A question I received: I just read how you were able to defend your dissertation on Kabbalah by writing against something you believe, which is an interesting strategy. I am pursuing my PhD in Education at Walden University and after four years now, I have finally come in contact with a mentor who understands my goal in obtaining this doctoral; I can now approach my research in Education by designing a program of “Metaphysical Education: an Emphasis on Kabbalah Studies.” It is good to know you are so willing to assist those of us on this educational attainment path and should I need your help, I hope you will be there for assistance as well. I must say, your books, the articles, website links, etc., are a tremendous help.

My Answer: In this case, the goal justifies the means. The PhD title gives one the opportunity to give lectures at universities about authentic Kabbalah.

It also took me a long time to find someone who would supervise my dissertation, and I still had to “fix” things according to his instructions. It’s possible that you will also have to make certain “corrections” that your academic director will insist on. But there’s no sense prolonging it, since the dissertation materials will be buried in an archive anyway. Kabbalah is probably the only field where the student pursuing a degree may understand more than his academic director.

Related Material:
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Laitman.com Post: The Irrationality of Kabbalah
The Path of Kabbalah: “About the Study”
Baal HaSulam Article: “Time to Act”
Baal HaSulam Article: “Messiah’s Horn”

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News Report (from PloS One): New Japanese research concludes that greater interpersonal trust is strongly associated with a better quality of life, including physical, psychological, social, and environmental quality of life.

My Comment: Small egoism or an artificial suppression of egoism creates a sense of comfort, because “One who increases his knowledge, increases his grief.” This is why an animal’s life is easier than a human’s. But of course, reducing one’s egoism is no solution to a problem because you can’t fool nature. According to the Creator’s plan, egoism must continue growing until it demonstrates its own incompetence to its possessor, or in other words, until it shows us that it is the source of evil.

This is egoism’s primary mission, as it says in the Torah, “I created a helper against you” (Ezer Ke Negdo). One way or another, the growing egoism will force “its master” (as man thinks at first) or more correctly – “its slave” (as man later realizes) to use it. There is just one solution: comfort can only be achieved by correcting egoism. This not only enables a person to rise above egoism, but because one uses it to bestow, one senses the life of the general soul (Adam). In other words, one perceives his next level – beyond the existence of his animate body, the state of Adam, an existence that’s equivalent to the Creator. He reveals the Creator inside him.

There is so little separating us from happiness!

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: There Is No Prohibition On Correcting Egoism
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From Chaos to Harmony: Part 1, Chapter 2 “The Boundaries of Joy”

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News Report (from CommodityOnline): “World is hit by hyperinflation & monetary collapse” The most probable sequence of events resulting in hyperinflation and monetary collapse is as follows:

1. A broad based shortage of goods that are thought essential develops and this is not relieved in time to satisfy demand.

2. Consumers trying to acquire essential goods that they believe are in short supply become fearful and are prepared to pay increasingly higher prices and stockpile these goods further increasing shortages and accelerating prices as a sellers market develops.

3. Prices rise for essential goods in short supply as an increasing proportion of the money supply circulates in these goods, also with increasing velocity and as most of these goods are consumables with high turnover upward re pricing quickly occurs.

4. The proportion of available money circulating in goods that are perceived as essential increases and the demand for less essential goods diminishes i.e essentials become disproportionately more expensive than the norm against non essential goods displacing money towards the goods most in demand further fueling inflation,

5. The shortage of essential goods accelerates as manufacturers increasingly focus on short term survival, longer term risk is avoided and investment in the production cycle is reduced accelerating 1.

6. The normal balance of demand for all goods increasingly prefers those goods required to satisfy primary needs and people engaged in making and supplying less immediately essential or non essential goods become unemployed who then pressures governments accelerating condition 9.

7. Eventually goods not immediately required but non the less essential are needed and rapidly increase in price as they also become in short supply.

8. Consumers with least money first find it increasingly difficult to secure essential goods, become frightened and are forced to allocate greater proportions of their money on essential goods and demand greater income.

9. The demand for money forced by need and fear becomes irresistible so governments feel insecure and provide increasing amounts of fiat new money.

10. Consumers first to spend the new money see some value but soon as this new money is distributed and its value is lost, the velocity of money also accelerates as people rapidly exchange money for goods, wealth is seen as best protected when stored as goods rather than cash further increasing price and reinforcing condition 9.

