The connection between us is governed by our egoism – the Pharaoh. We have to dethrone him, remove him from power. How?

This can only be done with the power of the Creator, who created the Pharaoh as the evil inside us. The Creator did this purposefully, so we would realize that we need Him and then dethrone the Pharaoh together with Him. This way, in the process of our cooperation, we grow close to the Creator.

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Hate for the fellow man is not expressed as the sensation of hate, but as the desire to use him for your own good. This is the feeling we have until we turn it into love – the desire to fill the other instead of myself.

My teacher Rabash used to say: You can picture yourself as a zero and your friend as a one, or you can see yourself as one and him as a zero. This depends on your desire – whether you desire to use him for your benefit, or to use yourself to benefit him.

To the extent that you desire to fulfill the other, the Light of bestowal and love will fulfill you.

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In order to rise to the “human” level, to a level higher than the animate, one must acquire the quality of bestowal and love toward others. This is called “faith above reason” – bestowal above reception. It enables a person to come out of himself and his egoistic nature.

Science is going through a crisis while it develops on the egoistic level. Meantime, humanity has gradually risen to a higher level, where everyone is interconnected as one body. From now on, the only way we can understand and reveal Nature is by becoming one whole. By making this change in our consciousness, we will reveal a deeper layer, new connections, forces and dependencies in the world around us.

But until we change our egoistic perception of reality to an altruistic one, our sensations, desires and thoughts will not allow us to overcome the knowledge barrier that we are stuck in. It is imperative that we rise above our egoistic reason to the altruistic reason. We must step outside ourselves to a feeling that seems completely irrational to us today. This is why the subject of my PhD thesis was: “Kabbalah – The Irrational Method for Attaining the World.”

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While in New York, I had an interview with renowned American psychologist, Dr. Kalman J. Kaplan.

Dr. Kaplan is a social and developmental psychologist as well as a licensed clinical psychologist. He has published widely in the areas of interpersonal and international relations, and life-span developmental psychology, with concentration in the areas of aging, family theory and therapy, as well as the emerging field of biblical psychology, the use of transactional analysis in schizophrenia, and in suicide and suicide prevention.

Currently, Dr. Kaplan is a Professor of Clinical Psychology in both the Department of Psychiatry and the Department of Medical Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine, and Director of the Program in Religion, Spirituality and Mental Health (www.rsmh.org) sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation.

He was a Fulbright Fellow in the Department of Psychology at Tel Aviv University in 2006-2007, served as editor of the Journal of Psychology and Judaism, is on the editorial board of Omega: The Journal of Death and Dying, and is also a reviewer for the International Journal of the Psychology of Religion.

He has been the recipient of federal grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

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A question I received: The world is suffering from a crisis. Sometimes people say, “I have suffered and I don’t want to unite with anyone.” In other words, people prefer to be secluded and to worry only about themselves. After all, no one takes care of them. Can it be that instead of uniting and realizing that the world is integral and global, people will, on the contrary, shrink into their shells? What will happen then?

My Answer: This is a real danger. The crisis can lead to nationalism in many countries, and then Nazi regimes and wars. Baal HaSulam, the great Kabbalist of the 20th century, wrote about this.

Nevertheless, after the Nazi regimes and the third and fourth world wars (which are possible but not necessary, according to Kabbalah), and after all the suffering that they will bring, humanity will still reveal the truth.

However, today Europe has reached a state where it no longer wants to go to war, since it is exhausted from the previous wars. Europe has shed enough blood to learn this lesson.

However, the rest of the world has not yet gone through sufficient internal suffering to reach the same realization. The same realization can be attained through analysis, by looking at history and scientific data, or it can be reached through suffering and war.

This is why Baal HaSulam talks about the existence of two paths to the new world. And this is why we, his followers, are doing everything we can to eliminate the second path – the one that leads to nationalism, isolation of countries, and war.

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A question I received: Why can’t our human society reach the state of mutual guarantee naturally, while staying on the animate level like cells in a body?

My Answer: A human being is far too complicated a creature to connect with others this way. Here’s why.

Egoism becomes qualitatively bigger on each level of nature, going from the still level, to the vegetative, to the animate, and the human. The bigger an object’s egoism, the more individualistic it is, and the more incapable it is of uniting with others. Therefore, as one develops, one feels more separate from others.

Nowadays, it’s not only the psychologists and sociologists, but also the economists and the politicians who are discovering that the world has become interconnected and therefore we – humanity – must unite. However, they believe that they are able to do this using a corporeal method, and that everything will settle down if only we create a world bank, a world government, a world upbringing, and a world-wide connection.

