The Key From The Concealed World

Dr. Michael LaitmanThe text of The Zohar is difficult to read in some places since it seems tasteless, doesn’t excite, amaze, or prompt us to respond. I see that it lulls everybody to sleep. What can be done, if we are separated from the spiritual state and have to connect with it? How else can the method of connection be built?

The state which I have to approach is beyond my feelings and desires. Nevertheless, how can I impel myself to come close to it? A small child looks at a driver with eagerness: A driver appears great for him. A pilot is even greater. A fireman is simply a hero. A child sees examples and wants to follow them. He has a sensation, example, vision, and connection. He can visualize the desirable state in the ego in which he exists. Nature itself forces him to desire this. Then, he moves selfishly, driven by his desire, urge, and aspiration.

We face the concealed world. It is hidden because now I don’t have any desire for it, so much so that I don’t see it and reject it. It isn’t even opposite to me since then I would see it as hateful, disgusting, repelling. But I don’t have even that.

So, how can I get closer to it? It cannot be seen because I don’t have any desires for it or any organs to perceive it. I was given a possibility to read about it, but I hear words and don’t know what they mean. I don’t have in me, in my world, in everything I am familiar with, any comparable phenomena.

If I am told about this concealed world by means of the words of our physical world: “the sun,” “the moon,” “an elder,” “mountains,” “sea,” “hills.” This baffles me even more because I begin to imagine what is happening in our world and not in the spiritual one. As a result, these words distance me even further. What can be done?

Therefore, Kabbalists use the language of Kabbalah. Reading the text written in the language of Kabbalah, you are prone to fewer mistakes because you see that Kabbalists talk about something unknown to you: technical terms that describe desires, clarifications, screens, Lights, degrees, and different numbers. All this is technology telling about something concealed from me. This text is much easier to read: It’s less confusing.

Why was The Book of Zohar hidden throughout centuries? It waited for our time so that people would not become confused and begin to materialize it. Until Baal HaSulam wrote his Sulam commentary on The Book of Zohar, it was very difficult to read it. If the masses started reading it, they would have imagined who knows what.

Even now, there are “teachers” who connect parts of the human body with spiritual activities: the right hand with bestowal, the left with reception. They tie a red string on the left hand, and it means correction for them. They haven’t reached spiritual attainment, and they think it is about what happens in our world. They don’t transfer this into the internal sensations, where we discover spiritual forces.

We must keep reading The Book the Zohar with perseverance and wait for the Lights concealed in the worlds to affect us. And it works! We have no book more powerful in its impact than The Zohar.

It is impossible to connect with the concealed world in another way. You need an adapter, an intermediary. What is this intermediary? You are told about something unknown, and you persist with your friends to aspire to it. Although you still have nowhere to aspire to, but if everybody says that it is important and concealed, you start to be impressed from what is still empty for you and to give it importance. Why? It’s because this is important for your environment.

Although it is not important for the environment either, and they simply work on you, this is sufficient. Then, you can develop a desire for the spiritual world which is opposite to us, and you cannot desire it. Thus, we reach spirituality by virtue of desire without a desire.

Otherwise, you will never reveal the spiritual world, or you will reveal it under the pressure of greater suffering, when overtaken by blows, you will rush to spirituality out of hopelessness, and not because you developed a desire for spirituality together with your friends. This is called development by the path of suffering, and not by the path of Light. Decide what you want!

If you are given an opportunity to move forward with the Light, to awaken it with your desire absorbed from the environment, but you don’t use this opportunity, suffering will befall you because you have to advance in accordance with the plan of creation.

It follows that the only free choice we have is to advance either by means of good or evil. But the fact that we have to advance is beyond all doubt. You have only a possibility to choose between the two paths, like a child who can opt either to become good or to remain bad. The end of the path is decided and known, and the time has been set. Everything was given initially except for your approach.

So now, we are at the point of an extremely critical decision: Do we see medicine in the reading of The Book of Zohar? It is true that I want to sleep, nothing disturbs me, the text doesn’t attract me, and it’s completely tasteless. The Zohar makes me sleepy….

But this is the true state. You are shown that you have no connection with spirituality. Get the desire from your environment now! Each is responsible for providing others with mutual guarantee so that they wake up. Then, out of total awakening, when we wish to wake up everybody, the Surrounding Light will come and make a small change in us. And we will immediately begin to sense what is written in The Zohar.
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From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/6/2011, The Zohar

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Kabbalah Is The Physics Of The Integral World

Dr. Michael LaitmanThe wisdom of Kabbalah is the physics of the integral world. What this integral world is all about, we don’t know. We attain only a tiny piece of it which we are able to perceive through the sensory organs of our physical world, similarly to all other animals.

