Here are some pictures from the public lecture in Jerusalem titled “Jerusalem of the Heart” that took place on March 27, 2012.
Baal 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.
[71969]
From the Arava Convention 2/24/12, Lesson 6
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Baal 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.
[72050]
From the Arava Convention 2/25/12, Lesson 7
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Question: 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.
[74020]
From a “Talk on Integral Education” #14, 12/18/11
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Question: 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.
[67964]
From KabTV’s “A New Life” Episode 5, 1/5/12
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Question: How do the interpersonal relationships change during the process of integral interaction?
Answer: It stems naturally from the changes a person undergoes. We don’t set any limitations; we don’t demand that our listeners comply with any conditions or conventions except during the lesson. In order for a person to perceive correctly the material we study, we limit ourselves to one topic only or to several topics that can come under the main topic of the lesson.
On the whole, there are different situations that the participants feel, from rejection to acceptance, and this repeats interchangeably, in waves. It all has to be studied and discussed. We are really interested in conducting the lessons in the form of a court trial so that people will reveal themselves to the maximum.
Suppose two people who cannot look at one another come to the lesson. They admit it and want to clarify their relationship. Otherwise they will not advance and will hold other people, their group, back. They will be punished for that, so to speak, in the form of a much stronger response on nature’s part because they harm the unity of the group by not being able to work out the relationship between them.
So perhaps under certain pressure from the members of the group (depending on what kind of a descent they are in), the clarifications begin. We are very happy when we encounter such cases, when all of it can be deciphered, researched, and corrected.
[73051]
From a “Talk on Integral Education” #13, 12/18/11
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[audio:http://files.kabbalahmedia.info/audio/eng_o_rav_2012-04-01_declamation_blog-rav_full.mp3 title=’1.4.12′]
Question: Can we measure our attainment?
Answer: First, what do I actually attain? To the extent that I bring contentment to the Creator, to that extent I attain the attribute called the “Creator (Boreh)” within me, according to the principle of “Bo-Reh” or “come and see.”
I attain the Creator in my understanding and awareness. This is my internal image. In the same way I also “draw” other people in my perception, and thus I attain them. My attributes are built so that I can imagine certain figures. I don’t know who is on the outside. Forces act outside of me, which project into my perception the “holographic picture” of other people who only seem to me as external. Thus my whole picture of the world is put together.
So what can I measure or weigh? I weigh my bestowal with regards to everything that I feel. This general measurement is called the “Creator.” Thus the Creator “clothes” a person, the Light “clothes” the created being.
I perceive different forms thanks to the attribute of bestowal that operates on the desires and arranges them in a certain way. From that I feel who the Creator is. I imagine the Creator and those who surround me as my own reaction to a certain action.
I don’t know who I am and what the world is. I don’t know anything, but gradually I begin to draw the sketches of different reactions and feelings in me. This is how I am built: The forms are all depicted as if on the outside. This illusion exists only here, in our current state.
A sensory system is developed in me along with its logical understanding. I live by the mind and the feeling. This reality is divided into four levels, the four layers of the desire: the still, vegetative, animate, and speaking. By the right combination of the four I discover the origin of everything that happens, my source, the source of my feeling, and of my four-layer images. I discover that there is an initial reason for all that, which I call the “Creator.” This reason is revealed when I begin to relate to all four levels with bestowal. Then out of equivalence of form, I discover the attributes of the Creator, the Giver.
Therefore, don’t think that our world actually exists—it all ends within me. Later, when I ascend the spiritual levels, it’s as if I move from one class to another. Suppose I know that I am in the first grade now, but can I compare it with the eighth grade or even with the second grade?
Today the clear measurements are still unavailable to us. We only have vague feelings, but there are no accurate tools because the mind and the feeling are not tied in such a way that we can attribute quantitative characteristics to our sensations. In the meantime we are on the psychological level, which lacks the mathematical tool for measurements and comparisons. Such a tool is truly provided by the wisdom of Kabbalah.
[73820]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/27/2012, “Introduction to TES”
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All the obstacles stem from the unified force of nature. What do we need these obstacles for? Suppose I realized that this force has cut the ground under my feet, that it has misguided me, has forced me to forget the goal, the search, because it has caused me pain, worry, an unpleasant feeling, and I began to feel afraid of something, to worry about something. After all, I am only human, and it’s very easy to knock me out. And what’s next? What do we need all this for?
We need it so that we will feel that we cannot manage without this force, without its personal help to each one; that without our appeal to what we call the upper Light, the Surrounding Light, we cannot advance. Attaining this state is the next level of our development. When I understand that everything that happens is done only by this one and only force, and that it does it on purpose so that I will need its help, while I cannot do anything on my own, this is already the beginning of direct interaction with it. This is a very important and serious stage that cannot be attained if the surrounding environment doesn’t support me.
We have talked about the fact that a person actually has no free will in this world. He is totally managed by his genes, hormones, and other things. There are people who can predict a person’s future. It is really so, except for one thing: Free will is actually expressed in self-development aimed at the search for this force, for the direction towards it, the connection with it, and the demand that it help us, which is most important. This is actually what it wants: to help us if we ask it to do so.
Why does such an immense, perfect, and eternal force that includes all of nature, not confined by our corporeal frameworks of time and place, and unlimited in its capabilities and actions, why does it need us to need it, to ask it, and to expect that it will do something with us since we cannot do it by ourselves? Why does it need such actions on our part, our weak attempts?
It’s necessary so that we will develop a new desire in us that doesn’t exist in nature: a desire to be in contact with it, to attain it, and to work together with it. To the extent that this desire develops in us, this force makes contact with us and is revealed in this desire. Then I can feel this great managing force.
From this recognition, from this feeling, we begin to understand everything: who we are, where we are, for what reason, for what purpose, and what is happening to us. Therefore, I should want the revelation of this force in me. I have to develop this desire in me by myself; otherwise I will not be independent. If it gives me this desire, I will not be free. And if so, what’s the point in creating all this?…
[73788]
From the Vilnius Convention 3/24/12, Lesson 3
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