Audio Version Of The Blog – 09.28.12

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Italy Convention Day One – 09.28.12

Italy Convention, Topic: “Love of Friends,” Day One, Lesson 1

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Italy Convention, Day One, Workshop 1

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Italy Convention, Day One, Workshop 2

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Italy Convention, First Day Meal 1

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Italy Convention, First Day Meal 2

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It’s Now Or Never

Dr. Michael LaitmanImagine that you come to the lesson and your arm hurts badly; you will think about the pain all the time, of course. It will interfere with your studying and will cause great discomfort; you won’t know how to get rid of this pain and you won’t be able to forget it.

The question is how should we feel the same pain for not having reached the end of correction yet, for not having reached our ultimate goal? I don’t want to wait a single day! If it is so important to me, I am burning with impatience, like a baby –I want it now and right away!

The problem is that I don’t want what I should want. Where can I get the right desire from? This is a reason for a prayer.

I see no rush to connect with the friends and to reach the love of others in order to reach the spiritual goal. These are problems on top of other problems that set many obstacles before me one after the other. If I really wanted to reach the goal, I would love the friends; after all, it is unattainable without them. But the point is that I don’t need this goal: Does anyone want to give? And so I don’t need the friends and I don’t want to pay for the goal by love of others. It all seems very distant, foggy and unrealistic. I sit in front of the book during the lesson thinking: “What am I doing here anyway?”

So we are given a tool called the Torah in which there is the force that brings us to the goal. For us this is the upper level from which the force called the Light comes and pulls us forward. This is what we have to think about during the lesson just as you think about the arm that hurts and which you want to heal.

It doesn’t matter what you are reading at the moment, you have to think about your “illness” and to dream about the healing. If you don’t have a deficiency for that, ask that it will be given to you, connect to the friends, check which desires they have.
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From the 3rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/24/12, The Study of the Ten Sefirot

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Finding The Force That Evokes Love

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: In the integral society there is a kind of “abstract” goal which is beautiful and perfect and that everyone loves. Won’t we be stepping on the same rakes the utopians once stepped on?

Answer: What does the whole problem come down to? Only a change in human nature.

If that is possible, the integral society will change from utopia to reality. If it is impossible, then it will remain a utopia and it is better to stay away from such a society.

First we have to find out whether we can evoke a certain force upon us, a certain attribute that will create certain conditions so that every person’s nature will change from an egoistic one to an altruistic one. This can be fulfilled by consistent, gradual change of small groups of people and then of increasingly larger groups. But on the whole this process should include all of humanity.

Can a person who was created as a total egoist who only thinks about himself and nothing else (this is the way we are programmed) change his program? And what is more, can he change it so that the object who receives the pleasure is not me thanks to everything that surrounds me, but rather that my pleasure will be the wellbeing of all those around me, brought about by me.

The pleasure remains. It has to be since it is part of our nature, only the character of the filling changes. On the account of what? A mother, for example, is filled thanks to the fact that she gives her child everything—this is natural love. Can we attain this state when we feel natural love for people who are total strangers, who are opposite to us and distant, when I feel that they are an inseparable part of me just like a child is for his mother? Can we find such a force?

If we find it, we will be able to conduct such an experiment and see that it is so.
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From KabTV’s “The Integral World: The Formula of Integral Society,” 7/1/12

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Nature Is Indivisible

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Which connectable parts should be highlighted in man and in nature? Is it possible to deal with the division of the whole into parts in order to focus our efforts on them?

Answer: First we have to see nature as a totally integral system in which everything is mutually connected. There is no particle, atom, force, or field that is not connected into one system, no matter whether it is on the still nature level or on the vegetative, animate, or speaking levels, or whether it is conscious or not. It mustn’t be divided into parts.

We divide it into parts because we cannot understand and grasp all of it, just as we divide all of nature into different sciences. There is no physics, chemistry, biology, zoology or all the other sciences. It is more convenient for us to study nature this way—in some concrete discoveries. It only displays the weakness of our recognition and of our awareness.

Nature itself is totally integral and no part in it can highlighted. It is mutually connected.

But we can attain it as egoistic parts that are detached from one another intermittently. Then we can reconnect them gradually by building the original mosaic. But this is only relative to us, since nature itself is integral. By creating this mosaic, we gradually discover not just the particles that compose it but the elements that connect, thus forming the general picture. So at the same time this picture receives its next upper existence. It is just as if we could put our body together from different organs and systems and it would begin to function and life would be appear in it.

We must understand that by getting closer to the integration in our recognition of nature we eventually attain the life in it, which can be called the only upper force in nature. It has a plan for our development, its beginning and its end. But we can only approach it if we constantly aspire for integrality.

We will start to feel it gradually, gradually guess, and then more and more clearly reveal it. And I think that we will begin to discover it not after we assemble all of nature’s parts into one picture, but even as we get closer, we begin to get a foretaste of the completed picture.

We see that as we get closer we begin to perceive the integrality and we will gradually attain its upper thought, not in the absolute revealed state, but in stages.
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From KabTV’s “The Integral World: The Formula of Integral Society” 7/1/12

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In The Era Of Globalization The Crisis Is A Contagious Disease

Dr. Michael LaitmanIn the News (from TD Waterhouse): “World trade will grow by a mere 2.5 percent this year, dragged down by Europe to less than half of the previous 20-year average, the World Trade Organization (WTO) said on Friday [September 21, 2012]…

“‘I see the risk more on the downside than the upside,’ WTO Director General Pascal Lamy said at a news conference in Singapore. ‘What could be surprising is that you have a volume of trade that is lower than world (economic) growth.’ …

“‘The main reason for the growth slowdown is of course Europe,’ said Lamy… ‘We also know U.S. growth is lower than expected, (and) Japan is not in great shape.’”