On the other hand, unlike them, we have a more capable mind, greater desire, and hence we fit into the world a little bit better than regular beasts, while trying to take the most advantage of it. Yet, our sensory perception as based on our five sensory organs: vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch is much worse than theirs. They are quite better at sensing nature than we are.

Only our mind and ego are more advanced, and that is why we are greater than beasts and are more cruel and perverted. We can take advantage of this world that they are also aware of. However, in any case, we are able to perceive but a small part of reality.

The wisdom of Kabbalah explains to us our entire existence, the attainment of authentic reality. According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, the major difference between our limited perception of this tiny piece of reality and the ability to see a broader reality, as if to soar out of this narrow cage of our closed little world to the enormous and beautiful outer world, lies in knowing how not to make ourselves dependent on all kinds of changes, forces, and acts, but rather perceive one single force.

As soon as we start pulling this infinite number of forces, actions, chances, and thoughts, all of this surrounding mess, into one unified force more and more, it signifies that we are climbing the ladder of the worlds, until we reach the world of Infinity where there is, indeed, only one force and where all thoughts, desires, perceptions, predicaments, and actions, absolutely everything that was so confusing to me before, become unified. That’s when we attain that “there is none else besides Him,” this singular force, the Creator.
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From Lesson 8, WE! Convention 4/3/2011

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Daily Kabbalah Lesson – 05.12.11

Writings of Rabash, “What Is A Abraham Is Old in Work”
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The Book of Zohar – Selected, Chapter, Mishpatim (Ordinances), ‘You Shall Not Follow the Masses in Doing Evil,’” Item 429
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Talmud Eser Sefirot Vol. 1, Part 1 Histaklut Pnimit,” Lesson 13
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Rav Yehuda Ashlag “Peace in the World,” “The Four Attributes: Mercy, Truth, Justice, and Peace, in the Individual and the Collective”
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Good Environment – 05.11.11

My Good Environment – Dr. Laitman’s Daily Advice for the Week

Kabbalah Moments: Appetite For Pleasure

To Change The Upper One Or To Transform Oneself?

Dr. Michael LaitmanA prayer is a person’s connection with the upper force that reflects only his or her perception of it. There are people who pray asking for a better life in this world, there are folks who pray for the future world, and there are those who don’t pray and don’t believe in the upper force.

Still, they do think about their future, and every such thought is regarded as a prayer. But whom I am asking, however, is a whole other matter. Is it nature, fate, something unknown, my future state, or an upper force that can be bad today and good tomorrow depending on my request?

A prayer is the action I take in regard to the subsequent moment in hopes to achieve a specific state, meaning that this notion includes various states, but all of them divide into two parts depending on to whom I pray: Is it someone that changes and whom I can force to change?

That is when people start looking for hidden ways to gain control of the upper force so that it would become more kind and change present reality and the world. This hope to bribe the upper one is the basis for all mystical and religious quests. A person of this world who lives in his or her egoism thinks it’s possible.

However, there is another, very rare approach that says that the upper force can’t be changed; rather, you need to know how to alter yourself by using the forces nature programmed within you. It is the method of Kabbalah which opposes all other methods.

It doesn’t matter whether a person thinks there is one God or many, imagines himself facing nature or any other upper force. What matters is his attitude toward it.

Does he seek to employ the forces of nature and transform himself in order to reach the chosen destination, meaning that everything depends solely on him and his connection with this force? Or, does he look outside himself, seeking to alter the upper force, meaning does he approach the upper force, trying to use it for personal benefit so that it rewards him, which relates to his desire to change the whole world and take advantage of everything there is?
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/9/2011, Shamati No. 113

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Commemoration Or Gratitude?

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: What does the mourner’s prayer (Kaddish) symbolize?

Answer: When someone dies, we thank the Creator. Seemingly, for what, for the death of a loved one?

However, we send gratitude at the spiritual level. We look from the height of the spirit, down to the desire to receive which shed its egoistic form by virtue of the Light, the Creator. Finally, He has made it happen. That part has died, and now I can realize the “revival of the dead” with it, meaning to take the desire that remains without an egoistic intention and begin to work with it for the sake of bestowal.

After the death of egoism, meaning the intention to receive, only the “body” of desire remains. It is decomposing, and I can start working with it. Thus, I received a great deal of help from Above and thank the Creator for that. These are not simply words, but the feeling that bursts out of a person when his egoistic desire dies at last.