My Comment: This is a perfectly logical scenario, although it may drag out over years and hence seem unrealistic to us right now. But more importantly, the solution to the economic crisis must be a moral one, because it’s the next level of human development. The solution must be fundamentally different, bringing us to the new, following level.

The universal interdependence (the global nature of our “small village”) shows us that in order to come out of the crisis, we must change our current relationships to the opposite ones. We have always sought to separate from one another, but today, in order to survive, we will have to start caring for one another. We cannot wait for instructions to come from the authorities or the government. It is man who must change (correct himself), and hence, it’s up to him to create this change (via education).

The new social relationships of mutual care will gradually produce a new system of government – a council of people who are great with respect to their vision of Nature and Society (the Creator).

Related Material:
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News Report by economics expertReinhard Göweil (translated from the Austrian newspaper KURIER): In the USA, the holiday season sales decreased by 8%. The Japanese industry declined by 16% this year. Economists call this situation, “freefall.” In many European countries, economic leaders tried to hush up the situation at first. But now it’s time to put the cards on the table: the world is entering a financial crisis that will bring so much destruction of property and jobs that anything comparable has only been known to happen after a war.

The capitalism of Reagan and Thatcher that was set free in the 80’s has brought its own demise. We now need a complete transformation of our economic and social behavior. The economy must start providing people with the necessities and stop being an end in itself.

My Comment: Whether it will happen through this crisis or the following ones (it’s up to us how many crises will be necessary), we will be cleansed. In some countries, hundreds of types and brands of goods and products will vanish from the counters, because some people aren’t content with just making money – they have to line their pockets as well. Meanwhile, necessary products will appear in other countries. In a unified, global world, everything must be arranged differently: everything in the world, all the things existing in nature and on the earth (all the natural resources), is common property and belongs to everyone. Everything that is produced must be distributed among everyone by one global authority, according to each person’s needs, like in one family.

Until we establish this system of interactions, we will continue to oppose the closed system of Nature in which we exist. For the time being we are like cancerous cells in a body. Therefore, our freefall is not an ordinary freefall, like jumping off a plane with a parachute. However, if we open up the safety canopy of Kabbalah above us, we will be saved! (In the image above, the word “Kabbalah” is written on the parachute.)

Related Material:
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Two questions I received on conversion to Judaism:

Question: Why would you say that Rabbi Akiva was not Jewish? How carried away can you get? He was 100% Jewish! I guess tomorrow Rav Ashlag will also be called non-Jewish!

My Answer: First of all, this doesn’t matter at all in relation to the Torah. We are all Babylonians by origin. The Jews started calling themselves differently because they differed from other people in that they based their lives on the law, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This is what is now required from the whole of humanity, including the Jews, who have fallen from the level of following this rule.

I heard my teacher explain Rabbi Akiva’s origin. You can also go to Google.com, type in the words “Akiva proselyte” and read what it says. Please verify your knowledge. And you shouldn’t get so offended: it’s an honor to be a proselyte! After all, it’s an indication that a person went through correction. I wish for all of us to become proselytes as defined in the Torah! The Torah repeatedly states, “Love a proselyte.”

Question: Upon reading the text, “The Last Generation,” I came once again upon the reference to Jews and Gentiles. I am the latter in the physical sense and have at times felt exclusion from Kabbalah because of this fact. But I have read with much interest other texts where the dynamic has been clearly explained in the spiritual realm: the term “Jew” pertaining to an individual with the point in the heart. However, I still seem to feel that there are two definitions in various texts, some referring to the physical and others referring to the non-physical. Any clarity would be greatly appreciated on what is the correct way to view these two terms.

My Answer: There is no such nationality or people as “Jews”! It’s because this “nation” emerged from Abraham’s students, according to their spiritual quality. Kabbalah explains that there are 70 spiritual roots of the nations of the world, but there is no separate spiritual root for the nation of Isra-El! And that’s because anyone who aspires to the Creator can become Israel. Here is what we have today:

• A genetic Jew must study and disseminate Kabbalah (see item 70 of the “Introduction to the Book of Zohar”).
• A spiritual Jew (Isra-El) is any person who aspires to reveal the Creator.

