn’t a cry of despair. A cry of despair has to come from inside you without any prior planning as one sees that he has no other choice. If you feel confused and are too tired and don’t know which way to go, it is an indication that you don’t feel that the goal is important.

Now the goal doesn’t seem important to you, and you don’t understand why you are making such efforts. Once you were full of energy and chased different pleasures and wasted your powers. What nonsense does a person do during his lifetime and all just to feel some fleeting pleasure? Sometimes you lie on the couch and don’t want to get up since there is nothing to get up for, and sometimes you get up and run, losing your head, ready to do anything.

It all depends on how important you feel the goal is, which is the main thing we should attain. The importance of the goal is the importance of bestowal, the importance of actions that are far from self-interest, which I cannot perform since I am not motivated to and have no fuel to perform them. How can I do something in which there is nothing for me? My body cannot move in such a case. Our whole world works only on the energy of the desire to receive, that receives a filling, pleasure, reward. But if I don’t see a reward, I cannot do anything.

Thus the Creator gets close to me and takes away my last powers to do anything. The attribute of bestowal comes close to me, and I don’t feel that I am motivated to do something, I actually cannot move.

Fortunately the attribute of bestowal doesn’t dress in the levels of the still, vegetative, and animate nature; otherwise, all the electrons, all the molecules, all the protein matter would stop and my body would freeze and become motionless; it would die, and disappear. Luckily the attribute of bestowal gradually comes closer and is dressed only in the “speaking” level in me.

But the moment it gets close to my shattered egoistic desire, I immediately feel that I am losing my energy, the fuel, the power, the motivation. So what can I do? The Creator’s getting closer at this point is meant to deprive me of the egoistic motivation and to force me, having no choice, to turn to the group. From it I will receive the impression as to the importance of connection, advancement, the greatness and the importance of the goal. I will be able to work by using the group’s fuel.

All this is necessary in order to help me adhere to the group and start bestowing upon it. By such actions I am incorporated in the group and I receive its values. I want to be with everyone because I respect them and see them as my group. They help me and they seem great and important. A person submits to the environment and has to make special efforts to be incorporated in it.

To the extent that I am incorporated in the environment, I receive a unique quality. It is a special chance that doesn’t exist in any method except the wisdom of Kabbalah. A miracle happens, a special power that influences me as a result of my preparation, and it corrects the shattered vessels in me.

These shattered vessels symbolize my readiness for correction. The Light that operates and influences them corrects them. This is called a healing action, like it says: “a remedy for one’s flesh.” Then I really begin to respect and to value bestowal, I suddenly discover in me respect and appreciation for this attribute and want it to be dressed in me. I want to annul myself and to connect with others. Suddenly I have such thoughts and desires that are not typical of my nature at all. But now I suddenly feel such an unnatural yearning and I understand that it is a result of the influence of the Light on me. So we advance.

Without a group, there is no way to receive the Light that Reforms, since it comes from the upper system, through the teacher, through the group, through the books until it reaches a person. There has to be a chain.

The group is not in the spiritual world yet or may be partly in it. The teacher is in contact with the souls of the Kabbalists that preceded him, with his teachers, and a person connects to the group through the books, dissemination, and working together, and thus connects to the goal, by ensuring himself a connection with the source of the Light.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/27/13, Writings of Baal HaSulam