That Sweet Feeling Of Love…

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: You said that instead of aspiring for fulfillment, we should aspire to desire, necessity. What does it mean to aspire to a desire? What does it mean to get fulfillment from a desire?

Answer: A young man is walking down the street and glowing with happiness. Why? He loves a girl.

Tell me, what does he get from this love? Why does this feeling fill him so much? What does he receive? He doesn’t receive, but is ready to bestow. He wants to unite with her, to love. I am not talking about love between adults, about sexual relations, but about a higher feeling, even though it is also based upon reception.

You love a person and want to do something pleasant for him. You want him to be happy and aspire to unite with him.

Besides hormonal attraction, which even animals experience, we received such an exalted feeling so that we would learn something from it. After all, nothing was created in vain. That is why in our biological organism, in this protein body, there is a certain inspiration from this kind of feeling for the neighbor, called love of one person for another.

Why does this fulfill me? Feelings fill us. Love is filled by the fact that I exist in bestowal rather than reception. And if I receive something from someone who loves me, then it’s only to awaken me to respond to the Light. But in essence, if love lives inside of me, then I enjoy by bestowing to the person I love, without receiving from him.

This is a law of nature and nothing can be done about it.
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From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/30/12, The Book of Zohar

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What Does “To Reach An Answer” Mean?

Dr. Michael LaitmanIf from the beginning you do not want to go from Lo Lishma (not for Her name) to Lishma (for Her name), to bestowal, then it is preferable not to do anything at all. At least don’t ask the Creator for the sake of the ego. After all, you agree on a partnership with Him, just to get more from Him.

How should we act in order not to turn into leeches that demand “Give me both this world and the next world!” but instead of this, learn from the Creator about His attribute of bestowal without, “building” on His riches?

Thus, the state of Lo Lishma is very delicate, serious, dramatic, and life changing. After all, from this point, I can go in two completely different directions and I need to make a choice.

The search for the meaning of life, its source and goal, brings me to this point, to the teacher, the group, the books, the system, and I begin to clarify it. From it, I can go back in all kinds of directions, and I can move forward.

But how can I discover where “forward” and “backward” are? After all, I don’t see the direction. I can be told about this a thousand times, but still I don’t see it. I need to clarify it myself.

Backward is death and forward is life, but to me it can be perceived completely differently. How can I check it in order to constantly direct myself?

I have partners concerning this point: the group, the teacher and of course, the Creator. Now I need to organize all these components in order to advance in the good direction.

But what is good: Is it what is good for me, for my ego, or about someone else’s goals? There are numerous questions here and I need to clarify. It seems that I am within a sphere with 360 degrees of choices of direction, and I can choose whatever direction I wish! Where should I go? That is the huge question that a person faces.

It takes a long time until he clarifies this question, and this clarification ends only at Gmar Tikkun (end of correction). In this way we attain the answer to the same question about the meaning of life that we arrived with. Although it seemed to you that you began to feel and understand it beforehand, we actually attain it only at the end. Indeed within this question are included all of your thoughts and desires, and all of them need to be corrected and fulfilled, and then it means that you reached the answer.

We stand before this point, and we need to connect ourselves together: the group, the teacher, the Creator, and another component, the Torah.

The Creator is the source. I, the group, and the teacher are the means. The Torah is the force of correction that I activate. Thus it is said, “Israel, the Light and the Holy One, Blessed be He, are One.” And if I connect all of these into one place, the correct path opens before me.

This path doesn’t exist by itself, it is created before me like a direction that was opened, like a straight arrow, like a vector, on the condition that I choose all the items of data correctly. I need each time to organize correctly all the attributes, my thoughts and desires, to clarify the direction, and advance forward again and again. In this way, we correct ourselves.
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From the 3rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/11/12, “Study of the Ten Sefirot

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With Whom Should We Make Our Attack?

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: What can I discover in the Arava convention?

Answer: You will discover what you want; you will discover what you prepare yourself for. Perhaps you are preparing yourself to find out the meat and rice is delicious?

In our connection we want to reach a true deficiency, and we have to go to the convention with the right yearning. It has to be so clear that we feel it in our bones.

Question: Should we set conditions that must be kept before the convention? Will this help us discover the right deficiency?

Answer: Yes, of course. How is it possible without preliminary conditions? We can’t jump the gun. If someone doesn’t prepare himself, there is no point in his going. By that he is tripping up himself and the friends, and he will get a spiritual punishment for that, like the fool who drills a hole in the collective boat. Everyone should be responsible for what is happening with him. There is time for everyone to correct himself according to the conditions you decide on.

You should present these conditions to anyone you think is ready for the attack. So think, whom are you taking with you and whom not? Make a list of names. The criterion here is not how much a person knows, not the number of years he has studied, but the level of his desire: How much does he want to and is he capable of helping.

