The Zohar, Chapter “VaYikra (The Lord Called),” Item 108: Hence, since the sins of the lower ones blemish above, they offer a sacrifice. That offering is as it is written, “And for your transgressions was your mother put away,” where the sin causes separation between ZA and Malchut for his flaw, since Malchut was sent away due to the sin. And the offering that they sacrifice brings the upper world, ZA, closer to the lower world, Malchut, and everything becomes one.

Man never willingly commits a sin. If he knows for certain that he would be committing a sin, he would not be able to do so. He sins only if he doesn’t know or doesn’t consider the act a sin. It is impossible to sin before the Creator, but can only do so if He is concealed, which no longer makes it a sin.

All the sins mentioned by the science of Kabbalah have taken place from above downward by the Upper Force. When ascending from below upward, we never sin. We merely reveal the sins that exist in us from Him in the first place.

The Creator created the evil inclination; no greater or other evil could have been done. He turned Himself into a polar opposites, placed this oppositeness into us, and is gradually revealing it to us. All the evil that we are presently revealing within is but the smallest measure of oppositeness to the Creator that exists within us.

As we ascend the spiritual ladder to the World of Infinity, we will continue to reveal evil within in increasingly greater degrees of oppositeness to Him, until the Creator becomes revealed within us on the level of Infinity as a polar opposite of Himself. The evil within us will be infinitely great, but at the same time we will have the strength to oppose it.

From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/20/10, The Zohar

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A question I received: What is “sin” from the perspective of Kabbalah?

My Answer: Sin is separation from the Creator regardless of a person’s spiritual level. He might have gone through 99% of the spiritual ladder or just 1%, but no matter how powerful his connection is with the Creator, if he disconnects from this connection, it is considered sin. He falls into reception instead of bestowal, where bestowal is synonymous with connection.

There are several levels of sin. The smallest sin is when a person separates from the Creator but does not yet lose his connection or similarity to the Creator. A greater sin is when the Creator disappears; this means that a person’s qualities are opposite to the Creator. A sin that’s greater yet is when a person submerges into darkness and senses the opposite side of the Creator. But the greatest sin of all is when a person becomes opposite to the Creator and unites with the Pharaoh through his hatred for the Creator. Thus, there are different degrees of sin, from simple distancing to total opposition.

The opposite of sin is “commandment” – unity, adhesion, closeness. It also has different degrees, just like the three phases of conception, feeding, and adulthood, which are degrees of adhesion. Both sin (separation) and commandment (closeness) can only take place and be experienced in a group, because the group is the unity of desires or souls. And through them, these qualities are felt in relation to the Creator. All good and evil are measured inside a person’s connection with the environment. This is the only way to check and correct any state (spiritual or corporeal), and the only way to always preserve and strengthen unity and love.

A woman’s sin is to think that there is no difference between the spiritual work of men and women, and to be of the opinion that everything must be completely equal, down to erasing all the differences and boundaries. My advice is to try and develop the inner feeling of unity and love for other women in Bnei Baruch, even to the point of loving them. See how much you are capable of this. This will enable you to understand what nature really demands from a woman: to help and support the men, because they are capable of attaining the unity of souls.

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When I reveal the wicked forces of the spiritual worlds, called Klipot, and the forces of goodness opposite them (as it is written, “The Creator made one against another – wickedness against holiness), then I attain a level of existence inside these parallel systems of good and evil worlds. Thus, I feel heaven and hell opposite to one another. It’s impossible to feel one without the other.

Let us hope we will attain all of this and become the “sinners” of which the Torah speaks. To be a sinner means to exist opposite to your “righteous” state; it is when you toddle between “sinner” and “righteous,” alternately becoming one and then the other. By “zigzagging” in this manner, one advances higher.

All of this refers to the system of the spiritual worlds that we are facing. There is nothing there resembling the colorful pictures of heaven and hell that religion has frightened us with. We have to free ourselves from all these primitive superstitions and realize that nothing can happen to our body after death besides disintegration, since the body is no more than a protein-based matter.

We have to understand that there are only two forces acting inside us – reception and bestowal. However, they can be called by many different names. Everything consists of them and everything exists only in us.

A name is a desire (HaVaYaH) with the Light (Ohr Pnimi) in it, which was attained by a human being. A holy name refers to a property of bestowal, and a wicked name refers to a property of reception. Even the name of the worst villain described in the Torah refers to a revelation of the Creator, but from the opposite side; it refers to the property of egoism inside a person. All the good names refer to the revelation of His “face,” goodness, the property of bestowal inside a person. All of this talks about the revelation of the Creator inside man.

All the good and evil forces acting “above this world” are the revelation of the Creator’s forces either from His front side or His reverse side, as Moses was told, “And you will see My back but will not see the face.”

