Einstein On The Nature Of Humanity

EINSTEIN“Everything that the human race has done and thought is concerned with the satisfaction of deeply felt needs and the assuagement of pain. One has to keep this constantly in mind if one wishes to understand spiritual movements and their development. Feeling and longing are the motive force behind all human endeavor and human creation, in however exalted a guise the latter may present themselves to us.”

Albert Einstein

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Just Like Fish – A New Song

This song by Arcadi Duchin is based on today’s Daily Lesson:

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Lyrics translation:

Just Like Fish

A big desire consumes a small one,

It’s simple, just like with fish.

You are controlled by your desires

Just like a puppet.

If you take a detached look at life,

It won’t seem logical.

Even though we are very advanced animals,

We are still slaves to the desire.

The thought is the force of progress

From one state to the next.

Love is the only way out –

Out of yourself and into others.

You are shifting inside a force field,

A field of forces that depict a picture inside your senses.

This is inanimate, this is vegetative and this is human;

But it is all your desire, broken into parts.

This drives us crazy and we just can’t understand

That everything around us is non-existent.

There is just a point from which you can see

That you are the whole world.

Finding Aaron And His Son Within

calm.jpg The Zohar: The sons of Aaron are drunk on wine. Who let them drink the wine? Could it really be that they were brazen enough to get drunk on wine?

Of course, they got drunk on the wine that is described by the verse, “They brought the Creator a foreign fire.” This means that they were unable to withstand the Light which they were supposed to accept for the sake of bestowal.

But a different verse says, “It was in order to hide from another’s wife.” Yet, all of this is the same thing.

We must remember that everything happens inside a person. Aaron is the quality of Chesed (mercy) which develops by overcoming the egoistic desire that it not yet corrected. However, this desire only awakens in a person who studies Kabbalah.

When we correct it, we raise all of our desires upwards and thereby attain greater equivalence to the Creator. The sons of Aaron represent the subsequent development of this quality, which also depends on overcoming one’s egoism.

Wine represents the Light of Hochma. To drink wine and to get drunk means to attract the Light of Hochma from above downwards (egoistically), instead of accepting from below upwards, in the middle line, in the Light of Hassadim.

We have to “translate” everything being described into the language of our inner qualities. How can we correct ourselves and attain the quality of bestowal above the egoistic desire that continually grows? How can we rise higher towards bestowal to the Creator?

As we read, we have to search inside ourselves; we have to try to find the phenomena and qualities in our small inner world that are being described by every word we read. After all, every person is a small world.

Did Noah Really Exist?

body When reading The Zohar, one must always think about oneself. The Torah does not say a word about history. However, every spiritual root has to touch a material branch, which is why all of these events also took place in our world.

Did the people described by the Torah understand who they were? This is indeed a question worth asking. Baal HaSulam writes that there was a time when someone “accidentally” decided to name a hill he saw “The Mount of Olives” because he thought it was a good place for planting olive trees. In reality however, he gave the mountain this name in a natural manner, instinctively, because every person acts according to his spiritual root. This root is instilled in every person from Above, and we carry out its commands.

So did Noah really exist? Yes, he did. Was he the most righteous person in all the generations? Did he understand what he was doing? This is a good question that we will discuss at some point in the future. Did he have sons called Shem, Ham and Jafeth? Yes, he did. Were they also righteous, and did they understand the Creator and speak with Him? All of this requires an explanation.

However, I am not interested in all of this history. The entire spiritual world has to be imprinted in a material form, inside me, in some way. It has indeed been imprinted there, but this isn’t important as far as I’m concerned. I have to arrange all of this in an orderly manner for myself in order to further my own advancement.

All of these Biblical stories are talking about man’s inner world. Therefore, I don’t care about anything else. The rest may as well be non-existent, as if there has never been any history, or Ancient Babylon, or this entire world. It doesn’t exist until I discover it for myself, instead of hearing someone else talk about it.

Right now I am inside an empty space where there is nothing. Everything takes place inside me. But who am I, standing in the middle of this empty space? I am someone that feels. And what do I feel? I feel what The Zohar tells me – and nothing exists besides this.

