Audio Version Of The Blog – 03.05.15

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Purim: Providing Example of Unity Will Stop Anti-Semitism

I Don’t Know, You Will Find This

laitman_525Question: Should it enter into us as axiom that the Creator is the characteristic of bestowal and love?

Answer: We cannot take this even as a hypothesis let alone an axiom, because with the help of an axiom, we solve precise physical problems.

I must accept and perceive Him specifically as not existing according to my characteristics and feelings. He doesn’t exist for me, because I don’t exist for Him. I don’t even have one characteristic in me that will be like Him so that through this characteristic I would be able to understand, feel, and determine precisely that this is Him.

He is not outside of me, this is a characteristic that is only within me, and so the Creator (Bore) is called, “Bo-Re” (come and see). In the Hebrew language all definitions are very precise because they are derived from the attainment of reality. All of the names are based upon practical actions. So the Creator indicates that when I will come and see, I will find Him.

Coming means gradually attaining the characteristic of bestowal. Then within that I will begin to feel the reality that is the Creator. Only by creating this within me can I determine what the Creator is. But if I don’t discover the characteristic of bestowal and love, this indicates that He doesn’t exist. And this is the relationship.

Question: Must an internal war happen inside of me for this?

Answer: No internal war happens inside of you, rather there is an internal investigation.

For if you have a desire to attain, to see, to determine, to feel, to be filled, with this knowledge, meaning that this need is alive inside of you, then according to the scent, according to your sixth sense, you will understand that there is something here for you, you cannot escape it, you must clarify everything and be infected with this.

But if you don’t have an inner drive like this, then you will only yawn and lie down on the couch again. It could be that you will want to satisfy your curiosity or will try to derive benefit from this: do some magic, experimentation, mysticism, and attract girls through interesting conversation. There were a few people who were with us who were only nourished by curiosity and being filled with knowledge. And they all left; they couldn’t hold on.
[135621]
From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 12/18/13

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A Faucet That Is Opened With The Help Of The Power Of Connection

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: With the help of what does a person open and close the faucet so that the Light will flow?

Answer: The faucet is opened with the help of the group. The more I reach equivalence of form with the group, connect to it more, the more power I get, the more of a feeling of connection, and I understand what I must change in myself and how I must accommodate myself to the Creator. The Creator is the power of unity and connection. When He shuts off the faucet for me, He shuts off the power, but demands intelligence from me; He wants me to learn to do this by myself. He will give me the Light, but it is up to me to want to be like Him for His work.

The Creator shuts down my reasons, and it is up to me to activate the connection and not the reasons. The Creator plays with me with the help of plates full of food and I play at having a “personal relationship” with Him, trying to be like Him. He influences my “belly” and I influence Him through my personality, through the Adam (man) in me. I work with the help of the society and He influences my body. And that is how I grow by means of this game. This is exactly what the Creator wants, through His influence on my body he makes me into an Adam.

I stand facing the “Master of the House” and facing the plates of food that He is offering to me on the animate level. But I transform the situation into a personal, human relationship, on the level of Adam, on the level of the Creator. I utilize the Kelim of the desire to receive. That is why this reception is called the “wisdom of Kabbalah,” for with its help I can lift myself to the level of divinity.

I am satisfied on my animate level so that I can elevate my relationship above the deficiency that I feel within my belly. I play a bit with the help of the hunger and the appetite that I feel, try to honor the Creator instead of honoring the plate that He offers me. And in this way I raise myself to the spiritual level.

So when “Bina” refuses to receive, she becomes “Keter,” and after that “Malchut” which receives in order to bestow. And all of this is within one spark of Light that was created as “something from nothing,” a small black point. So everything that is needed for building the image of Adam is found in this world.

Until the end of development we will have a “heaviness of heart” not by means of high states but only in this way. But this will be enough for building all of the levels of the five worlds when faced by all situations.

The group opens the faucet through connection. The more I connect with the friends as “one person with one heart,” the more the faucet opens. And in order to push me to connect, the Creator turns off His faucet. So then I am in a “night,” which I must transform into “day.”