Nothing exists besides the creation and the Creator, and the Creator can either be concealed or revealed to creation. Our task as creation is to reveal the Creator – the only acting force in the universe. All the rest that we now perceive as an “external world” is also inside us, but in our desires that have not yet been revealed.

This is the picture we have to imagine. We have to understand that nothing is worse than our current state, the state of complete separation from the Creator. Namely, our world is the worst of all worlds (states).

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In the News (from The Wall Street Journal): “His Empire in Tatters, German Billionaire Takes Life” Adolf Merckle, one of Germany’s wealthiest men, committed suicide. Mr. Merckle’s body was discovered Monday night near train tracks… In a rare interview last month, Mr. Merckle told the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung he had survived “many so-called stock-market crashes” but that he “couldn’t calculate a banking and financial crisis of this dimension.”

My Comment: He’s right: there’s never been a crisis like this in all of human history, because the current crisis is “qualitative.” It was caused by the human society’s opposition to Nature. Society has become global and interconnected like a “small village” where everyone is completely interdependent (“the Butterfly Effect”). However, our mutual egoistic hatred destroys all the connections. The effect of broken connections in a single system manifests as a crisis in the system – a crisis in all areas of our activity.

The crisis will not end until we find a solution – a way to be together, united by bonds of bestowal and love. This is what is required of us by the system that we have found ourselves in. We cannot escape these closed connections. We will have to observe the rule, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” We can do this through suffering (as we always have) or by realizing that it’s necessary (the method of Kabbalah). The choice is ours.

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In the News (from The Wall Street Journal): “Ending the West’s Proxy War Against Israel” The reason for Gaza’s endless youth bulge is that a large majority of its population does not have to provide for its offspring. Most babies are fed, clothed, vaccinated and educated by UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. …Many of Gaza’s young – like in much of the Muslim world – dream of leaving anyway. Who would not want to get out of that strip of land but the international NGOs and social workers whose careers depend on perpetuating Gaza’s misery?

My Comment: On the one hand, there is all of the above mentioned, and on the other hand, they instigate Hamas and Iran. And this is how they create the problem of the Palestinian nation. But there is hope:

In the News (from Asia Times): “The failed Muslim states to come” The present [financial] crisis is leaving the economies of the largest Muslim countries in ruins. …Iran’s President Mahmud Ahmadinejad controls Iran through a kleptocracy … What will Ahmadinejad do now that the oil price has collapsed? Despite the oil-price collapse, the government has not reduced energy subsidies [worth] more than a fifth of gross domestic product (GDP). Iran is eating through its $60 billion of foreign exchange reserves, unable to adjust to a collapse of its only significant revenue source.

My Comment: The crisis will force us to stop sustaining the UN, and then the UN’s “charity” will come to an end. The emissaries who line their own pockets will disappear, and so will the Palestinian problem, which they created for their own enrichment.

Additional Comment: There are many similar examples of how people “intelligently” destroy other people in order to make money. For example, up to 40% of the medications being distributed are inactive or even harmful. This fraud, perpetuated by those who sell us medicine that either doesn’t work or harms us, will only stop once they are reeducated. Basically, the crisis is our only hope!

Latest News: (from MyFreeze): British government ministers on Saturday criticized the BBC for refusing to show a charity fundraising appeal for Palestinians in the war-hit Gaza strip. The national broadcaster said BBC had rejected the ad because showing it might harm the BBC‘s reputation for impartiality and because it could not be sure humanitarian aid would reach the needy in the chaotic territory.

Britain’s main private broadcasters also turned down the ad.

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In the News (from Impactlab): “City Life Is Bad For Your Brain” The urban environment impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. “The mind is a limited machine,” says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, “And we’re beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations.”

My Comment: Man was created to exist in balance with nature, to be a harmonious part of the correct eco-sphere. This can be achieved when everyone comes to an agreement, in two stages: “Don’t do to others what you don’t want done to you,” and then, “Love your neighbor as yourself. If we build the world and the environment based on these attitudes to everything outside us, then the environment will be optimal for man. Someday, we will get there; Nature will force us to.

News Report (from CNN): “Behavioral screening – the future of airport security?” Security experts say focus is shifting from analyzing the content of carry-ons to analyzing the content of passengers’ intentions and emotions… Developers say the combination of these technologies can detect a person’s reaction to certain stimuli by reading body temperature, heart rate and respiration, signals a terrorist unwittingly emits before he plans to commit an attack.

My Comment (a joke): One day they’ll invent a device that will be able to tell whether a person “loves his neighbor” or not. (They’ll also do this using the external signs, or maybe by one’s immediate reaction to something.) Whoever loves his neighbor is good for society, and whoever does not (whoever hasn’t attained it yet) is an anti-social element.

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News Report (translated from Scepsis.ru): The recent years, dubbed the “era of globalization,” will not go down in history as years of prosperity. They will be studied (if there will be someone left to study them) as a time of bloody regional wars, the growing poverty of the Third World, and the crisis of the Western middle class; a time when technological progress and financial speculation brought outrageous profit to tens of thousands, while casting hundreds of millions to the bottom of the social ladder.

