In the News (from Postimees.ru): “Disconnection leads to the isolation of Europe. The debt crisis has highlighted the fact that despite the rhetoric of ‘unified Europe,’ we are ready to point at each other and blame others.

“Northern Europe accuses Southern Europe of being lazy and wasting money. Southern Europe, in turn, rebukes the North for gaining its wealth at the expense of others and now demanding that the others ‘live as sparingly as it does.’

“The West accuses the East of helplessness; the East accuses the West of narrow-mindedness. All these accusations have their own history and reason, many contain a grain of truth. However, if we concentrate on differences, it will not help solve the economic problems or stop Europe from marginalization in world politics.”

My Comment: All this is tied to a single action—integration, unity, above all the differences. Otherwise, Europe will be defeated on all fronts: economic, political, and ideological. This is how the evil of our nature is disclosed in each person, nation, and state. We only have to correct it—and happiness is so close….
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Question: What is the importance of the conventions that are intended not only for us, but mainly for the world?

Answer: The point is that we need to take advantage of each convention in two ways: to advance upward toward the Creator, to the attribute of bestowal and love, and simultaneously to move downward, towards the remaining 99%. Essentially, we need to separate the two and afterward to connect it all into a single whole. This is what we have to do.

Thus, at each convention we will talk about our advancement forward, upward, and also about our movement downward to all of humanity since one cannot exist without the other.

We received the disclosure of the wisdom of Kabbalah, the disclosure of the condition of unification, the attainment of the spiritual quality, because we need to call for the unification of and connection with all the others, to rescue humanity from the state it is in. This is why we are like this; otherwise, we wouldn’t have been given this.

We connect all of humanity: the 99% and the Creator. Under no circumstances can we forget either of them.

Between ourselves, we must go forward, to the attribute of bestowal and love in order to become one whole. For this we need the connection with the Creator. And all of this is in order to bring humanity to the same state.

It is precisely because the ego and the crisis have manifested in the world enough that we were given the opportunity to bond between us, to work with the book, to understand the system, to discover the world, and in this way to advance it forward. This is the only reason we exist.

We represent Galgalta ve Eynaim (GE), and all of humanity is the AHP. If we advance forward, we will be able to attain only a small illumination. Our advancement needs to be as follows: We need to advance toward the Creator, and the Creator will lower us down toward humanity. Afterward we will advance a little more toward the Creator and then back to humanity.

And thus it alternates. Otherwise GE won’t have the Kelim (vessels), desires, since GE do not have enough Aviut (coarsenss or thickness of the desire).

All of the Aviut comes from the AHP, from humanity. Thus we must, like from Egypt, take from there all the Kelim and “drag” them with us. When we bond with them and begin to transfer their Aviut, we will begin to advance forward with the help of descents and ascents. Thus we will move all the time, in a circle, until we bring the entire humanity to connection with the Creator.
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From the Lecture on Unity Day “To Acquire a Desire to Give” 1/29/2012

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Baal HaSulam: “A Speech for the Completion of The Zohar“: And while one sees how one’s environment slights His work and does not properly appreciate His greatness, one cannot overcome the environment. Thus, one cannot obtain His greatness and slights during one’s work, as do they. Now you can understand the verse, “In the multitude of people is the king’s glory,” since the measure of the greatness comes from the environment under two conditions:

1.            The extent of the appreciation of the environment.
2.            The size of the environment.

Everything depends on the connection with the group. From it a person draws the strength to connect, and it is there that our might grows until we reach the Creator who is in the center of the environment.

But if a person doesn’t connect with the environment, he has no one to receive the strength from, and so he doesn’t find the upper force in the center.

Many details make up our connection: positive ones and seemingly negative ones. They belong to different levels of Aviut, meaning the coarseness, “thickness” of the desire. A person cannot do anything with his Aviut by himself. He must receive stimuli from the environment, such as needs, obstacles, and problems. When he overcomes them, he turns to the friends again because it is impossible to advance without enough negativity either.

