Question: How can I, as an individual organ of the general soul, feel the harm that I am causing the whole body by my corruption? How can I feel the sufferings of the general soul?

Answer: You will feel it according to how much you feel the sorrow of the general soul. You should feel the harm; try to be incorporated in society and to connect to it. Then you will feel what it suffers from, its illness, and you will attribute all this harm to yourself.

The feeling of cooperation is all the result of the connection: both the collective joy and the collective sorrow, the commitment towards society and the freedom from it. It all depends on a person, and on how much he exerts himself in order to attain his state and his feeling.

It is said that one should feel sorry for the sorrow of the Shechina. We see how humanity suffers. Can we help it?

Kabbalists say that the Creator wants to be revealed within the created beings, that is, He too seems to be suffering because others suffer. His suffering is completely unlike ours.

Imagine a family that has a mentally retarded child. How much does the child suffer? Sometimes he doesn’t even feel that he is sick and that he is different in anyway from the other children. We too, are living a peaceful life at the moment, not worrying about anything. We think that everything is fine, and we are surprised when we are told about a crisis and different problems.

People protest: “What is all the noise about and what are these claims that people are suffering? No one suffers; everything is fine. Don’t disturb us and let us enjoy life!” But this kind of life is like the life of a retarded child who isn’t aware of his condition. He plays with something and is happy. To others his condition is physically apparent, but the child is happy, he doesn’t suffer. Those who are near them suffer.

This is because they know his condition, how ill the child is, and how much he is lacking in life. Everyone who sees him suffers. This is the “sorrow of the Shechina,” which sees us like that retarded child.

But if he begins to improve, to get better, to understand and to feel more, then as he adds knowledge, he adds pain. He begins to feel problems and pressures; he sees that not everyone wants to be friends with him. First he felt the whole world as good and he was all right, he lived as if in a dream.

Now, the more he wakes up, the more strongly he feels the different states and his dependence on others. Only now does he understand where he really is. It turns out that this whole world is full of worries and problems and that you have to get along with people and to be careful of different dangers.

But the parents are happy! Why are they happy? After all, the child isn’t happier. True, he isn’t happy yet, but he has begun to live!
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/22/12, Shamati #1

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Opinion: (Bruce Krasting, a former hedge fund manager): “Issues related to subsistence have replaced the fervor for demonstrations.

“The closing of stores and shops is escalating. Apparently, 20% of all retail establishments are shuttered. Nearly every block has one reminder of the ongoing depression in the economy.

“The Greek Diaspora is in full swing. People are leaving the country, old and young alike.

“They leave their homes, as there is no future there, but all the time they wish they never left.

“As the shops close and the people leave, the economy shrinks. …The country is imploding.

“People are feeling hopeless, and the situation is getting worse. …there is not a chance in hell that Greece will avoid a default.

“A transition from the Euro to the Drachma would cause huge additional pain. It would devalue the pensions of every citizen by at least 50%. …a default would mean that Greece would be a debt pariah. In spite of this, [many prefer] that it would come sooner rather than later. … There is nothing desirable about this choice. It’s now just inevitable.”

My Comment: This is how a hurricane, tsunami, mudslide, or any other disaster is approaching us slowly—so as to give us time to realize that the reason for what is happening is the lack of correspondence of our egoistic connections with unified nature. As soon as we start considering and treating the world as a single whole and ourselves as its part, we will immediately feel that the blow is retreating and giving us time to adapt.
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In the News (from ABCnews): “The so-called SOPA blackout — protesting the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA for short) in the House of Representatives and the Protect IP Act in the Senate — has spread across the web today, perhaps the most widespread online lobbying effort ever coordinated by Internet entities.

“Sites checked by ABC News did not actually ‘go dark’ as originally threatened. Instead, they posted appeals to users to get in touch with their Congressional representatives to argue against passage of the two bills.

“The bills were intended to protect movie makers, music publishers, and other providers of online content who fear that in the digital age, people can copy what they’ve created and spread it without paying for it.

“The companies said the bills could require your Internet provider to block websites that are involved in digital file sharing. And search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing could be stopped from linking to them — antithetical, they argue, to the ideal of an open Internet.