My Comment: It is left only to discover how much we are connected not only economically and politically, but also spiritually. We, all of humanity, are a single whole in nature and completely dependent on each other in everything. The development of nature and human evolution are intended for us to reveal this fact in the near future, either through suffering or awareness, and thus evoke in us the need to unite as one family, contrary to and above all our contradictions “by love above hatred.”
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The Future Of Europe Is Integration

Dr. Michael LaitmanOpinion (Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission): “He explained he wanted to see Europe develop into a federation of nation states, while at the same time sharing sovereignty between EU members. He also spoke of the need to focus on growth in order to bring sustainable employment, especially for young people.

“He denied the single currency was the cause of Europe’s problems, but admitted not being institutionally prepared for the euro crisis.”

My Comment: While Europeans are planning their “national” and “state” sovereignty, the crisis will worsen.  No other path but suffering is seen. It is difficult to become aware of the need to follow unified nature in human community especially for Europeans.
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The Magnitude Of Spiritual Desires

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Where is the borderline between suppression of material desires and gaining spiritual ones?

Answer: We do not suppress our desires! We only discuss them and immediately assign more weight, greatness to the next, higher level of desires, the ones that drive us to unity and integrity, since they are far more important, better, higher, superior, and valued than our egoistic inclinations. It’s so even if our egoistic desires are seemingly of a positive kind, such as wanting to listen to a certain type of music, or read some kind of literature, or go to the ballet, or watch a football match, or go to a men’s club, or eat a special type of food—whatever it might be.

In other words, at this phase, with the help of the group I must receive a very serious and strong impression that these collective integral global standards are of a next level. They are not one step up, but incomparably more advanced than our aforementioned animal instinctive desires that nature automatically aroused within us and we, like slaves, tried to realize them quickly.
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From a Talk on Integral Upbringing 3/1/12

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Between The Sky And The Earth

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: A person comes to an integral group from the “outside.” He already has certain worries related to the material world, conflicts, problems with children, and so on. How can one transition from his routine predicaments to integration?

Answer: Everything has to be discussed in the group. However, it should be done specifically in the attempts to rise above corporeal problems. Various problems related to gender or character, to anything that might transpire between us have to be raised and discussed. We are a research group; we scrutinize ourselves. This is why we have to be ultimately sincere and interested in detaching from our animal “I” and rising above it into our integral “I,” which gradually is turning into “we.” So, there is nothing we should hide from one another.

At the same time, we shouldn’t concentrate on, dig into these issues too much: your personality against mine, somebody’s attractiveness, or animal, hormonal, drives… We have to discuss these things in brief in order to help each and everybody rise above them and keep ourselves specifically in this state while we continue understanding and sensing them in our animal body, as we know that they don’t exist at the next level.

We’ll constantly be “hanging” in the gap between our internal layers as if between the sky and the earth. This state will emerge in us and bother us for a long period of time: We’ll constantly be getting urges upwards and downwards. This is what our work is all about.

Within the inner states that we go through, we have to test our internal baggage of doubts, impressions, and aspirations in order to firmly position ourselves on the ground, to fly up as a balloon from earth to the “ceiling,” leaving behind our egoistic properties, ambitions, desires, and impulses. I am still aware of all of my problems, but internally I want to identify myself with the “ceiling,” meaning with my next step.
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From a Talk on Integral Upbringing 3/1/12

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The Connection Between Us Consisting Of Ten Sefirot

Dr. Michael LaitmanIt’s not enough to simply connect with our friends’ sparks. We also have to study; knowledge will shape us and teach us how to connect with the sparks. So far, we have no idea how to unite, since we are not familiar with the system of spirituality. So, we read about it, listen, and study. We learn that we have to connect and form a system that consists of 10 Sefirot, Partzufim, worlds, Surrounding Light and Direct Light. All these names describe the connection between us that we need to achieve.

The main thing is to tune ourselves to receive help from Above. It’s not enough just to think of connecting with our friends’ sparks; we need someone else who will tie us together. We have to appeal to the upper force so that It does this work for us. We bring our broken connection to the higher force and complain to It about our inability to unite. It’s similar to a crying baby who approaches his mother and father complaining that he cannot do something because it is broken and doesn’t work anymore.

The upper Light deliberately broke the bond between us so that we would demand it be restored. When one appeals to the upper force with this request together with his friends, it means that one is already inside the corrected system. It is called “Israel, Torah and the Creator are One.”

Israel stands for all of us, for those who are oriented “directly to the Creator” (Yashar – El.) The Torah is the Light that we search for in order to get glued back together. We study its actions with the books. The Creator is the upper force, a source of the Light that returns to the benevolence and assembles us back together. That explains why it is called the returning to the source of the good state that existed before the shattering occurred. This is how we attain correction.

We have to clarify numerous phases at this point. Although, we should understand that one is totally unable to do it on one’s own because he will always tend to work internally and presume that he has enough power and qualities to appeal to the Creator and scream to Him on his own.

But, I will never be able to address the Creator without presenting the broken vessel that consists of at least 10 friends who want to reconnect. I will be one of them. And if there are friends who understand that they need to connect in order to reveal the Creator and if they try to appeal to the Creator, for bestowal and love to reign between them, it happens.
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From a Talk at the Meal Commemorating Rabash, 9/20/12

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