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What Are You Wasting Your Life On?

Dr. Michael LaitmanBaal HaSulam, “Introduction to the Study of The Ten Sefirot,” Item 115: That such a person, who is still short of one commandment, will regard himself as half unworthy and half worthy. Meaning, one should imagine that the time when he was granted repentance was in the middle of his years….

Thus, in the first half of his years he is unworthy, and in the second half of his years, he is worthy.

Question: If a person wants to complete the whole process in this lifetime, how should he make an effort in the work?

Answer: During the preparation period a person hates everyone. Then the transgressions become mistakes and he connects with everyone. But this isn’t a complete correction yet. He is still in a state of Hafetz Hesed. Eventually, on the next level a person connects until he is in adhesion.

So the whole process is aimed at unity, and a person can reach the greatest unity from the greatest separation.

Every change is called a “reincarnation.” A person can live for 80 years without even starting to change and not go through one reincarnation. A new car, a new apartment—these things have nothing to do with reincarnation. The beastly body lives and dies, and this has nothing to do with reincarnation either.

On the other hand, everyone can end the process in one lifetime. Whether a person will do it is another question. It depends on him—he needs to want to end it. There is nothing else in creation except for the desire. If a person’s individual desire is small, he should find ways to increase it; he should find assistance in the wisdom of Kabbalah and in the Light that’s in it. There are no other options.

Some people come to us once a week, some come only on holidays, some come everyday, others come here in the morning and in the evening, and yet others try to spend the whole day doing what’s important. There are people who spend the whole day here because it is convenient and it feels safe, they feel like an embryo in the womb. Others want to fight their ego. It all depends on a person’s intention and on how he uses the means at his disposal.

Question: What does it mean “the middle years”?

Answer: It is the symbolic age of 40, that is, the stage in which a person ends his correction in Bina. Bina is called a blocked “Mem” (ם), whose numerical value is 40. Only after this level is it possible to move to receiving in order to bestow.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/20/2012, “Introduction to TES

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To The Fourth Floor For Love

Dr. Michael LaitmanBaal HaSulam, “Introduction to The Study of the Ten Sefirot,” Item 116: One who is granted the commandment of love by repentance from love, through it he is rewarded with turning his sins to merits.

Overall, there are four degrees on our way. At the bottom there is the broken desire to receive, meaning the broken AHP. This is called “sins” or “transgressions.” On the next level there is the broken desire to bestow, meaning the broken Galgalta ve Eynaim (GE). This is called “mistakes.”

Above that there is the Machsom (barrier). Above it, there is the corrected desire to bestow, GE. This is the level of Bina, “an incomplete righteous” who performs 612 commandments, which is the state of “Hafetz Hesed (HH)” or Lishma. Finally we reach the level of “one commandment,” 613th commandment—love. This is already the corrected desire to receive.

After crossing the Machsom, the mistakes turn into commandments and the transgressions turn into mistakes. By rising to the level of love, the remaining mistakes turn into commandments in the corrected AHP, and the commandments rise from the third degree to GE.

Thus the “transgressions” are the desires to receive in order to bestow, which were broken and turned into the desires to receive in order to receive, the shattered, corrupt AHP. While the broken GE are “mistakes.”

When we try to picture all that, the main thing is not to exit the framework of the ten Sefirot. If we are going to be confused, then at least it should be within clear boundaries and not in the space of imagination.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/20/2012, “Introduction to TES

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Who Are We Raising: “Masters” Or Workers?

Dr. Michael LaitmanA person should be constantly careful because at any moment, as the sages say, he can tip the scale not only in his favor but also in favor of the whole world. But this doesn’t mean that we can’t make mistakes. Today we go through the phase of preparation and of course we may make mistakes.

If you make efforts and make mistakes, it is normal. During the preparation period a person doesn’t correct anything yet, but only prepares his desires for correction. This is also what we teach children. We don’t demand any real work from them, which they are unable to do yet. We don’t assess them according to the results, but according to what they have learned. For example, if we give a child a toy and he takes it apart and breaks it, it is natural for him, and although the toy is broken he still learned something from it. He may discover that there is nothing inside it, or that there is a spring; the child has learned something and this is the main gain.

You don’t even punish a ten-year-old for things that a grown-up may go to jail for. During the phase of preparation a person is not expected to reach any real results. The main thing is to prepare oneself for correction and to advance, even by the corruptions that you summon and discover. This is the principle of learning. This is why traditional teaching in our schools and universities is futile; a person is not allowed to make mistakes. Good grades and high achievements are expected of him and he doesn’t think about the essence of the material, about how to put together the materials that are presented to him ready made. No, he has to get a grade and all the rest doesn’t interest him.

