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I was joking with a friend that if you don’t hate the friends sometimes you’re not doing it right. He said love is just love, always smooth, never mixed with hate, and that he never feels hate at all. That stopped me and made me wonder if that is really love or if it is just the will to receive playing with its own idea of others.
From what I can tell real love only shows up outside that bubble. It is not that we should go looking for hate or conflict, but love only becomes real when there is resistance, when I feel the gap between myself and others and have to rise above it. My experience has been totally different from his. I feel that friction all the time, always needing to pray to rise above it. Is it normal to feel that friction? Correct discernment? What to do about it?
Thank you, this is very helpful, and we read this together as a 10 today. It’s hard for me to reconcile the idea that “there can be friends that come and go on the periphery of the ten” and that we are all equal, but I sense this as a truth in practice because we do have some members on the periphery. This friend was just so dedicated that it’s jarring. We spend a lot of energy trying to make everyone equal, but I understand there are many paradoxes we need to rise above, and that’s the nature of the work.
We’ve had a friend leave the ten, and it feels like a part of us has been cut away. It’s painful. On top of that, there have been some accusations about inequality in the ten. I keep turning it over in my mind, maybe there’s truth in it, maybe not. We never had the chance to work through it with that friend, and now the “sterile lab environment” we try to maintain feels disrupted. I’m trying to sense what he was referring to and it’s influencing My perception of the friends.
How do we keep going? How do I keep going? Do we just move forward and annul ourselves to this possible, perhaps even imagined, inequality? It’s hard.
I’m trying to understand what makes a True Prayer in the work.
Baal HaSulam writes:
“There are three conditions in prayer… [One of them is that] he must believe that he is in the worst condition of all his contemporaries… and if the Creator doesn’t help him, he would rather die than live.” (Shamati 209)But if I feel that low and pray for the Creator to give me vessels of bestowal, isn’t that still egoistic, because I’m suffering and want to feel something better?
How is that not a prayer for pleasure, just hidden in a more spiritual form?
In the group and in the study, we’re constantly talking about bestowal, trying to understand it, hoping to come closer to it, trying to want it for the friends. But the teachers keep saying that bestowal is something completely beyond us, something we can’t even imagine, let alone feel or taste. It’s totally outside our reality.
So I’m struggling to understand: how do we aim toward something that we can’t grasp in any way?
In my current senses, there’s just no taste in it, it feels neutral, flat, not good or bad. I can’t perceive it as anything desirable. And that leads to this wall of, “Do anything but leave.” But without any taste, it’s like working in a vacuum.
How are we actually supposed to regard bestowal in this state? Especially when we try to want it for the friends in the ten, but we don’t even know what we’re hoping for. Are we just playing a game with words? Is that what it means that the Creator plays with us?
I realize this isn’t a single, sharp question, I’m trying to get better at that, but I wanted to give a little context to express where I’m coming from.
In the last morning lesson, Dr. Michael Laitman said we “solve all our problems in the connection with the friends.” How do I bring an internal deficiency to the ten—not to be understood or to gain wisdom—but purely with a desire for correction, in a way that aligns with the purpose of our work and supports the ten’s adhesion with the Creator?
