The Open Book

Throughout time, man has sought answers to the fundamental questions of life: who am I? What is the purpose of my being here? Why was the world created and is there life after death.

Each of us tries our best to find the answers in our own unique way and through the sources of information at our disposal. Each of us creates his or her own unique perspective on life, depending on what we discover, and the confidence we place in our source of information.

The question of the meaning of our lives adds a global dimension to our everyday torments. And indeed, why are we destined to suffer so? That question relentlessly irritates us, denying us of satisfaction even when we do succeed in satisfying one of our mundane desires.

A person that has come to attain the goal he aspires for, quickly returns to the sensation of emptiness and dissatisfaction. In retrospect, the efforts he invested in attaining his goal and the pain he suffered along the way, provide no lasting sense of satisfaction with the achievement.

Because to this day, no answers have been provided to these questions, people continue to search in various directions, including all kinds of religions and faiths. Meditations and exercises of physical and intellectual development give us some transitory relief, but do not allow us to find the answer to the question about the essence of life and human suffering, and what our purpose is in this world. All those methods calm us down, at the expense of the nullification of our needs and desires.

But sooner or later everyone finds out that they can no longer deny reality. Humanity continuously seeks logical justification to our existence. Man has tried to inquire and interpret nature for thousands of years.

Contemporary scientists have learned that the more they progress in their scientific research, the more the picture of the world that they discover becomes obscure and difficult to grasp. Contemporary science books look more and more like science fiction, but still they fail to provide us with a clear answer as to the essence of the meaning of life.

The wisdom of Kabbalah, offers a clear and proven method to understand the meaning of our lives and our objective in the universe. That method focuses on the development of man’s ability to sense a hidden part of reality. The word Kabbalah stems from the Hebrew word lekabel (to receive), and it expresses man’s aspiration for higher knowledge, to feel and see the broad and real picture of the universe.

Kabbalists tell us about practical methods that are based on their own personal experience. Their books convey the method to investigate the reality of that world, to attain and find the answer to the question of the essence of all life.

Kabbalists who attained the spiritual degree of revelation and absolute attainment maintain that there is nothing in our reality but the fundamental desire for pleasure. That desire is called “creation”. It is made by the Creator (His light), which is why creation feels the light as pleasure, because it was created by it, whereas the absence of the light of the Creator, is felt as pain and torment of all kinds: physical pain, disease, famine and death.

Thus, we are comprised solely of negative and positive sensations. Our brain was made for the sole purpose of aiding us in the satisfaction of our needs, to realize, understand and differentiate between positive and negative desires, to find their source and realize the ability to attain pleasure and comfort.

Any action in the still nature, focuses on the preservation of its form. In plants – the primary purpose is growth; in animals – movement, sexual desires, family and society and the continuation of the species, as well as growth; in man – in addition to all the above, appear greed, desire for glory, government and knowledge. But at the basis of all that, there is still the basic desire to attain pleasure, and the mind is but a supplementary tool, whose development depends solely on the development of the desire to enjoy. Because the more one is ambitious, the more one suffers, one is forced to evolve trying to relieve the sensation of inconvenience. One is forced to evolve and thus invent new things and grow smarter.

If we artificially diminish the intensity of the desire, man feels less inconvenience, less pain at his inability to fulfill his desires and satisfy his needs. All religions, faiths and the various systems of ‘brainwashing’, meditations, yoga and so on, focus on limiting man’s natural desire. That is how they attract a person; they are meant for that alone. Man diminishes his desires, he feels better and suffers less. But humanity does not stand still. With each passing generation the souls of past generations descend to this world with a stronger desire for pleasure, for light, for the Creator, a process that does not exist in the other parts of creation. Human development is directed straight at increasing egoism and the craving for pleasure – it is the essence of our nature and our evolution. It is also expressed in all other levels of creation, because they are dependent on man and valued by man. That is why there are changes and evolution in the still nature too, as well as in plants and animals.

But only in man’s soul do the desires increase from generation to generation, because it is man, by nature’s plan, who must ultimately attain a spiritual desire to unite, to delight in the light of the Creator. That is why all other methods and religions will disappear from the face of the earth. Even today we can see it happening – they can no longer provide people with the needs, the solutions to the problems, through the suppression of desires. They do not enable genuine tranquility and completeness.

That is why only an ancient Jewish science, the wisdom of Kabbalah, that is not based on the suppression of desires, coercion and abstaining from society, has been and remains the one true means to attain peace, spiritual tranquility, genuine happiness and wholeness while living in this world. Thus, pain and torment will fill our lives and make us finally seek redemption. That is why it is said that in the last generations the wisdom of Kabbalah will become the primary, and only science. After all, what drives man to develop science, arts and everything else, if not the need to realize himself, to sooth his drive for pleasure.

We even see how families are destroyed as a result of the increasing desire to receive – the egoism. As soon as man rises one degree above animals – as a result of the development of his ambition to take pleasure – his social frameworks and his links with others change. It happens because, as it is said in the Zohar, from this generation on, the masses too are allowed to begin to study the laws of the spiritual world. That is why man can no longer go back to the ‘good old days’. Man will only be able to attain it by way of correcting the additional desire. That is possible only through the study of the wisdom of Kabbalah. Coercion and restriction of desires are inefficient, because the upper law of development, does not allow one to destroy oneself, his desire, but will make him suffer, search for the right way – how to be filled with the light of the Creator.

You can learn about evolutionary processes in our world through books that were written by scientists, physicists, biologists and others. But how the evolution of the soul is performed is what we really need to understand.

Souls descend to the physical bodies according to a fixed and predetermined order. They return to this world each time in a new body. The physical characteristics of each generation are similar to the one that precedes it, but the souls of each generation come to the world with an accumulated experience of all the previous generations. They have new powers that they acquired during their stay ‘up there’.

That is why in each generation there is a series of desires, goals in life, that characterize a generation. In each generation souls with new potential desires descend. The desires determine how the science, culture, art and social relationships of that generation will evolve.

Everything is determined from above, even before the souls descend to this world and determine the direction of the development of that generation. Looking at the attributes of the souls that descend to the world, it is possible to predict all the details of development of a certain generation, including all the important events that will occur to the very last detail, because the spiritual data in the souls, includes everything within it to begin with!

Even if a certain generation does not develop the desire to discover the actual reality - the Creator, it still makes certain progress in that direction, when it suffers pain and torments that are sent to it by the Creator. Thus, each generation accumulates experience in relating to its egoism, and as a result, begins to feel that pain. But at that point, it is still unconscious pain, because the actual reason for it, which stems from our egoistic nature, is as yet not grasped.

Eventually, the accumulated memory of the torment of all generations will bring about the understanding that we receive only benevolence from above. When we feel that benevolence through our egoistic vessels only, we will feel it as absolute evil! The evolution of the generations will bring us to the attainment of the actual reality.

A different kind of souls descend during each historic era, because they need a different kind of providence. They need providence that will suit the type of souls that are currently in the world.

That is why in each generation there are people who lead us to spiritual advancement. They write books, set up groups of disciples, all in order to convey to us the method by which to reveal and attain the actual reality, that would best suit the present type of souls.

In his “Preface to the Zohar”, Baal HaSulam writes that over a period of six thousand years, souls descend to this world. In each generation the souls are characterized by worse and coarser qualities.

Each generation demands its own correction. During the first two millenniums, the souls that descended were indeed so pure, that they didn’t even need the Torah in order to fulfill their part. They evolved in this world without any need for a means to reveal and attain spirituality. It was a time of gaining experience and torment in the world. The very fact that they existed in this world was enough for them to advance toward the spiritual correction. The accumulated pain pushed the souls to exit from that painful situation. The driving force in human development is in fact, the desire to be freed from pain.

Over the next two millenniums, they needed only the revealed Torah and the physical observation of mitzvot, for their spiritual evolution.

They related to the mitzvot as acts that are concerned with this physical world. The mechanic observation of mitzvot was enough for them in order to be purified and advance toward correction.

But the attainment of the goal of the souls does not end here. The number of the souls is limited: there are 600,000 souls. Each time, the souls descend to the world in order to perform yet another spiritual advancement.

When we refer to a soul as coarse or not coarse, we relate to the length of time that remains before it attains the end of correction. A soul that needs greater correction is regarded as coarser.

The era of the descent of the souls lasted until the 16th century, and ended when the ARI wrote that from his time on, not only is the study of the Kabbalah desirable, but it is a must for everyone: men, women and children of all nations.

It is explained that the souls have reached a certain degree of evolution, so that each soul, using the unique system that the ARI developed, will be able to attain complete attainment of reality, the attainment of the source of light and its own end of correction. Thus, each soul would be able to attain the purpose for which it came down to this world, to fulfill its destiny in this world.

That condition alone, necessitates the attainment of the actual reality, that the wisdom of Kabbalah enables. That attainment will only be when the whole of mankind finds the laws of the actual structure of the world, their origin, at which time, torment and pain will vanish from this world.

When we realize how reality affects us, and how we relate to it, we will stop corrupting what we mustn’t; we will not miss out on opportunities to do what must be done, and all our actions will be conscious and correct – in accordance with the law of the universe. Then this world and the world we will discover, will coexist in complete harmony.

But in the meantime we can only do wrong. Only in retrospect can we see that we have corrupted rather than corrected. Today, we have no way of refraining from erring. Humanity is at a dead-end and storming on, inflicting more and more pain and harm.

Our pain will continue to increase, until finally the whole of mankind realizes that there is but one way – the way of spiritual growth. We must realize this; we have no other alternative, but to begin studying the laws of the upper world, to try and understand them, because we are an inseparable part of it.

This understanding will dramatically change our situation, and make us attain higher spiritual degrees. We will begin to act consciously, from a broader perspective, grasp the final goal and begin to work together, and not as individuals who care for no one but themselves.

The wisdom of Kabbalah examines the whole system of creation as one object. At the moment, we can only perceive a small part of it, which we call “our world”, or “this world”. As with all exact sciences, Kabbalah entails experimentations, documentation of results, repeating experimentsand the collection and sorting of data. That is why the wisdom of Kabbalah is also called the “science of Kabbalah” – a science, not a religion.

The wisdom of Kabbalah examines not only the phenomena of matter, but also those of the spirit in the matter. Within that study, we learn how the upper spiritual forces, are extended from above down to our world, where they split into various phenomena we call physical, chemical, biological and mental phenomena.

There is, in fact, only one inclusive law that everyone studies, which bears various manifestations: in mechanics, in biology, astronomy, music and so on. Thus, the division to fields is symbolic and superficial. It exists because we were made in such a way that we cannot examine those phenomena as a whole, and by studying them separately, we create different fields. But the truth of the matter is, that everything is tied together, because the object examined is common to all, and we divide it only so as to make studying easier.

The wisdom of Kabbalah is not about studying this world. All other sciences are but particulars that make it up. With regards to Kabbalah – music, biology and medicine are but external phenomena that stem from that single inner law of nature.

The soul is receptive only to emotions. In our world, we cannot accurately, geometrically describe our feelings. Sounds, flavors, fears and pleasure cannot be accurately documented.

