Audio Version Of The Blog – 08.03.12

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An Endless Road

Dr. Michael LaitmanBaal HaSulam, “Introduction to The Book of Zohar,” item 55: This is because he attains the Lights and degrees of his soul, called NRNHY, according to the measure of the purity of his will to receive. And with each degree he attains, the Lights of that degree assist him in his purification. Thus, he rises in degrees until he achieves the amusements of the final aim in the Thought of Creation.

Question: Is the level of “to receive in order to bestow” meant for every soul?

Answer: Yes and no. It can also be attained indirectly by incorporation, since we are talking about an analog system that is perfect and integral in which everyone is connected to everyone else and the general pattern is in everyone like in a holographic picture.

The whole point is what my role in this picture is: Am I part of the “leg,” of the “head,” the “heart,” or another organ in the general “body”? I will definitely attain everything, but I attain my part in the system actively by operating independently.

I have my own deficiency and also the deficiency I acquire from everyone else. There is myself that stems from my element and there is everyone else. So our attainment is not identical. Everyone attains the whole system as a whole and is in Ein Sof (Infinity), but at the same time everyone “envies” the others since everyone has a different starting point. This also requires work and correction.

Then we rise to such a level, which in the meantime, we know nothing about. The development continues and disappears somewhere. The vessels will have to grow and turn into something that we don’t know…

Question: Why does a person have to attain the thought of creation?

Answer: Because this is the desire of the upper, of the Creator, since the thought of creation is the Creator.

Our words are inaccurate, but we have to use them. It says that there is an unattainable reality called the Creator. He is unattainable, but there is the thought of creation, which means His attitude towards us.

As a result of His thought about us, something was done. He created a desire to receive and did different things with it. But the point is not that we should stay in this desire to receive. The desire and the Light are the only two attributes—receiving and bestowal, which He has chosen in order to eventually raise us above both of them.

This means that we rise not only above receiving, but also above bestowal, because one will not be able to exist without the other. We have to understand His thought of creation and rise even higher to what we cannot speak about today because we don’t know what it is.

This is the way of attainment that leads us to an unknown end. In our desires we cannot even attain anything higher then them, while here we speak about something that is beyond Gmar Tikkun (the end of correction). Still we have to understand that this is where the goals that truly match the Creator are. By clarifying the process we go through, we have to say that His attitude towards us is not below the level He is on and about which we know nothing, since even the roots our branches stem from are not derived from it.

So by knowing this we should also understand where we are today.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 8/01/12, “Introduction to the Book of Zohar

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The Era Of The Last Generation

Dr. Michael LaitmanBaal HaSulam, “Introduction to the Book of Zohar,” p. 57: If the worshipers of the Creator had at least engaged in the internality of the Torah and extended a complete Light from Ein Sof, the whole generation would have followed them. And everyone would be certain of their way that they would not fall. But if even the servants of the Creator have distanced themselves from this wisdom, it is no wonder the whole generation is failing because of them. And because of my great sorrow, I cannot elaborate on that!

If the masses studying the Torah understood what the true teaching is… That is how they call the wisdom of Kabbalah, but they do not want to learn it. And yet, if they had taken up this science, of course, we could have made great corrections, both quantitative and qualitative. And then our situation today would be different.

Who is more aware of this gap between the desired and reality than Baal HaSulam, when instead of internality we are preoccupied with externality? The end of the 19th century, when the return to the land of Israel was allowed, was the latest milestone. In general this period lasts from the time of the Ari, the Messiah, son of Joseph.

Rabbi Abraham Ben Mordechai Azulai writes in the “Introduction to the book, Ohr HaChama [Light of the Sun]” 81:

The prohibition from Above to refrain from open study of the wisdom of truth was for a limited period, until the end of 1490. Thereafter is considered the last generation, in which the prohibition was lifted and permission has been granted to engage in The Book of Zohar. And since the year 1540, it has been a great Mitzva (precept) for the masses to study, old and young. And since the Messiah is bound to come as a result, and for no other reason, it is inappropriate to be negligent.

From here, we can understand at least a bit how much we lose because we still neglect the science of Kabbalah, and what harm it carried to the people then and to this day. In essence, we make a great offense.

