Morning Lesson August 18, 2021, Transcription
Baal HaSulam. Article "The Essence of Religion and Its Purpose" (Two Paths: A Path of Pain and a Path of Torah)
Subtitle: (0:28) “Two Paths: A Path of Pain and a Path of Torah” Twice
1.R. (07:44) What does he want to tell us here? There's a program of creation and we need to reach the awareness and attain the entire program according to this program of creation. We need to cascade and keep going forward until we reach the attainment and understand that the Creator is the creator of this program and He spread it out for us. According to this program, He is performing actions on us now that we will gradually grow and advance, to get bigger from zero to His degree. We will then be capable of understanding the entire creation and of recognizing Him. He wants us to reach such a degree that we, the created beings, will be like Him. He gives us our desire, our intention, in heart and mind, and all of our senses. We can understand and feel and connect with all of creation according to what He created in us. He wants us to recognize that His providence is the Good That Does Good.
S. He writes ‘without any evil’ but we do feel evil things.
R. Of course, and what evil do we feel? The created beings on the path reveal all of these contradictory and different states but after they reach a state where they obtain all of these things from the beginning to the end, then they say now His providence is the Good That Does Good and even all the bad that they went through, they went through it but it wasn't on them but on the will to receive. They exit and separate from it and feel it as their hater. All the bad that they went through in the will to receive now seems to them as good because this belongs to their hater.
S. When we reach the goal, in the final correction, is there a part of hate or evil left with respect to the Creator?
R. Why is it called the end of correction?
S. It is not clear where you hold the discernment that everything was good and for the sake of the goal.
R. The light comes and corrects the vessels where you once felt bad and changes this sensation to a good one, and you begin to see changes in your attitude to what is good and what is bad.
S. Do we discover a good part, a balance, a scale that draws us to project on all the bad?
R. Of course this is precisely what you do along the way. You have a scale with a left and right line and each time you need to balance and straighten them, that they won't be more right than left and not more left than right otherwise you are losing your path. They both need to be balanced until you reach the end where all of the bad that you see is not bad but rather these are things that needed to be revealed in order for you to understand what good is. The bad was artificial. ‘I created the evil inclination.’ The entire evil inclination was created so that the good is revealed by it. You cannot attain the Creator without having an opposite form of Him. You are just a created being so you always need to grasp light from darkness, one from another. That's why the Creator created something opposite from Him. You have an opportunity to attain the Creator as Good That Does Good by this monster, called the evil inclination. One who is bigger than his friend, meaning whoever has a bigger evil inclination, a bigger force, attains the Creator to a bigger extent. Everything is built only in this manner. It can’t be possible otherwise.
2. S. (13:32) I do have complaints but I don't have punishment, but in the excerpt, there is a message that is scary to think about the Creator that he is not the Good That Does Good. Why is it so important?
R. I don't understand you. You are talking like a person from this world who is not yet familiar with this process and the program of creation. We need to recognize some phenomena that we don't have in us, to become familiar with it. A person is a mechanism that needs to feel some phenomena, but in order to feel that phenomena, he needs to be capable of sensing its opposite and to measure one against the other. Otherwise, he wouldn't be able to feel. That is how we are built in all of our senses in the body, in the mind, in our sensation, in everything. We are always measuring one against the other. The Creator created the evil inclination, the will to receive, which is opposite His quality of bestowal. We need to incorporate both the will to receive and the will to bestow in order to understand and feel what is a desire to bestow, who is the Creator.
We need the entire system of evil. It doesn't matter if you call it Klipot or whatever. It needs to be in us for us to recognize the Creator, to become familiar with Him. Our path is to build such a system that both of these can exist, and we won't lose ourselves and suddenly fall to the side of evil or to the side of good but rather always be in some manner that is balanced between them on the scale. That is how we need to advance. This is what we build and this entire system of creation is built as such. Think about how we need to depict it to ourselves to get into us. Through all sorts of things, we will understand the relations between man and man and nature, all the laws of nature from the smallest to the more global ones, everything that we can understand. Only out of this condition can the good be revealed, only according to the revelation of bad, of evil. We are in the center of the scale in the middle and we can understand what is happening only by comparing one to another. There is no evil or good in the world, it is all in the middle line that we will reveal the Creator. He doesn't really belong to good or bad, He is Good That Does Good because this is how we reveal Him on top of the evil that is revealed first.