Kabbalah gives us a chance to accurately, mathematically express the attainment of the upper world: the feelings, the sensations and the experiences of each and every one of us, according to our situation, according to the factors that affect us. Those inner situations are called “the situations of the soul”.

When one changes one’s situation, one can return to the previous situation of one’s soul. Meaning there is a way to accurately manipulate, in a scientific manner – through certain formula, in personal situations – to move from one situation to another. It also happens when we read books of Kabbalah. If the reader has a “screen”, he can consciously travel through spiritual worlds, depending on what the author wrote.

Take, for example, a Kabbalistic prayer book, written by the RASHASH (Rabbi Shalom Shabazi). It very simply states: take light from one spiritual degree and extend it to another. Rise to the new degree and take the light in it from one place to the another. From that we learn that a Kabbalistic prayer book is really a manual explaining how to affect the upper world, so that ultimately I will be able to affect my own future. What does it mean when a person prays? He builds for himself and for his environment better conditions for development.

That Kabbalistic prayer book is found in stores, but no one understands a word of it. There are instructions in it as in any manual. If you are operating on a spiritual level, if you have the knowledge and the power, you can perform changes in the providence that is activated on you from above, and by that, change the world for the better, and only for the better.

That is why they say that the Jews (the Hebrews) lead the world. Indeed, a Hebrew-Jew (from the Hebrew word 'ever' – meaning OVER) refers to someone who has crossed over to the upper world, beyond our world, and therefore he can really lead the world.

There is no contradiction between the known sciences and the wisdom of Kabbalah. Quite the contrary, many of my students have academic degrees in exact sciences.

The wisdom of Kabbalah has all the characteristics of a science: experimentation, testing, documentation, repeating experiments and reconstruction of phenomena. In fact, it includes everything you find in other sciences, but on a broader perspective, because it includes all the fields of science within it.

The wisdom of Kabbalah allows for attainment (sensation) of results only through the attainment of a certain spiritual degree. It is called the wisdom of the hidden because the results are attained by the researcher alone, through his “screen” (power of aim). He cannot convey the results of the experiment that he has conducted to another person if he does not have a screen with the exact same power.

Performing an experiment in Kabbalah means to change within you, to feel the results of the experiment on yourself, in your body, your desire. A physicist can perform his experiments, regardless of his attributes and emotions; they are irrelevant to the experiment that he conducts and do not change in the course of it. With a Kabbalist, however, if he wants to perform an experiment at a certain level, he must first raise himself to that spiritual level, operate with his spiritual attributes, and by that affect the results of the experiment and document them on himself.

There are only external tools to expand the power of perception for an ordinary scientist. But in the wisdom of Kabbalah, the Kabbalist has no other tool, but an inner ‘screen’, which serves him as an extra sense, a sixth sense, which is enough for him to act upon the whole system of creation and correct it. For that reason he needs nothing more than the screen.

Kabbalah is no different to any other law. It corresponds to all the laws of nature that we know. All it does is reveal them in depth. It seemingly continues the laws of physics, chemistry, optics, electronics etc. but from the perspective of the soul. The ordinary science is a part of Kabbalah, because Kabbalah is a science that depicts the basic law of creation and its consequences in our world.

Because the wisdom of Kabbalah deals with the system of creation as a whole, through all the worlds, including our own, it naturally includes all other sciences, including medicine, that is, the knowledge of our biological body. But all that is possible only provided one attains spirituality and is proficient in the spiritual world. Then one knows which way the spiritual forces descend to our world, and sustain the body, why this or that thing happens with the body, what is the problem with each disease etc. For the attainment of this knowledge, you have to be a Kabbalist, because you cannot learn it from books alone.

For us, it is still an axiom. Only after the correction will we discover and realize that there is an upper force, a Creator, which bestows upon us something called “light”. We, the spiritual vessel, feel inside us the Creator and the light. Something fills the vessel (a desire for pleasure, for delight) – us - with the very desire we call light. A combination of the sensations of pleasure enables us to picture what the Creator wants to give us. The Creator is the source of light.

Light is pleasure, and the Creator is the source. Those are the three factors in creation. The sensation of the Creator is called light. Thus, creation can find, but not fully grasp the perfection of the Creator, because to understand it in the full sense of the word, not as we understand in our world – superficially, with the mind, means to spiritually unite, to complete the spiritual contact with the Creator. To understand the perfection of the Creator means to be perfect, to be in the same spiritual degree as Him. If creation was made in such a way that it delights in attaining the spiritual perfection of the Creator, it follows, that perfection and creation – are not the same. Perfection is the light that delights creation, whereas creation is only the desire to be delighted.

If the Creator represents spiritual perfection, and He wants to create something, then creation must be outside the attributes of the Creator, meaning incomplete. That means that the only attribute of creation – is the lack of perfection. But if the Creator is perfect, how can He create something that is not perfect? Meaning from the very assertion that the Creator is complete and perfect, stems the conclusion that He cannot create anything. Because whatever He creates, would have to be incomplete, and if He creates something incomplete, it means that He Himself is incomplete. After all, it is impossible that something incomplete would emerge from something complete.

So how did the Creator create creation after all? He created it in such a way that He could emphasize His perfection. If the Creator wants to delight someone, that someone must rise to the spiritual degree of the Creator, with all the attributes of perfection. How can that be done? On the one hand, you’d have to create someone, and on the other hand, create that someone in a way that does not exceed the boundaries of perfection. What it comes down to, is creating something that contradicts its very existence. The only way to do it, is to create an incomplete creation, render it a spiritual aspiration to attain the degree of perfection of the Creator on its own. If we could talk about creation only as a will to receive pleasure, we would naturally realize that it is not complete. Then we would ask – how could the Creator create such a thing? But if we look at it assuming creation was made like that on purpose, so that out of that opposite attribute, it would realize the state of spiritual perfection, then the pieces would fall together.

In order for us to come to the spiritual degree of the Creator, through the desire to receive pleasure, we have to know how to use our vessel in the same way the Creator uses His attributes. Creation has but one thing: the aspiration for pleasure, whereas the Creator has but the aspiration to give.

In such a case it is possible to attain the spiritual degree of the Creator only if we correct our nature. But it is impossible to invert our nature to that of the Creator, because they fundamentally contradict one another. The nature of the Creator is to give, and the nature of creation – to receive. In order for us to be able to rise to His spiritual degree, we must correct our nature, meaning use the vessel in order to give. How is that done? When the Creator fills the vessel with His light, He generates pleasure in it, and along with that induces the appearance of the attribute of bestowal. That is what differentiates man from the rest of creation (spiritual and physical). In the rest of nature – still, vegetative and animate, and people too (though not all, of course), there is only the desire to receive corporeal pleasures and nothing more. If they get what they want – they call it pleasure. If they get less than they want – they call it pain. In short – a greater or smaller pleasure determines one’s situation.

But there are people who begin to feel – along with the sensation of pleasure – an extra sense, seemingly incomprehensible. They begin to feel that there is an external force that pushes and directs them. At first they don’t understand what it is and where it leads them, but ultimately it appears as a spiritual desire to give. And when that attribute begins to act, man loses his calm. It is as though he has left the world and feels a need to find something else. He begins to criticize his nature, himself, evaluate his actions and thoughts through this other nature. He finds that he cannot correct his preliminary nature, but he can direct his desire for pleasure in other directions, meaning to receive new attributes – the attributes of the Creator, through his own nature.

The light within him makes him realize that there are two intents: for myself, and for the Creator, and he can work with both.

How does it happen? Because the light brings not only pleasure, but renders a sensation of the giver, a sensation that he too can give. That is why a person begins to feel that through his aspiration to receive, he can work both ways. People who live, work and trade in our world, cannot understand that in fact, they are giving nothing to no one, although they think they give and receive, trade. In fact, they only receive. They just don’t see the opposite nature, whose essence is pure bestowal.

Man can understand his egoistic nature only when he begins to sense the altruistic nature of the Creator. Before a person begins to realize it, he has no right to be called Man.

When we are in our world, we live by our egoistic nature. When we come out to the spiritual world, we will understand what spiritual egoism is, called the “shell”. In our world that shell does not even exist, because our physical egoism is on a subconscious level. Thus we were created and thus we live. When one begins to sense the Creator, he receives the spiritual light and begins to understand the nature of the Creator, and how opposite it is to man’s. Here there is already a dilemma and freedom of choice. If he chooses to continue working as before, meaning to receive pleasure – he is now aware that he receives pleasure – which is called to receive “not for Her name”. (That option did not exist in the past, and he only received pleasure. Now, that there are two choices before him, and he chooses to receive, it is considered a shell, evil force, against the Creator, because he also has a second nature). And then man begins to really receive for himself. But if he chooses to use his intent in order to resemble the Creator, it is called receiving for Her name, meaning using his preliminary desire for pleasure in an opposite direction. Thus man fully utilizes the attribute of the Creator to bestow, through his natural desire for pleasure.

Thus we see that in order to use our natural aspiration for pleasure correctly, we must first adopt the attribute of the Creator, and then we will be able to make a choice between giving and receiving, meaning to be the good force, or the evil force. We can, to a certain degree, make that choice right now. But until we receive the attribute of the Creator, we are within the framework of the corporeal egoism, which does not even count as egoism, because it still doesn’t have the contradicting attribute.

It is not that this is a negative or positive attribute. It is simply our nature. It cannot be evaluated as a negative or positive attribute. Rabbi Ashlag said that this world is like a school in the old days. In those days paper was very expensive, so children were given a board and a piece of chalk to write with, until they learned how to write properly. And before one learns how to write, meaning how to behave, one is under restricting conditions, so that he cannot cause any harm. If you make a mistake, it can always be erased and the board remains clean. So we, in our world, can do whatever we want. It does not count as a sin or mitzvah, regarding the spiritual world. Everything we do in this world (speaking from the perspective of Kabbalah, man’s individual spiritual evolution) cannot even be evaluated on a spiritual level. It is all beneath the level of the spiritual world. Only when a person begins to receive something additional to physical pleasure, different to his own nature, or begins to feel the absence of the attribute of giving, when he begins to understand that there is something more, which is opposite to his nature can we begin to speak about dualism, freedom of choice, ability to aim the egoistic beastly nature toward the altruistic nature, to prefer something to something else. Before that moment one is not responsible for anything he does, he cannot be demanded of anything, because in fact, he has no freedom of choice. Sinners, righteous, sins and spiritual actions, all those begin only at a certain spiritual level. Our world is only a place of preparation through which to enter the spiritual world.

How is it possible to enter the spiritual world? And to do it not after death, but while living here, to begin to feel the attribute of the Creator, to correct and direct the actual desires, our natural ones – that is called entering the spiritual world. The spiritual world means the adoption of the attributes of the Creator. In fact, it is all very simple and not as we imagine it in baseless fantasies. The reception of an attribute of the sensation of the Creator is called the spiritual world, or the upper world, and nothing else! When we begin to feel the attributes of the Creator, it means that we enter the spiritual world. The physical world does not change, it remains as it was. But man feels additional powers within him, because he has now received a second nature.