The Kaddish appears contradictory in our present egoistic understanding. In fact, all our prayers, precepts, and rituals don’t correspond to the laws of our life. All of them are absolutely illogical, irrational in our eyes because they are the projection of spiritual laws.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/9/2011, About the Israeli Nation

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A Special Place On The Map Of Humankind

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: We know that “Isra-El” is a calling and not just a stamp on an identity card. Yet, is there a special task for those who live in the geographic state of Israel?

Answer: In the future, this land, this country, should become a symbol of the state that will be built completely on the forces of bestowal, reciprocal love, mutual guarantee, on the principals of “love thy neighbor as thyself” and “don’t do to others that which is hateful to you,” on unifying into “one man with with one heart.”

Here is the place with the most suitable conditions. Thus, if a person is drawn to spirituality, in a sense he is drawn here. It is impossible to establish the state of Israel on Madagascar or in Uganda. The law of the spiritual root and branch acts here, and this has to be taken into account.

Thus, we don’t have a choice. We are here and have to build a state of love and bestowal here, setting an example for the entire world. Only in this way can we defeat enemies, achieve independence, and avoid any new victims.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/9/2011, About the Israeli Nation

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Between Two Fires

Dr. Michael LaitmanBaal HaSulam, “The Nation”: The only hope is to establish a thoroughly new national education for ourselves, to discover and ignite once more the natural, national love that has been dimmed within us, to revive once more the national muscles, which have been inactive in us for two millennia, in every suitable means to this end. Then we will know that we have a natural, reliable foundation to be rebuilt and to continue our existence as a nation.…

Question: What is “national love?”

Answer: It is brotherly love. Every nation has its inherent love because the nations take their origins from the 70 roots of Zeir Anpin. These roots have a place for every nation. That is why people feel a connection to the mutual root.

Despite egoism and individualism conspicuous today in everyone, people have a sense of belonging to a particular nation. This feeling is common to all nations except the Jews. After all, Israel is not a nation; it has no root in those 70 roots. Of all the nations that inhabited Ancient Babylon, Israel was made of people with the point in the heart. They separated from the others and joined together because of this spark.

When the spark blazes and connects them, they live at the spiritual level, welded by their points in the heart into a single soul. But when this soul breaks, their vessel disappears, and they fall into regular desires, the desires of other nations.

Then, Israel stops being a nation because nothing connects them besides the hate of others toward them. Only external pressure keeps them together. If the pressure decreases, they become dispersed as far as possible from each other. They exist in comfort namely when their connection is weakened. We can see this in the Jews living among other nations.

When will Israel become a nation again? It will only be when they assemble around the message that Abraham laid in the nation’s foundation: “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” It must be done not for themselves, but for the sake of the world.

We are at the last stage of redemption, the final correction, which has to embrace the entire world. Baal HaSulam writes about this in his articles “The Revelation of Godliness (Matan Torah)” and “The Mutual Guarantee.” Israel has to be united for the Creator to correct everybody through them.

Desiring to correct themselves, Israel raises MAN, a plea for the entire world. Then, it receives the upper Light, the Light that Reforms. This Light moves through the “template” called Israel and obtains the right form of unity. The Light is abstract and formless, but here it acquires the form called Mashiach (Messiah). Then, the great desire of the nations of the world becomes corrected.

If we act in this manner, we are Israel. If we don’t, we receive blows and troubles, both from the upper Light and the nations of the world. We are in the middle between them. Either we perform the coordinator’s task, or we are worse than everyone else and have to suffer the consequences directly from the Creator and indirectly through others.

The Light must find its vessel, and until then, it will not calm down.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/8/2011, “The Nation”

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Kabbalists On The Torah And Commandments, Part 44

Dr. Michael LaitmanDear Friends, please ask questions about these passages from the great Kabbalists. The commentaries in brackets are mine.

Only the Light in the Torah Reforms the Person

By not being able to exit the will to receive for oneself and feeling the need for the Creator’s help, a need is born to be assisted by the Creator. The Creator’s help is through the Torah because the Light in it reforms him, meaning he receives vessels of bestowal.
– Rabash, The Rungs of the Ladder, “What Is the Foundation upon which Sanctity Is Built

Our sages said, “The Creator said, ‘I have created the evil inclination, I have created the Torah as a spice [for its correction],’” meaning that the Torah and Mitzvot spice [correct] the evil inclination, to give it flavor, for the evil inclination is called the will to receive.

When it is for oneself, it is tasteless, for the restriction is over it, and it remains in a vacant space. But through Torah and Mitzvot, one reaches the intention to bestow, and with this vessel, called the “will to receive,” one receives all the delight and pleasure.
– Rabash, The Rungs of the Ladder, “Concerning the Goal”
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