Part 3:

Baal HaSulam. The Essence of Religion and Its Purpose

1. S. (03:54) What brings a Kabbalist or what gives him an ability to write such harsh words?

R. I don't know. That's a question. I guess nevertheless he feels great sorrow for what's happening in the generation, and that's why he is coming out with such an article. He also calls this short article the essence of religion and its purpose. And in the headline is like the entire reality.

The absolute good : to avoid tiring the readers…

2. S. (10:16) Every person that wants to get that good to complete himself, so he finds his needs by causing harm to the others? Any desire that a person wants to complete in himself, is it necessary for him to do it on the account of the other? To do bad to the other?

R. This we have to see. I don't know we have to check and see if this is the case or not.

3. S. (11:11) He writes that because the Creator doesn't have the will to receive so he can't do anything bad to another, to his created beings. Let's say I can understand that, but then he says that necessarily it means that he is doing good to the created beings. He even says that if we look, thus we call him as the absolute good. Once we have learned this let us look at the actual reality that is guided by him, how he bestows only goodness upon them.

R. Yes, hang on he finishes this with a question mark?

4. S. (12:09) He writes that from the Creator it's clear to us that he is whole and he has no need for anyone to help him become absolute. So is that wholeness of creation part of the wholeness of the Creator?

R. No, the Creator above all creation. That's it.

His guidance is purposeful guidance

5. R. (18:30) Up to here everything he writes is quite logical.

6. S. (18:54) It is very clear in the way that Baal HaSulam explains about purposeful guidance according to the examples of nature, how it develops. The question is because this nature was created by the Creator. So why did he do it this way? That the purposeful guidance is revealed that the more exalted the purpose is so the pre-stages are the worst and bitter. You can say he could create it in a different way.

R. That is an answerless question. We don't ask it. That's how it is. In my opinion that's how it is. That is how it is written.

S. Still Baal HaSulam is trying to prove to us the essence of the purposeful Providence or guidance, but how do I say it. It's based on the example of nature but not according to a higher mind of the Creator.

R. He simply wants to say that the more nature develops to hire degrees it has to start from lower degrees in the beginning and he gives us examples for it from the animate and the human degrees. What can you do? We see it before us.

S.Well actually there's nothing to ask.

R. Yes because that's what we have before us. We can't add anything.

S. Maybe in a different place he explains why specifically everything is revealed from the opposite.

R. Yes. A thing and its opposite.

S. Why?

R. The advantage of light from darkness, he explains it in different ways. But after all, what we understand, we understand a thing from its opposite. If we want to attain exalted things we have to start from the lowest things.

7. S. (21:40) He says that there is no wise as the experienced. When he sees the fruit at its ripeness, so that's the end of corrections. Only when a person reaches that he can be experienced and see that all the corruptions were solved.

R. Yes.

S. Also in the first part of the lesson, friends were saying that they see corruptions, I slander the Creator, and you said only in faith above reason you can solve this problem for now?

R. For the time being, yes.

8. S. (22:32) Working with the friends, maybe you could say that if I recognize a resistance from a certain friend, my attitude that it's not whole so the more the attitude that I reveal there's a bigger gap. So when correcting it, so there will be more lights? There will be more place for the ten?

R. That's clear. Even in technology, in the inanimate degree we discover that this is how things work.

9. S. (23:11) About purposeful guidance, is there no guidance that is not purposeful?

R. No there is, but where we want to connect, to attach everything to the Creator we call it purposeful Providence or guidance because the end of the action is in the initial thought.

10. S. (24:08) What does it mean that purposeful guidance towards the good and how should we calibrate ourselves to that guidance?

R. We need to accept this guidance, this Providence as good, as correct on the condition that we are incorporated in this Providence. To the extent to which we are incorporate in it otherwise this Providence works on us and it surrounds us forcefully until we agree with it.