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Question: When I act before a friend, trying to make the goal seem more important in his eyes, must I act according to what I think is great or according to his attributes?
Answer: What do you mean, according to what you think? You must take into account only the friend. When a mother takes care of a baby, what does she think about? Is it about what is good for her or about what is good for the baby?
When I act before the friend, I aim at the highest goal. Of course, it isn’t in an exaggerated manner, but I try to convey encouragement on the spiritual path gently, from the bottom of my heart. This also impresses me. I lie to myself, as if I really want it.
As a result, I receive more Aviut, “thickness,” a deeper desire, and then I suddenly fall. However, this fall is a result of my efforts. I summoned the descent by myself, and this is already a great step forward.
There are descents that simply wait for me along the way, but there also are descents that come as a result of my efforts. They are totally different, and I receive them differently since my vessels are ready for this.
I have made something higher of myself; I have “drawn” myself anew in an attempt to be equal to the spiritual level. I am impressed by bestowal. I judge everyone to the scale of merit. I justify the Creator, my past and my present. I “blow up” all this by myself, helping the friends, yearning for mutual guarantee, living and breathing it, and, suddenly, I feel a descent in the vessels that I have created myself. Although they are not real, although I only was acting, thanks to my “performance,” thanks to the “costume” I tried on, I get additional Aviut.
In fact, I have gained an upper form and have jumped the gun, and it is as if I built it independently, and the Creator only adds the “matter” of the desire to it. By my inclination forward, it is as if I have built a large “me” in advance, and the Creator only agrees with me and fills the drawing, the “bubble” I have created. He has filled the airy body with “flesh,” with the matter of the desire, and, now, I am already in a higher state.
Thus, I advance with the help of my imagination. Of course, things are a bit more complicated. I don’t just make a “drawing,” and the Creator “colors” it in, but it is a wonderful means to advance.
In addition, there is one more thing: By acting before the friends, I actually build the Creator, the future state of bestowal. This is because I cannot imagine the Creator as higher than myself on a higher level. For me, it is the same thing. I either imagine myself or Him.
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From the 3rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 10/10/12, Talmud Eser Sefirot
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“Preface to The Book of Zohar”: Indeed before we are awarded to turn the desire to receive in us to receive in order to bestow, by the Torah and Mitzvot (commandments), there are strong locks on the gates to the Creator, since they have an opposite role then, to keep us away from the Creator. Thus the forces of separation are called locks, since they block the gates of closeness and distance us from the Creator. But if we overcome them, so they don’t influence us and cool the love in our hearts, the locks become openings and the darkness becomes light and the bitterness becomes sweetness, since for all the locks we receive a special level under His Providence and they become openings, levels of attaining the Creator.
This happens even before we go through the Machsom (barrier) into the spiritual world and before we acquire the attribute of bestowal with which a person begins to work. Even before that, the locks gradually become an invitation for a person’s feelings and perception.
First, he begins to understand that the locks were put there for his own good. Then, he really feels that by seeing the benefit that each descent and fall brings him, every problem in life and all the confusion, both the closest and the most distant ones. He begins to expect a positive result in everything that happens, and this focuses him correctly and straightens his path toward the goal.
Eventually, a person begins to justify everything and to be grateful, even during a time of a descent and confusion when enemies and adversaries attack him. He knows that they are all forces that were brought from Above to correct his way.
He sees the good angel, instead of the stormy waters of the flood. He sees God’s hand in everything that happens. He gets this feeling thanks to his experience and the gradual acquisition of the force of bestowal, until finally, he really is rewarded with the revelation of the force of bestowal and begins to use it beneficially for his advancement.
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From the Preparation to the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 10/10/12
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The Book of Zohar is all about the revelation of the Creator to the created beings. Who is the Creator? It is the upper Sefirot in which the simple upper Light is dressed, and through the Sefirot we, who are in Malchut, are impressed by them in different ways. This impression leads to the expansion of Malchut and then there is a desire, and it is impressed by them.
We in this world are a very distant result of these processes that take place on a higher level. But we are also impressed by the upper Light, which is dressed in the desire. I just feel this desire in the form of the still, vegetative, and animate nature, and people. I see it through this picture. It is only the Light that operates in the vessel, in the desire. But I was allowed to see its appearance like a theatrical performance, like a picture, a play that appears before me, but in fact, we did not need to see anything. Why do I need to see if I don’t have the right desire, I don’t have a Masach (screen), and I am not compatible to the upper world in any way?