Everyone should carry out his job on the boat, from the captain to the youngest apprentice. The only question is: How focused is everyone on the goal?

Question: What is that spiritual punishment?

Answer: If I fail the friends by my wrong participation, then I will certainly be punished for that. The harm I cause will come back to me like a boomerang.

In the same way, I can also receive the reward through the friends when I advance with them and receive from them powers, directions, and assistance; I only add a bit from myself. In our world it is just like working in a certain field and being able to exchange my salary for numerous goods and services that others offer me. When I connect to them, I provide myself with everything that I need in order to live a good life. It is the same in spirituality: I work in my place on the boat and do my job faithfully—and together with everyone else I reach our destination. Could I cross the ocean by myself?

Question: How can I check whether I am ready for the convention?

Answer: Ask your friends all over the world what they think the preparation is. You should write about it yourselves, so that everyone will be able to check himself whether he is coming physically or whether he is going to participate virtually. Women and men should write separately, and then discuss the matter and closely stick to the decisions that are reached.

The main thing is the deficiency; we don’t need more than that. So it is about the clarification of the deficiency, or the clarification of the obstacles on the way to reach it, which interruptions should I take with me in order to sharpen things and bring about correction?

Question: For whom should I ask for the deficiency during the lesson: myself or the others?

Answer: It is written, “He who prays for his friend is answered first.” But if you are asking for the friends just so that you can be first, your prayer won’t be answered. That is not a prayer for the friend.

Question: The last time before we went out to the desert, we were given the chance to overcome many obstacles. Now, however, we have to ignite this desire by ourselves. Is this the minimum with which we have to come to the desert?

Answer: Today much more is demanded from you. At that time you expected some revelation, but we didn’t say what exactly should be revealed. Now we say: We have to reveal the desire, the deficiency. I don’t need anything but this desire.

What exactly is it aimed at? At the revelation of the Creator? No. It is aimed at bestowal. None of us has the desire for bestowal, and we want it to be revealed in all of us. After all, the desire to bestow that fills me is actually the Light. I am happy because I want to bestow, and I don’t need anything but that. Even if the Creator doesn’t let me bestow—the desire itself fills me with and brings me pleasure.

Then we begin to understand the details, and to climb the mountain to the King’s palace.

There is nothing to add here. We have the opportunity to reach the right deficiency, which will be filled. We don’t need anything else.
[67956]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/29/12, “Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot

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Do Not Turn Your Back To The Creator

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: What does the Creator want through The Book of Zohar?

Answer: The Creator does not want anything. He wants what you want. He is constantly in the law of absolute bestowal. And Reshimot (informational genes) are awakened in you all the time and reveal to you how much you are opposite to this total property of bestowal that is ruling over the world.

The stronger the Reshimot will open in you, the more you will feel opposed to this law, this force, in various forms. From day to day, your world will appear to you much worse from any side.

Do you want to stay in it? Stay. Do you want to move out of your misery? Advance! Do you want to do something with yourself? Do. Use this power for good. How? If you strive for it, then you will discover its greater impact on you. If you do not strive, you will not discover.

The Creator is unchangeable. By your aspiration, you will be able to draw more help, more power from Him. And if you do not long for Him, if you turn your back to Him, you will reveal something different.

The Creator does not want anything. We just say: “His desire is to bring pleasure to the creatures” because we think that His desire is the same as ours, that it operates and performs. It does operate and perform, but in an unchanged form. And that is why, in contrast to our world, it is a static state, when everything depends on you. All changes depend on you.

Reshimot are revealed only to you so you feel changes; it is not He who is changing every moment. The Creator does not change; the Light is in absolute rest. The creature wanted to perform the first restriction (Tzimtzum Aleph) and has done it; the second restriction, please do! The Creator agrees, but nothing more. The creature does everything. We just relate in our earthly language that the Creator acts in everything.

Thus, if you want to change something, you should not forget that it is we who change,.
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From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/29/12, The Zohar

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A Play Without Extras

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: It is difficult for us to wake each other up by means of external actions, but the internal ones are slipping away from us. What should we do?

Answer: The point is that each one of you falls asleep and despairs. This is natural, and this will continue until you feel that each one depends on the others and must care about the others. I must understand that my desire depends on you, and yours depends on me. Only then will we arrive at the real desire.

Today, you are searching for this desire personally, individually, but not together. Each one thinks about how to increase his own desire, but this is incorrect. You will not be able to do that. On the contrary, you fall asleep, counting on indulgences from above. Nothing else can possibly happen, while a person makes the calculation only for himself. Alone, nobody is capable of establishing even the smallest contact with spirituality since it is absolutely opposite to him. We still cannot imagine the depth of this divide.

