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Bestowal: All Or Nothing

Dr. Michael LaitmanBaal HaSulam, “Introduction to The Study of the Ten Sefirot,” Item 130: They that are granted the sensation of His Providence in the form of the first degree of disclosure of the face, called “repentance from fear,” are considered medium. This is because their emotions are divided into two parts, called “two cups of the scales.” From the time before they were awarded the above repentance, all remain standing and are called “a scale of sin.” And the scale of merit is set and guaranteed to them from the moment of repentance onwards, the time of repentance stands “between” the merit and the sin, and hence they are called “medium.”

It isn’t about time periods but about the present reality. Upon reaching this level, a person discovers in his present attributes that he has partly sinned and partly merited. In other words, there are still uncorrected and corrected parts in him. The criterion here, of course, is the connection with others and with the Creator.

At the same time, a person is immersed in a state of Hafetz Hesed: He cannot do any evil to the other, but he hasn’t done any good to the other either. So it is as if he is in the middle of life, having neutralized the evil in him, but not turned it into goodness yet.

Question: Can we set the attainment of this “intermediate” state as our goal?

Answer: Why settle for half? You should imagine the state of the complete righteous. If you are asking for something, ask for the maximum: the end of correction. If you want to find yourself at the end of correction, you will barely succeed in reaching the next level. This is because at the moment, you cannot imagine more than its corrupt back side. This is the limit of your imagination because you have no other model. So go all the way, wish for maximum bestowal, and by that you will acquire the minimal similarity to the AHP of the upper one.

But if you only ask for half, this isn’t bestowal but pettiness. In bestowal there is no calculation for part of the whole. In bestowal you are looking for what else you can add, how to engage everything you can.

In this sense the spiritual laws are simple. I yearn for the end of correction, and I want all my desires and thoughts to be aimed at bestowal upon others. This is what I ask for. There cannot be half way in the attribute of bestowal. By demanding half, I am making an egoistic calculation and this isn’t bestowal anymore. After all, a secret bid for personal benefit is necessarily present in the “altruistic half” as well.

It is impossible to limit bestowal. Therefore, the course should always be set towards the final goal and not to intermediate phases.

In everything that we do, from this world to the world of Infinity, there are ten whole Sefirot, but in a minimized form. We are in a holographic picture, in which every part contains a whole. Therefore, a partial calculation isn’t right here. You have to do everything in your power, everything that depends on you, and then you may barely reach the next level.

You are now facing the AHP of the upper one, and this is the only thing you can imagine as something infinite. It is the same with small children who cannot take an example from a grown up. A five year old looks at an eight year old like at “God” and wants to be like him. There is something he can “hold on” to, it resonates within him. Rabash gave the same example of a girl who is more interested in playing with a doll than with a real baby.

So don’t try to minimize the goal to the “accepted” sizes. Even if you aim at the maximum, you will barely reach the upper one.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/1/2012, “Introduction to TES” 

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My Coming Visit To Colombia

My Coming Visit To ColombiaIn preparation to my visit to Colombia on April 27-29, 2012 a comprehensive site explaining the principles of global education has been created by my students, with information about the lectures that will take place to address the general public in Bogota, the capital, and Barranquilla, the second largest city.

I will also have a warm encounter with the Colombian group, including special lessons and meals. The students are coming from nine different cities in the country.
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Israel: Those Who Aspire To The Creator

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: The Jewish nation (Israel) is supposed to unite and be a light unto the nations, but in Israel you have so many divisions between people that the only time we have truly united is the War of Independence (after immense suffering from the Holocaust) and the Six-Day War (out of great fear of being destroyed). Will we not have to go through more immense suffering to realize we must unite as one people?

Answer: We are talking not about Jews by birth, but Israel—those who aspire to the Creator, regardless of their nationality. They have to unite and lead the entire world to the Creator.

In Kabbalah, souls have no nationality, but the level of their development. Thus Abraham once chose his students and called them Israel: those who aspire to the Creator.
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The ARI Institutes Forges Partnership With Siauliai University

The Šiauliai region site and the news portal of the Lithuanian TV channel published an article titled “Šiauliai University Has Signed a Contract with the ARI Institute (Israel).”

The ARI Institutes Forges Partnership With Šiauliai University

On March 22, at the library of Šiauliai University, the Vice-Rector for International Relations and Development Professor Teodoras Tamošiūnas and the director of the ARI Institute Professor Michael Laitman (Israel) signed a cooperation agreement between Šiauliai University of Lithuania and the ARI Institute (Israel).

At the press-conference, Professor Michael Laitman presented the principles of the integral education and upbringing. Professor Teodoras Tamošiūnas said that Siauliai University has a long tradition of teacher training, and thus integral education, advocated by the professor from Israel, can be developed in Siauliai. The Vice-Rector said that the visit of Professor Michael Laitman to Šiauliai University and signing of the contract with the ARI Institute indicate the recognition of Šiauliai University.