The Creator makes one condition for us; we receive or don’t receive within our desire to receive. Everything else is added through the greatness of the Creator that we must attain through the greatness of the group.

The Creator says that His suitcase that He lets us carry is very light. This means that there is no significance to physical pleasures and we build the entire spiritual ladder above them. Everything that is required to begin climbing the rungs of the ladder that is placed in front of us is in the group. And the situations that seem like darkness to us are opportunities, a call to begin to ascend. This is as it is with a child whom they stand on his feet so that he will begin to walk by himself.
[135625]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/21/14, Writings of Baal HaSulam

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Without Any Disturbance, We Do Not Need The Creator

laitman_239Question: What depends upon us?

Answer: Only the building of the right deficiency depends on us; whereas the Upper Light is found at absolute rest. Only to the degree of the power of the deficiency and its components is it possible to see the Light according to its intensity and quality.

According to how many discernments there are within the deficiency, we will see the simple Light, the Light of Nefesh—that is found in rest (Nefisha), without movement—or the Light of Ruach (wind) that already moves and is found in motion. After that, we discover the Ohr Neshama that already shows us the source that the Light comes from. We begin to see in it the desire of the Upper One that is ascribed to us.

After that, comes the Light of Haya that shows us how, with our strong, complex, and versatile desire, we also can enter into contact with the Upper Light and begin to work together with it.

Then comes the last Light, the Light of Yechida, when everything is united through mutual bestowal.

Question: What is the difference between the intensity of the Light and the quality of the Light?

Answer: Intensity and quality are two components of the intensity of the Light. Similar to this, in electricity, there is a power supply that is determined according to voltage times current. This determines how much you can produce from the power supply, in other words, the ability to operate and perform the required work.

The quantity and quality are connected together. In the Upper Light, there is no difference between quantity and quality. It is only in reference to the receivers. All of the substance of the still is equal in value to one vegetative. It follows that one vegetative is great in quality, in contrast to the entire nature of the still, which is great in quantity.

Question: So, what do we need to ask for?

Answer: We need to ask only for a deficiency. It is good that we now are receiving a deficiency during dissemination. There is nothing more valuable than that. Feeling ourselves obligated to the entire world is the best thing. This is the same deficiency in which we discover all of the reality, all of the phenomena of the Creator.

This deficiency will oblige us to feel how much we require the Creator. Up until today, we didn’t need the Creator, but, today, He has become a necessity for us, like air, and so, not for nothing is it written, “Come to Pharaoh!” for, without Pharaoh, we would not need the Creator.
[135790]
From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/25/14

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Like A Bundle Of Reeds—A Nation On A Mission, Part 2

Like a Bundle of ReedsLike A Bundle of Reeds, Why Unity and Mutual Guarantee Are Today’s Call of the Hour, Michael Laitman, Ph.D.

Chapter 4: A Nation on a Mission
The Role of the Jewish People

 Mix ‘n Mingle

And yet, how is the correction to flow unto the nations? If the nation of Israel corrects itself, how will that affect any of the other nations?

When Abraham first discovered the Creator, he described it to whomever would listen, and those who joined him became the first corrected people. Those people then went to Egypt and finally emerged from it in much greater numbers, an entire nation. That nation received the Law of Correction, namely the Torah, and corrected itself. In the First Temple, the Jewish nation achieved its highest level of connection with the Creator, as demonstrated in the previous chapter. From there, the nation began to decline until its people were exiled to Babel. When they returned to the Land of Israel, the majority of the Jewish nation chose to stay in the diaspora and gradual assimilation commenced.

Indeed, this is how the passing on of the message began. When people who were once corrected—who had transcended self-interest and discovered the Creator—mingled with those who had never had such thoughts, those noble ideas began to spread within the host society, and help instigate more humane thoughts in people’s minds. While those were not corrected thoughts deriving from minds that had transcended egotism, the notions of universalism and humanism nevertheless began to take hold in people’s minds.