Question: Baal HaSulam writes that: “The entire generation would have followed us.” Does this mean that everyone should learn the wisdom of Kabbalah?

Answer: It is not accustomed to speak in the subjunctive mood, and yet: If the religious people in those generations had studied Kabbalah and added the hidden part—the writings of the Ari and the teaching of Baal Shem Tov—to the explicit part, then over time, we would have corrected ourselves. First of all, we would have felt reality correctly. People would not have abandoned the religion; the time of the “Haskalah” (the Age of Enlightenment), caused by separation from the right direction in human development, would not have arrived.

After completing a period of spiritual exile, in the 15th century, the Jewish people would have continued towards salvation and ascent.

It was from that time that “the era of the last generation” has begun. Even then we had to become engaged in Kabbalah, that is, the method of correction that carries the Light that Reforms everyone, and all of us together. Then the nations of the world would have received illumination through us, which would have changed their attitude.

However, we did not engage into the internal part of the Torah, the science of Kabbalah, and thus, we did not have connection with the Light. It affected us in its own way, according to the new epoch, and this made our path more difficult. Instead of the Light, the world grew dark because we were not able to accept It. Darkness is the same Light that we cannot discern in our corrupted desires. If we had corrected ourselves, we would have felt Its approach as something desirable. However, everything went to the contrary; we don’t want the Light, and It turns into darkness for us, terrible suffering.

That’s the problem: So far, people were engaged in the Torah only externally, in the studies. “Externally” means not in order to correct the soul. The exile in which we are was caused by the fact that we don’t correct ourselves, but study without advancement. Once, we had to act that way, but chronologically this period ended in the 15th century. We are 500 years behind.

Question: Today, it turns out that the secular part of the population is closer to the Kabbalah.

Answer: Right. Let’s hope that situation will change. In the meantime, the religious part is going through the stage of the awareness of evil in themselves and in the contemporary events. Little by little, in different forms, it begins to realize that. And this will happen in a couple of years.

In any case, we are not going to correct anyone but ourselves. Anyone who wants to join the process of correction is welcome. In the total system, we are all interconnected; so let’s hope that this will affect everyone.

If the religious audience had begun to study Kabbalah, of course, we would have quickly come to general correction. However, such are the conditions, such are the properties inherent in the receiving desire.

In addition, we must understand that what we face is a consequence of the breaking and exile. This part of the people should behave in this way. Indeed, we are all driven by nature, and nothing is beyond its scope. During the exile, a person is in the nature of the desire to receive; he does not feel his connection with the Creator. The upper Light and the Creator are not revealed to him and there is no connection. On the other hand, he is content by studying the Torah and the Commandments in their current form. And that is why, tied by the left line, he just cannot get out of this state.

This is the result of the path we have traversed, and we cannot accuse anyone of anything. We look at these social events as researchers, objectively, remembering that there is none else besides Him. So it had to happen.

As for the practical corrections, we need to understand that now everything depends on us. We demand nothing from anyone but ourselves. This is our approach to every part of human society and to everyone: We must give him the best explanation, and then it is his free choice.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 8/01/12, “Introduction to The Book of Zohar

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Everyone Has The End Of The Thread

Dr. Michael LaitmanWe only receive the recognition of evil from the Creator; in fact, He created only the desire to receive. The Light, the means that will help us correct our state, we must find within the environment.

The point is that the action from the side of the Creator is to give us the recognition of evil, and the action from the side of the creature is, after reaching the recognition of evil, to ask for correction. This is the work.

I don’t need anything from the Creator, only that He will disclose to me that I exist within evil. But it is only in the real evil, “the quality,” that I need to understand that I am lacking the attribute of bestowal and to feel bad because of that. All the rest will move by itself: Of course I will run to find help, I will cry, ask, and demand, until I force Him to correct me.

Thus, the task of the Creator is to reveal the evil, and my task is to demand from Him to transform the evil into good.

Question: How is it possible to increase the intensity of my request to the Creator?

Answer: The intensity depends on how bad you feel in your egoistic attributes. Everything moves only after the feeling; the intellect is useless here. Thus, I need to translate the situation to feeling: I feel bad that I exist in the desire to receive.