What is the quickest way to attain that second nature, to finish this ‘class’, learn how to write without mistakes and enter the spiritual world? What does it mean to learn how to write without mistakes? Rabbi Ashlag writes that in principle, those who are ready for it are only those who have the right feelings and intentions, who have already attained the sensation of the Creator and are ready to perform spiritual acts, while still working in our world. These people begin to understand that they must discover the spiritual world, but not through speculations, fortune telling, analyzing the past etc. meaning things that belong to our physical world. It does not interest them any longer. The past and the future of the physical body are irrelevant for them. They begin to think and analyze something higher than that. Not aliens from another planet, not fortunes, nothing that relates to this world, to our body. If they get a push beyond all those desires, it means that the Creator is calling out to them. He wants to endow them with the sensation of His attributes, so that they are able to use their own desires properly. Then they come to a spiritual degree that enables them to exit the physical sensations of our world, from the egoistic desires to the sensations of the desire of the Creator, the spiritual aspiration of bestowal. Through the study of Kabbalah in a group, with a teacher and the right books, it is possible to attain those feelings.

How can that be done? We’ve already said, that if a person has already received the light of the Creator in his vessel, the Creator passes His attributes on along with the light (to the unworthy He only gives a spirit of life that does not include His spiritual light).

How do I make the Creator pass His attribute to me? Let’s say that I have a certain preliminary aspiration. How do I make the Creator convey His attributes to me? There are special books for that. If we read in them, we extend upon ourselves the light and thus receive certain sensations (some negative, some positive), although in the meantime we cannot feel that light. The Creator begins to gradually pass on to us small amounts of sensations of revelation and the attainment of His aim, what the spiritual desire to give is really about.

Why does He do it in hiding and not openly? Well if it were hidden from all the others, and only we, the chosen few, were worthy of that revelation, we would also keep it a secret. And why do we need to hide it, why is it hidden from us? So that we will genuinely want that attribute.

It is a little difficult to explain. I feel that there is a little problem here. The thing is that to convey to us the attributes means to reveal them to us. If the Creator were to be revealed to us, we would receive such tremendous pleasure, that we would not be able to focus on anything else. In order to prevent distractions with this immense pleasure, but to pass His attributes on to us – for that reason the Creator hides that attribute and the pleasure, and conveys them to us secretly, so that we do not feel it. We can only feel the result.

Gradually, over many months of studying the wisdom of Kabbalah, we begin to feel a greater desire for spirituality and attain a better understanding of it. It happens very slowly because our nature is made of an infinite number of subsystems, and we have to have them all corrected. They have to adopt attributes that correspond to the attributes that we receive in our subconscious, attributes that we will never feel, that are actually second and third degree attributes. All those subsystems have to partake in that process of correction, which is why that process lasts so long. The time of correction actually depends on the investment, the amount of efforts man makes. His ability to immerse himself is up to him. He only gives the preliminary desire, but from here on it depends on man’s efforts. It would be more correct to say that it depends not only on man’s efforts, but on his environment, the one he’s found in order to advance toward spirituality.

In the essay “The Freedom” Baal HaSulam writes that the only way to implement our freedom of choice is by searching and finding the right society, that would help a person attain the purpose of creation. The only factor that man can change by himself, and thus influence his spiritual development, and indeed the whole world, is finding the environment that would influence him. There is nothing else besides that. All the processes and all paths are predetermined. The path to the Creator and the spiritual degrees one must go through are given. You cannot change a thing here, or influence it in any way. After every step there is the next step, and then the next step, because it depends on the inner structure of the soul, which must evolve. That structure is predetermined and the only thing that man can choose is the right choice of environment: man is under the influence of society and society can correct him.

How can society change a person if nothing can be changed? If the preliminary and final parameters are predetermined, then what can still be changed? Baal HaSulam answers that only the speed of progress can be changed. That is a parameter of great value. Why? Just think, that you are advancing from one degree to the next in one second, or in a million hours. Let’s assume, that you have a toothache for a million hours, or for one second. In that one second you will not feel anything really. But if it is stretched over a million hours, just imagine the pain! This is a serious matter. Precisely in that ratio, if not greater, one can speed up his progress. Thus he diminishes the unpleasant situations on a quality level. They cannot be avoided because they too are predefined. Everyone must go through them. But we can hasten the passage and thus feel much less pain, or even none at all. The free choice of society, man’s environment, can affect the spiritual advancement of man.

But here we must ask: what kind of choice are we talking about? Do we choose between a more pleasant or a less pleasant path? And is our choice in the egoistic dimension? The thing is that we choose this path not because it makes us feel good. If I choose this path, based on my egoistic desires – it does not necessarily indicate fast progress. To advance fast is to advance with the force of the Creator, through the reception of His attribute of bestowal.

All the worlds that the Creator initially created are only a desire to enjoy. When light, even very dim light, penetrates that desire, it adds another nine aims that belong to the Creator. Man has but one desire – to receive pleasure. The nine other desires evolve under the influence of the light within man. Man is impressed with the operations of the Creator and receives the combination of the attributes of the Creator – his ten desires. A person should know how to implement all of them, his natural desire for pleasure as well as desires that he adopted from the Creator. How can he implement them, so that he becomes like the Creator? How can that be done? He can do it if he corrects his natural desire for pleasure - his tenth sefira, called Malchut – and transforms it to resemble the nine previous sefirot – the attributes of the Creator. Meaning, he takes that Malchut and tries to give using the aim “for Her name”. Then he takes that Malchut and tries to make it resemble the sefira of Hochma, and so on. There are nine attributes of bestowal of the Creator, nine possibilities. Using various kinds of desires, a person tries each time to resemble a certain attribute of the Creator, and thus he adopts all the nine higher sefirot, all the attributes of the Creator. The part of Malchut that cannot resemble any of the nine sefirot, meaning to receive with the intent ‘for Her name’ is called the heart of stone, and one cannot work with that part. A person simply cuts off these attributes (desires) and says: “I will not work with these desires!” With all other desires he can work with complete sameness to the Creator. Once a person has corrected his nine intents within Malchut, there remains only the tenth part, which cannot be corrected, because the attributes of the Creator do not affect it. That part cannot understand or sense the light of the Creator. It only feels the pleasure, but not the source, the attributes. That situation is called the “end of correction”. It means that a person has fully corrected his intents and attributes.

That part of the aim, which he could not correct and therefore completely detached himself from it and made no use of it during the correction, is the most powerful, most natural desire.

If he completes the correction of his aims, there comes a special light from above, which can correct the “heart of stone”, so as to make it resemble the Creator. It is impossible to imagine how it happens. It is just that from above comes such a powerful light, that even that desire receives the intent ‘for Her name’. Thus all of man’s attributes, all his possibilities of resembling the Creator are realized, and he becomes equal to the Creator. But what does he gain by that?

In the beginning, when he was first created, he was filled with the light of the Creator, but could not sense the attributes of the Creator. He was created and received pleasure as a result of the Creator’s desire to give. Now he has returned to that state – namely he receives everything that the Creator wants to give. That is because the Creator wants it, but not he himself, meaning that spiritual stature was also attained thanks to the Creator. Besides, because he received the attributes of the Creator and has become like Him, he rises above the spiritual degree of creation, the initial degree that he was born into and attains a higher degree – that of the Creator. That is why he can attain eternal life, perfection and absolute attainment – everything he could not attain while he remained within the boundaries of his own nature. He would receive the attributes of the Creator, but not become like Him. The Creator enables man to rise from a spiritual degree of creation, to the spiritual degree of the Creator, by rendering man with His attributes and bringing him pleasure.

We see that this whole process is predefined by the Creator. That means that He did not create anything inferior to Him and the path that man must go through is necessary for his self discovery, for the reception of that sensation, because otherwise, he would not be able to understand the spiritual degree of the Creator. That is why he begins the spiritual path from an opposite situation to that of the Creator’s. That path is necessary in order for us to go through all the existing spiritual degrees, in all their situations, from the beginning of creation to its end, from a completely imperfect state to complete perfection, so that when we come to the degree of perfection of the Creator, we will know how to appreciate and understand the pleasure that comes with the spiritual degree of the Creator.

However we look at it, the spiritual path until the end of correction is paved with negative experiences and sensations. So where lies the difference between the path of Torah and the path of pain? The path of Torah is different not only in the quantity and the intensity of the pain. The thing is that when a person takes the path of Torah, meaning studies the wisdom of Kabbalah and extends upon himself the light, he understands that he should relate to his physical pain as the lack of the ability to bestow upon the Creator. Meaning, the pain is transformed from physical to spiritual torments, i.e. pains of love for the Creator. That is why a person does not have to go through an endless cycle of physical pain in order to ultimately turn it to spiritual pain. He extends upon himself the light of the Creator with the help of the right books, and begins to feel exactly what is it that he lacks. He immediately comes to the right kind of torment – torment at the absence of spirituality. Therefore, he is spared the horrible physical torments.

If a person has the attribute of Malchut, the desire to receive pleasure, the light affects him in such a way that he begins to receive the nine additional sefirot that are completely detached from Malchut. It is, in fact, more of a psychological problem, which can be clearly detected in our world. If you receive pleasure from a certain individual, you gradually begin to want to be like him, you want to adopt that attribute. It is all because pleasure and the adoption of a certain attribute, are one and the same.

The Creator shows His ten sefirot to man; He shows him exactly how he can delight in the Creator. Man feels not only the pleasure, but also its source, the nine sefirot of the Creator. I see a host who prepares the meal for me, brings me pleasure, and I also see why He does that, I recognize His attribute. Thus one receives, in addition to the original attribute of delight, the Malchut, nine other attributes for pleasure. Now he aspires for the Creator, aspires to receive pleasure through all these attributes, which means that the pleasure that he now wants is different. But how is it different? Where is the difference? Each attribute brings with it a different kind of pleasure: pleasure from food, from a child, from a walk in the park or from rest. All kinds of pleasures. We cannot quite find its equal in the world, because after all it comes in different wrappings of the same pleasure, just different kinds of pleasure. But in the spiritual world there are distinct differences. That means that I begin to understand that it is possible to receive pleasure in various ways, meaning Malchut divides into ten additional sefirot and feels that there are ten additional sefirot before it.

How does Malchut, which receives pleasure from the first nine sefirot, begin to aspire to resemble them? Pleasure comes before everything else. It is the vessel’s number one priority. Therefore a vessel that rises to a higher spiritual degree and receives the pleasure, wants also to receive all its attributes. Thus, for example, if you are next to someone you have admired your whole life, you will (whether you like it or not) adopt his characteristic behavior, become like him. Why? Because he is greater than you. You depend on him, enjoy his nearness. You want to receive, adopt all his attributes. Thus you automatically become like him.

So is it possible after all? It is possible in the first nine sefirot of Malchut, the nine sefirot she senses. But the tenth sefira, Malchut itself, remains unchanged. In that tenth part there is no sensation of a Creator, a giver. There is only a simple sensation of pleasure. It has to be disconnected and preserved. It is not used until the end of correction. That tenth part is the “heart of stone”, the essence of man. It is man’s natural attribute – the craving for pleasure. All other parts are not that egoistic. They are influenced by the attribute of the Creator and become like Him. And that attribute of man, to crave pleasure, is the last sefira. So in fact, man does not correct his actual self, his own essence. He corrects where the Creator gave him a chance to lose, so to speak, to become like Him. Only in that area can anything be done.