Indeed, during the Renaissance, several renowned scholars maintained that the Greeks had adopted at least some of their concepts from the Jews, in this case specifically from Kabbalah. Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522), for example, the political counselor to the Chancellor, wrote in De Arte Cabbalistica (On the Art of Kabbalah): “Nevertheless, his [Pythagoras’] preeminence derived not from the Greeks, but again from the Jews. …He himself was the first to convert the name Kabbalah, unknown to the Greeks, into the Greek name philosophy.”[i]

In 1918, a French pastor, Charles Wagner, was quoted as having written, “None of the resplendent names in history—Egypt, Athens, Rome—can compare in eternal grandeur with Jerusalem. For Israel has given to mankind the category of holiness. Israel alone has known the thirst for social justice, and that inner saintliness which is the source of justice.”[ii]

More recently, Christian historian, Paul Johnson, wrote in A History of the Jews: “The Jewish impact on humanity has been protean. In antiquity they were the great innovators in religion and morals. In the Dark Ages and early medieval Europe they were still an advanced people transmitting scarce knowledge and technology. Gradually they were pushed from the van and fell behind; by the end of the eighteenth century they were seen as a bedraggled and obscurantist rearguard in the march of civilized humanity. But then came an astonishing second burst of creativity. Breaking out of the ghettos, they once more transformed human thinking, this time in the secular sphere. Much of the mental furniture of the modern world too is of Jewish fabrication.”[iii]

Similarly, In The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels, author Thomas Cahill, former director of religious publishing at Doubleday, describes the Jews’ contribution to the world, which, in his view, began during the exile in Babylon. “The Jews started it all,” he writes, “and by ‘it’ I mean so many of the things we care about, the underlying values that make all of us, Jew and Gentile, believer and aethiest, tick. Without the Jews, we would see the world through different eyes, hear with different ears, even feel with different feelings … We would think with a different mind, interpret all our experiences differently, draw different conclusions from the things that befall us. And we would set a different course for our lives.”[iv]

Interestingly, some renowned Jewish leaders also wrote about the spreading (and spoiling) of Jewish wisdom after the ruin of the First Temple. Rabbi Shmuel Bernstein of Sochatchov, for example, wrote, “The Greeks had the wisdom of philosophy, which originated from the writings of King Solomon that have come to their possession after the ruin of the First Temple. However, they were spoiled by them with subtractions, additions, and substitutions until false views mingled with them. And yet, the wisdom itself is good, but parts of the bad have mingled with it.”[v]

Baal HaSulam wrote similarly in “The Wisdom of Kabbalah and Philosophy”: “Sages of Kabbalah observe philosophic theology and complain that they have stolen the upper shell of their wisdom, which Plato and his Greek predecessors had acquired while studying with the disciples of the prophets in Israel. They have stolen basic elements from the wisdom of Israel and wore a cloak that is not theirs.”[vi]

[i] Johannes Reuchlin, De Arte Cabbalistica (Hagenau, Germany: Tomas Anshelm, March, 1517), 126.

[ii] Source: A Book of Jewish Thoughts, ed. J. H. Hertz (London: Oxford University Press, 1920), 134.

[iii] Paul Johnson, (Christian historian), A History of the Jews (New York: First Perennial Library, 1988), 585-6.

[iv] Thomas Cahill, The Gifts of the Jews: How a Tribe of Desert Nomads Changed the Way Everyone Thinks and Feels (New York: Nan A. Talese/Anchor Books (imprints of Doubleday), 1998), 3.

[v] Rabbi Shmuel Bornstein, Shem MiShmuel [A Name Out of Samuel], Miketz [At the End], TARPA (1921).

[vi] Rav Yehuda Leib HaLevi Ashlag (Baal HaSulam), The Writings of Baal HaSulam, “The Wisdom of Kabbalah and Philosophy” (Ashlag Research Institute: Israel, 2009), 38.

Daily Kabbalah Lesson – 03.05.15

Workshop

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Shamati #33 “The Lots on Yom Kippurim and with Haman”

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Writings of Baal HaSulam “Introduction to The Book of Zohar

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Lesson on the Topic: “Preparation for the Convention to Arava”

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