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Hi Roxana,

Each soul has its own correction and we can’t judge anything with our egoistic eyes. We don’t know what each person needs to go through on their path towards correction. If they didn’t receive an awakening towards correction then it just simply wasn’t time yet. The path is only for those who have a desire for it and there’s no way to instill desire or like our teacher’s teacher Rabash had said, “where’s the pharmacy where I can buy desire?”

But to relate to the first part of your question, no physical actions in this world have any effect on the spiritual.

Thanks!

Chris

Hi Erez,

Great question! Really, there are a lot of details here you’ve managed to squeeze out. The first principle to remember is there’s really nothing we can “do” but only ever ask the upper force for strength to do reach a higher level of bestowal.

When talking about the screen or Masach, this is always already including the action of not receiving in order to receive and TA is the first time one has reached this threshold of desire to not want to receive for themselves. It’s confusing here because it could sound like we’re talking about eliminating the desire and then when you have no desire, this is the correct desire. However, the emptiness achieved is actually a growing desire for bestowal that hasn’t been fulfilled. A desire for Lishma is simply the willingness to be nothing and have nothing for yourself along with the “expanding” but more correctly the more revealed will to receive.

So to answer your question, when one sees he’s unable to make any actions for the Creator and from this has a great pain of not being able to bring contentment to Him, if this is a greater desire than the desire for him to receive for himself, this is the true prayer and it is answered. Nothing about Lishma can be egoistic since that state is only the ability to act for the Creator’s sake. Asking the Creator for the ability to work for His sake while still feeling and seeing that his reality is still egoistic, this is called Lo Lishma.

Hope that answers your question.

Thanks!

Chris

Hi Humehr,

I’m afraid I cannot answer your question. I have not seen any reference to this in the authentic Kabbalah source texts.

Joseph

Hi Hing,

When Kabbalists speak of Jerusalem they refer to an inner state of spiritual development and not of anything in this world. In general the many words we learn through our study never refer to external phenomena, but only to internal ones.

Jerusalem refers to the state of “absolute awe” before a higher power. “Awe” is a great desire to be like the one force of creation and to develop a single desire to comprehend the power of the Creator in our connection.

Michael Laitman describes the state of New Jerusalem as such:

“Our unity must create such a condition where the united power can manifest itself in us. Precisely because we are all so different, so distant from each other, so opposite, we must unite in such a way as to ultimately create a single field between us, which consists of all of us, all the opposite desires, aspirations, intentions, and thoughts. Then the higher power will manifest in us as one. This is what we should strive for.”

Joseph

Hi Hing,

First of all, anyone who finds Kabbalah usually finds it as a result of previous attempts to find something that suited their own individual path and weren’t able to find something that spoke to them. A lot of the time, these people have tasted other religions and practices, all kinds of New Age methods and see Kabbalah as something…different. Maybe they aren’t able to put their finger on what it is exactly that makes it different, but they usually feel that it stands out in a unique way.

Kabbalah can be described as humanity’s “first science” which when Adam, the first person to discover the upper force 6,000 years ago began speaking and even wrote about the upper force guiding all of reality, there were many who went with him and continued until Abraham who also felt the upper force as the single force in reality that has the intention to do only good.

The “method” of Kabbalah was something that developed over the next few thousand years, as the ego developed, so too the method for revealing the upper force. Since the ego is the force within us that separates us from the Creator or nature or the general upper force, however you want to call it, the method for how to use the ego correctly and rise above it needed to adapt to what was essentially a “heavier” ego in each era of humanity.

Kabbalah is different from any religion or any other method or mysticism main in the fact that a person himself tests only what he sees and feels himself and judges his advancement which can be towards only one thing – “do I want the quality of bestowal?” – the desire of a person is what is researched and that is what’s unique. In Kabbalah, a person learns how to react correctly to the growing ego instead of blaming it on some other foreign force besides the Creator or trying to ignore or lessen it or restrain it.

There’s no “judgement” of actions or thoughts since according to Kabbalah, each thought and desire a person receives is precisely what they need in that moment to advance further towards the purpose of creation. I don’t need to “believe” in anything or really make any kind of physical action since there’s nothing in this world that we can do that affects anything in the spiritual, only work on our desire which we learn we get from our environment. The desire of a person is personal to them and this is what they use to tune themselves at each moment, “what is important to me right now? Am I thinking about the purpose of creation?” etc.

We have gone years without knowing what to do with these questions and Kabbalah helps us aim those questions towards a certain goal and at each step, you can check and see if you are indeed closer, even if only by a millimeter, to what the Kabbalists write about in the stages a person goes through towards reaching the goal. They write to us about what we’ll go through on the path and if we do what they recommend then we’ll feel those changes, we can examine ourselves and see if it truly is how they say it is.

Ultimately however, it depends on the person. If they feel they’re drawn to Kabbalah and they continue down the path they really don’t know why they decided to stay, it’s as if the Creator gave them this desire even though they can’t really understand it or justify it. So if someone wanders here for a while and decides to go, they either weren’t ready and still had some more searching to do or it just wasn’t time. No one is forced to stay since advancement is based on desire and how could someone with no desire to advance advance?

Thanks!

Chris

Hi Hing,

A good example is what you imagine the connection the cells in your body have to the entire body. They certainly need to be in some kind of mutual “flow” that allows all the parts of the body to work together towards a common goal of sustaining the life of the body. They depend on one another that each one will do their job and by carrying out each individual role for the good of the common body, life can continue in homeostasis.

When the Creator created the soul of Adam HaRishon and broke it, all that was broken was our awareness of this connection we have to one another, like cells in a body. The perception that we are individuals living on our own little islands on planet Earth is just our broken perception. When we attain the connection that exists above our bodies, outside our bodies, meaning we don’t relate to our lives as our own individual “I’s”, we’re attaining the connection that already exists, we just didn’t perceive it.

What we’re really tapping into is the thought of creation that performed this action of separation on us and feeling His good will in it, how He did it for us to feel this separation and make these efforts to as if bring ourselves back together, to feel we were doing it of our own accord and own exertion. We rise above this imaginary reality where these connections seemingly do not exist and begin existing in the true reality where each degree upwards, we get closer and closer to the actual true reality, that only the Creator exists.

Thanks!

Chris