Question: What does it mean to thank the Creator?

Answer: After all the efforts that are required from me in dissemination, studies, and the group, I reach despair and then I start perceiving my egoistic desire separately from myself. It’s the same as how a sick person feels the place of the illness and its source—the painful area inside him, which he discerns and wants to isolate.

Then he begins working to come out of Egypt, to isolate his egoistic desire. A person tries to separate from it, but cannot do it. That is how the first and second Egyptian plagues go by.

After that a person starts to feel that all of these changes in relation to his evil inclination are evoked by the Creator. As the Torah tells us, the Creator informs Moses that He has given more strength to Pharaoh in order to ascend and project Himself above him.

A person starts to see and understand that the Creator does all of the work inside him. He leads him up, out of the egoistic calculation, and then lowers him, and then a person falls back. Then the Creator brings him out once again and later a person falls again. That is how time after time, a person acquires the knowledge and sensation of the fact that unless the Creator performs these actions upon him, he will always remain in Egypt by himself, inside his egoistic desire.

These impressions accumulate, becoming clearer and stronger, until a person cries out, ready for anything—even pitch darkness for his egoism —anything to run away from it. This is the “Egyptian darkness,” the night of the exodus from Egypt. There is no darkness in a person greater than this one, but if he knows that he is following the Creator, then he prefers this darkness. Of course, he does not prefer it in the desire for pleasure, but because the Creator is walking ahead of him.

And the way to attain this is through meticulous work.
From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/23/11, Writings of Rabash

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