This is how I, a point inside an empty space, study The Book of Zohar, building an entire world out of the material that I absorb. It is the only world there is – not the Upper World or the lower world, but the only one. I make efforts to understand how this world is arranged and where every quality and action being described by The Zohar are found in this world. This is what I am always trying to imagine. I am just a point that tries to find these qualities.

5 Minutes Of Light From The Daily Lesson: What Is Practical Kabbalah?

Practical Kabbalah

disappoint Authentic, practical Kabbalah means that we attract the Light of Correction that causes us to change. Our world is a world of results; we are influenced by Upper Forces that govern all life in this world. So we shouldn’t think that we can change anything in our world with our actions. There are no effective actions we can make in our world, besides one – raising a MAN (request) upwards. This is the only thing we can do. Raising a MAN is called practical Kabbalah.

If, on the other hand, a person hopes to change his fate and influence the Upper Forces with his material actions (including the observance of traditions and commandments), then Kabbalah says that this is impossible. Don’t do it – it won’t help. Sure, you can carry out the rituals in order to feel more relaxed and to have order in your life, but at the same time, you should know that you will not change your fate by doing so. These actions do not enable you to reveal your egoism; they do not make you to want to correct it. They might even make you feel the opposite way – more relaxed, as if everything is ok.

If a person hopes to change anything in this world by influencing it directly, rather than through the Upper World, this is called mysticism. If he isn’t asking to be made similar to the Upper Forces and to change, but is instead trying to change the forces and world that seems to be outside him, then he is engaging in mysticism. It means that one’s outlook on the world is incorrect. The only thing in reality that we can change is ourselves; or rather, we can ask to be changed.

All of our reality is the One and Only Creator, the Absolute, who is Good and does Good. There is no one besides Him. “There is a law and it cannot be transgressed.” This refers to an iron law that we cannot affect in any way. If we want change, we can only ask Him to make these changes in us.

All we have to do is discern how we differ from Him, and then ask Him to make us the same as He. We will then shift our entire fate to the path of goodness. As for everything else, no matter what we do it is all meant to show us that we are not acting correctly. It becomes expressed as pain in order to direct us to the “true path.”

Don’t Let Your Point In The Heart Go Back Into Hiding

east A question I received: Hundreds of thousands of people all over the world watch our lessons on The Book of Zohar. As opposed to other books, is The Zohar able to awaken the right kinds of desires in a person regardless of whether he has a point in his heart?

My Answer: Everybody has a point in their heart; however, it can be concealed or exposed. If it is concealed, there is a possibility that it can reveal itself in the next moment. No one knows when and in whom it will show up next.

There have been many people who have come to us with burning points in their hearts, but alas, it subsided several weeks or months later because they did not apply enough effort toward their spiritual development. They were given a chance, but they lost it and the point in their hearts became concealed again.

The transition from concealment to revelation of the point in the heart, as well as the reverse (from revelation back to concealment), depends entirely on the effort that a person makes. This explains why some people who did not have a particular desire for spirituality at first, but kept listening to our lessons out of respect for The Book of Zohar or simply to be polite were able to accelerate their growth.

By doing this, one’s point in the heart, the embryo of the soul, will reveal itself quickly and one can begin to develop it consciously.

The Difference Between Mysticism And Science

control Classical science wishes to penetrate into the matter of the spiritual world through physical matter, by examining our world through the five senses and their assistant, the mind. However, this is impossible for one simple reason: the matter of our world is perceived under the condition that our perception remains egoistic. Meanwhile, spiritual matter can only be felt through the quality of bestowal.

In other words, our attainment depends on a person’s qualities: whether they are altruistic or egoistic. If a person is an egoist (meaning, his qualities are those of reception), then it is impossible for him to study the spiritual world, the quality of bestowal. Only by rising from our innate egoism to the quality of bestowal can we can examine egoism from the outside, objectively. Then why were we endowed with egoistic qualities in the first place? It is because if a person were to enter the spiritual without first having existed inside egoistic qualities, he would not be able to identify or understand it.

However, there is no connection between these qualities; it is like fire and water – one does not understand the other. This is why the discovery of the spiritual world is described by the verse, “I labored and found.” If a person puts in effort, then he activates a system that will later give him the quality of bestowal. He then starts to understand what it is. However, until then, all talk about the spiritual world will remain meaningless to him.

