What Drives Us Forward?

Question: Is a typical mistake of beginners studying Kabbalah, at least for the first few years, that a person asks for knowledge?

Answer: Yes. He goes toward knowledge because he is used to it in our world. This is a natural, selfish, understandable gain for him.

Question: So he asks for the sensations of the Creator? Is this wrong?

Answer: It depends on what this is for. In principle one should not give orders to the Creator. Besides, when a person advances forward, his desire to reveal the Creator disappears. The desire to reveal the property of bestowal, to be more in a property similar to the Creator than to feel Him within his egoism begins to awaken in him.

Question: We always can explain the state we are in now as well as the future state: how we will feel if the Creator appears in us. But the transition from state X to the state X+1 is not clear. How does it happen? What actions should be taken? I can’t understand it.

Answer: It is said, “What the mind does not do, time does.” You must study systematically, work in a group, work on yourself, disseminate, exert yourself in it, as it is said, “Everything that is in your power to do, do.”

As a result, by all these actions you attract the upper light and it moves you forward. Being a quality of bestowal, love, and rapprochement, its strength radiates on you all the time and these qualities manifest in you. You begin to desire them; you begin to feel they are not in you. In this light, you feel the opposite of it. This is called the realization of evil.

Since you see the opposite, you sense the evil in yourself, you wish to get rid of it even with your selfish qualities. Although you are still an egoist, you already want to get rid of your egoism. You are convinced that it harms you. Here the person’s work on himself and his consistent movement forward begins, directed toward the quality of bestowal.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 4/1/19