So The Group Will Absorb Everything

Question: What is the meaning of adhering to the group?

Answer: To adhere to the group is to be with the friends in the entire process through which they are passing, to perform the tasks, to participate in all the events: in studies, dissemination, duties, gatherings of friends, workshops, and paying maaser. I need to try to be a useful and active participant in all this. These are mechanical actions of joining a group, which are visible.

Besides this, within myself, I wholeheartedly try to be included in this image called a “group,” to disappear, to melt there. I want to be absorbed within this concept of the “group,” the “society,” so that nothing of me remains.

If I try to do this according to my egoistic motives, to the extent of my efforts, I become closer to the Light, and It brings me thoughts about this and shows how appropriate I am to it or not. So, I begin to demand that the Light correct me more. I begin to relate to my inclusion in a group in a more practical way, connecting this inclusion with the Light that influences me and helps me to enter a group.

It follows that the more I am included in it, the more states I begin to discern: greater or smaller inclusion, how much I forget about myself, how much more I belong to the friends, how much more or less I love them. Only according to this do I evaluate my ascents and descents, since no other ascents and descents exist.

And so together with everyone, I turn to the upper Light that makes of us one whole. And here the work begins. All measurements and evaluations take place only in regard to the group because without this there is no correct measuring scale, there is no correction with which I would be able to examine myself.

I have no indication and evaluation of my emotions, not in relation to the Creator and not in relation to myself, if we don’t do this within the group. The group is the place where I feel, measure, and carry out all spiritual actions.

There is no other place outside of it! There, in the group, I need to discover hatred and my ego, all of my characteristics. All that is discovered outside the group doesn’t require any correction. Only what is discovered in the relationships between the friends, this is the only thing that we need to correct. Pharaoh, the ego is the force of mutual rejection and of hatred that is discovered in a group. And outside the group, this is all the physical life of the animal body.
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From the Preparation to the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/31/13