The Eternal Reality Is Me

Question: What remains unchangeable in a person who develops spiritually and what changes in him?

Dr. Laitman's Answer: The only thing that doesn't change is the intention toward the right goal which he sometimes tries to create. Besides this, everything else changes and nothing remains. You lose everything besides the right intention if you have created it. Everything else only seems to belong to you, including your existence, and it is given to you only to create the intention.

This world and the spiritual world are not taken into account. Only the intention remains which we can create as a result of our efforts. This is the spiritual vessel, the soul.

In that intention you see the eternal reality, meaning yourself. What is the true reality? It is the degree of your revelation of yourself in the upper Light, in equivalence to it, in becoming identical to it. All of this becomes revealed only in the intention, and nothing remains besides it.

There is nothing besides the intention. This means that nothing else exists in reality. Everything else is imaginary and only seems to exist right now in order for you to attain the intention. After all, you have to live inside something. Who creates the intention? It's the person whom you now perceive as yourself, living and existing in this world. Why do you need this? It's in order to form the intention.

When you complete creating your intention from the beginning of the ladder of the spiritual degrees and until its end, then this entire world, this entire reality disappears because in reality it did not exist. It only seemed to exist to you in order for you to develop the right intention.

Now understand how important is the activity you are engaging in-the creation of your eternal image, the human who is similar to the Creator.

From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 03/17/11, The Zohar

Hope For Salvation

Question: Why is it so difficult to keep the intention while reading The Book of Zohar, or to imagine the connection between us and to grab on to the text? What should we do?

Dr. Laitman's Answer: If a person found himself in a great disaster and was told, "Read this text for half an hour and there you will reveal how to get out of the disaster," then you can imagine how he would spend that half hour. Would it be difficult for him to concentrate on it? What kind of pressure and hope would he feel in trying to penetrate inside the text, to understand what is being required of him, what he can find there, what kind of salvation is there, and how it will arrive....

Everything depends on the environment, on how much it "warms up" this inner attitude to The Zohar's text. All other Kabbalistic texts are beneficial to a smaller extent with regard to their text's influence on the reader because when reading them we can involve the mind and feelings, and somehow connect them to ourselves.

The Torah, in turn, is perfect, pure, unattainable, "in the heavens." What does "pure" (Tmima) mean? No one touches it. It is the upper Light. We only wait for the results from it that will manifest in us.

Only the group can give me this attitude to reading The Zohar so I would passionately wish to receive a result from it. Otherwise it won't happen.

We have already gone through this state when we just began reading The Zohar. During the first few months people were so inspired that this common excitement influenced every person and every person felt the surrounding illumination to some extent, feeling the power of The Zohar's influence upon him.

Now this inspiration has waned because at first we received it from Above, whereas now we have to develop it ourselves. Nothing happens by itself in nature. You receive an initial awakening and then it is taken away so you would add it from your own end, so you would complete the space that has been emptied of inspiration from Above with your own efforts.

If we don't add to it ourselves, then we cannot keep the intention for correction over the course of 45 minutes while reading The Zohar, and we just wait for the lesson to be over. If we don't awaken a person, if we don't stimulate the inner vibrations in him so he would feel like a sick person facing the only means of salvation, the only opportunity to be healed and saved from disaster, then of course it is difficult for him to keep the intention and to grab on to the text. In essence, he blames us because we do not let him feel the vital necessity of this, meaning the importance of the goal.

From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 03/17/11, The Zohar