“Congressional staff, meanwhile, sent out messages defending the bills. ‘Websites “going dark” today in protest of the PROTECT IP Act will not be affected by enactment of the legislation,’ said one. ‘None of the following websites meet the definition of a site dedicated to infringing activities: Wikipedia; YouTube; Flickr; Twitter; Google; craigslist; eBay; The Huffington Post; Yahoo!.’”

My Comment: There are two ways: censorship or education. Censorship is not correction. If we do not begin to correct, to educate ourselves, the Internet created by us will “eat” us alive because it represents our own ugly reflection. Instead of limiting the Internet, we need to educate humanity. This is what the Internet should be engaged in! If an alien entered our Internet and saw who we are, wouldn’t we be ashamed of ourselves?
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Opinion: (David Rubenstein, managing director and a co-founder of The Carlyle Group): “Countries teeter, protests rage, unemployed multiply, deficits abound the virtues of capitalism are questioned.

“I always felt there were two principal flaws – and we saw them come to a head over the past few years. The first is that unfettered exuberance about wealth creation will produce unsustainable booms and inevitable crashes. The great recession, fueled by cheap credit, is a textbook example of this flaw.

“The second is the inequality that results when the charge towards wealth creation leaves behind those less able (in most cases through no fault of their own) to adapt or to compete with the hard-chargers.

“While there is no simple cure to capitalism’s two big flaws, here is what I would do in 2012 to get the system back on its feet and to modulate income disparities.

“1. Save the euro and the European Union. A functioning and vibrant EU – the world’s largest economic unit – is essential to global prosperity.

“2. Fix the US debt and deficit. …This is not acceptable, nor is it good for capitalism.

“3. Integrate the emerged markets. The world needs to acknowledge that the centre of capitalism is shifting to the emerging markets – where most of the growth will occur in 2012. …If they are not, the capital needed to solve many of the developed markets’ current problems, especially residual issues of the great recession, will not be available on tolerable terms. Again, this will hurt the poor more than the wealthy.

“4. Educate. Educate. Educate. Perhaps the greatest cause of income inequality is the dismal state of primary and secondary education.”

My Comment: Capitalism has exhausted itself; it cannot be integral as Nature requires because it is built not on reasonable consumption, but on the continuous growth of production and consumption, which is unfeasible due to limited markets and natural resources.
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In the News (from BBC News): “US-based scientists found that the last four pandemics all occurred after La Nina events, which bring cool waters to the surface of the eastern Pacific.

“Nevertheless, the last four pandemics – the Spanish Flu that began in 1918, the Asian Flu of 1957, the Hong Kong Flu of 1958 and the swine flu of 2009 – were all preceded by periods of La Nina conditions. What pandemics have in common is that they all feature novel strains of the virus to which people have not developed immunity.

“The link to La Nina events is not clear. But recent research has shown that some wild birds’ patterns of flights and stopovers during migrations, or moulting times, differ between El Nino and La Nina years.

“‘Now we can look at viral gene flow in a number of birds, pigs, and people – and we might be able to get something more statistically robust, to get a better sense of the mechanisms.”’

My Comment: We have entered a new phase of the revelation of the world to us, the revelation of the world as a single whole, and this obliges us to become the same. For this reason, we will constantly discover greater connection between all parts of the world.

If we started to unite, we would change ourselves, and in our new property of integrality, we would discover the world as integral. Otherwise, “everyone judges according to their flaws,” and we, not seeing the world as unified, relate to it incorrectly, not like to an analog system, but like to a discrete one and thus, feel the discrepancy between it and us like a crisis. This is a more dangerous “pandemic.”
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Shamati #148 “The Scrutiny of Bitter and Sweet, True and False,” Writings of Baal Hasulam “Introduction to the Book, Panim Meirot, uMasbirot,” (To: “Let me explain it to you in an allegory”), Item 16
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The Book of Zohar – Selected Chapter “Beresheet (Genesis),” “Moses and Jacob,” Item 155, Lesson 43
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Talmud Eser Sefirot, Part 6, Item 8, Lesson 7
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“Introduction to the Study of Ten Sefirot,” Item 52, Lesson 27
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