A person cannot do anything with his own nature, which the Creator had created existence from absence (meaning that exists in the creature, but not in the Creator. C.R.). Despite that, he wants to do something with it. How can we see that he does? Because he continues to work with all the other intents that were given to him by the Creator. He is willing to do anything, and that is why the Creator changes his nature. It is like a game: “I will correct you if you prove that you really want to be changed”. The Creator gives man the nature of the first nine sefirot, a person receives them and then the Creator changes his basic nature, which is the tenth sefira.

The beginning of the connection between the first nine sefirot of the Creator and Malchut is taught when one first starts studying Kabbalah. The connection begins before the first restriction. But when a person begins to acquire these attributes in our world, it is a different story, because the soul of a person in our world already contains everything. The world of Ein Sof and all the spiritual degrees to get there, are already in it. It also includes reshimot (reminiscence) of the spiritual degrees from the world of Ein Sof, down to our world. It is all a part of the soul of each and everyone of us, as a spiritual gene, DNA.

So how does the road develop? The light shines on us from above and illuminates the reshima of the spiritual degree ahead of me, and I begin to aspire to rise to it. Then the light shines on the next degree – and I begin to want to rise to the next degree. The Creator gradually endows me with His attributes, from without, from within, from all around. All the spiritual degrees are in us, in an embryonic state. The light that shines from above makes us want to climb from one spiritual degree to the next.

A side question: “For there is not a righteous man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not (Ecclesiastes 7, 20)”

There are many such verses. The thing is that the path of the righteous is an ascent in the degrees of the spiritual world, and in each of those degrees a person accumulates additional egoism, corrects it and turns it to altruism and thus justifies the Creator. That is why a person is called righteous, because he feels that the Creator is right (just).

No degree is comprised solely of a positive part.

In the process of correction, a person must be in the negative part, in evil desires, shells, egoism. When he is immersed in egoism he is called a sinner, he commits sins. Later on, when he becomes a righteous person, through the correction, he is able to do good. Any person will sin the number of times that he becomes righteous. And so it is in each spiritual degree. If he does not sin, he will have nothing to correct, by which to become righteous. That is how it goes. As you can see, these are completely different terms than those used in our world. The wisdom of Kabbalah speaks of inner processes within the soul, within each and every one of us. Everyone has a sinner and a righteous person within him who take turns. Each spiritual degree is comprised of that combination. Therefore, he who rises higher also falls deeper, and his sins are worse. But then he rises even higher up. There is no fear from sins in Kabbalah, because it is something that a person has to go through in each and every degree, before one can be corrected. It is as it says: “For there is not a righteous man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not.” The sin must come before the correction.

What does it mean to sin? It is a complete captivation in my own egoism, total identification with it, to the point that I can only feel my own egoism, and from within that situation consciously condemn the Creator, and then rise from that situation. But there still remains a clear reminiscence from that situation, at which time one begins to correct his attributes, his aims, to the positive side, otherwise there cannot be a correction. Only he who has something that requires correction, can be corrected.

People in our world have a different conception of the term righteous and sinner, because the Creator did not intend for them to have more serious work, because they cannot go through a complete correction.

This world has existed for billions of years, but the Kabbalah does not speak of the 6,000 years that we ordinarily count in our world, but of 6,000 degrees that describe the ascent of the soul back to its root, to the place from which it came.

The 6,000 years that Jews count are the length of time of the descent and ascent of the souls. At the end of the 6,000 years all the souls should be corrected and climb back to their root. The world itself will continue to exist when those 6,000 years are over.

Time is only an inner sensation and does not exist in and of itself. The sensation of time is a subjective sequence of events that concatenates by way of cause and effect. Baal HaSulam writes in Talmud Esser Sefirot (The Study of the Ten Sefirot) that time and space are terms that exist only in relation to us humans, that in fact, time does not exist.

The minute one crosses the barrier between cause and consequence and begins the spiritual ascent the present and the future merge into one. Even the laws of physics have begun to discover that there are processes where the end comes before the beginning, meaning time is but an inner, psychological concept within us.

Humanity was created in order to discover its highest state, the highest point. The attainment of that goal depends on what we identify ourselves with, with our soul or with our body? That determines our outlook on life and our body.

Our souls are all linked together. When a person discovers the upper world, he sees how strong the link is between him and the other souls. Right now all we can see is our body, which is why we think we are divided to many bodies. But a soul is a structure that exists in each of us – the same soul inside all of us, that is why when a person begins to identify himself with his soul, the walls between him and the other souls fall because he can see and feel that he has something in common with all the people and all the nations – a collective spiritual body.

When everything is finally corrected, everyone will be tied in one collective soul, feeling that bond and living it. If we could see the futuristic, corrected state we would see that there is no difference between one person and the next. When that fact becomes known to man, it begins to dictate his outlook on the world.

The Kabbalah maintains that there is no need to hurt people in order to make them be ‘good’, moral, but we should open their eyes, to how the world is really built. Then, naturally, they will want to feel good from within their egoistic nature and therefore will not harm one another. Humanity should come to precisely that state.

Everything in this world was created for a purpose. There are no coincidences. Our whole world and the whole universe is built of corporeal substance, but in precise accordance with the upper spiritual forces. Each detail is built of forces, and each spiritual force has a corporeal object that corresponds to it. That is why man studies the spiritual, because it is the origin of the corporeal world. Man begins to understand why everything is ordered as it is, because everything in this world is a result of the spiritual world.

Moreover, any spiritual force is linked with its consequence in our world. That is why when we ascent to the spiritual world and correct something there, we immediately change the consequence that stems from it, here in this world.

Throughout the history of mankind, providence has compelled man to study the world around him. Beasts do not need to perceive the world, only man, who must perceive the world around him simply in order to exist. Man must discover the worlds that surround him in order to improve his situation, to sustain the increasing population, to feed and clothe it. Man must evolve, develop science in order to know how to take advantage of nature for his own benefit. Without science, humanity would have been unable to survive and would remain at the level of no more than a primitive clan to this day. Man must attain such a state where he is master of his own fate, and nature will not allow him to remain in his beastly degree. Nature will force him to actively participate in the leadership of the world. That is the essential difference between the degree of “man” and that of a “beast”.

Unlike conventional science, Kabbalah allows man to see or attain spiritual forces only according to the degree of man’s inner correction. That is why there is no danger that you will be permitted to study Kabbalah if you are unworthy of it, uncorrected, meaning with ‘impure’ aims. Unlike other sciences, in Kabbalah no one asks if you are good or bad, or with what purpose you ‘break’ into this field, how you will use the knowledge that you are about to attain, but the guiding principle is to open the door, let you in and let you see for yourself. There are no commissions of inquiry in Kabbalah to see how loyal one is to the Creator, but one acquires the ability to interfere with providence according to one’s correction. Only with His corrected attributes can one begin to belong to providence and become involved in its actions.

That is why it is impossible to take advantage of the upper forces and inflict damage upon them. That contradicts nature itself, meaning there is no possibility of causing any harm, because as soon as you correct your aim for the better, even just a little bit, precisely to that extent you are able to manipulate the upper force. That is why there are no prohibitions on studying Kabbalah. It can never be used in order to inflict harm, and throughout human history there is not a single testimony of such an act.

The leaders of the world are not free people, but are as conductors to the upper forces. They cannot be blamed personally for their actions because one way or another they do as they are dictated from above – they are also not chosen by us. Man has an ability to choose only when he enters spirituality, but before that, he is like the rest of mankind, as a “herd of beasts”.

The book of Zohar - a complex and profound book – contains the wisdom of Kabbalah in its entirety. It tells us of the complete path a person must go through from the moment his souls finds its place in a corporeal body; the time he lives along with it in the corporeal world, and how he ends his life, continues to exist as a soul without a body, and how it descends to this world again. Thus, many life cycles go by and we call them “reincarnations” of the soul.

The Zohar explains that the purpose of those reincarnations, of those repetitive returns to this world is to bring man to a state where he feels all the world completely, and not just the one he is living in at the moment.

The Zohar says that apart from our world, there is another world – much more spacious – that only Kabbalists can feel, or the souls that exist outside the corporeal body. Man must come to a situation where he lives in both worlds simultaneously. It gives him the ability to be master of his own fate, to plan his future and not be influenced by the life and death of his biological body, but rather to be directly connected with his soul.

The Zohar speaks of the path each soul goes through separately, and the way that all the souls go through as humanity, starting with the descent of the soul to the body for the first time, through all the cycles that this soul goes through, and ending in the state where the soul, along with the body, comes to a state where man feels his existence in the whole system of creation, and life and death cease to exist for him, and he becomes an active part of a complete eternity. That is the situation we must all come to.

The wisdom of Kabbalah maintains that the descent of the souls to our bodies continues for 6,000 years, meaning that it began some 5763 years ago, and will continue for 237 years. In the remaining years the souls must attain the whole system of creation, that sublime form of existence, where man will identify himself with his soul and not with his body.

All the Kabbalists wrote in their books about the uniqueness of the time we live in. They talked about how gradually, over thousands of years, souls descend and dress in the bodies of our world, accumulate a certain amount of experience and climb back up to the upper world. Afterwards they come back down to this world in order to dress in new bodies, and so on.

Thus, the souls gradually accumulate experience which makes them come to study the wisdom of Kabbalah, through which they will attain the upper world. According to the Kabbalists, that will happen when the last exile of the Jews ends. The year 5755 (1995) was marked by Kabbalists as a very special year; a year that is a historic cornerstone from which begins a genuine change in man’s relation to the world, in his relation to the wisdom of Kabbalah, and his relation to his destiny.

That change is a consequence of a process of evolution that man goes through, which compels him to bond with the leadership of creation, to take an active part in it, to rise to the same degree where he will be master and guardian of the whole world. If he does not aspire for that, then the collective law of creation will make him do it by torments that will force him to think of such questions as: “What am I living for?” “What do I exist for?”, and examine the purpose of his life and ask why is he living so poorly.

Thus, everyone will begin to feel that question, burning. It will begin to irritate us precisely in order to make us think of how to control our destiny. People in this generation are slowly beginning, according to the level of development of their soul, to come to a situation where they feel a great need to know the purpose of life. Torments, agony and the lack of confidence about the future compel us to think of the meaning of our lives. Pain pressures us to begin to learn about providence in order to become the most active part of it.

That is what the wisdom of Kabbalah speaks of, and this is the method that gives man the knowledge of how everything that happens in our world is generated in a higher world, and from there extends to our world. We are but witnesses to the picture that spreads before us as the Creator has planned it.

If a person can feel the upper world, he knows what is going to happen ahead of time, and the most important part is that he can even determine what will descend to him from above. By studying Kabbalah, a person acquires the knowledge of how he can influence the events of his life.

