I think the whole business of the cult that the Gra signed the excommunication on is a waste of time and even damaging mentally and spiritually.
The Shatz left lots of cookies. That is like Hansel and Gretel left crumbs to be able to find their way back to the town. Cookies mostly seem innocent. They are also left by software writers in order to preserve their copyright. That is: when they write some code, they sometimes writes meaningless code that does nothing, and has no use. But if someone copies their software and claims that they (the second person) thought it up all by himself, it can be shown in a court of law that the second copied from the first if there are the same lines of meaningless code. [Since there is zero chance the second thought up also the same meaningless code by himself]
These cookies you can find all over all books of the cult that the Gra signed the excommunication on. So you know from where they get their ideas from. The Shatz has copyrights.
But even more so--actual basic innovative ideas of the Shatz and his false prophet, Nathan, were accepted by the cult that the Gra signed the excommunication on and became part of parcel of their unique teachings.
This is not news to anyone with the slightest familiarity with the books of the cult that the Gra signed the excommunication on and knows a bit of history.
What was a surprise to me was the first chapter in the Lekutai Moharan. I had thought that seeing the Divine wisdom in everything and tying oneself to that wisdom was a unique idea of Reb Nachman. Little did I know. It is straight from Natan Haazati [Natan from Gaza] whose has a long and involved presentation of this idea in one of his major works. [In some universities you can find his three books on microfilm]
But Reb Nachman is the very best of the bunch. The most insightful and sincere. The rest of it really ought be be thrown out with the rest of the trash as the Gra already said 200 years ago and still is not listened to.
It is undoubted the original the cult that the Gra signed the excommunication on had spiritual powers, but certainly not any more than the Shatz himself. The miracles people did in name of the Shatz dwarfed anything anyone heard or saw with the Baal Shem Tov. People as far away as Frankfurt could revive the dead just by saying the name of the Shatz. I never heard anyone do such a thing by saying the name of the Baal Shem Tov.
Spiritual powers are taken to be a proof of holiness by the cult that the Gra signed the excommunication on. The opposite is the truth. Spiritual powers are a proof of unholiness and powers from the Dark Side.
At any rate, it takes a certain amount of the interest out of learning the Lekutai Moharan when you realize from where a lot of the ideas come from.
Reb Nachman was sincere, but so was Shabatai Tzvi. That does not make one right.
The trouble here is that this kind of person that makes a living by being meta-magical is not that rare in human societies. Every society has it's shamans, witch doctors, speaking in tongues --but all at the right time. So they are not full blown schizophrenics, but a gray area called schizo-typal personality