For example, I feel shame when people around me look at me with open disregard. I simply can only think: “How can I go on? Indeed, tomorrow, I will need to see them again.” So when I feel bad, I look for a way out.

But if you felt good and didn’t feel any shame, then you wouldn’t be able to approach correction. The ego is certainly provided for and someone’s talking out there doesn’t concern me. Words in themselves are powerless. I need to transfer them to that inner level where they will cause a response that I will really feel bad about the way they relate to me. The influence of the environment needs to control my own power of self-persuasion. In short, I need to feel shame. It brings me to “restriction,” to a request, to everything that will come later.

Question: How can one amplify this shame?

Answer: Through the power of thought.

Question: How can one amplify the thought?

Answer: By the power of persistence, by using perseverance.

Question: How can one increase the persistence?

Answer: Ask the friends to help you remember to think about it and the awareness of the importance.

Question: What if I forget to ask this from them?

Answer: Write them an email in advance so that they will support you.

Question: What if I forget to write the email?

Answer: It just cannot be that a person isn’t given an opportunity and isn’t given the end of the thread. He’s always able and needs to begin his path from something.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 7/30/12, “Introduction to The Book of Zohar

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“The World On The Edge”

Dr. Michael LaitmanOpinion (Lester R. Brown, president, Earth Policy Institute, Washington, World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse): “In the summer of 2010, record high temperatures scorched Moscow from late June through mid-August. … The record heat shrank Russia’s grain harvest from roughly 100 million tons to 60 million tons. This 40-percent drop and the associated grain export ban helped drive world wheat prices up 60 percent in two months, raising bread prices worldwide. …

“If the July temperature in Chicago were to average 14 degrees above the norm, as it did in Moscow, there would be chaos in world grain markets. Grain prices would quickly climb off the chart. Food prices would soar worldwide. Many grain-exporting countries, trying to hold down domestic food prices, would restrict or even ban exports, as they did in 2007–08.

“Oil-exporting countries would try to barter oil for grain. Low-income grain importers would lose out. Instead of being dominated by scenes of smoke and fire in Moscow, the TV evening news would run live footage of food riots in low-income grain-importing countries and carry reports of spreading hunger, falling governments, and failing states. With governments collapsing and with confidence in the world grain market shattered, the global economy could start to unravel.”

My Comment: Nature forces us into the corner, and it will be doing this until we realize that we have to change ourselves instead of the world.
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Against The Wall

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Should we only be telling about the integral methodology to those people who have problems?

Answer: I think that we simply need to disseminate the knowledge about the presence of an integral methodology. Gradually, in a short time, people will start to “lighten up,” to understand, and to feel that the only possibility to survive is exactly in this.

We stand in front of such serious problems that humanity has never faced. Man has entered into an opposition with nature. He has never reached this border before. And now he has arrived at it and is facing a wall that is not letting us go any further. This is, on the one hand.

While on the other hand, the developing force is pushing against us, pressing us against the wall in front of us. And we will have to do something about it.

That is why it is necessary to give people the knowledge, data, and information, at least about the fact that the integral methodology exists, that now we are undergoing this kind of a development, and that there is no other way out. At the same time, we need to teach, having the latest scientific data as our base.
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From the Virtual Lesson7/15/12

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To Change A Person

Dr. Michael LaitmanToday, many are already saying that we have come to a state, when we need to be changing not the world around us, but man himself. Man has always stood in the middle and changed the society, industry, and technology—everything around. It is not so now. Now all of that is falling out of our hands.

We must first change man, and then we will be able to create a new environment around him, new social, political, economic, and other relations. Only after that will we understand how to change the world.

That is why, today, nobody has any methodologies, no “tools” to change anything. Many recognize this today. What people only started to sense earlier, 20-30 years ago, to slightly realize it ten years ago, today is being talked about it. It is not in the mass media yet, but they are already talking and understanding that the world, having gone through the post-industrial state, the postmodern state, must now enter a new state.

And the next state of the world is the change of the human. We must step up to the new level on which we will become fundamentally different, and on it, we will build a completely new world. This is not fiction; we will see this. It is advisable to talk about it, desirable to keep trying it, because this way we decrease the suffering and blows on the way.