In our world we see things in a similar manner: If I take off my glasses, I don’t see anything, if I put on different glasses, I see ten meters ahead, and if I put on another pair, I see a hundred meters ahead. This means that we perceive everything in accordance to what is external to me and what is inside me. There must be some adaptor, since the main law of nature when two parts connect is the law of equivalence of form. If there are two things, then to the extent that they have something in common they can be in contact, in mutual bestowal, impressed by each other. There must be an equivalence of form because otherwise they cannot perceive one another.
I am only in the desire to receive. And there is the upper Light. The desire to receive isn’t meant to receive anything from the upper Light or to feel its influence; it is only detached from it. It had to be. We don’t even feel the darkness. But a kind of theater show is created, some false picture, an illusion called “this world,” the innermost sphere of all the spiritual spheres. In this sphere the desire to receive is detached from spirituality, detached from the Light, detached from the darkness, detached from everything, and feels that it exists. This is the state we are in now, since it is a replica of the spiritual world. So we were given a game: We try and try, and as a result we eventually reach spirituality. Why? Our efforts are worthless, except for the fact that we try. I have to invest powers and then in contrast to my powers I summon upon myself the Light that Reforms from a distance.
Our world is actually not connected to spirituality in any way. Therefore, all our advancement is when we are not in contact with it, and when we don’t understand anything. What should we do? Do what Kabbalists tell you to summon the Light that Reforms. If you draw it upon you, it will help you. If you don’t, it won’t help you. You will never summon it mentally. It is only possible if you subdue yourself before the group and make it your environment. From all this area called “this world,” you were given a group. If you work with it correctly, you will exit this sphere and enter the upper world, otherwise it won’t happen.
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From the 3rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 10/09/12, The Zohar
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Opinion (Peter Gray, Ph.D., research professor of psychology at Boston College): “Most children in our society protest going to school. Am I telling you something new? They protest in many ways—by feigning illness, by dragging their feet in the morning, by doing the least they can to meet the school’s demands (or not doing even that), and by violating school rules when they can get away with it. …
“Are these kids just spoiled ingrates? If so, then you and I—and essentially everyone else who ever attended school after schooling became compulsory—were also spoiled ingrates. We all protested it. In fact, back in the days when schools first became compulsory kids protested it even more than they do now, even though there was much less of it then. They had to be beaten with birch sticks to get them to stay in school and do what the teachers told them to do. …
“As I pointed out in one of the first essays in this blog, the means by which children became educated in hunter-gatherer cultures were the opposite of the means by which we try to educate children in our schools today. One of the most cherished values of all band hunter-gatherer societies that have ever been studied by anthropologists is freedom. Hunter-gatherers believed that it is wrong to coerce a person to do what the person doesn’t want to do—and they considered children to be people. They rarely even made direct suggestions, because that might sound like coercion.
“They believed that people, on their own initiative, would learn to contribute to the welfare of the band, because they would see the wisdom of doing so and experience the joy of it. For hundreds of thousands of years, that was the organizing principle of human society.
“The hunting and gathering life required great personal initiative and creativity, and it required trust that people would share and cooperate because they wanted to. Hunting and gathering people seemed to understand that—and they also seemed to understand that children would best grow up to be free, trusting, cooperative, creative adults if they were permitted freedom throughout their childhood, in the context of the moral community and models that the band provided.
“Throughout our immense hunter-gatherer period, children were free to play and explore all day, day after day, and in that way to educate themselves. Education was always self-directed.
“In fact, the reason children are naturally so playful, curious, and social is because those traits were the motivating powers behind children’s abilities to educate themselves. Those ‘childish’ traits were promoted and shaped, by natural selection, precisely to serve the function of education, in conditions of childhood freedom.
“So, when we force children to sit in their seats and listen to a teacher and do just what they are told, every bone in their body, and every neuron and muscle, resists. Their body tells them, ‘This is wrong. I need to control my own actions; I need to play at the skills that seem to be important to me; I need to explore the questions that I’m curious about, not ones that bore me; I need to pay attention to what people in the real world are doing, not to what this teacher, who doesn’t even seem to be part of the world outside of school, is telling me. If I don’t do these things that I need to do, I will not grow up to be a competent, dignified human being.’ In hunter-gatherer times, a child who did not feel so strongly driven to run his or her own life and education would have grown up to be a misfit.
“So, our children have instincts that drive them to educate themselves through their free play, exploration, and socializing. But we have schools that insist that they give up that freedom and do what they are told to do. The schools have never worked well, and even in theory can’t work well, because they always put the school against the child and thereby evoke resistance.