Let us assume, for example, that a person faces a certain situation – how should one relate to it, how should one understand what is happening in order to relate to it correctly, so that his reaction will soar upward and cause the consequential events to be more pleasant and better than the current one.

We therefore see that the wisdom of Kabbalah teaches us not only to witness what is going to happen, but at the same time respond to it in order to produce good results in the future. That is how the system of guidance works. Meaning, a person can feel what is happening with him and what he must do in order to determine his future situation.

Coming to such a capability is possible only through studying the writings of Kabbalists. Kabbalists are people who feel and who reside in the upper world, while writing their books. As a result, the words that a Kabbalist writes when he is completely immersed in the spiritual world, are adopted to certain superior-spiritual actions. Therefore, a person who reads them and expresses them, even if he does not understand what the words speak of, because he is not in the spiritual world, still, even unconsciously, he awakens the upper light on himself, the upper force which gradually purifies and prepares him to a state where he begins to see and feel what he reads about. Reading and studying from the special books of Kabbalah, gradually brings a person to a state where he begins to feel the upper world, because that is what the study is based upon, and that is why Kabbalists write their books, so as to help us advance.

But because each of us has only a small desire to attain the upper world, the students of Kabbalah form a group in order to join the desires together and thus increase the influence of the upper light on them, and by that progress faster, meaning attain the situation where they begin to feel the upper world faster, and begin to guide their own destiny.

Thus, throughout time Kabbalists have studied Kabbalah in groups such as that of Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yochay, the writer of the book of Zohar and the holy ARI from Zephath.

If even in the spiritual world, we are unable to express our emotions toward one another, how then can we use the language in order to describe spirituality? After all, the spiritual world is a world of desires, it occupies no space or time, only desires without any substance. In addition, Kabbalists tell us that those emotions are very precise and therefore demand a complete and accurate language in order to describe them.

How can we express in our language such accurate concepts such as subtle observations in Godliness? A description of the spiritual world is a description of man’s soul, a description of the phases of the adduction of the soul to the Creator, and the growing intensity of his emotions. Kabbalah divides the collective soul to parts, gives each part a name according to its attributes, and describes the relationships between them and the outer world.

That is the power of the language of Kabbalah. It describes emotions in an accurate manner that enables even the use of charts and graphs and formula. We might say that the wisdom of Kabbalah is the engineering of the soul. But how can we overcome the inaccuracies of our tongue so as to use it in such precise inquiries?

Try and give a unique mark to your mood, graphically compare it with someone else’s mood, express all the shades of your emotions in numbers: the dependency between the lack of confidence and fatigue, the mood when you feel hungry, the power of fears in the day time. We cannot accurately measure emotions in our world. For example, the relation between touching a warm body and the brain’s reaction to it, depends, among other things, on such factors as mood, condition of health, physical fitness and more. We cannot compare by percentage, or by quality of quantity, the pleasure we derive from music or a favorable dish. If our language is that poor, subjective and inaccurate, why did Kabbalists adopt it to describe the spiritual acts, and why did they not invent a special language, especially suited for that purpose?

In ordinary science for instance, misusing a term brings with it misunderstandings. An expert who knows the language of that science will not understand where the results were taken from and will relate to the conclusion as wrong, and a person who does not know that language will take it as truth and will make mistakes. The same applies to the wisdom of Kabbalah: when a person begins to describe things that seem to be happening in the spiritual worlds with words of our world, or makes up his own terms, we cannot speak of any level of credibility.

That is why Kabbalists chose the “language of the branches” to be the language of the Kabbalah. That language is based on the situation, that the whole creation in our world – still, vegetative, animate and speaking, and everything that happens to them in the past, present and future, and the whole creation as individual objects and their behaviors, all concatenate from the Creator and down through all the spiritual worlds, until they appear in our world. The leadership of all those things is constantly being renewed from upward downward until it comes to our world. Everything in our world necessarily begins with the upper world and then descends to our world degree after degree. Because everything in our world is a result of the upper world, there is a specific connection between the cause, being the root in the upper world, and the effect in our world. Kabbalists are those who find the connection between the root in the upper world and the branch in this world. They are those who can accurately say what connects with what, because they see the upper root, from which that connection comes, as well as the result of the upper root, the branch that unknowingly receives from the upper and is lead by it. Because of that Kabbalists can determine the roots by their corporeal consequences (branches) in our world.

That is why the Kabbalah received the name of “the language of the branches” and the name “the language of the roots”. The upper root is named after the branch and not the other way around. That way Kabbalists invent the language that accurately describes the spiritual world. It is the only language capable of connecting the spiritual world with our world in words we can understand.

From that stems a principle law in how to relate to the books of Kabbalah and the whole of the Torah: we must remember once and for all, that all the words in the books of Kabbalah are only words of our world, but not the interpretation that we are used to give it in our language. What stands behind those words are spiritual things, roots, that in no way belong to our world. We must always remember that, so as never to be confused.

Spiritual concepts are independent of time, space and motion. That is why we cannot picture them, because everything we feel exists in a framework of time and space, and in some sort of motion. Our universe, for example, exists in a certain space. If we imagine that we take everything out of the universe, what will be left? In spirituality there are no bodies, there is no time, motion or space. That is why there is nothing in common between spirituality and the structure of our nature or our emotion. Can we examine something we cannot feel? Why do Kabbalists say that Kabbalah is a science or a wisdom, if the topic it speaks of is inconceivable to our senses? How can we speak of something we cannot even imagine? How can we understand what is written in the books of Kabbalah, if spirituality is something we cannot begin to imagine, and how Kabbalists nonetheless explain it, and in the terms of this world?

Kabbalists are people who were endowed with the opportunity to feel another world. Only those who see, feel and understand it, are called Kabbalists, because they receive knowledge and sensations from ‘that’ world.

But because we are unable to feel anything that it is outside of time, space and motion, we cannot feel the spiritual world, and therefore we live as blind. It is as though the spiritual world exists without connecting to our emotion. Yet it is here! And although we cannot imagine a timeless, spaceless and motionless world, we must nonetheless accept the fact that those terms do not exist in the spiritual world. But how then can we say anything about the spiritual world? How can a Kabbalist tell us anything about the spiritual world, if it has none of the things we have in our world? After all, we feel our world only through time, space and motion, and all our terms stem from our five senses. This is how we create our vocabulary. We cannot measure our feelings, which are something personal, private, we cannot know if it is good or bad, plenty or little, we measure all that toward ourselves, vis-a-vie our personal desires at the moment of the measurement, denied of any absolute values.

In addition, we know from experience that our feelings can change, and any living creature feels his world differently. I’m stressing ‘his world’ on purpose, because each of us has his own world, and we cannot compare and see how identical our emotions are. All creatures, still, vegetative or animate, feel the world differently. Scientists discovered that each type of animal has its own sense-structure, each species sees a completely different picture of the world. If, for example, we could connect with extra terrestrials, how would we compare our impressions of the world? Our whole discourse is built on what we feel, which already includes our subconscious values of ‘good and bad’ regarding each object. We express something as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ depending on how we feel ourselves. It is enough for our framework; we understand one another.

We can converse only if we feel that the difference of thought and culture, or the way of life, do not exceed the boundaries of some general consensus, based on common senses. But besides those limitations on our senses, because there are personal impressions, even what we can feel is only the figment of our imagination, and there is no way for us to tell how absolute they are.

Our vision, for instance, pictures some affect on our eyes, then this limited and personal impression is overturned in the head, and what we get back from our mind is already felt as something that exists outside of us. This is how we perceive everything that we can see.

All other external impressions are accepted relative to our senses as well, depending on their limitations. We cannot know and feel the outside world within us; only a certain amount of influence on our senses, but this is no more than the reflection of our senses on some of the external factors that they feel. Thus, we realize that we are but a closed box that reacts only to some of the external factors that it feels. We have to understand that our beautiful and rich and creative language describes but a tiny portion of reality, that we are somehow impressed by. But if that is the case, how can we describe in our own language, which is based on individual sensations of our world, the various concepts of the spiritual world. Even if we take the finest word in our world – light – that seems to be closest to spirituality, we will see that it too talks about a corporeal idea such as the light of the sun, or an enlightened mind, that has nothing to do with Godliness.

By the way, light is the most misunderstood phenomenon even in our world, despite all the physical theories. It was the RAMBAM who wrote that our whole universe is below the speed of light, and that above that speed there is another world. In another explanation to that word, we describe it as pleasure, or as the light of the mind. But if I choose my words according to my emotions, and pass them on to another, which in turn interprets them according to his own understanding, how can we compare the sensations we ascribe the very same word? What is the common basis by which we can compare our sensory words? And because we cannot compare our emotions with any accuracy (and who knows if psychology and psychiatry will ever come to that understanding), we are compelled to use terms without first comparing the emotions they bear for us. It is not necessary for my emotions to be the same as yours. What I do awakens something similar in you… and that is the whole language of the Kabbalists.

Spiritual concepts are independent of time, space and motion. That is why we cannot picture them, because everything we feel exists in a framework of time and space, and in some sort of motion. Our universe, for example, exists in a certain space. If we imagine that we take everything out of the universe, what will be left? In spirituality there are no bodies, there is no time, motion or space. That is why there is nothing in common between spirituality and the structure of our nature or our emotion. Can we examine something we cannot feel? Why do Kabbalists say that Kabbalah is a science or a wisdom, if the topic it speaks of is inconceivable to our senses? How can we speak of something we cannot even imagine? How can we understand what is written in the books of Kabbalah, if spirituality is something we cannot begin to imagine, and how Kabbalists nonetheless explain it, and in the terms of this world?

Kabbalists are people who were endowed with the opportunity to feel another world. Only those who see, feel and understand it, are called Kabbalists, because they receive knowledge and sensations from ‘that’ world.

But because we are unable to feel anything that it is outside of time, space and motion, we cannot feel the spiritual world, and therefore we live as blind. It is as though the spiritual world exists without connecting to our emotion. Yet it is here! And although we cannot imagine a timeless, spaceless and motionless world, we must nonetheless accept the fact that those terms do not exist in the spiritual world. But how then can we say anything about the spiritual world? How can a Kabbalist tell us anything about the spiritual world, if it has none of the things we have in our world? After all, we feel our world only through time, space and motion, and all our terms stem from our five senses. This is how we create our vocabulary. We cannot measure our feelings, which are something personal, private, we cannot know if it is good or bad, plenty or little, we measure all that toward ourselves, vis-a-vie our personal desires at the moment of the measurement, denied of any absolute values.

In addition, we know from experience that our feelings can change, and any living creature feels his world differently. I’m stressing ‘his world’ on purpose, because each of us has his own world, and we cannot compare and see how identical our emotions are. All creatures, still, vegetative or animate, feel the world differently. Scientists discovered that each type of animal has its own sense-structure, each species sees a completely different picture of the world. If, for example, we could connect with extra terrestrials, how would we compare our impressions of the world? Our whole discourse is built on what we feel, which already includes our subconscious values of ‘good and bad’ regarding each object. We express something as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ depending on how we feel ourselves. It is enough for our framework; we understand one another.