However, we have the opportunity to make this leap across the distance separating us from the spiritual world. This depends on the group, on how we play within it, how we play such a game from which we simply have nowhere to escape. In this “play” of the group, I must constantly demonstrate this environment, its continued staging: all of us on stage together in every act, in every scene. No other means will help without this.

It is said: “A hero will not save himself by his own strength.” The power of the Creator is needed for this, but it can only be summoned through the group. We must think in this direction and play, like in the theatre. We need to build this play, where everyone will participate without exception. In our play, we give the mutual guarantee to each other; we display our participation, attention, and the need of each one for everyone and everyone for each one. We will not come out from Egypt otherwise.

If you are working on this and encounter obstacles along the way, then we can go out to the Arava desert, since we will have something to go with, we will have the suffering of the whole Kli that is not able to unite. It is said about this: “And the sons of Israel cried out from the work!” For their egoism, they have built the wonderful cities of Ramses and Pithom, while they have found themselves to be in poor cities, threatening not to let them out from the exile.
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From the 3rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/26/12, “Study of the Ten Sefirot

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Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: What should be the minimal hold to the group, and what is most important about it?

Answer: There are many types of work and relationships in the group: when the friends are smaller than me, greater than me, or equal to me, and whether I relate to them as the revelation of the Creator or use them as a shield. The group is everything. It’s a desire I can manage, play with, and through it, I determine my attitude towards the Creator. Through the group I acquire a Masach (screen). All my requests, my prayers, my desires, my definitions, and my clarifications go through the group to the Creator.

The group is the compass with which I can focus on the Creator, the upper force. If I can connect with the friends and be incorporated in them, I will be more concentrated and more accurately focused on the Creator. In the corporeal world I see someone and I can approach him. But in the spiritual world, I don’t see the Creator, I don’t know what the attribute of bestowal is, or where it is, in what range of frequency. It’s as if I have a radio, but I don’t know how to find the station I am looking for among millions of other stations.

So I have a problem because I don’t know what spirituality is at all, and I imagine it in a totally wrong way. If it were simply the opposite it would be good, it would at least give me some direction. I don’t know where to look for it at all. I am standing in the middle of a circle and can go in any direction in 360 degrees, and according to my nature I will never be able to guess the right direction.

Therefore, there is only one means: the group, through which I can somehow imagine the attribute of bestowal. If I yearn to connect with them internally, then in that connection, in my yearning for them, I will begin to feel what the Creator’s attribute of bestowal is. Thus I can establish my attitude towards Him inside me.

Hence, the group becomes the most precious thing for me, a means by which I attain my only and most important goal. I begin to feel that it’s when I am with the group and we establish the connection among us, that I can discover the Creator. The Creator is revealed only in that state, in the collective deficiency, in the collective feeling that is created between me and the group. Otherwise He has nowhere to be revealed.

It is as if we build a stage together on which the Creator can appear and perform, inside the feeling of our collective connection, the mutual guarantee, our adhesion. If it didn’t exist, there wouldn’t be the attribute of bestowal in which the Creator could be revealed, because an equivalence of form is required for that.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/25/12, Shamati #175

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Tell Me How You See The Group And I’ll Tell You Who You Are

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Where should each of us start to create our own environment?

Answer: Start from the need to evoke inspiration and to impress everyone by your desire to create the environment. Try to spur them without words that we should all yearn to create an environment that will oblige us, change us, and bring us closer so that we will connect. This is a must. Without such a society, without the right connections among us, there is nowhere that spirituality can be revealed. Spirituality is revealed only in the connection among us.

The form of the connection among us is the form of the spiritual world, the form of the level a person is on. The moment it influences me and I want to discover it, the level of the connection will depend on me. In the same group there are those who see it on level 50 and there are those who see it on level 5 and others can see it as absolutely perfect, in Gmar Tikkun (Final Correction).

Spiritual reality doesn’t have a predetermined form; it all depends on a person. This is why I need the environment so much, so that it will oblige me to treat it correctly. That’s all we need.

Actually, when I see that it is corrected, I see that it has always been that way, and I only lacked the desire to discover this, I lacked the sensitivity. Now too we are in a group and in an environment that is in Gmar Tikkun, in the world of Infinity. But it doesn’t spur me to discover that. By evoking the friends, I create an effect that helps me discover that they are absolutely corrected.

As a result of this cycle, which comes back to me, I correct myself. This is called to pray, to judge myself, how do I return to the right attitude through the environment. We have to give it a lot of thought because it all begins and ends here.
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From the 3rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/20/12, “Introduction to The Book of Zohar”

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Building The Plant That Will Manufacture Me

Dr. Michael LaitmanAll our work is building the environment. After all you can’t create yourself by yourself. This is what we have to create for humanity these days. If I have to correct myself, how can I do that? I simply need to create around me such an environment, the media and an education system, so that I will be the product of this environment.

