Audio Version Of The Blog – 01.01.16

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Forecast For 2016

Laitman_504From the News (PR Newswire): “Saxo Bank, the online multi-asset trading and investment specialist, has today released its annual set of ‘Outrageous Predictions’ for the year ahead. These are 10 unlikely, yet perhaps underappreciated, events that could have significant consequences on the financial landscape as we venture into 2016.

“As ever, the predictions span the length and breadth of markets and geographies; ranging from oil making a drastic return to $100 a barrel to Silicon Valley’s much vaunted unicorns returning to myth. Other claims include the Russian rouble rising 20% versus the US dollar/euro basket, the Olympics turbo-charging a Brazilian recovery and a meltdown in corporate bonds.

“Steen Jakobsen, Chief Economist at Saxo Bank, commented: ‘We are nearing the end of the paradigm paralysis that has dominated the policy response to the global financial crisis. Quantitative easing and other forms of intervention have failed. China is transitioning, and geopolitical tensions are as complex as ever. The marginal cost of money is rising, and so is volatility and uncertainty. It is against this backdrop we have set this year’s predictions.’

“‘Saxo Bank’s Outrageous Predictions remain an exercise in finding ten relatively controversial and unrelated ideas which could turn your investment world upside down. It is rewarding to see how the Outrageous Predictions catch our clients’ imagination and fuel ongoing debate; it is this process of discussion and anti-herd thinking that is at the heart of Saxo’s now established tradition of attempting to draw attention to the unfathomable’ Steen Jakobsen added.”

My Comment: One way or another it must come to an end. Everything is overblown and too artificial and the world has to make a switch to a new type of relationships, to an integral, mutual connection.

This is a revolution in all our mutual relations and firstly in our social relations. But they will begin to change because of the economic challenge. We are about to witness extraordinary changes in our social, political, and economic life.
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Work In This World And Reward In The Next World

Dr. Michael LaitmanTalmud Eser Sefirot, Part 1, “Histaklut Pnimit,” Item 7: … They said that there is a great flaw in free gifts, namely the shame that encounters every receiver of a free gift. To mend this, the Creator has prepared this world, where there is work and labor, so as to be rewarded in the next world for their labor and work.

Usually the religious stop with this saying and do not advance further. They claim that in this world one needs to work in order to receive the reward in the next world, meaning, after death. As if we work today and tomorrow receive the reward.

But that excuse is very strange. It is like a person who says to his friend, “Work with me for just a minute, and in return I will give you every pleasure and treasure in the world for the rest of your life. There is indeed no greater free gift than that, because the reward is incomparable with the work. The work is in this transient, worthless world compared to the reward and the pleasure in the eternal world.

What value is there to the passing world compared to the eternal world? It is even more so with regards to the quality of the labor, which is worthless compared to the quality of the reward.

Our sages have said: “The Creator is destined to inherit each and every righteous person 310 worlds etc.” We cannot say that some of the reward is given in return for their work, and the rest is a free gift, for then what good would that do? The blemish of shame would still remain! Indeed, their words are not to be taken literally, for there is a profound meaning in their words.

Shame is a creation by itself. It is a feeling in the souls of the difference between them and the Creator, a feeling of disconnection from Him that was created by the Creator Himself. Therefore, as much as man rises higher in the level of the degrees, the feeling of shame grows in him and becomes more refined and clarified. Therefore, it is said that shame is intended only for higher souls.

If I feel disconnected from the Creator, then the feeling of the “I” is awakened, the feeling of a separated existence. I understand that I must annul this separation, close it, do something with it. And therefore I work. This feeling of the gap between me and the Creator, between the guest and the host, the feeling shame, forced me to work. To the degree I feel this shame, I am willing to work until I remove the separation between us and I reach an equivalence of form with the Creator, meaning adhesion.

It is clear that it does not talk about the 70 years of man’s life in this world and in the next world after this life. When I work for myself, it is called Olam Haze (this world) and I must work in it and correct myself. When sometimes I succeed in correcting myself compared to each amount of shame, the difference that I reveal between me and the Creator, by that I perform my work in this world, and as a result I reach equivalence of form and adhesion, which is called reward in the next world.

Therefore, in my life in this world I must feel this world and also the next world. The difference between them is that state in which a person feels shame and works in order to remove it, to correct his lack of equivalence with the landlord, called this world. This is the world and these are the efforts in this world. And the attainment of equivalence and adhesion is called the next world. According to this principle, the two worlds are separated.
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The New Humanity Is Born In Suffering

Laitman_115_06Comment: Currently, the world situation is very tense: Terrorist acts in Paris, the downing of the Russian airliner in Egypt, war in Syria. One gets the feeling that everything is falling apart.