3. S. (18:14) Do we as students choose the path of suffering in order to progress in our work towards the Creator?
R. We are entering the path of suffering. If we are not connected to a group and to the Creator, then the Creator increases the will to receive in us and then we begin to yearn to fill it. This usually brings us pain and suffering because filling the desire to receive is something you can never do. Ultimately there will be some emptying from the fulfillment and we remain empty and miserable. This is the path of suffering. We will talk about it. He writes about it and we will learn this. The path of Torah is a method of how to properly work with the will to receive in a way that we fill it and receive more, as opposed to the path of pain. How can that be? This is the opposite of the Creator. There is no will receive in the Creator, only the will to bestow. If we use the will to receive in order to bestow contentment to the Creator, then my reception is considered as bestowal and this is considered the method of Torah.
I have no problem. I can feel the will to receive without any limit, with no corruption. On the contrary, the more I feel the will to receive in order to give pleasure to the Creator is considered doing this with faith above reason. When the force of bestowal from me to the Creator determines to what extent my force of reception is working within me, it turns out that we reach bestowal and equivalence with the Creator and the correction of creation.
4. S. (21:31) Is the path of Torah a matter of free choice and the path of suffering without free choice?
R. Yes, that is correct. The path of Torah is something I reach by my free choice and if it is not through my free choice then it is the path of suffering, the path of the will to receive. We need to talk and think about it, and to cook it in our minds because we hear these things on the street a lot and this confuses us. We have to think and sort it out. Write down questions when you have them during the day that we will scrutinize them tomorrow or the next day. We have to be scholars in this because we are going to have to answer questions for the whole world about this as they are going to want to know and be corrected, they are going to want to run away from all of the torments, problems, and blows. We need to explain this.
5. S. (23:00) Is our dissemination of the process of connection for all of humanity, in a more simple and approachable manner, a preparation for the process of connection with the Creator?
R. No. If we start dealing with all sorts of socialism, communism, and paths of love with different colors, and are going to hug each other and connect people in this way, by that we don't reach the correction. We're not against them but it is not that we are among them. Our work is, ‘love your friend as yourself’ in order to discover creation and to bring men closer to the inner force of nature and not in order to fill all of his beastly pleasures.
6. S. (24:30) In the story of the king and his son mentioned in the article, is it the child or the king whose heart does not awaken?
R. We can say that they are on the path.
7. S. (25:20) If we view everything our ten says and does as perfect but we see flaws and others outside of our ten Is our work the same or is this a sign of not putting in enough work in our ten?
R. We should invest ourselves only within the ten. If we are successful in connecting between us in the 10, we discover the Creator. Only working in the ten is enough for us. So don't be confused between our work, what we should do, and the work outside of the ten. That is the wrong approach. We don't bring spiritual work outside of the ten at all.
8. S. (26:31) Baal HaSulam writes that there is an order of states to bring us to the final goal and if we don't see it this way, we are doubting the Creator. Is this supposed to be our intention in every action?
R. We should try to be as close to the friends as possible and by that we can be certain that we are walking correctly. This is what I recommend to you because by your wisdom you're trying to scrutinize all of these things and I'm telling you to shift it from your intellectual level to an emotional one, where you feel more and scrutinize these things more. The closer you are to your friends through them you are closer to the Creator. That is the correct scrutiny.
9. S. (27:59) It doesn’t sound balanced to say that the closer we are to the friends, the closer we are to the Creator.
R. What do you call balanced?
S. That's what I'm trying to understand. It sounds like we are to be connected to the friends as much as possible. So, what is the balance with evil being revealed?
R. If evil is not discovered why do you need it? If it's not revealed you can go with connection all the time.
S. Because we're saying we don't want to go too much one way or the other we want to find the middle line.
R. This is correct. Are you saying that if you go in connection all the time you are not going to have the left line?
S. I don't know, I'm trying to understand. What is going to be the balance if the left line comes?
R. I don't need to worry about the left or the criticism. Nothing. All I need to do is to carry out the action and if out of 23 and 1/2 hours a day I care only about the right in but love and connection, then for 30 minutes I am allowed to be in criticism.
S. I am asking something else. If we're in connection and out of the connection the evil is revealed, does the work change?
R. What do you mean does the work change? You keep going to the good with all of the evil you have and you try to add it to the good connection and then the connection becomes more powerful and more intense. It increases its level.
S. This is all of the work, just this?
R. It is all of the work. Try it, you have everything there. There is nothing else besides that. You are working on the connection all the time. In the connection you discover new degrees, fulfillment, lights, Reshimot, everything appears in the connection and along with that you discover all kinds of negative phenomena. You work with the will to receive in the connection. You always have this work of overcoming resistance, Reshimot, that rise and fall and the purification. You will see what will happen. Your questions are not yet from practice.