We can converse only if we feel that the difference of thought and culture, or the way of life, do not exceed the boundaries of some general consensus, based on common senses. But besides those limitations on our senses, because there are personal impressions, even what we can feel is only the figment of our imagination, and there is no way for us to tell how absolute they are.

Our vision, for instance, pictures some affect on our eyes, then this limited and personal impression is overturned in the head, and what we get back from our mind is already felt as something that exists outside of us. This is how we perceive everything that we can see.

All other external impressions are accepted relative to our senses as well, depending on their limitations. We cannot know and feel the outside world within us; only a certain amount of influence on our senses, but this is no more than the reflection of our senses on some of the external factors that they feel. Thus, we realize that we are but a closed box that reacts only to some of the external factors that it feels. We have to understand that our beautiful and rich and creative language describes but a tiny portion of reality, that we are somehow impressed by. But if that is the case, how can we describe in our own language, which is based on individual sensations of our world, the various concepts of the spiritual world. Even if we take the finest word in our world – light – that seems to be closest to spirituality, we will see that it too talks about a corporeal idea such as the light of the sun, or an enlightened mind, that has nothing to do with Godliness.

By the way, light is the most misunderstood phenomenon even in our world, despite all the physical theories. It was the RAMBAM who wrote that our whole universe is below the speed of light, and that above that speed there is another world. In another explanation to that word, we describe it as pleasure, or as the light of the mind. But if I choose my words according to my emotions, and pass them on to another, which in turn interprets them according to his own understanding, how can we compare the sensations we ascribe the very same word? What is the common basis by which we can compare our sensory words? And because we cannot compare our emotions with any accuracy (and who knows if psychology and psychiatry will ever come to that understanding), we are compelled to use terms without first comparing the emotions they bear for us. It is not necessary for my emotions to be the same as yours. What I do awakens something similar in you… and that is the whole language of the Kabbalists.

Words and letters provide a code that points to the spiritual object and to its unique situation. When one Kabbalist reads what another Kabbalist wrote, he can reconstruct the text and feel exactly what his fellow Kabbalist meant, just as a musician can reconstruct a musical piece that was written by a another composer 500 years ago through notes, or just as we mark the mathematical signs with notes that are numbers.

Let’s assume that we meet a creature from outer space, and he speaks our language, meaning he uses our words, but the content that he puts into them is completely different, could we still call it ‘our language’? In order to learn it we would have to know what he means by those familiar words. Kabbalists too can convey to one another the knowledge in our language, but within the words there is a completely different content that points to a sensation, act or an attainment of the ‘right’ result. And that is because they have common feelings and a common basis for these realizations. Their language in our world is the language of the branches, where every name points to a specific spiritual object that it symbolizes.

When Kabbalists take a name from our world, they see the root from the upper world that stands behind it very clearly. The whole difference between us and Kabbalists is in that when we read in the books of Kabbalah, we see before our eyes pictures from our world, which are completely unlike what the Kabbalist who wrote them meant, whereas when a Kabbalist reads the book, he sees the spiritual roots of the upper world in the words. That is why we often find in books of Kabbalah, words that seem inappropriate to spiritual terms, such as: kiss, coupling, hug, vagina, uterus. Of course their spiritual meaning is not the spiritual meaning we ascribe to the words in our world. Even a person unfamiliar with the wisdom of Kabbalah will easily agree that this area is above our reason. According to our understanding, spirituality cannot stem from such abject egoistic desires and from the use of such mundane language, so how is it that we find such ‘vulgar’ expressions, that even in our everyday life we almost never use them?

The thing is that once the Kabbalists have chosen the words in the “language of the branches” for the description of spiritual objects, they cannot change one word for another as they please. They must use words that precisely indicate those upper roots, and they cannot waive even a single word just because it seems vulgar or improper. Just as two hairs cannot grow from the root, so two branches cannot stem from the same spiritual root. Each and every creature has its own upper root, and it cannot be replaced with another.

Each object in our world has an upper root that bears the same name. There cannot be two different roots with the same name, just as two separate creatures in our world cannot bear the same name, because they are different at least in something, or else they would be one and the same. Each object or a phenomenon of nature must have a specific name, and once it’s been given, it cannot be called by any other name.

If we were to replace the ‘dirty’ words with others, we would break the tight connection between the branch and its upper root. We would not know which spiritual object to relate to which written word, because there is no other science in the world with such perfect correlation between root and branch. Kabbalists are people who attain those roots; they clearly see those ‘strings’ we can not, which link the root with its branch below.

From beginning of creation to its end there is an ongoing process of correction and elevation, according to a plan that descends from the upper world and dictates us everything. Each and every creature goes its own way in that collective process, and no ‘I’ disappears in the process. It might take on different forms, but it always sustains.

Of course in such a complex system you cannot replace one name with another. In order to choose an accurate ‘code language’ it must be applicable under any condition – meaning, always use the word that points to its upper root, as in genuine Kabbalah books. The people who wrote those books attained the roots and were in such spiritual degrees that they provide accurate definitions. That is why their language describes the upper worlds with utter precision. We learn from this that books that are written by people who call themselves ‘Kabbalists’ are worthless and only mislead and divert the reader from understanding and advancing in the right way.

All the terms we meet in Kabbalah books such as: kiss, coupling, dressing/clothing, extension, meat, circumcision etc., all speak of the upper roots and in no way about any worldly processes. They are called that simply because it is impossible to find another name that will point to that upper root in our language, and not because the processes in the upper roots somehow resemble the ones of this world. We must not picture sublime bodies mating or kissing.

Because of that it is very difficult for a person who doesn’t know how to translate the words to the spiritual language, to read the books of Kabbalah, and that applies to the Torah (Bible) as well. In legends and in the Torah and most of all in the Song of Songs (that seems to speak of love as we understand it) it is very difficult to separate between the ordinary meaning that we ascribe to the words, and their spiritual meaning, because there is already a solid connection between the words and our emotions. (By the way, it is easier for those whose mother tongue is not Hebrew, because they do not connect directly between the Hebrew words and their emotions).

In time that connotation is broken in the student, and gradually, according to his work and effort to feel spiritual concepts that stand behind the language of the branches, he creates a new connection. An ordinary reader of the Bible, or the Gmara, simply cannot free himself from the familiar meaning of the words he knows, which in fact, stand for things that are completely unknown to him. The whole problem is that Torah is understood correctly by only a handful of people, although the Torah itself says: “The whole Torah is the names of the Creator”. But what does that mean?

We name an object according to its attributes, after we have attained them and we know precisely what its essence is. When a Kabbalist rises with his feelings to the spiritual world, he begins to feel the revelation of the Creator, His actions, His attributes, the Creator Himself, and he names what he feels. Only a person who can feel the Creator can name Him. The name is not a result of reading a book. A Kabbalist calls the Creator by a name when he feels Him no less then we feel anything in our world.

That is why the expression: “The whole Torah is the names of the Creator” means that the revelation of the Torah is only for those who climb up his spiritual sensations and can feel the Creator.

The light that the Kabbalist receives is called Torah. Only people who attain the roots, meaning Kabbalists, can easily see what is behind the words of the Torah. That is also how all our holy books are written, which is why they are holy. They speak of Godliness, about the world of the Creator.

A Kabbalist is named after the highest degree that he attains – the highest revelation of the Creator that he attains defines his name. For example: we learned that a partzuf (spiritual object) is named after the type of light in its head. If it is the light of wisdom, it is a partzuf of wisdom (Hochma), if the head contains the light of mercy, it is called partzufBina. In our world too, we name a person after his greatest achievement, for instance: Professor, Doctor etc.

It is almost impossible to understand the books of Kabbalah, because they were written in our world’s terms. It is said about the first man, who was created by the Creator, that he was a thief, about Moses’ wife – “cheap woman”, about Laban (which is really the light of wisdom, the upper light), that he was a “cheat”. We simply do not understand the real spiritual meaning behind the familiar words. Each and every language has its own spiritual root, as does every thing in our world, but there is certainly a difference between one spiritual root and the next. At the end of correction, those spiritual differences will disappear, but until then there are upper roots and lower roots, more important and less important.

The world is built as a spiritual pyramid, and until the end of correction we are not all equal in relation to the spiritual world, and we cannot determine the position of a person who delves in spiritual correction by one’s appearance. He who is closer to entering the spiritual world might have a worse character, but he is more familiar with his attributes, with the lowness of his nature. Those who are farther from the entrance to the spiritual world have nicer attributes. We must remember that we are only talking about people who are working on their spiritual correction. About a person who is not studying Kabbalah there is nothing to say anyhow, because they still cannot feel anything real, because they have no spiritual scale to compare themselves with. Hence, there is a difference between the spirituality of the upper roots and the branches in our world. So can any language be picked as the language of the branches? In fact, every language has its own upper root, but Hebrew is the only language that we know the spiritual code for. The world was created in its letters, and each and every word expresses the essence of the object.

That is why the Torah was ‘given’ in Hebrew. In the upper world there are no letters, but the spiritual attributes were described for us in the form of Hebrew letters.

The ARI, the great Kabbalist from Zefad (Hebrew city) described the spiritual world through ten sefirot. He conveyed the reasons for everything that happens in the spiritual world, through a screen and the upper light, which allows any beginner to study Kabbalah. Before the ARI all the books were written in the language of legends or midrash, like the Zohar. Until then, Kabbalists wrote their books as a story that tells of what they saw in the spiritual world, and not as a scientific description of what happens there, by way of extension of light from up downward, or the five phases in the vessel and the screen that dresses over it. You might say with certainty that there were Kabbalists who attained higher degrees than that of the ARI, but he was the first to be given permission from above to convey to us the whole wisdom of Kabbalah. Baal HaSulam, Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag, interpreted all the places in the writings of the ARI that needed to be stripped of terms of time, space and motion.

How then, did Baal HaSulam refine the language to such a degree that now there is no room for the materialization of spirituality? He ‘only’ explained the ten sefirot, and nothing more. The first nine sefirot describe how the Creator relates to the creature, and the last sefira is Malchut – the creature himself. There is nothing in the whole of creation other than the inclusion of the Creator with the creature.

In the following example we will try to further understand what is the “language of the branches”. For example, scientists measured a certain level of influence that the outside world has over a certain person, through instruments that they connected to his sensory organs and to his heart, which is his vessel of reception for the reaction. That way they built charts and graphs that expressed the dependency between his inner reactions and outer stimulus. Afterwards they connected the source of the electric signals to his body and sent them to his mind, as they came from the real source. The person did not feel any difference, he took the signals as though they came from the actual source. They gave technical names to the experiments, you send this and that signal and get this and that reaction. That is how a scientific dictionary is created. That is also how Kabbalist-scientists operate. They perform experiments with the effect of the light of the Creator (the single source of all our emotions) on themselves, and afterwards they describe their reactions.

The Kabbalist is both a researcher and the object being researched at the same time. That is why he can describe his feelings in terms of an exact science, and not only through emotional expression such as poetry or music. That is why the Kabbalah is called the “wisdom of truth”, or a “Torah of truth”.