“This radical approach is to let our children educate themselves, while we provide the conditions that make that possible.”
My Comment: This what integral education provides for children.
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In the News (from Medical News Today): “A new study suggests that holding a smile on one’s face during periods of stress may help the heart. The study, due to be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science, lends support to the old adage ‘grin and bear it,’ suggesting it may also make us feel better.
“The study is the work of psychological scientists Tara Kraft and Sarah Pressman of the University of Kansas. They looked at how different types of smiling, and people being aware of smiling, affected their ability to recover from stressful episodes. …
“The age-old saying suggests smiling not only signals happiness to others, but could also be a way to help cope with life stresses. …
“They found the participants who were instructed to smile, and in particular those whose faces expressed genuine or Duchenne smiles, had lower heart rates after recovery from the stress activities than the ones who held their faces in neutral expressions.”
My Comment: These actions also cause the upper correcting force OM (Ohr Makif) even as we want to get closer to spiritual states in which we are not present at all, by our mechanical efforts to become similar to them, we attract these desired states to ourselves. It is the same principle, and that is why it works. We are in the same system of forces of the world of infinity and if we use the likeness to the higher degree, to that extent we receive something from it.
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Baal HaSulam, “Letter 19”: But not in one time will a person be ready for the high, sublime pairing, called complete coupling. But “only goodness and grace will follow me.” Therefore He intervenes, which is the beginning of the coupling, which means, “a righteous suffers….
The Creator wakes a person, which means that He doesn’t push him forward but arranges him by many tricks, as if flirting with him. We see that even in nature in the animal world there are mating games before the coupling. It’s a whole process in which each side has to show the other that he is ready for the connection and is responsible for it, able to care for the next generation.
It’s the same with a person who is rejected from the coupling by the Creator because he does not have a strong enough desire. A person thinks that the Creator doesn’t want to connect with him and so he suffers because he wants to connect so badly, and is so ready for it having done everything he could in order to attain it. So why doesn’t the Creator reveal Himself to him?
It seems to a person that he is ready to bestow, but we understand that he only thinks of how he can use the revelation of the Creator for his own pleasure. These are not vessels of bestowal yet. If he had a desire to bestow, his sorrow would be different. The sufferings would immediately turn to goodness, to pleasure
But “time will do what the mind doesn’t do”… If a person follows this path persistently: working in the group, studying, doing everything that he can, his successes and failures are already in the hands of the upper Providence and his only goal is to continue. He should try to make the best of every state that he experiences.
It isn’t enough to drag oneself from one phase to the next. Thanks to all the awakenings, all the stings from the Creator, and since he feels bad as a result, he must desire to run forward, to break all the barriers along the way, and this is clearly impossible without mutual guarantee.
A person thinks that he has made such great efforts and has not received any rewards yet! His great passion is unanswered, which means that the Creator does not respond. As a result, he despairs: How long can he chase the Creator without any results? Is there a limit to this or not?
He begins to ask: Where have all his efforts, all his exertion, and all his yearning gone? And he is left with a feeling of great longing. Actually we have to connect all our successes, failures, and disappointments. On the one hand, we should feel a great disappointment, but on the other hand we should rise above it in “faith above reason.”
The times in which the ego power pushed me forward are over. Now I have to break through all the hostile barriers along the way; now I have to feel how many such barriers are inside me and how to rise above them in “faith above reason.”
I have to feel the full depth of my ego, to feel totally disappointed in my powers. Then suddenly I understand that I can’t cope with these enemies and to break through, only because I am trying to do it with my ordinary egoistic powers (the corporeal mind and feeling) by brute force. Suddenly from this disappointment I see the solution and I understand that this isn’t the way to advance: I have to rise above reason and then everything will suddenly work out. This means that there must be a feeling of disappointment and heaviness in which the solution, the new approach, is born. But in order to reach that, we have to reach a full measure of disappointment.
And the one who knows the mysteries knows how much a person desires to be close to the Creator, a desire that may cease. And so the Creator increases His interventions, which means the beginnings of couplings. This is to the extent that a person can bear them.
It depends on the environment. If the environment is strong and sustains a person internally and constantly evokes him, he can go through this process very quickly and end all the preparation stages for the coupling.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/712, Writings of Baal HaSulam
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Please know that if you go alone, you will never have the forces needed. The same path that is possible to pass within a year will take you fifteen years to pass, and, in the end, you won’t reach any result, except for recognizing that you need the group.
