Who Do We Ask For Forgiveness On Judgment Day?

cancerA question I received: Who should I ask for forgiveness on Yom Kippur, if we learn in the science of Kabbalah that there is no one outside of me?

My Answer: First of all, we have to ask our friends for forgiveness. If a person doesn’t have everyone’s forgiveness, then he won’t have anything with which to turn to the Creator. But what is forgiveness in spirituality?

Forgiveness is the revelation of my current state, which I can correct, in contrast to the desires I couldn’t even fathom being able to cope with and to ask for their correction. I have to discern my desires gradually and advance step by step.

Forgiveness (Slihot) and Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) mean the revelation of our broken vessel (Kli) or soul. We check it and compare it with the state of the full correction – Purim. This is why we call the opposite, uncorrected state that we reveal, Ki-Purim – Like Puirm).

Therefore, Yom Kippur symbolizes a time when a person truly asks to be forgiven for all his “sins.” But he doesn’t want this because it is written somewhere, but rather because he reveals how opposite he is to the final state, which he is able to envision. This state is the unity of all the souls for the sake of equivalence with the Creator, the force and desire to love and bestow.

Daily Kabbalah Lesson – 09.27.09

Preparation to the Lesson
The group “charges” me with the importance of bestowal, and at the same time, let me see how far away I am from this quality. As a result, I am able to demand correction.
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Part 1, on Writings of Rabash
“Darkness” is the breaking of the connection between us. When we really desire to unite, we light up the darkness.
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Part 2, on“Preface to the Sulam Commentary”
Being able to enjoy something that isn’t bestowal is just an illusion we have. In reality, pleasure and bestowal are the same thing.
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Part 3, on Baal HaSulam’s article, “Thou Hast Hemmed Me In Behind and Before”
You have to nourish your egoism, pretending that what you’re doing is good for it. After all, we will need egoism in order to undergo correction.
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5 Minutes Of Light From The Daily Lesson: Reveal The Collective Desire

How To Talk To Your Inner Mafia

in2520the2520news2520the2520biggest2520physics2520expeWhen a person wants to work for the sake of bestowal, his egoism puts up a fight. It takes a lot of different actions to divide a person’s general desire into two camps: that which a person can do for the sake of bestowal, and that which he can’t.

One has to “give gifts” to his egoism in order to make it calm down and understand that it wins out by taking part in your path – bestowal. We can’t just completely cut off our desire to receive pleasure. Rather, we constantly have to awaken this desire in order to receive new desires from it, which we could then correct and thus ascend toward the goal.

This is why it is not enough to simply restrict your egoism. Instead, you have to nourish it: give it gifts, hug it, and tell it, “We are brothers!” We have to be like Jacob who went to meet Esau bearing gifts.

We will still have much more use for the will to enjoy! However, as long as we’re unable to work with it, we have to nourish it and show it that all our spiritual work is for its benefit. After all, it doesn’t know that you are planning to correct yourself for the sake of bestowal.

You have to treat it as a foreign, alien body, which remains uncorrected for now. And you have to nourish it in order to be able to build the middle line. It’s like the mafia, which comes to you the minute you want to open up some great business, and it tells you: “We are allowing you to start your business, but every month you have to give us a part of the profits.”

This is exactly how we have to work with our egoism, but we have to be much more cunning. Every time we lie to it, we extract new parts of desire from it which can be corrected, while assuring the ego that it’s all done for its own good.

We continue nourishing it so it will allows us to work even more, very much like the mafia which is happy about the fact that your business is growing: “Do whatever you want as long as you pay!” This is how we trick our egoism. The desire to receive pleasure is the matter of creation, and we can’t neglect or extinguish it. We have to sustain its life, hoping that one day we can bring it to complete correction.

Don’t Fall For Egoism’s Tricks

israelA question I received: When a politician comes to power in our world, then even if he is motivated by compassionate goals such as a desire to do good for the society, he still can’t avoid getting mixed up in political power struggles and petty troubles that make him forget about the compassionate goals he had. On our spiritual path, how can we make sure that we don’t stray from the goal and fall for the tricks our egoism plays on us?