To a person in our world, who has not yet attained the spiritual world, there is a spiritual vessel in his heart called a “black point”. It is a spiritual point that is not physically in the heart, but only felt through it. If a person studies Kabbalah with the right teachers, he slowly begins to develop that point into a complete vessel, a spiritual partzuf. It is as though he expands that point, inflates it and creates a space in it, in which he will afterwards receive the spiritual light – the sensation of the Creator. The sensation of the Creator is called “light” and the spiritual partzuf is the “vessel” that can receive it. The size of the partzuf determines the spiritual degree of the Kabbalist. A name in Kabbalah (such as Moses) is used to indicate a degree that Moses the Kabbalist attained. Anyone who attains that degree will also be called by that name. Kabbalah does not deal in any way with a description of the physical body. Only the measurement of the revelation of the Creator determines the stature of the spiritual degree of a Kabbalist. When a Kabbalist reads in a Kabbalah book, he knows what he must do in order to raise himself spiritually. The acts that he performs in his spiritual body are called “mitzvot”. They are spiritual actions – “desires of the Creator” that one must follow in order to attain the light and feel the Creator.

That is why the books of Baal HaSulam can be studied without any danger of materializing the spiritual concepts, without picturing physical objects that operate on one another. We do not affect the spiritual world by the mechanical performance of the mitzvot. There is no connection between our physical acts and the spiritual world. The severity of the prohibition of idolatry is about materializing spirituality and not about bowing before some piece of wood or a rock. Such things are not even a topic for discussion. Idolatry is the materializing of the spiritual terms, as though spiritual powers dress in our body, or in a piece of flesh. Because of that danger there was the prohibition on the study of Kabbalah. Baal HaSulam conveyed the wisdom in his books in such a way that anyone could study it without materializing the spiritual concepts. Before his time, they were still not ready to accept it, and the Kabbalah was hidden. In fact, the purpose of the development of mankind is to bring it to feel and agree that there are things that we cannot feel, but do exist; that they are unseen, yet great, that there can be existence beyond time and space.

That will prepare mankind for the thought that such a thing as spirituality, that is not felt and that cannot be described, can still exist. Our collective experience is so great by now, that we are more willing to accept that anything is possible than ever before.

The Creator created the desire. He created nothing Other than the will to receive. In terms of Kabbalah it is called “will to receive”, and it means to receive pleasure.

Therefore, all that exists is the Creator and the will to enjoy that which He created. But enjoy what? The Creator Himself! The sensation of the Creator in creations is synonymous to the sensation of pleasure. Kabbalah calls that pleasure - “light”. the will to receive is called - “vessel”. Thus, there are the Creator and the creature, the will to receive and the pleasure, the light and the vessel.

The spiritual aspiration to receive the light in our world can be divided to four degrees: still, vegetative, animate and speaking (man). The intensity and the level of the will to receive light changes from one degree to the next.

The lowest power is in the degree of still. The desire is so small in that degree, that no motion is initiated. Creation still feels something, even at this level, because if it is created, then there is a will to receive in it, but it is not expressed in any way, because the power of that desire is very low.

Positive and negative results of the will to receive pleasure and egoism, coincide with the power of spiritual aspiration, which is why a still object can cause no harm, or benefit anybody or anything else, because it is motionless.

In the vegetative level the will to receive light is more developed, it has a stronger desire than that of the still. Because of that it has the ability to grow. Compared to still, the vegetative can already draw the good and extractthe bad, it is therefore capable of development.

There is a fixed cycle in plants. The vegetative lives and dies, it is dependent on its environment a lot more than a still object. It feels the changes between day and night. It is a completely different form of life compared to the still, and all those changes occur solely because of the increase in the power of the desire to receive the light.

In the animate degree, the power of the will to receive is stronger still. What is added in the animate compared to plants? Each animal feels its environment individually, and can approach the good and stay away from the bad. The intensity of the feeling of harm and benefit in all the plants put together, in addition to the benefit and harm that they might cause, are parallel to the power of will of one body in the animate degree.

An animal moves from place to place, it has sensations and personal feelings, it has its own character. Each has its own individual character. Because the desire to receive the light is stronger in animals than in plants, they have unique, personal characteristics. However, animals are still limited in their sense of time: they can only feel themselves and are incapable of feeling others, the past, or have any interest in the future.

The next degree – speaking – is man. It is comprised of two components: mind and heart (emotions). The two factors help one another develop, which is why man’s strength is not limited by space or time.

What cannot be perceived with one component, can be comprehended by the other. For example: I cannot feel events that happened a thousand years ago, but I can analyze and understand these events with my mind and make up for the deficit to the point that I can feel it. The ability to think helps the emotions and the senses.

There can also be an opposite situation: I feel something. How can that sensation affect me, for better or for worse? I add my thinking ability to my feelings and thus analyze the situation. Emotions and thoughts alike expand my understanding of the space and time factors, I no longer feel bounded, I can understand another human being, and experience events I have not experienced through his feelings. Thanks to this ability, man is capable of rising above time and space.

A person can be at any level of development in the spiritual sense: still, vegetative, and animate, all at once. But a person who discovers the “point in the heart” and begins to develop it until it becomes ten sefirot, until it becomes a vessel in which man perceives the revelation of the Creator. Such a person is called a “Kabbalist” and he contains within him all those who are at the degree of speaking, from all times and nations, since the first generation through the last of them.

That pyramid reflects the proportion between the five forms of creation that exist in reality: still, vegetative, animate, and man in our world, the degree of speaking, when each individual item of a higher degree rises higher than all of creation in the lower degree put together.

This is uniquely expressed in our desires:

A single desire in the degree of vegetative, can bring as much harm or good as all of the desires in the degree of still in the universe.

A single desire in the degree of animate, can bring as much harm or good as all of the desires in the degree of vegetative in the universe.

A single desire in the degree of speaking, can bring as much harm or good as all of the desires in the degree of animate in the universe.

If the point in the heart, the root of the soul, appears in each and everyone of us, and it begins to develop it to the proportion of a spiritual vessel, its power will be equal to the power of all the people at all places and all times. That is the pyramid! But the higher the object, the fewer of them there are, and the more unique they become, and prevalent in creation.

We distinguish five degrees in the desire that the Creator created, which are marked as (the next section refers to the meaning of the Hebrew letters in the name of the Creator – י-ה-ו-ה):

The tip of the Yod:

The letter Yod: י

The letter Hey: ה

The letter Vav: ו

The letter Hey: ה

It is a symbol of the desire that the Creator created, a symbol of creation. The desire is comprised of the five parts that are symbolized by the five symbols, letters. And we do not say that it is the name of creation, but the name of the Creator because the desire is filled with light, with the sensation of the Creator. The only thing that the creation can feel is the Creator, nothing else.

That is why the situation of creation is called by the name of the Creator, meaning the world that creation feels, its sensation of self – the collective sensation of creation is an expression of the aim of the Creator, as expressed in creation. That is why that vessel is named after the Creator. Only four letters are spelt, besides the tip of the Yodי)) we call those letters Yod – Hey – Vav - Hey (י-ה-ו-ה).

To summarize, this is the structure of creation:

י The tip of the Yod – a desire that is as yet unfelt.

י Yod – corresponds to the degree of still.

הThe first Hey - corresponds to the degree of vegetative.

ו Vav - corresponds to the degree of animate.

הThe last Hey - corresponds to the degree of speaking.

Each degree of the desire – still, vegetative, animate and speaking – is divided into sublevels of - still, vegetative, animate and speaking. That means that even in the degree of still there is a division to levels - still, vegetative, animate and speaking.

Our purpose is to understand what in fact is man, what it stands for. A single plant stands above all of the still nature, a single animal stands above all the plantation and a single human stands above all the animals. But what does “above” mean? It means that if man corrects himself, his spiritual development brings him above any other inferior form of creation.

That is why it is said that everything is inside man. And in his spiritual ascent, man can raise all the worlds, and then all the worlds serve that person. That is why if a person performs correction, the whole of creation rises respectively. That is why only man has to correct himself.

But what does correction mean? It is a correction of our attitude, our attainment of the Creator. If He gave us the desire and the powers for it. He who’s received that desire is called “man”. Below that degree there is the “speaking”, the animals, the plants, the still within man in our world.

People are those who have to correct the whole of nature, because man has a soul – the most evolved spiritual desire. A person who discovers the point in the heart in this world, which forms the embryo of his soul, and begins to develop it, becomes the most significant and influential both in the corporeal and spiritual worlds. He receives spiritual forces that enable him to discover and unite with the Creator, to become like Him. All four degrees of creation exist inside man.

Naturally, everything is based on the degree of still (dust/earth). The existence of that spiritual degree is justified because all the levels, the plants, the animals and man, rely on earth for their sustenance. On the one hand, the earth in and of itself is an insignificant factor, but then again, no form of life can exist without it.

The same can be said of the masses in the degree of still: they have three possible directions of development. Within the masses there is a possibility for the creation of more advanced forms for desire, which Kabbalah refers to as: “rich”, “rulers” and “wise”, corresponding to our desires for wealth, power and knowledge that evolve from the degree of still.

At the conclusion of man’s spiritual development in one desire, there evolves a more mature desire, under the influence of the three desires: “lust”, “envy” and the pursuit of honor.

Thanks to those desires man develops spiritually and rises to higher degrees, until he reaches the last – perfection. To summarize: because of the desire in the first degree, the attribute of lust that is given to man, separates the “rich” from the masses. It is a degree that is characterized by a much stronger desire than that of the masses. That spiritual degree corresponds to the vegetative degree in the universe.

Afterwards, when a person receives the attribute of envy, the rulers are separated from the masses. It is a second degree, and it corresponds to the animate degree in nature.

The next desire in line, “pursuit of honor”, exists only in humans. A person who wants to be honored needs to be given that honor from others. That is an altogether different degree of existence. He needs other people. His ambition is already developed to the degree where it is no longer enough to control something inanimate. He must also control other people, in order for other people to satisfy his desire for pleasure. He aspires to be in your heart. That is called “honor”.

The “envy” helps to separate the “wise” from the masses. People who have a great desire and are motivated by jealousy acquire knowledge and wisdom. That degree corresponds to the degree of “speaking” in the structure of the universe.

Their actions are not limited by time or space. Man is sometimes so intensely jealous of someone who had died a long time ago, that it is as though that person were still alive today. Time cannot influence that sensation. Man is jealous of another not only because he has something that I do not, but also if they both have the same thing, meaning man aspires not only to receive everything that the other has (the ambition and the attribute of the other), but also to ruin the other’s aspiration, so that he will have nothing.

If, for example, I am in the spiritual degree of “speaking”, my ambition is so strong that I want to receive everything that others have, and more, I want them to have nothing, and thus I will be able to intensify my ambition indefinitely – to want everything the others have, meaning that I alone will equalize with the whole of mankind. We are all like that.

This attribute is only characteristic of man. People who are not in the degree of “speaking”, cannot intensify their desire, they only chase honor or greed. They need certainty in the satisfaction of their needs, but only their own. If it were not for envy, man would be unable to infinitely intensify his will to receive.