So there is a lot of work to do and it is all in the society. Only there does a person gradually acquire the thickness and the purity of the desire. Eventually, his efforts add up to the necessary measure and he discovers the Creator within the unity with the friends.

If a person doesn’t see the Creator among the friends, it is a sign that he hasn’t connected with them yet. If he doesn’t understand that the Creator is revealed specifically there, it means that he is still far from unity. A person must at least believe the sages that the Creator is revealed within our unification, in its center. On the way to it one must acquire great thickness of the desire, experience many disappointments, and at the same time overcome many obstacles and refine himself.

Both things are necessary. If a person doesn’t despair, he can very quickly discover the Creator, like in the exodus from Egypt.
[70259]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 2/19/2012, “Advice for the Arava Convention”

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Question: How can we plead with the Creator correctly? I encounter my egoism everywhere….

Answer: You have to realize one thing: Everything is ready for your birth, but if you don’t start acting and fighting, Pharaoh will keep you in prison and won’t let you free. On one hand, your egoism gives you an opportunity to develop, but on the other, it doesn’t let you exit.

There is a need for external pressure, greater suffering, wars, and misfortunes—just so you will desire to be born. A spiritual birth is not a mechanical process; it is impossible without your consent. You reveal your desire from within and then you feel a new life. Without it, you can’t transition to a new stage.

And hence, two possibilities exist: Either the developmental factors will pressure you or you yourself arrange the pressure of the group. Then Pharaoh, who doesn’t let you breathe, becomes a good environment. Moreover, this environment also pressures and obliges you. What’s more, you yourself demand this from the friends, until you begin to scream: “I want to be born!”

So, everything is ready for your birth, and everything depends on you. Clearly, we are now numb, dormant. How can we awaken? For this we need to spur everybody to action. We need to apply effort, which doesn’t pass in vain, but accumulates into a critical mass.

The path to your birth, if you accelerate it, is not a gradual ascent to the summit whereby you rise higher and higher. Rather, you experience a sequence of ascents and descents, until their sum (∑) brings you to the point of birth. It happens all of a sudden, you are not aware of it until the last moment—suddenly you are born into the world in the escape from the Egyptian exile.

This way you don’t need to grow by experiencing the intensifying misfortunes and birthing pains. A few pangs that you arouse yourself are enough. After all, you do it consciously and sensibly; you see what is happening with you and hence don’t have to rise by the degrees of suffering. The understanding of the process covers and compensates your misfortunes, and torment turns into a yearning for the Light.

Instead of suffering from wars and other corporeal disasters, you are burning with impatience: “Why haven’t I been born yet?” A small pain at the human degree replaces huge misfortunes at the still, vegetative, and animate levels.

A tiny effort in conscious progress is a billion times more effective than forced efforts on the long path without acceleration.
[70136]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/27/2012, “The Peace”

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Question: We are saying that the Arava Convention requires one to be serious. What does it mean to be serious during the convention?

Answer: This means that I do not allow myself to deviate to any thought or desire outside of the goal. I must be united with others and reveal the Creator in this unity.

Along the way I see that I lack desire. Sometimes I want it, and sometimes I do not. And then I come to prayers and questions, I analyze my state, and this, essentially, is our preparation. As we arrive in Arava, we need to feel a constant need for the Reforming Light, so it would give us unity.
[70267]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 2/19/20,  “Advice for the Arava Convention”

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It is important to remember that the current state is the last stage in the development of humanity, and a sour, unripe fruit has to become sweet, tasty, and fragrant. All these additions spring from the fruit according to nature’s love to it. Nature develops us like a mother taking care of her baby. We have to reach the power of love, bestowal, mutuality, and global unity between us as well as with nature as a whole.

This opportunity can be fulfilled only when we understand and feel how this development takes place within us. We cannot promise a person a good life unless he rises above himself, above the way he was born, by climbing the levels of understanding and feeling. He must come to awareness. He must know what kind of world he is living in. He must discover all of nature.