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: Israel Is All the People Who Aspire Toward the Creator
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Kabbalah for Beginners: “Rabbi Akiva”
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Baal HaSulam Article: “The Love for the Creator & Love for the Created Beings”

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This Sunday I held another virtual lesson from 4:00pm until 5:00pm Israel time. The topic of the lesson was, “The importance of a Congress.”

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News Report (from The New York Times): “Blind, Yet Seeing: The Brain’s Subconscious Visual Sense” A patient whose visual lobes in the brain were destroyed was able to navigate an obstacle course and recognize fearful faces subconsciously.

“You just had to see it to believe it,” said Beatrice de Gelder, a neuroscientist at Harvard and Tilburg University in the Netherlands, who with an international team of brain researchers reported on the patient on Monday in the journal Current Biology. (A video is online.) The study, which included extensive brain imaging, is the most dramatic demonstration to date of so-called blind sight, the native ability to sense things using the brain’s primitive, subcortical — and entirely subconscious — visual system.

My Comment: As I’ve already said, we actually see and feel everything within ourselves, and there’s nothing on the outside. Hence, a person may have no eyes, but still be able to see. So why do we need eyes? In order to have the illusion that there is something in front of us!

Baal HaSulam writes in item 34 of the “Preface to the Book of Zohar”:

Take our sense of sight for example: we see a great world before us. But in fact, we do not see all that except in our own interior. In other words, there is a sort of a photographic machine in our hindbrain that portrays everything that appears to us, and nothing outside of us. Moreover, the Creator has made for us there, in our brain, a sort of a polished mirror that inverts everything that we see, so that we see it outside of us, outside of our brain, in front of our face.

Despite the fact that what we see outside us is not a real thing, we should still thank His providence for having made that polished mirror in our brain, enabling us to see and perceive every thing outside us. This is because by that, He had given us the power to research every thing with clear perception and knowledge, and to measure every object from within and from without. Without it, we would not have most of our knowledge and perception.

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: The Eyes Can Hear (and Smell)
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The International Academy of Kabbalah invites you to attend
The International Kabbalah Congress
Which will be held in Israel
On February 2 – 4 of 2009.
Information and registration can be found on the Congress blog.

[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2F4OUaj_poY]

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A question I received: I am studying Kabbalah for 3 years and I have translated many writings from English to German. I also know almost all of your women’s lessons. But sometimes it happens to me that I still wonder why, for instance, the children’s lessons are made only by men (even if a woman appears, her role is played by a man), or why women are not allowed to read texts for audio material or translate your lessons simultaneously? All the Kabbalistic songs are sung only by men. Why are women excluded from participating at cultural evenings during Congresses? Is it really because men are distracted and cannot concentrate on the goal?

My Answer: The lessons are taught by men because Kabbalah in general is taught by men. As the method of correction, Kabbalah must come from men. Didn’t you study that Zeir Anpin corrects Malchut?! However, the translation of our lessons to Spanish, for example, is always done by a woman. Our TV shows also devote a lot of time to women and women participate in them. We welcome women’s participation anywhere possible. However, it doesn’t correspond to our inner work to have women speaking in front of men. We learn in Kabbalah that the female part (Malchut) receives from the male part (Zeir Anpin), but not vice-versa.

Related Material:
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News Report (from BBC News): …many executives couldn’t resist the excruciatingly seductive call of easy money… And so, in America, with the temptation of the many renderings of mortgage-related profits before them, and with no discernible punishment in sight (indeed, with only praise from boards, analysts, and shareholders) it was a simple matter to take what was there and ignore the longer term consequences… As a nation, we seem to have forgotten that the most important goals take time to accomplish, and that lacking this perspective we succumb to what amounts to bribery and pandering…

Let’s hope the new administration can alter our frame of reference and lead us in a more distant direction… Showcasing the lost virtues of patience and persistence couldn’t hurt our national ethic.”

My Comment: This shows that people are already making the correct conclusions about the reason for the crisis. However, for now the conclusions are still made on the corporeal level, without understanding the true reason for the crisis: to force man to rise above egoism and attain the goal set by Nature – similarity to Nature/the Creator (the quality of bestowal and love). In addition, people are still far from understanding the needed changes in upbringing, the society, industry, the economy and finances. Nevertheless, this shows how quickly suffering “straightens people out.”

Related Material:
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