As long as we exist in the egoistic desire, no amount of research will enable us to understand anything about the spiritual world or the soul. To accomplish this, we must first change our qualities to altruistic ones. However, if you try to research the world in which you exist without changing yourself, then you are entering the realm of mysticism. You fall into the danger of defining spirituality incorrectly, thinking that it is not bestowal, but some “other worldly” adventures.

Only the quality of bestowal can be “other worldly” because the only thing there is in our world is only matter – the quality of reception. The spiritual world is bestowal and love, which exists above our ego. Its existence does not depend on whether our animalistic bodies are alive or dead, because it is not connected to the body at all. It also doesn’t depend on how developed our minds are.

Everything depends only on whether or not the quality of bestowal is present in one’s desire, and this quality can only be acquired using the Kabbalistic method because it enables us to draw the Light of Correction – the quality of bestowal from the next degree, from the Upper Force.

Therefore, studying the “spiritual” world before acquiring the quality of bestowal is mysticism because it is made-up. Kabbalah, on the other hand, is a science. To the extent that you attain the quality of bestowal within, you can then examine everything that happens in your qualities of reception and bestowal.

The Intellect Is A Tool For Working With Our Desires

Is the Antagonism Between Israel's Secular and Orthodox Jews a Form of Anti-Semitism A question I received: Is my intellect able to easily comprehend what’s written in The Book of Zohar?

My Answer: Our intellect can only understand what we feel. It is able to perceive only what is felt inside our matter, or our desire.

Even in mathematics, where we operate only with numbers, these numbers are arranged inside us according to how small or large our desires are. Therefore, everything has to settle within ourselves, within the matter of which we are comprised – our feelings. We cannot do anything about it since that’s how the Creator made us.

After that, we turn on our brain and start to see the difference between numbers: this one seems bigger, that one is smaller, this one is positive and that one is negative. This is how we operate and the reason why the first thing we have to do is develop our senses – the desire to receive and all of its different forms, as well as the desire to bestow.

Our brain and intellect serve only to help us build the connections between different levels of the desire to receive pleasure and the desire to bestow. This is what our intellect is meant for; it connects various forms of desire.

The Channels Of Light

inside.jpg The Zohar: Peer into the secret of the degrees, and you shall see how the colors (white, red and black) expand in all directions: to the right, to the left and to the middle, until they enter Malchut below by the secret of the twenty seven channels with gates that conceal the abyss.

If we can change our qualities and make them similar to the Light’s quality of love and bestowal, we will unite with the Light and reveal its channels. We exist in the World of Infinity even now, but it is concealed from us by five worlds. These worlds are concealments that exist within us, inside our desire, because it is opposite to the quality of the World of Infinity.

These concealments don’t exist in and of themselves, but become revealed as we establish contact with the World of Infinity. Concealment emerges between us and infinity in order to help us make the necessary revelation. However, if we are not prepared for this, infinity is concealed from us. This is called a “world” (Olam in Hebrew, which comes from the word “concealment”), which conceals and reveals at once. In the end, everything depends on how successful we are at uniting and transforming our qualities.

…Through these 27 channels the Upper Light pours into Malchut, and the gates are the channel rafts that conceal the judgments and restrictions, called abysses, that reign in Malchut.

We are the ones who build these channels inside us, and the rafts (bolts) are like valves that sometimes open the way for the Light and sometimes block and conceal the Light, depending on our desires’ similarity or contrast to the Light. Therefore, our efforts should be aimed at taking all our qualities and using them to build a likeness to spirituality. We will thereby receive a portion of Light.

The Light is revealed to the extent that our egoism is concealed by “modesty” (The Zohar even has a chapter called “Book of the Modest”), and to the extent our egoism is made similar to the Light, it receives the Light. We then reveal the Creator’s qualities and the Thought of Creation.

When we conclude this work of attaining similarity and become just like Him in every way, all the Light channels disappear and we end up in a vast ocean of endless Light. However, this is only possible due to the force of our anti-egoistic screen.

We then see that all the concealments were necessary. They helped us understand the Creator and cling to His thought by ascending above His actions. In this way we ascend to the Creator’s level and unite with Him.