However, such people are ultimately left helpless, incurable, because their desire is not strong enough. That is why they mix all three directions, and because their desires are scattered among those three directions, it is broken into little pieces, and there is no focused aspiration that will enable the attainment of something concrete. A person constantly changes his direction, searches for something else, squanders his energy.

It is like a little child who wants everything he sees. Even if a person has a strong desire, but it keeps shifting between wealth, honor, power and knowledge, he will ultimately be left empty-handed. People in the spiritual degree of still, are aware of their domestic needs, their needs for sex, food, leisure, television. Their whole life is like one day.

When a person begins to want wealth, he is willing to work day in and day out, just to make more and more money. He is no longer interested in anything else. The same happens to a person who wants honor or power: he wants to be elected to the parliament, to become the next president, everything else is second to that. There is no time for holidays, family, pleasure, nothing exists but the overwhelming desire for power and control.

The problem of those who come to the degree of envy, is that they look at others and all that they have, and want to have it all at once. This is why they cannot attain anything. But along with that, they are capable of taking the desires of other people, to the extent that they develop such a strong desire, as strong as the desire of the whole world put together, and although that desire is not aimed nearly in the right direction, it still has great power.

The negative and positive powers have the same power, therefore, because the power of one person is more than the power of the whole world of the animals, at all times, past, present and future, he can cause more damage than all animals put together, and to that degree, he can also do good.

That is why before a person is ready for spiritual ascent, meaning before he is capable of using his powers to do only good, he needs a spiritual handicap.

That means that in the meantime he cannot be envious of the “human” degree, which is determined according to the degree of one’s wisdom and knowledge, meaning he cannot be given knowledge by which he can harm others, and take what they have. He cannot be given powers and abilities beyond what he’s already got, because his desires are unbalanced by wisdom and moral degree.

That is why the first sages hid their knowledge from the masses, for fear that unworthy students would misuse the knowledge they had been given, and turn the spiritual energy to satisfy their beastly desires and bring about the destruction of the world.

Wisdom has to be a supplemental asset, a spiritual force that a person has in addition to the natural forces, and according to his spiritual and moral degree. Otherwise it will only cause harm. Despite their unlimited abilities, they lived humbly, in poverty, and refused any kind of material pleasures but for the sake of spiritual attainment.

But over time the morality declined; sages wanted to be rich as well, and gain control. As a result, their moral fiber deteriorated to the level of the masses, the protective walls around the wisdom was breached and there began to be misuse of it, for the satisfaction of man’s beastly needs, which prevails even to this day.

If there weren’t the scientific development in the world, what would it look like? We might imagine that there was indeed some development in the spiritual values and spirituality, although it is only an assessment that we could continue to develop according to the spiritual ascent.

But if progress were to match the moral level, we would still be today in the same situation people were two thousand years ago, in accordance with the measure of our correction. From this we should learn that everything that happens beyond it is in fact, corruption, corruption for the sake of correction.

We are not meant to disconnect ourselves from everything and start living the way our fathers lived two thousand years ago, but we must understand that any developmental process is an unbalanced process; the positive and negative forces in society as well as in man are unbalanced. It doesn’t matter how much we want to improve our lives, to make it easy and pleasant, it is still possible only through spiritual efforts.

That is why a person who aspires for spiritual progress finally ends up wanting to live a simple life, humble, he expects nothing of the wonders of the modern world and looks at the products of progress around him as something superfluous.

The advancement of humanity through science is a development in a path of pain. Humanity will continue to evolve until it discovers that that road leads nowhere. We have to detach ourselves from the last two thousand years of progress and start looking for another way. It turns out that after two thousand years, mankind finds that we haven’t really evolved in all that time, but rather moved in the opposite direction. If we were to invest our efforts in the spiritual, we would come to much more positive results!

Reality exists for one purpose only – for man to perform a correction through the wisdom of Kabbalah. Kabbalah has been barred from the masses until today, but in the last generation, before the coming of the Messiah the wisdom of Kabbalah should become open to all, even to the youngest.

If everyone should begin to study Kabbalah, does that mean that its spiritual degree must be high enough for that purpose? But our sages said that in that generation people will be rude and insolent and will not want to understand the wisdom of Kabbalah. So how is that possible? And why is it that today it is permitted to reveal the wisdom of Kabbalah to everyone?

It is written that “The face of the generation will be as the face of a dog”. It will have no interest in the wisdom of Kabbalah, it will want to receive only for itself. That is why there is no fear that unworthy students will come to learn, because no one will want that knowledge. The wisdom of Kabbalah says that before you can receive the attributes of the Creator, you have to correct your nature from an aim to receive, to an aim to bestow, and only then will you be able to attain the wisdom of Kabbalah. That is why no test is needed to see if a student is worthy.

The desires have increased so much in all of us, that we are no longer interested in anything but material reward, and only those who aspire for the attainment and revelation of spirituality will want to attain the wisdom of Kabbalah, whereas all the others will mess with it, trying to sell it for profit.

Everyone will get their chance to start studying, but people will be able to comprehend the Creator only to the extent of their spiritual readiness and the extent of their spiritual purity. Only a person who will understand that the wisdom of Kabbalah doesn’t bring any material gain, but simply gives one a chance to render pleasure back to the Creator, to give Him contentment, will be able to advance spiritually.

If man has that strong desire (all the other desires are still present, but at a completely different ratio), he will begin to study the wisdom of Kabbalah. Other people will simply not want it. But from that we learn how much everything depends on a person’s desires, precisely on what a person wants to achieve.

The book is opened to a person, he begins to study. After some time he can see whether or not he is ready for it. Man’s desire is the factor that determines where he will be and what he will do. Only his inner point can tell him exactly at which spiritual degree he is. He gradually begins to understand that besides unification with the Creator, he will get nothing! No worldly pleasure, no wealth, or honor, or any kind of power. That is why only those who are aware of that fact, and aspire only for the revelation and the attainment of the inner spiritual content endure.

In the course of the spiritual advancement fewer and fewer people remain. The more a group draws near the goal, the choice becomes tougher, and only the truly worthy are left. The process of the study itself, renders power and winnows the students.

Until today, the most correct form of society, was certainly a group of students, whose members were all united with a single desire to obey their leader – the sage, the rabbi. That aspiration stemmed from an absolute recognition in the spiritual correctness of the rabbi, and not from his charisma – his special connections with the Creator, or fear from his officers and armies.

The entire religious history of mankind testifies to man’s inability to keep, or demand from others to keep the ten commandments, or even hope that they will ever be kept, without knowing who we got them from. Only the revelation and attainment of the Creator can give us the power to keep the commandments, and only to the extent that a person understands the power, uniqueness and greatness of the Creator.

The degrees in our ability to keep the ten commandments, are in fact, the spiritual degrees of the revelation of the Creator, the attainment of him, the spiritual rise, the rungs of the spiritual ladder, Jacob’s ladder.

Otherwise, if human society breaks the fundamentals of observing commandments, not through the attainment of the Creator, the revelation of Him by creation, it must find a justification for keeping the ten commandments in its everyday life, meaning, life itself must justify the keeping of the commandments.

The generator for the creation of the laws and codes of human society, both civil and criminal, is a distortion of the element of observing commandments. That is why only in the last generation humanity will be able to return to the genuine observing of the laws of nature, that are perfectly compatible with our nature, and bring about genuine correction.

No commandment will be able to make people follow all ten commandments in their genuine form, and it is only the revelation of Godliness that will make everyone keep the commandments willingly.

Baal HaSulam calls that condition (in his Introduction to Talmud Esser Sefirot) of voluntarily observing the word of God's “testimony”, meaning the Creator testifies by His appearance before man, as in a court of law, that that person will no longer be able to err, because the revelation of the power and magnitude of the Creator forces man to willingly and naturally observe all the commandments of the Creator.

The substance we are made of is the egoistic desire to enjoy, and we can only perform what we perceive as beneficial to us. That is why the revelation of the Creator creates in us yet another decision to follow His wish, because it would bring us only good. But if a person goes through the phases of the recognition of the sinfulness of his nature, and he sees that without that coercion, he lives in constant pain and suffering from generation to generation, he is convinced that any decision that comes to him from above, however difficult it may be, ultimately brings only good and is preferred over all his searches and the fictitious freedom he enjoys today.

Then a demand of the Creator awakens in man, to appear before him, as a witness, or in fact as collateral that man will only take the right way from now on, and will not make such bitter mistakes and suffer so from his mistakes.

It turns out that the desire, as we understand it in our lives, in our corporeal understanding, was given to us only in order to understand, once we have discovered all the fictitious and bitter beauty of that freedom, that in fact we are not free at all, because we follow our own egoistic desires, the evil in us, and cannot break free.

If we were to become slaves to altruism, in order for it to control us the way egoism does today, meaning that we would unconsciously swap one slavery with the other, and the Creator would replace one nature with the another, although we want precisely such a passage from one owner to another, we still get from the Creator something of a different quality. He creates in us a mechanism of the three lines in which we use our egoism in another way, for bestowal, after we perform the first restriction, once there is full detachment from any aspiration for pleasure.

A person cannot change his own desires for pleasure, to receive, to satisfy his material, moral and spiritual needs. But to be satisfied for myself or for the Creator is the whole difference between egoism and altruism. Before a person detaches himself from ‘for me’, he cannot understand that that aim was given to him from above. It is not a natural aim, but something that accompanies his desire for pleasure.

And should the Creator add to his desire to receive the aim ‘for Her name’, he will also begin to use his desire to receive pleasure with that new intention.

That transition state of ‘delighting in mercy’, when a person receives from above the strength to refrain from making any selfish calculations produces his spiritual liberation. After that, a person chooses a different use to his desire to receive pleasure – for the Creator. If it were not for that new element, the spiritual state of “delighting in mercy”, man would not feel free in his desire and intention ‘for the Creator’.

But precisely because he comes to that situation of “delighting in mercy”, he can elect his actions completely freely. And if he chooses altruism at this point, it is a decision of free will, and not in order to escape suffering. A person does not sell his freedom of choice and his freedom of will for a painless life, but he willingly and independently chooses freedom.

Each generation passes on to the next, the collective experience that mankind has accumulated, in addition to the scientific and cultural achievements. This human recall goes from generation to generation, just as energy from a rotten seed goes to the young bud. There is only the transference of memory, energy, and reminiscence ( reshimot). All substance is doomed to rot, just as man’s body rots, and all the information goes to the soul that rises. Then, after its entrance into new bodies, it implements that accumulated memory.

What is the difference between transferring information through a seed, when a young couple has children, and the transference of information when the soul of the deceased moves to a new body? After all the parents are still alive, and so are their children. So what souls enter the bodies of those little children?

Throughout the generations and in all the peoples, there is an enormous desire to pass the accumulated knowledge to the next generations, to pass on the best, most moral values. The best implementations of that desire are not in the study, not in education, it is implemented in the ‘sacred still’ (the orthodox religious), in the old-fashioned way.

The transference is executed through the ‘spiritual package’, and therefore, the best thing that a person can do in order to pass on the good reminiscence to the next generation – is to