10. S. (30:59) Is the definition of always working in connection to always thinking about the friends or to request from the Creator to give us the force to be connected in our daily work?
R. Make efforts to connect to the friends then turn to the Creator to help us be connected and in this way, we will come closer to each other in practice. We will discover spiritual phenomena in connection between us
11. S. (32:02) I am a will to receive. I'm also an evil inclination. What choice do I have, what are my options?
R. In the meantime, you have no options to choose from.
S. I am the evil inclination?
R. Yes.
12. S. (32:42) What does it mean to get closer to the friends in the 10?
R. It is when I understand the friend's inclination towards correction, and his tendency, his desire, the direction towards correction, and it resembles the way I am drawn to the correction. We feel close as a result of our yearnings, our goal, our path of resembling each other. We are close in our view and in the way that we understand things. This is the meaning of being close.
S. Does it mean that we are close if we all have the same goal and desire? We reach that and we see how we hate each other.
R. That is the way that it seems to you and this is great, it is a sign that you have a healthy desire. This is how you feel and see that you hate them. It is very nice now. What you do is, you say that ‘they have eyes and see not,’ meaning that I see this through my own ego. If I could take off the filter of my ego and see things without it, I would see a corrected connected society where the Creator resides. How to do that? The fact that I see them all today in a bad way is the opposite of the good, corrected way. I am close to this good way and all I need to do is to take off this filter, this screen from my eyes, that’s all. How to do this? Just as Rabash writes in the social articles, pray and ask for Him to take away this concealment and then you will see that the entire society is connected between them and the Creator is within them. You will discover Him. You cannot discover Him unless it is a result of a good connection between the friends. So, you are close to that.
S. Can I do certain actions to get close to praying practically?
R. The best is if you can help your friends, to help them, but if you can't just read the materials because as you read them it means that you also are praying. That is considered praying; this is what I recommend.
13. S. (37:04) What is the cause of the fear of not being able to bestow to the friends? Should I be afraid of not being able to bestow to the friends?
R. Only to the extent that I can bestow to my friends can I bestow to the Creator, so If I am not bestowing to my friends I am not bestowing to the Creator. Every day I have to be concerned about how I want to bestow to the friends more, and from there I come to bestow upon the Creator. There is a verse, ‘I dwell among my people.’ It is written that when I bestow to the society where the Creator is, that is to bestow to Him. So how do I reach a state where I feel that within society, there is the Creator? I discover Him there in the desires of the friends that are connected. This is how I advance.
14. S. (38:44) It is written that the Creator created the will to receive and is it necessary. Where in the ten do I get the lack that exists in my will to receive to reach wholeness and completion?
R. From your friends. Where else can you take it from other than the friends? Except for your ten and the Creator there is nothing. Nothing. Everything is empty, it doesn't exist.
S. But I am supposed to bestow to them, not take from them?
R. If you are taking you are bestowing because you want to receive in their will to receive a connection of all of the desires. The revelation of the Creator will happen to the whole ten.
S. Do we become like the Creator by the wholeness we attain in the ten, by taking and giving?
R. Yes.
15. S. (40:40) You said that we need to prepare ourselves. Do I understand correctly that we need to try to feel the opinions of others regarding the actions of the upper force?
R. We should only work in the ten. The way you're saying it is not good. I'm not going into any foreign work but only with my friends and no one else.
S. What are we preparing ourselves for?
R. Dissemination is something else and. of course, we should do that for foreigners, alien people. That is far from what we are doing, to explain why we are suffering in this world, what nature requires of us, and that we will be connected and how to come to connection. It has to be very simple for the people. But our spiritual work is only in the group and only in the friends. Whoever is doing this outside of the ten is harming himself and the ten. That is why you have to be aimed correctly.
16. S. (42:30) The good and bad from this world is just an illusion compared to the spiritual truths which we need to reach?
R. I'm not certain exactly what you mean.
S. It isn't precise to call the Creator the Good That Does Good because he's beyond good and bad. So how do we understand?
R. Both the good and the bad are in the Creator but is only good because it works in the ego to bring us back to the Creator, to the good.
With this we will conclude today and I hope each one will meet with his ten in the morning lesson tomorrow. We will continue with these things and let's be connected. Prepare the questions and we will scrutinize them all. Let's hope that we will be so good to the world so that there will be fewer physical torments and more understanding about spirituality for all of the people in the world.