Unless each and everyone stops being a smart aleck, unless he knows what he was born for and towards what goal nature advances him, humanity will not advance and will suffer from disasters instead.

Question: But you’ve just described a very exalted goal…

Answer: You studied history and geography, botany and physics,  the history of humanity, as well as other general, global subjects in school. Now, too, you will continue to study. After all, you won’t be able to change yourself without knowing the process, without knowing that you depend on others. You don’t have to be an expert, but you must know the general guidelines. It is just like when you finish school and you begin to forget things you’ve learned, but there is still a general impression left in you of historical processes, geography, biology, and botany that you’ve learned. One way or another, what you’ve heard stays in you.

It is the same here, except that now you are studying the subsequent levels of development. Actually, you are taught what is most essential nowadays—how to lead a good life. There is no need to learn anything by heart because later the practical studies of the environment will start: You will bestow upon it, and it will bestow upon you, and you will learn to get along.

But you still need several general lessons about a new world, a new society, and a new perspective of the world.
[66312]
From KabTV’s “A New Life” Episode 2, 12/28/11

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Question: If our whole path is already predetermined and can’t be shortened, does it mean that I can’t change anything and that all I can do is just go with the flow?

Answer: It’s impossible to skip degrees and to miss some states of your development. However, you can hasten your development by applying your own effort. Time represents the speed with which your states change.

If you’re in a group and you attract greater reforming Light, then in each given moment you can perceive, attain, understand, and react to new states. You can go through these states a lot faster because you’re building an environment that helps you sense these states correctly.

If you are not doing this, then it will take a long time for you to start feeling, understanding, and reacting to your states. After all, you must experience each state, but without this inclusion you won’t have the vessel for revealing the Creator.

As a result of applying effort and trying to build an environment that will allow you to reveal your states, you hasten time and speed up your development. It’s similar to the way we help ourselves study in this world by putting on reading glasses, by turning the light on, by using computers, printers, and various video and audio devices: All of this is done for the purpose of better absorbing information about the world and developing faster.

Just compare this to the life of some primitive nations versus nations that have access to knowledge and information that allow them to quickly advance and build various supportive devices.

This also applies to spiritual development. We build a group; we study, listen to the teacher’s advice, and create a proper environment. All of this is done so that we could more quickly analyze the states that pass through us. Therein lies the purpose of our work.
[70144]
From the 3^rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 2/6/12, “Study of the Ten Sefirot”

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We see laws by studying human psychology and a person’s place in the common picture of the still, vegetative, and animate levels of nature; we see the laws and we must advance according to them. We are a part of nature, the result of its development. We are not outside of it.

Psychology is the science of human behavior and it’s also a part of the laws of nature. It’s a very important part of nature, even though it has only existed just over one hundred years. But it’s true that only one hundred years ago we started to feel that we have an ability to evolve in a special, individual, conscious form with the understanding of where I come from, who I am, and how I treat others and why.

Until then only novels spoke of a person’s behavior. But one hundred years ago, essentially not all that long ago, we started studying why a person behaves a certain way and from where this behavior comes. This refers to studying laws that pertain to people. This is why psychology is very important. It helps me understand: who I am, who others are, and how I can build a happy life between us.

If we are a family living in one room called planet Earth, and we depend upon each other, then we don’t have any another choice; we must reach an agreement. And psychology helps us reach peace in the family. This is referred to as observing the laws of nature.

Moreover, there are laws on the still level of nature studied by physics, laws of the vegetative nature studied by biology and botany, and animal nature is studied in zoology. All these are laws of nature’s behavior on the still, vegetative, and animate levels, the behavior of elementary particles, molecules, cells, and bodies, their interaction, etc.

A person’s behavior is studied in psychology, the science of human nature. And nature demands of us according to our development. When we look at the growth of children, we know how they are supposed to develop every year. What is developing in them? It’s their nature. We know what a child is supposed to be able to do at the age of one, two, three, etc. Each year, a person goes through development in his understanding, comprehension, behavior, and develops physically, physiologically, psychologically, and mentally. This is referred to as the law of the development of nature.