According to the lecturer Vida Skačkauskaitė, who participated in the press-conference, the system of integral education aims at creating a new human being and society. According to her, Šiauliai University that began to apply and promote the method of integral education can serve as a model for other institutions of Lithuania.

After the signing of the contract, the library of Šiauliai University hosted a conference, during which Professor Michael Laitman gave a lecture on the topic of “The Integral Upbringing: Why?” There were also other speakers from France, Ukraine, and Israel.

Professor Michael Laitman is a Professor of Ontology and epistemology, MSc in bio-Cybernetics, Doctor of Philosophy. Professor Michel Laitman is a member of The World Wisdom Council and the founder and director of the ARI Institute. Using innovative ideas that are suitable for solving the acute problems of modern upbringing, he is seeking positive change in the education strategy. The professor presented a new approach to education, which applies the laws of the interconnected integral world.

Michael Laitman set up new landmarks and explained how to live in the new global village of humanity—more technologically connected in our interconnected world.

His view encompasses different areas of human life: social, economic, and environmental. In addition, a special focus is given to education, a system that provides universal values​ and thus creates a harmonious society in our so closely connected reality.

Over the past three decades, Professor Michael Laitman published over 40 books that were translated into 18 languages.

Photo: Sigita Inchyurene
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A Lecture In Jerusalem, March 27, 2012

Here are some pictures from the public lecture in Jerusalem titled “Jerusalem of the Heart” that took place on March 27, 2012. 


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The Best – For The Friends

The Best - For The FriendsBaal HaSulam, “The Arvut (Mutual Guarantee)”: With this collective responsibility, each member of the nation was liberated from worrying about the needs of his own body and could keep the commandment, “Love thy friend as thyself” in the fullest measure, and give all that he had to any needy person, since he no longer cared for the existence of his own body, as he knew for certain that he was surrounded by six hundred thousand loyal lovers, who were standing ready to provide for him.

This is the condition: The upper force is revealed only if we really need it for unification.

Question: Where does this agreement come from?

Answer: It comes from the general desire. One is not able to correct himself without the other. The correction is made through the universal unity. The force that corrects needs to be common to everyone.

The force and the mind, the effort and the approach, everything needs to descend from Above. Everything accumulates into one and as if “sews” me to others.

This is what we need to think about. If we want this to happen, then first of all, we need mutual guarantee. After all, in the general mutual inclusion, every single point that is soldered with the others contains all the rest.

Question: Is our cry to the Creator our agreement to this?

Answer: I would say yes. Only actually it isn’t a forced scream. We reach agreement about our state, about the helplessness, and the need to reach mutual bestowal, mutual guarantee, mutual connection, and mutual assistance and support. When you begin to connect all of these things, you discover that you lack the upper force. Then you really need it, while previously your needs were of a personal nature.

You discover that you need the upper force in order to really fulfill the conditions of connection in mutual bestowal between everyone. But it’s not starry-eyed idealism already since the goal is to discover the true attribute of bestowal that lies above the needs of all.

Thus, here the general agreement is required: We carry out the unification but not for the sake of corporeal benefit. Thus, it arrives as a result of our search, our work in analyzing the state.

Question: By what does the friend complete me?

Answer: Without one another, we are not able to understand what we need to receive the Light that Reforms. We can’t reveal our real deficiency if I don’t help him and he doesn’t help me.

Question: Do I ask for the friends?

Answer: I try to pray for the friends, I worry that they will receive spiritual revelation, understand, and feel what the spiritual world is. When everyone supports each other, each one shows the correct desire.

You want something that seems to you like spirituality. And it doesn’t matter how correctly you picture it to yourself. Let everything be artificial, until we receive the Light that Reforms. And still, try to think about the friends: “I wish that they will achieve this before me.” If you initially wish for the greatest things for the friends, this is already spirituality.
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From the Arava Convention 2/24/12, Lesson 6

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To Receive The Payment, Move To Spirituality

To Receive The Payment, Move To SpiritualityBaal HaSulam, Letter 12: But it is foolish to think that the Creator is obliged to bless exactly the place where the action takes place. On the contrary, usually, the action is in one place and the blessing in another place, in a place where a person doesn’t do anything, because he either didn’t know or couldn’t do anything there.

We exert ourselves in one place and the result is revealed in another, and so we don’t understand where all our work disappears. Actually, we don’t know what kind of work we are doing. Are our actions good or bad? Do they lead to the goal or not? Who carries them out: we or the Creator? We don’t understand all this because we are in a very confused state.

Why are we in concealment? We don’t know exactly what we should do with it, we don’t know if we act correctly or not.… Why is it that the fog, the confusion, the lack of understanding, the lack of orientation, or the lack of responsibility bear some result according to the principle of “I have labored and I found?” Why is it called exertion? Wouldn’t it be better if we were told in writing exactly what we should do?

No, that’s not the way it is. Although we cannot agree with this approach, it is described in endless places in Kabbalistic writings, in thousands of excerpts.