However, after having a few more meetings like the recent G20 summit, they will begin to understand that they lack the method to unite. Unfortunately, before they realize this, people may have to go through great suffering, including a lack of safety, a feeling of disorientation, total powerlessness, and universal grief. People cannot bear to be in a state of uncertainty, since constant alarm is worse than death. Our minds cannot function under such circumstances. Yet all of this may happen in order for us to realize that the only way to achieve unification among us is to rise above our egoistic nature.

This is not so on the still, vegetative, and animate levels, where all of nature and its parts are instinctively, naturally interconnected. They supplement each other and interact with each other harmoniously, without any freedom of choice or any decision-making.

Unification between people, however, can only be achieved when each person does it consciously. Unlike the other levels of nature, the Creator did not just make us unite by giving us instincts for this. Our unification is possible only if we acquire the quality of bestowal and love, where everyone participates and joins with everyone. To do this, we have to rise above ourselves and our egoism, and achieve the Biblical commandment of “love your neighbor as yourself.”

This is how the quality of the Creator will be revealed among us, and we will become similar to Him. We will then understand why He acted this way in regard to us.

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In the News (translated from VZ): History shows that when the capital of banks and industry merge, global wars occur. We don’t yet understand whether the world financial crisis will necessarily give rise to a new world war. However, historians have already warned us of this possibility.

The world’s politicians are forced to acknowledge that they don’t know what is the cause of the current crisis. Humanity’s main problem is that it does not know where it is going. We are starting to understand that it’s necessary to make a breakthrough in our consciousness.

My Comment: Conclusions such as this give me hope that Kabbalah’s suggestions will be heard. Otherwise, we will suffer a third and even fourth world wars, and only the small fraction of humanity that will remain alive will reach the goal – adhesion with Nature or the Creator.

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A question I received: You have said that we, meaning the world, have reached a state where we are already bound into one whole or one vessel. And according to Nature’s (the Creator’s) plan, this vessel must be filled with the sensation of the Upper Level of existence. However, we don’t feel our connection clearly and the state of the world has no precedents in the past. Could you please explain the meaning of this?

My Answer: Today we are revealing a global, integral connection among us, the effect of a “small village” or the Butterfly Effect. However, we are revealing an egoistic connection between us, together with universal interdependence. Thus, we are finding that we are unable to sustain correct, kind connections among us. This is called “a broken vessel,” because our connection is wrong.

Therefore, the current crisis is a revelation of our spiritual state. Throughout all of human history, until now, we existed on the level of our world. But we are now discovering the next level of Nature through seeing the interconnectedness between all parts of nature.

The world has to understand and internalize this level. After all, we have never been in this situation before. We have always thought of spirituality as something up in the sky, in other galaxies, beyond the boundaries of the universe, or in another dimension. Yet now spirituality is actually being revealed inside us, but it’s being revealed in the uncorrected form – the egoistic connections between us.

Baal HaSulam writes: “We are all one family.” And we are a family even if all of its members hate one another. The connection between us is spiritual. But it’s uncorrected because it’s egoistic. Our task is to correct it, to turn it to, “Love your neighbor as yourself”.

Spirituality has never been revealed in all of history before us. This is why our generation is called “the generation of the Messiah,” where the word Messiah originates from the word Limshoch – “to pull” ourselves out of egoism.

Thus, the crisis is the revelation of the broken connection between us. It is not an economic, financial, political or ecological crisis, but a crisis of the relationships between us. And that is what we are now revealing.

We have to give everyone (including ourselves) an explanation of the state we are in. Like a sick person, if we find the cause of our illness, we will be able to cure ourselves. By following the advice of Kabbalists, we can create the right connection between us – that of love and bestowal. We will then find ourselves in a perfect world!

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We are living in a special time, because our uncorrected spiritual state is being revealed through the uncorrected connections between people. This uncorrected form is being revealed on purpose, so we will correct it.

All the previous crises were meant to increase our egoism, whereas the current crisis is revealing that our own egoism is destroying us. In all the previous phases of our development, we continued to think that egoism would bring about greater development. Even fifty years ago in America, everyone saw themselves as the generation that will make progress, attain prosperity and achieve greater consumption. But today all of this egoism and consumption have ended.

For the first time, we are revealing that our egoism is destructive. Everyone is arriving at the same conclusion, because this is how our shattered spiritual state is being revealed. The entire world of yesterday, which was founded on egoism, egoistic advancement and exploitation, is no more.

But the crisis continues, and it will not stop. The blows will keep coming one after another, until we reveal their purpose, discover the medicine and agree to take it.

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In the News (from Boston Review): In order to assess explicit prejudice toward Jews, we directly asked respondents “How much to blame were the Jews for the financial crisis?” Among non-Jewish respondents, a strikingly high 24.6 percent of Americans blamed “the Jews” a moderate amount or more, and 38.4 per cent attributed at least some level of blame to the group.

My Comment: They are right, but on the other hand, see Items 70-71 of the “Introduction to the Book of Zohar.”

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