Answer: We have entered into a completely new period that the wisdom of Kabbalah calls “The Last Generation.” This speaks of the last egoistic generation that must be replaced in the next level of existence with a new regime, a new humanity.

But the birth of something new is always painful; this is what we are experiencing now. It is the birth of a completely new humanity, which ends the egoistic state. For thousands of years we have developed with the help of the ego, and now we must move to a new level of development in which we will balance the ego through the good forces of nature.

The wisdom of Kabbalah speaks about this. It appeared 3,500 years ago in ancient Babylon where a crisis developed that was identical to what we are experiencing today.

In those times, all of humanity was concentrated in a small part of the earth in Aram-Naharaim (northern Mesopotamia), and the people who lived as one family suddenly felt themselves interconnected with hostility, major opposition appeared among them, which we call the Tower of Babel, great mutual hostility towards each other. They weren’t successful in tolerating this any longer, so they defined a domain for themselves and scattered all over the world.

Some of them, a few tens of thousands of people, joined Abraham who called for everyone to rise above the egoism that was raging within them. Later, he took them out of ancient Babylon and founded an ideological group that began to live according to the teaching of Abraham, according to the principle, “And you shall love your friend as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18).

Since then, humanity scattered all over the face of the Earth. For a long time things were good and at ease for us, and now we have come to the same Babylon, meaning we have again become locked in, but now this is all around the Earth and we have nowhere to disperse.

And this is the entire problem: We are again dependent upon each other egoistically, the world has become a small village and we need to find a way out of the situation that has been created.

So now again the wisdom of Kabbalah has been revealed, which was hidden from humanity since the days of ancient Babylon due to the lack of necessity. Today it is taught by 1,800 faculties in the world. It speaks about how we need to adapt and learn the method of “And you shall love your friend as yourself,” and at least learn to accept others as ourselves.

The ego dwells in everyone regardless of sex, age, political views, and religious aspirations.

We see how much the younger generation does whatever seems good to them; people cannot get along and live with each other, families are destroyed, problems appear on all levels, even on the political level. The influence of the ego puts humanity into very strong antagonism.

It follows that, on the one hand, it is tearing us apart inside and we want to stay away from each other, but on the other hand, the flow of nature, our evolution, connects us with each other. These mutually conflicting tendencies arouse enormous tension in the world and fears of how this might end up.
[172702]
From Radio Program, “The Echo of Moscow” 11/25/15

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Learning From The Sages

Laitman_137Question: Why aren’t you content with attaining the revealed meaning of the Torah? Why should we penetrate its inner concealed layers?

Answer: According to Baal HaSulam in the Introduction to The Study of the Ten Sefirot and the Vilna Gaon in the Sidur of the HAGRA, it is impossible to attain the Torah without understanding its four layers.

The sages who wrote the Torah and all the holy books wrote them from the level on which they attained every part of reality and the corporeal reality, which is revealed to us. This is the reason that I want to learn from what they revealed in the Torah and not to settle for mechanical actions.

I cannot understand what the Torah says and what the sages wanted to convey if I don’t understand the internal meaning of the Torah. I am like a kid who doesn’t know how to read but only leafs through a book looking at the pictures.
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The Déjà Vu Effect

laitman_423_01Question: Is the déjà vu experience a manifestation of the higher power, or is it our choice?

Answer: There are states where a person receives particular influences from the underlying integral system in which we exist.

Sensations of being within the system suddenly could pass through him, the ability to predict the future or a feeling of being in another place. This is a temporary, superficial, physical state and is irrelevant to the higher state.

Kabbalists don’t pay attention to it at all because entry into the higher management must be conscious.

Question: Could memories of past lives arise in a person?

Answer: In fact, there are no so-called past lives because in the upper world, in which we actually are even now, we are in a completely different state than that which seems to us as reality now, as a dream.

When a person is thrown into an unfamiliar place and a feeling arises in him that he has been there already, this indicates his heightened sense of what is happening.
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 11/8/15

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Daily Kabbalah Lesson – 01.01.16

Preparation for the Lesson

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Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Preface to the Wisdom of Kabbalah”

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Writings of Baal HaSulam,“The Mutual Guarantee” 

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