So it isn’t a preparation for something greater any more. The education system produces people who don’t know how to think.

Actually in the preparation phase, in the process of learning, one thing should be expected from a person: to absorb as many good and bad things as possible, to constantly rise and fall. His level of preparations should be assessed and not how much he knows. It doesn’t matter if he breaks something on the way. A person counting on a lucrative profession is not a master of anything. A real master works only for the “sake of art.” The pay doesn’t interest him. A person who really wants to become an expert in a certain field should only connect with the material he will work with, study it, and penetrate it. In order to do this, he has to break the raw materials and sink into this breaking himself, into the depth of the raw material.

This is a totally different method of teaching and educating, a method that is opposite from the current method. There are no grades, because during the preparation there is nothing to give grades for. There is also no reward for the future results because otherwise a person desires the reward.

In the world, however, people prefer something that promises a reward. In the last 30-40 years people have become very limited and cannot find solutions even to small crises. This is because they don’t have a creative approach to learning. The person was not built from the shattering so that he can really be complex and multifaceted.
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From the 3rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/19/12, The Study of the Ten Sefirot

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Bringing The Light To The Education System

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: The current education system is limited. It produces professionals but not creative people or artists that can analyze and solve global problems. How can the situation be changed?

Answer: This can be done only on the basis of the wisdom of Kabbalah. There is no other way. After the shattering has been revealed in the last decades, humanity can only be corrected by the Reforming Light, and no experts or artists can help here. Today the crisis is so deep inside the desire to receive, that only the Reforming Light can correct the situation.

The previous crises were on the development levels of inanimate, vegetative, and animate nature and they pushed and drew us from the front, to the current crisis that is global and comprehensive, on the level of the speaking. This level cannot be corrected by continuing to develop on the egoistic plane, but only by the Reforming Light that will raise us upwards to the next level. There is nowhere we can develop any more. We must rise.

Only we can teach humanity this; no pedagogical education will help here; we are talking about a different kind of education and training, one that allows people to open up the integral world for people.
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From the 3rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/19/12, The Study of the Ten Sefirot

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Crisis: In Search Of New Ideas

Dr. Michael LaitmanOpinion (Valentina Matvienko, Russian Federation Council Speaker): “The EU countries’ closer cooperation with Russia could help resuscitate the economy of Europe, Valentina Matviyenko said during the 14th session of the Association of European Senates in Paris.

“Delivering her speech at the Luxemburg Palace, Matvienko called the current global economic crisis ‘a completely new phenomenon’ which she said could be resolved with the help of fresh ideas and approaches. She signaled Moscow’s readiness to help Europe grapple with the economic crisis.”

My Comment: It is encouraging to hear about the insights of decision makers, but the problem is that they do not know what decisions they need to make.
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“Religion May Become Extinct In Nine Nations”

Dr. Michael LaitmanOpinion (Jason Palmer, Science and technology reporter, BBC News): “A study using census data from nine countries shows that religion there is set for extinction, say researchers. The study found a steady rise in those claiming no religious affiliation….

“The team’s mathematical model attempts to account for the interplay between the number of religious respondents and the social motives behind being one. The result, reported at the American Physical Society meeting in Dallas, US, indicates that religion will all but die out altogether in those countries.

“The team took census data stretching back as far as a century from countries in which the census queried religious affiliation: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland.

“’In a large number of modern secular democracies, there’s been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion’…The team then applied their nonlinear dynamics model, adjusting parameters for the relative social and utilitarian merits of membership of the ‘non-religious’ category.

“They found, in a study published online, that those parameters were similar across all the countries studied, suggesting that similar behaviour drives the mathematics in all of them.

And in all the countries, the indications were that religion was headed toward extinction….

“Obviously we don’t really believe this is the network structure of a modern society, where each person is influenced equally by all the other people in society,” Dr Wiener said.

“However, he told BBC News that he thought it was ‘a suggestive result.’

“’It’s interesting that a fairly simple model captures the data, and if those simple ideas are correct, it suggests where this might be going.’

“’Obviously much more complicated things are going on with any one individual, but maybe a lot of that averages out.’”

