The “Globes” newspaper has published a comprehensive article about the “happiness industry,” which is making us more and more unhappy. The rate of depression in the West is constantly on the rise, while the average age of its victims is decreasing. According to data from the World Health Organization, by 2020 depression will be the second cause of disability and death in the world, surpassed only by cardiovascular diseases.

The modern person is sinking in loneliness, but society does not throw him a life-buoy. With the exception of Islam, the role of religion as a source of support is dwindling to nothingness. Communities are falling apart and the concept of a big, happy family in the Western countries is becoming nonsensical. As people shift to the space of virtual communications, they mistakenly suppose that from now on they can manage without a real, caring environment. As a result, a person looks for the solution to all the problems one on one with himself, inside his shell, perched by a computer screen.

The life of a society that suffers from attention deficit flies by at lightning speed. People twitter short trills hoping to have the time to express something that won’t be heard by anyone a moment later. Anything requiring inner efforts, persistence, and time is rejected at the root. When a person is empty, having no true goal, then worry and depression settle in. So where can he get that goal? Where can he find meaning?

Today all serious researchers assert that happiness lies inside contact with others, in bestowal, and that real meaning can only be revealed in the interconnection between us. Viktor Frankl, the famous Austrian psychologist, says that a person sitting at home and trying to find meaning on his own is like someone trying to break into an open door, not understanding that it opens inwards instead of out.

“You won’t find happiness in a shell,” says one of the interviewed experts to the “Globes” newspaper. By focusing on himself instead of extending a hand out to others, a person only increases his narcissism and depression.

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Philosophy refuses to rely only on scientific experiments, and sometimes it draws conclusions only based on human imagination. Even a totally abstract theory, when one considers his intellectual conclusions to be above actual fact, is also considered to be philosophy.

As long as you work as a machine, as a scientist, based on strict facts, you will not make mistakes. However, as soon as you separate from them and start “philosophizing,” your conclusions become worth nothing. This is what Kabbalah states.

On one hand, Kabbalah seems to lower a person, turning him into a “machine” which operates according to a simple system. But on the other, it is ready to present him with new possibilities, new instruments of perception. However, it warns that we must not rise above our rationality because we will make mistakes. It offers us new research tools in order to reveal the world further.

The human mind reaches “to the skies,” but one cannot rise above this limit; this is its limit. External sciences go to this limit, but do not continue beyond because one will begin to philosophize. Instead of this, one has a possibility to further continue his scientific experiment with the help of Kabbalah.

The reason for the eternal struggle between Kabbalah and philosophy is because philosophy intrudes on the area where Kabbalah operates. External sciences do not go there. They strictly work within their field: research in the egoistic instruments of knowledge.

However, today, we are reaching a special state when science is reaching its “sky,” its limit. Kabbalah wants to continue the scientific experiments with man beyond this limit, using the same strict principle, but relying on obvious facts, on “what your eyes can see.”

This is why it needs to expel philosophy from this area and show that there is no place for it there. After all, philosophy goes there with fantasies, and Kabbalah comes with actual research instruments (the property of bestowal).

Granted, to research this area of reality, one needs to have new organs of perception and a new approach based on the force of bestowal instead of reception. This is why Kabbalah is called a higher science. But it is nevertheless a science!
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/28/201o, “The Wisdom of Kabbalah and Philosophy”

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