Our work is abstracted from results, and it is really very hard to accept this. I have to act like a “dummy,” like a beast, like a madman. I am offered a lie: to hug with the friends while I don’t want to, to speak about love while not feeling it…. In short, I have to do what I don’t understand.

This dualism is needed so that we will rise from this world to the spiritual one. The spiritual world is opposite from this world, it is unfamiliar, unperceivable. Therefore by these incomprehensible actions we acquire the vessels that guide us to the place we haven’t reached yet.

So we need the orders from Above to fulfill these actions. We want to enter the dimension that doesn’t go together with our attributes in any way, and in fact there is nothing that draws us in that direction. We have to act “automatically”: Kabbalists say and we do.

If a person understands that there is no choice, if he really wants to rise to a higher degree, then he is aware of the fact that this is a totally different level and it isn’t a quantitative addition at all. I will not be smarter or understand more, I will not acquire more earthly blessings. I act on the assumption that this world is exhausted and over. There is nothing I can add here.

I am getting ready to add something else to myself: a spiritual degree. Therefore, I have to be equipped with the vessels, the Lights, discernments, and Reshimot (informational genes)—with everything that belongs to the spiritual world.
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From the Arava Convention 2/25/12, Lesson 7

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How Can We Identify The “Careerists”?

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: I see the system of the integral upbringing as a large quantity of groups around the entire world: virtual and physical ones. This is a huge mass of people. Among them there might be people whose point in the heart is awakening. Do we need to create some mechanism of “career growth” for them, meaning the transition into groups with more intensive study?

Answer: They will make themselves known and will want it. They will come to the instructors themselves, offer their help, and express desire to participate in this process. Obviously, then they will transfer to the groups that we belong to. There will be a lot of people like this. I hope there will be hundreds of millions of them.

Nevertheless, the majority of people will stay as inert as today. We will be obliged to provide them with upbringing and education. There is nothing we can do since this is a pyramid. The majority of people exist at the basis of the pyramid, and it is very hard to move it from its place. However, due to the crisis related problems, they will develop the receptivity.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #14, 12/18/11

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The World Through The Glasses Of Mutual Guarantee

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: You said that the key to success is concessions.

Answer: Yes, willingness to concede is one of the necessary conditions. Learning about mutual guarantee should be a gradual process. First of all, we need to study human psychology and the psychology of the relationships between two friends, spouses, parents and children, neighbors, and relatives (for example, with mothers-in-law or people with whom conflicts are possible), and then we should proceed with studying the relationships in a workplace, with one’s nation, and with the whole world.

In other words, starting with close and understandable sensations that anyone can experience and by developing perceptivity, skill, and acuteness of feeling within people, we have to gradually bring them to working with wider circles of society. As a consequence, we’ll be able to understand which countries, parliaments, and rulers can unite with each other.

Let us imagine these structures and the form in which this can be realized. When we become involved in this study, we begin to understand what changes need to take place in the world.

We see that all of today’s leaders aren’t able to solve anything; they have not been brought up in the spirit of mutual guarantee and lack the knowledge of integral systems. They do not look at the world through the “glasses” of mutual guarantee. They need to gain the perception, awareness, and understanding of how to achieve that, how to connect one with the other, all the way to the point of attaining love. And of course, the willingness to make mutual concessions is necessary in this process.

This doesn’t mean that I conduct business negotiations with you, and while forming a contract I initially include clauses that will allow me to retract later in order to swindle you. We build honest relationships from the very beginning. From the very first item of any agreement it is clear to us that we cannot violate it. We cannot run away from each other.

It follows that all the problems, on all levels, are problems of upbringing. Mutual guarantee is the network of connection between us that ties us to one another in the entire world. It became revealed now, in our time. A few decades ago, in the 60’s, the founders of the Club of Rome started writing about it. At the beginning of the 20th century, scientists started talking about the fact that we are all interconnected through what they called noosphere. Since then and to this day all kinds of research is being conducted in this area.

The system of mutual guarantee has become revealed, and it binds us together, not allowing us to run away from each other. By wanting to violate it, we can unleash terrible wars, but then suffering will still force us to reach this form of mutual connection, mutual concessions, mutual guarantee, and mutual love.

Someone might object, saying that humanity has already thought about this. Five hundred years ago, various utopians wrote about it, and then the communists, Kibbutzniks, and others. All of this is true, and we only need to understand that never before in history was this a mandatory condition of our development. There were individual people who saw that this is necessary for humanity and that ultimately, humanity will come to that. Thomas Mann understood this, and then the communists in Russia and in other countries, but they were all isolated individuals whom the people never followed. They foresaw to many years ahead, and it seemed to them that they could implement it immediately.

And we are starting to talk about this today because the all-encompassing crisis shows us exactly what we are lacking: We lack mutual guarantee. In other words, it’s happening not because we wanted it to happen, but because it’s necessary for our development, and nature is forcing us towards it.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” Episode 5, 1/5/12

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