But by creating it, I correct myself. It’s because through the process of creation I already begin to feel how it should be built and how I should exist, and accordingly what kind of an environment it should be so that it will affect me. I feel how I should build it now so that it will take on such a form that will influence me.

In the building process itself, we join the operating mind and understand what the Creator wanted to do by the shattering, why He prepared such building blocks, wood and building materials for us, and why we should build this house. Thanks to this we begin to discover Him. It looks as if I am building the environment so that it will correct me, and so that the corrected me will be incorporated in it and then…but it isn’t so. By building the environment I get to know the Creator.
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From the 3rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/20/12, The Zohar

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Evil Robed In Goodness

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: According to the method of integral upbringing, a person is not supposed to be shown bad examples. But in psychology things are a little different: A person talks about his misfortunes and begins to evaluate what he is doing wrong. Essentially, a person is getting in touch with his evil, bad side, which he then tries to correct.

Answer: Our approach is absolutely different: Evil does not exist! There is no evil in the world! Even though all of nature appears evil to us, it is only because we use it incorrectly. If we use it in a different way, it will be absolute goodness. And we can also use egoism for good, and not bad.

When I play against my own egoism, meaning begin to evaluate and work with it as with an instrument of my ascent over it, it becomes my starting point, the guideline according to which I measure myself: how much I ascend and change.

I regard my egoism as a negative essence given to me, which I must properly robe into a completely opposite intention: to use it all for bestowal, love, and connection. Then egoism will constantly be of help to me; it will constantly push and goad me, pull me somewhere aside, and I will constantly work on counterbalancing it by finding ways to rise above it. This way it will be my help “against me.”

We know that any tracking or any developing system must consist of two opposite forces. And these mutually opposite forces achieve the best possible result, the common denominator by balancing each other out.

This is why the egoism in me must be balanced out by the desire to rise above it, lean on the environment, the help of the neighbors, friends, and the entire community in order to rise above it. These two systems—society, the environment on one side and my egoism on the other—are helping me. And it is as if I am standing between them and am raising myself this way.

Ultimately, I examine my egoism, reveal the qualities in it that can help me grow above it, use it for bestowal, advancement, joy, and helping others, and then it becomes the force, the mass, the matter, I am working with. I am in no way destroying it! It keeps developing in me, and I welcome with joy all the nuances of its development.

A modern person greets it with sorrow and grief: “Me again! What did I do?!” But it is not me. It is nature revealing itself in me this way—an enormous egoistic nature that reveals itself in us specifically this way so we would keep uniting over it.

This is why egoism is an engine that moves us forward. We need all its forms, all its manifestations, even the most horrible ones, so we could robe them in pretty clothes.

This horror remains on the inside, and let it stay there. But when we put a completely different and opposite shell on it, we create a discord, a dipole in every one of our qualities, which helps us increase the strength of egoism and use it for the sake of others in a way which creates a completely different structure called “Man.”

Now is the first time in history that we are coming to a state when we will be able to rise above the level of our corporeal existence (for the sake of the physical body) to the level where we create a completely different, spiritual structure: a common virtual humanity, where everyone is interconnected and mutually complete one another. And this single integrated mechanism, the so-called Adam, which is the prototype of the collective human being in the world, provides us with the opportunity to attain all the forces of nature, all its depths, and use them the right way.

So, by no means do we destroy or neutralize the egoism; on the contrary, we rejoice in all of its negative manifestations, like a sculptor who finds a good material to make a sculpture. Of course he is looking at a lot of work to shape it into a specific form. But he is glad that this material has landed in his hands.

It’s the same with us. The revelation of egoism is the new material with which I can work. And we only need to change the way we use the material and not the actual material—instead of doing something at the expense of others, we need to do it for their sake.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #7, 12/14/11

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Tackling Youth Unemployment

Dr. Michael LaitmanIn the News (from CNBC): “Young people should work for free for up to two years to gain experience, youth and business leaders said at the World Economic Forum in Davos Thursday.

“A new UN resolution to enshrine the importance of a couple of years of voluntary work for young people was urged by delegates including Maurice Lévy, chairman and chief executive of Publicis Groupe, as part of a CNBC-moderated debate on how to avert a lost generation of unemployed youth.

“The world needs 600 million new jobs in the next decade to cope with a rising population and the effects of the financial crisis, according to figures released earlier this week by the International Labor Organization.”

My Comment: In this way, capitalists want to put the problem of unemployment on the shoulders of society. Moreover, they wish the state to support the unemployed. But the world will not need new workers; on the contrary, unemployment will increase. A person should be engaged not in useless work that costs much more than the unemployment benefits, but in what will really help the community: in educating everybody about cooperation and mutual guarantee, which will bring society to balance with nature and will benefit the world.
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