The current crisis will be no exception: as we speak, some are already making plans to ensure that the losses suffered by the financial speculators will be reimbursed at the expense of regular citizens and debtors from poor countries.

My Comment: It all depends on how you view the crisis. Kabbalah views it as the beginning of goodness – as the revelation of the evil that is our egoism, the revelation that egoism is the one and only source of evil in our lives. It is the reason why we only perceive a tiny, negligible fraction of our eternal existence. This revelation, that egoism is evil, will be followed by a renunciation of it, and then by the correction of human egoism to bestowal and love.

We will then feel our existence as eternal harmony, called the Upper World or Paradise. And we will feel it both during the life of our physical body and after it dies. So let us accelerate this process by studying the method of our correction.

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News Report (from Marketwire): “Global Economic Meltdown: Systemic Shock” The present economic crisis is systemic and global. Consumer optimism has dipped across the globe, leaving no region untouched… Emerging Markets – heretofore stalwart guardians of global consumer confidence – have shown a precipitous decline in optimism as well. Case in point is China, registering a 42% decline in optimism from 2007 to 2008… In response to the crisis, a super-majority of the world’s consumers have already made cuts to their family budgets.

My Comment: Because some politicians don’t understand the fact that our world has become integral (one interconnected system), they say that “the crisis is happening over there, not over here.” Indeed, the world has become a single whole, and hence, regardless of any country’s level of development (whether economic, industrial, or other), anything that transpires in any part of the world will now reverberate everywhere. In addition, we can’t even tell how powerfully this will happen in different places, because we don’t know the true structure of each country and nation in the general system of souls.

The crisis began with something that is a common, unifying factor for all of us – money. However, we will soon discover that we are completely interdependent in all other respects as well! There’s only one piece of advice to give to anyone, from governments to average citizens: don’t do anything that’s against others, lower your pride, give in, and help others. At the very least, these actions are contrary to the crisis.

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News Report (from The Telegraph): A mind game where players guide a ball through an obstacle course using nothing but the power of their thoughts has been developed by toy manufacturers. The Mind Flex comes with a brain-scanning headset which measures brainwaves and turns them into energy. The aim of the game is to concentrate hard enough to generate enough energy to power a fan which in turn causes a ball to levitate and move through a series of hoops.

The toy made by Mattel, the world’s largest toy manufacturer and makers of the Barbie doll, has been previewed in the US. The game is expected to cause much discussion at the Consumer Electronics Show 2009 which is currently taking place in Las Vegas.

My Comment: Actually, there’s nothing supernatural about this, because thoughts are also forces that have energy, which is expressed on different levels of the brain’s function. For example, as electrochemical vectors, pressure, and the changes taking place in any parameter of an organism.

Nonetheless, all of these toys help us to realize that we are nearing a boundary, a threshold leading to a world that is currently concealed from us. And we are getting closer to revealing it.

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News Report (from Phantoms & Monsters): The CEUFO (Center for Studies UFO) of Argentina received an email from a photographer (Fabián Romano) that claimed to have captured a strange being on his camera while taking some shots around the Macachín airport. The CEUFO analyzed the image and declared it to be that of a flying “entity.” They also said that the image was of a “high strangeness.”

My Comment: Spirituality consists of forces that are not clothed in matter. They descend to us from their source – the Creator, and they are called “angels” (in Hebrew “Malach” – singular, “Malachim” – plural). We cannot see or perceive these forces, but only their influences, their manifestations in matter. It’s similar to how we can only perceive the influence of a magnetic or gravitational field, but not these fields in and of themselves.

We perceive the Creator in the same way – in our desires of bestowal and love. That is how this force of Goodness, Love and Bestowal is revealed in us. Its revelation in us is called “the part of the Creator from above,” or the soul. To perceive one’s soul, to have a soul, or to perceive the Creator – is one and the same (Israel, the Torah and the Creator are One). The “Preface to the Book of Zohar” talks about our perception, explaining that everything is perceived within us, and not outside. Hence, this leaves no room for “miracles!” In this world, everything is prosaic and bleak. But once you reveal the Upper World, there you will discover true miracles.

And here’s another explanation: All the forces of our world, (the forces clothed in matter that we can perceive) are also angels. Even the still, vegetative and animate levels of nature, man included, are angels, because they are completely controlled by the Creator. So who isn’t an angel? Only a Kabbalist, because he becomes independent, a Man (Adam, one who is similar to the Creator), one who is independent from the Creator. A Kabbalist isn’t just one of the Creator’s forces or messengers, and hence, a Kabbalist is not an angel.

One time, Rabash and I went to a zoo to talk about the roots and branches in both worlds. When we got there, he exclaimed: “So many angels in one place!”

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