I think that within the coming half-year this will be felt on a very large scale.
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From the Virtual Lesson 7/15/12

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A Road Covered By A Shadow Of Bestowal

Dr. Michael LaitmanThe difficulty in our work is a result of the oppositeness of the states between which we have to balance ourselves, on what is called the “middle line.” On the one hand, you should be proud that you are following this road. Otherwise you’ll fall under the influence of the world around you and will become infected by its “viruses”: you’ll start dealing with money, respect, control, knowledge and many other empty goals the world is full of.

On the other hand, the internal work requires modesty and humility towards the group and Creator so that they’ll pass on to you the right values. If a person constantly carries on such a correct clarification—as to what he should be impressed by and what he should ignore, who he should be in contact with and from whom to keep away, he thus chooses the right environment. He builds this environment since it’s not just a group he has come to and in which he exists.

He determines what is important and what is not important in every society he finds himself, and so he builds his environment, as it says, “one chooses a good environment.” The environment doesn’t exist in its ready form, each of us has to clarify this concept and build an environment for himself.

This work is perpetual, not a onetime event in which it is enough to make a decision once and leave it at that. I have to make new decisions at every moment, and I realize that this is the only opportunity I have of free will. It is the only way that I can hasten my advancement while everything else are already the outcomes, which I don’t even touch.

I cannot change anything and if I make efforts I will only spoil my advancement. Not only will I not advance, as I don’t correct the only thing that needs to be corrected, but I also will spoil my attitude toward other things that were supposed to be the result of my good free will, as I treated them as the first main tool.

Besides, I have to clarify my attitude towards pleasure and suffering, since if the Creator is good and benevolent, why does He send me sufferings? Do I feel these sufferings because of my corruption or is it the Creator who treats me so cruelly? What can I attribute to Him, if anything?

A person clarifies these things until he comes to the conclusion that his goal is to attain the force of bestowal, the force of faith, which eventually turns into the force of love. Love is the force of connection by which a person receives the image of the Creator and becomes like Him, which is called to become Adam (human in Hebrew).

The Creator dresses in a person and gives one’s desire to receive the form of bestowal. If this is what a person demands, one reaches such a simple prayer and asks for simple mercy.

But all these actions are revealed together with great confusion and changes of different opposing states until eventually a person ends one’s clarification and it becomes clear that there is nothing but the simple upper Light.

The attribute of bestowal begins to dominate him and it determines the only reality he knows now. All the opposing, conflicting states were given to him only so that he would feel and understand in his mind and heart, having tasted pleasure and sufferings, and attaining the truth and the lie that there is nothing in this world and nothing controls it but the attribute of bestowal.

All the attributes that a person has felt along the way, which are opposite from the attribute of bestowal, were only the shadow of the attribute of bestowal that helped him learn, understand, and acquire it. So eventually he reaches simple mercy, which is the pure attribute of bestowal.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 7/27/12, Shamati #113

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Overcoming The Differences In The Family

Dr. Michael LaitmanFirst and foremost, an integral family is a family where the two understand that they have to be one unified whole. They have to rise above their natural differences.

All of us are absolutely different from each other, and we don’t even realize to what degree. When our egoism bursts into flame and we exist in the state of shock, fear, or irritation or in the state of happiness and euphoria, we experience the rise of such inclinations within us that we, possibly, did not even suspect existed.

It follows that we all have to come to some integral interaction despite of all our differences. What is it? In no way do we break a person or change him. We only help him interact with others like in a puzzle where the protuberance and concavity of different parts of the picture allow one to create a connection, a single picture between them. Certainly, here a person needs to have some basics in psychology, in the work with oneself and others, and to understand them and oneself. If we give all of that to the people, they will undoubtedly become different.
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” 7/8/12

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Daily Kabbalah Lesson – 08.03.12

Preparation to the Lesson

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Writings of RabashConcerning the Importance of Friends

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Part 2: Workshop

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Talmud Eser Sefirot, Volume 1, Part 3, Chapter 4, Item 7, “Ohr Pnimi,” Item 11, Lesson 80

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Writings of Rabash, Shlavei HaSulam, “Article 22”

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