My Answer: Indeed, when we are doing spiritual work, we have to lie to our egoism. We are standing opposite the Creator whether we want to or not, and He is the one setting up all the forces that come our way, all the disturbances and all our inner discernments.

As soon as you forget about Him and veer off the path leading directly to Him, you start to feel suffering. And this suffering eventually brings you back to the right calculation: that all the forces must unite together into a single aspiration toward the Creator. This is how things work in spirituality, because the Creator controls everything that happens to a person.

The Creator is above and a person with the point in the heart is below, and there is a system of two forces between them: the right line and the left line. You advance from below upwards, toward the goal, which is the middle line. As soon as you deviate away from it in any direction, you start being affected by a force that brings you back, because only being in the middle line allows you to feel unity with the Creator, where unity is balance.

Yet, as soon as you attain balance, you immediately shift to a higher level. Then, the search for balance on that higher level once again forces you to research all the parts of the system and to ask for help from Above. After all, it is only by correcting your matter – your desires, that you ascend above them and perceive the new world in those corrected desires.

All of these forces come from Above in order to help you advance upwards. It’s impossible for anything to get “mixed up” here. The only thing that depends on you is whether to advance toward the goal by the short path or the long path. This is up to you!

There Is Never Anything Outside A Person

A True Desire Is Always Answered by the LightWhen reading a Kabbalistic text, it’s important to understand that it is only talking about spiritual processes that take place inside a person, rather than about different characters and external actions. Everything that is described in a Kabbalistic text is inside a person.

For instance, the entire Torah talks only about how a person discerns different desires and qualities within: which ones belong to bestowal and which – to reception, which are fit for correction and which are unfit for it; and how a person experiences an inner world through these qualities, which is the only world that actually exists. A person then discovers that he perceives our world inside him as well, and there is never anything on the outside.

The way to enter the new world is by expanding your perception of your internal desires and qualities and by taking care to use all of them for the sake of bestowal. This is how one realizes oneself to the fullest.

A person contains all the characters of the Torah – the whole world to the fullest is within him. Kabbalah explains how a person can arrange the entire sum of all his desires within, and thereby reveal a new world.

Organizing Our Lives In The Changed World

reading book A question I received: It is becoming increasingly clear that population surplus is a problem not only in the Third World, but also in the developed countries of Europe and North America. There are not enough jobs to go around. What do you think the job market will be like in the future?

My Answer: The crisis is bringing to light the type of production that is excessive. We must come to a state when we produce the essentials for a normal existence, but nothing more. When this happens most of the Earth’s population will be left with nothing to do.

We are already witnessing forced reductions in working hours in all the developed countries, with many companies switching to a four day work week.

The rationale is that this will reduce maintenance costs, as workers would be taking less vacations and sick days, while being motivated to work harder.

Let’s remember that it was the Great Depression of 1929 that led to the emergence of the five-day work week. Before that people worked six days a week, 12-14 hours a day.

By reducing work days and hours we’ll be able to provide work to twice as many people.

Question (cont’d): Either way one question still remains – what will one do in his free time? By increasing peoples’ leisure time, will we not disturb the balance with Nature that we must come to? After all, this imbalance is the reason we’re in this crisis.

My Answer: Nature is freeing us not so that we can have a good time, but so that we’ll achieve equilibrium with it by attaining the quality of love and bestowal.

Therefore, we must organize the free time we are given to study the Nature of man and our world, so as to equalize their qualities.

Therein lies the essence of the science of Kabbalah. We must establish national universities and other such education centers, which will serve to educate the people in their increased free time about their likeness to Nature.

We must explain that humanity’s increased free time is part of Nature’s plan, and is specifically intended to help humanity come to the realization of this plan.

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: What Is Balance In Nature?
Laitman.com Post: We Won’t Need Surplus In The Future Society
Kabbalah Today Article: I Thought I Was Retired, But I Am Now Unemployed
Baal HaSulam Article: “Building the Future Society”
Video: Modern Laws of Global Life – Law of Necessity & Surplus