However, if I work correctly with the group, then always at the time of a descent, it will awaken me. And it is not necessarily through obvious physical methods, but it will come from above as an inner awakening after I have joined myself in connection with the group. At the time that I am able to, I constantly think about it: How can I attain connection where there is my exact place, within which I am included, like in a “puzzle?” I want to feel my place in this puzzle and constantly think about it, only about the connection. After all, this is the place with which I associate the future revelation of the Creator, which will connect us.
If I constantly invest my efforts in this, then it can’t be that I will fall and am left without any forces. My friends will help me.
Imagine that, like an element of a mechanism, I am a part that is included in a system. I constantly insert this force within this system, the desire to connect, by awakening the others. And, at a certain moment, I die; in this element, the ego suddenly grew, and it can no longer do anything, standing still like a car with a flat tire. And, then immediately, to the extent that I “inflated” the others, they now begin to work on me.
In our body are the same processes; all the time there are ascents and descents, contractions and expansions, absorption and emission of various substances in different systems. So the body constantly operates, and that is called being alive
To live means that there is a time to give and a time to receive. This is how each cell in the body operates, large or small. And, if I do not, then there won’t be any life. I can receive awakening from above, but only in order to awaken myself and return myself again to work with the environment. The environment is like a battery for my efforts, which then return to me.
First, I need to do everything in my power. I can’t say that now I am in a descent and wait until the group will give me strength. In any case, I need to invest efforts according to how much strength I have left, and then begin to receive forces from the friends. I just can’t fall into their arms in advance.
You will be convinced from your experience that it works specifically in this way, and huge accumulations of strength will be revealed to you. Take as much as you want. It’s like on a long run when your strength is gone, but you continue to run anyway, and then you pass the critical point when you get a second wind.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/7/12, Writings of Baal HaSulam
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Question: A person can tolerate and adjust to the crises and stresses until he loses all his energy and clearly sees that he has passed a point of no return. Can it happen that all of humanity will encounter this problem and end up being at the point of no return?
Answer: A point of no return is a very good state. To what do you want to return? When I begin understanding that my mind, my intellect, is useless, I try to look for a way out of it. So I come to the conclusion that I am the one who has to change.
Question: How can we make a person understand that the entire pool of resources and energy are almost exhausted and that if we continue dragging a little longer, it will be impossible to change a thing?
Answer: For that, we have to “turn on” the system of upbringing, education, dissemination, advertisement, etc. We have to realize beforehand that it’s our duty to caution society that changes will lead them to the next, better state, whereas a passive advancement under the internal pressure of egoism will only bring us to affliction.
The problem is that we are currently in a state that doesn’t let us come to any solutions. I am talking from the point of view of regular people, as well as scientists, not to mention those who have the authority and who define, so to say, our social development. They don’t regard changing a person as a solution, and that’s why everything remains the same.
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From a TV Program: “Integral World: Formula of an Integral Society” 7/3/12
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Question: In the industrial approach for building an integral society, there are no clear management goals, and essentially, this whole system is totally dependent on an unstable element such as a person, human psyche, and human perception. Therefore, the industrial management system is not good.
Answer: Precisely because of this the system is in a crisis already. Since a modern person is incapable of managing a complex system, he put himself through his ego in such a situation that he uses everything that he produced for unnecessary and totally foreign goals. Look at what is happening! In what debt everybody is in, to what extent we impoverish nature! And all this is basically without any purpose.
Question: This is a paradox of the complex systems. The more complex it is, the more profit can be made from it with minimal investment for management and supervision, but along with that, the smallest failure in a complex system brings much more disastrous results than in a simple system.
Answer: I think that the issue is not in the system, but in man who wants to make profit not by using the system correctly, but in any other way. In any place and in everything, all sorts of inflating economic “bubbles” are expected. We are ready to invent anything possible just to sell and profit from it despite the fact that this money will just lie somewhere in the banks.
In other words, we basically ventured into some field entirely different from the path of development; we got lost. And if this development were for welfare, for fulfillment, for progress… But unfortunately, all this is just for the pocket or for war. Therefore, the crisis here is a purifying element. And it’s very good that it’s being revealed now.
Question: This is an indicator that shows that the society is sick.
Answer: We will not be able to do anything without changing a human being. It’s because this whole crisis and our whole global system is precisely in this state for almost a hundred years: A sick person manages nature and inserts his illness into it. We need to correct the person!
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From KabTV’s “Integral World: Formula of an Integral Society” 7/1/12
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