My Comment: Since we are in a dynamic process of the continuous growth of egoism in us, a person constantly asks himself how this or that behavior is profitable for him, and if his egoism finds no benefit for itself, then this behavior is rejected. Thus, we always choose (sort) new actions, goals, environment, etc.

Once, our egoism brought us into religion, but today it has outgrown it and takes us from beliefs not supported by reality. It requires proof, and if there is none, it cannot hold itself in obedience without an apparent benefit for itself. That is why all religions will die out and will be replaced by cultures. In essence, even today, every religion is mostly the culture of this or that nation, its customs, but not faith.
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More Resources, Less Knowledge

Dr. Michael LaitmanIn the News (Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s Deputy Director of Education, from OECD Education Today):  “OECD’s PISA [Project for International Students Assessment] study shows that there is also a significant negative relationship between the money countries extract from national resources and the knowledge and skills of their school population (see figure)…this is a global pattern that generally across 65 countries that took part in the latest PISA assessment. Exceptions such as Canada, Australia and Norway, that are rich of natural resources but still score well on PISA, have all established deliberate policies of saving these resource rents, and not just consuming them. Today’s learning outcomes at school, in turn, are a powerful predictor for the wealth and social outcomes that countries will reap in the long run.

“One interpretation is that in countries with little in the way of natural resources – other examples are Finland, Singapore or Japan – education has strong outcomes and a high status at least in part because the public at large has understood that the country must live by its knowledge and skills and that these depend on the quality of education. So the value that a country places on education seems to depend at least in part on a country’s view of how knowledge and skills fit into the way it makes its living. Placing a high value on education may be an underlying condition for building a world-class education system and a world class economy, and it may be that most countries that have not had to live by their wits in the past will not succeed economically and socially unless their political leaders explain why, though they might not have had to live by their wits in the past, they must do so now.

“The most troubling implications of these data relate to the developing world. Many of the countries with below-average GDP succeeded to convert their national resources into physical capital and consumption today, but failed to convert these into the human capital that can generate the economic and social outcomes to sustain their future.

“In short, knowledge and skills have become the global currency of 21st century economies. But there is no central bank that prints this currency, you cannot inherit this currency and you cannot produce it through speculation, you can only develop it through sustained effort and investment by people and for people.”

My Comment: Kabbalah states that the desire is at the heart of nature, and all of life is its development, realization and correction. And if the desire is prevented from developing, it feels its sufficiency and a person does not develop. He who increases knowledge, increases sorrow, but he who does not feel sorrow, does not multiply knowledge.
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What Is Good In Us?

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: In the psychology of family relations the period of people demonstrating their best personal qualities to one another ends relatively quickly because we actually don’t have that many of them. Eventually we begin to discover and to accept each other’s weak  points.

Answer: When we reveal man’s essence, we fail to find a single positive, decent quality. Let’s look into the source of such seemingly positive movements like love and compassion. A person helps others, feels love and compassion, makes personal sacrifices, but all of this stems from his egoistic qualities. We can’t attribute these qualities to his personal virtue because he receives them from nature.

If I am created with all of these nice qualities, people say about me: “What a special person!” But if nature granted someone with a different set of qualities, we say: “What a horrible, ugly person!” However, neither I nor he have anything to do with this.

This is why upon marking out a person from all that’s inherent in him, we must simply distinguish an empty outline and attribute all of this not to him, but to his inherent qualities. Initially, a person has neither positive nor negative qualities. We have to accept a person for his readiness to be corrected and not pay attention to his characteristics.

No matter who you are, when it comes to interpersonal relationships, an ascent above oneself has the ultimate value. All of a sudden you reveal that all of your positive qualities are actually worse than the negative ones because they appear to be good on the outside, but in fact stem from a deeper egoism.
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” #13, 12/18/11

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A Disease Is Correction

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: In psychology, a crisis is described as a painful phenomenon, but if a person overcomes it and does not give in, he transitions to a new level, where a large quantity of energy is released and a person begins to live a new life.

Answer: Even more so, any disease is also an act of healing. Suppose some malfunction occurred. Now it is being corrected, compensated in some way. And the timeframe when it is being compensated and corrected, we consider it to be a disease. In reality, however, this is already the correction.

We purposely have vaccinations; we inject a micro-disease into the organism in order to stimulate its positive reaction, to prevent it from threatening external influences.

If we collected all these critical, painful symptoms together, we would discover that we need to relate to them as to the birth of a new state, as to health improvement, to correction, to our adjustment, and to our rise onto the next level.
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” #13, 12/18/11

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