It’s a law because we can say that a two-year-old child is supposed to have a certain weight, height, and skills. The numbers are different for a three-year-old. How do we know what he will be like at three? We are familiar with the law of development, the dynamics, meaning the process. This is called the law of nature. There is nothing we can do different here because this development is instilled inside a person.

We study the laws of nature; we are part of nature. There is a certain motor inside us that develops us; it develops every person throughout the seventy years of his life and all of us over the entire course of history. Now as we look back, we can analyze why we developed the way we did from year to year, from one epoch to another, and we can identify the driving force behind our development and what was happening.

There can be an entire evaluation about the history of mankind. Not just regarding what happened and when, but why it happened, what made it happen. Humanity is like a child who develops according to certain laws. When an animal has a pup, I know how the puppy is supposed to develop. And if I don’t know, then I take it to a specialist who does, a veterinarian. All of this is referred to as knowledge of the laws of nature. And human society has the same laws; they are called sociology. Everything submits to the laws. We simply don’t know or understand them very well as these are very young sciences. But to the extent of our knowledge, we see that everything submits to strict laws that exist everywhere.

There is an inner, social development instilled in humankind. Its inner data determines how it will develop, how it will build its society, build itself. And time, which affects this inner data, develops us in a certain way. When a child is given food and care, he will develop yearly. Is food developing him? No, food is just nutrition which helps develop the inner genes, which develop a child into a person.

Nothing accidental happens during a child’s development from the initial drop of semen. We know ahead of time that this drop of semen will develop into a body that will be born and become a person. All this comes out of the informational genes, the certain data instilled within it, which then develop through external nutrition. And all this happens in accordance with the laws. And we see the same in the development of human society.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” Episode 1, 12/27/11

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So far this is only the beginning. To conclude our first lesson, we all need to agree that we exist in nature. We can imagine it as a closed sphere, a circle, inside which we live. Absolute laws operate inside this sphere, and they govern us.

We discover a part of these laws as we evaluate nature, and we call it science. But undoubtedly 99.9% of these laws remain unknown; we are not yet able to reveal them.

Usually, knowing the laws of nature helps us make a better life. Look at all the useful things around your house: television, the Internet, a washer and a dryer; you have it all. Compare how comfortable your life is in relation to a person who lives in a tiny forgotten village, who gets his water from a well, cooks over fire, and washes his clothes in a washtub.

We do all these things in a matter of seconds without any effort. Instead of a well, I have a faucet in the wall, all the comforts of home, which help me exist without much effort. This way I can live without doing much additional work, as was required to manage in the former, rural life.

In other words, our development frees a person to do other things, things that are far from providing life’s necessities. But the question is, why after having achieved such a developed life has it become so cruel and empty, leading us to despair, instilling uncertainty, fear, and anxiety in us?

What have we done with the time freed through technological and social development that could have created such a wonderful addition to our lives? Instead of a calm and peaceful, although physically difficult, rural life, we have landed in a modern jungle.

Why do we waste the energy and time freed up by the development of technology on making such a hard and complicated life for ourselves? Maybe it is time to stop? Maybe now it is time to move on to a completely different life: like leaving our village again for a new, more appealing life.

We need a just a few hours to provide what we need for our existence, the things we needed to provide back in the village; let’s dedicate the rest of our time to the soul, let’s give it other things to do! Maybe we will manage to correct our lives this way?

I complete our first conversation with this question…
[66058]
From KabTV’s “A New Life” Episode 1, 12/27/11

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Preparation to the Lesson
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Writings of Baal HaSulam “Pri Chaham”
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The Book of Zohar – Selected Chapter “Beresheet (Genesis),” “Moses and Two Messiahs,” (Starting with: “The Hey of Moses”), Item 234, Lesson 67
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Talmud Eser Sefirot, Part 6, “Histaklut Pnimit,” Item 10, Lesson 27
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Topic: Constitution of  Arava Convention
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