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A Court Without Prejudice

Dr. Michael LaitmanThe Torah, “Leviticus” 19:15: Ye shall do no unrighteousness in judgment; thou shalt not respect the person of the poor, nor favor the person of the mighty; but in righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbor. The Torah warns us not to corrupt our feelings and that we must not treat people as the unmerciful ego dictates.

Each of us is a judge. You should judge a person without prejudice and without looking at him. He can be black or yellow, ugly or handsome, or he may speak in an amazing manner and move you to tears and so on.

How can a judge make sure that he can conduct a trial without prejudice? In order to do so, he has to judge himself. After all, if you judge another person according to a perspective that is free of prejudice, which means that you dress into the Creator on their level, and the verdict is wrong, then you must assume the guilt for the accused and pay for his debt to all of society, to the whole general soul.

If you send a thief to prison and after serving his time he is free and steals again, it means that you have to be imprisoned instead of him because this sentence was incorrect. If he didn’t reform for different reasons while in prison and steals again, it means that you are to blame, not him, since you and society should have corrected him and you did not do so.

Thus when he goes free, you face the problem of what to do with him, while we know exactly what to do with you: we put you in prison or resort to other forms of correction.

Comment: If we followed this principle, all the judges would be in prison by now, but as we all know, prison does not reform.

Answer: There is no mention of prisons in the Torah. Indeed, prison doesn’t reform and we see that according to what happens today. The sages knew this 5,000 years ago.
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From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 4/2/14

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Turn Obstacles Into A Degree of Elevation

Laitman_041_01The Torah “Leviticus” (Kedoshim) 19:14: You shall not curse a deaf person. You shall not place a stumbling block before a blind person, and you shall fear your God. I am the Lord.

If we translate the language of the earth into very simple spiritual laws, then hearing is Bina, and vision is Hochma.

The deaf are people who don’t possess the level of Bina, the quality of bestowal, and the blind are those who don’t have the level of Hochma. Therefore it is said, do not put obstacles in front of the blind for one will stumble since there are no sensors, no internal device to see, to analyze, and to determine what is good and what is bad at these levels.

An obstacle is everything that you can’t properly use during the spiritual path. If you would have the sight, you would define it not as an obstacle but as an opportunity to overcome and rise to a higher level. After a blind person faces a step when it’s invisible, he stumbles and falls, but the one who sees the step rises higher and higher. Everything depends on whether you are able to cope with this obstacle, turn it into a lever for lifting along the spiritual ladder.

It turns out that the deaf isn’t able to climb to the level of Bina with the help of obstacles, and the blind isn’t able to do the same at the level of Hochma. Therefore, you should feel the level of the other person, what is for his benefit and what isn’t, and lead him gently, as a small child, so he would start studying, ascending, descending, but not falling. This is how you should treat any neighbor, following the rule of “love thy neighbor as thyself.”

We educate children through soft teachings and morals in our world. A serious analysis and ascertainment take place in the spiritual world of whether it is possible to turn obstacles into a level of ascent.

This is why you have to act so that there will be obstacles in front of others, by which they would ascend. You must enter the other person, understand at what level he is, and even help this person to find an obstacle that he can overcome it.

This is the mutual aid, when all merge into one common cause, on one hand, reveal obstacles to each other, and on the other hand, help to overcome them. And so mutually supporting each other, people rise up like mountain climbers.
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From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 4/2/14

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Hatred – Is The Lack Of Love

laitman_283_01Question: The story of Job captures the essence of human suffering. When a series of fatal misfortunes befalls him, the Creator tells Job: “Where were you when I founded the earth?” What does this question mean?

Answer: Feel that you are a human being, you are greater than everything, and therefore obligated to take development into your own hands, to rule the world. Job simply does not want to look at anything except what he has. Thus, of course, he continues to suffer.

Question: It turns out that the Creator says to Job: “You don’t understand how nature is controlled; how can you understand what happened to you?” So, what does a person have to learn: the Creator, Satan (evil inclination), or both?

Answer: This is the same thing: the two opposing forms of the same force acting in the world. Only the force of love acts in the world, so all of nature is connected, kind, and harmonious, except for a small area, which is called human nature.

This force is missing in us intentionally so that we ourselves, consciously, by our own hands and actions, create it between ourselves. Then we will be similar (Domeh) to the Creator, similar to all of nature, and will be called Adam (Man).

Question: What will happen to Satan? Will he disappear?

Answer: He does not exist! The evil inclination, i.e., hatred, is manifested in us because of the lack of love. Hatred does not have its own existence; it is the lack of love, connection, cooperation, and mutual guarantee. If we fill this place, then there will be only good. This is what the story of Job depicts.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” 5/28/14

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The Engine Of Progress Is Dead

Dr. Michael LaitmanBaal HaSulam, “The Peace”: And humanity has already thrown itself to the extreme right, as with Germany, or to the extreme left, as with Russia. But not only did they not ease the situation for themselves, they have worsened the malady and agony, and the voices rise up to the sky, as we all know. 

Today all the means that were useful in the past are invalid. It makes no difference how we choose to advance, what plans we make, or what recommendations or innovations we come up with. Eventually all this will only deepen the crisis we are in, force us to waste our powers in vain, and increase pain and suffering.

So what can we do? A wise man tries to identify the whole process in advance from beginning to end in regards to a predetermined goal. If we do this, we will certainly save ourselves pain and follow the way that will still bring us to the same outcome.

On the other hand, as long as we keep postponing the only possible correction, the unpleasant phases will only be stretched out and prolonged. If we continue to advance along the corporeal egoistic plane, we raise our ego each time and overcome the bad states that are revealed. Our ego keeps on growing and we invent more and more new sophisticated innovations in technology, means of communication, or legislation.

Instead of a king, we have a parliament; we save money in bank accounts and give priority to private enterprises. Why is this so? In order to give people different opportunities to fulfill the egoistic desire and thus keep advancing. We are in perpetual motion, and on each level we discover its worthlessness the moment when we cannot satisfy the demands of our developing desire by ourselves and it forces us to keep on developing.

Today, the desire has reached a certain level of satiation and now we can decide what to do with it. It doesn’t matter what means we try, nothing is successful. Matter, the desire to receive, which has been the basis for the development of human society for thousands of years, is no longer fruitful. Competition can no longer be the engine of progress.

We are in search of new directions, trying to understand what else we can do. But we find nothing. There are no more opportunities in industry, commerce, or science. We have fulfilled and exhausted ourselves.

Of course, we would rather believe that this is a temporary dead end before a new breakthrough, but there is a fundamental problem here: We have developed society only in order to use the power of our ego. Today the ego doesn’t work anymore.

Therefore, we mustn’t continue our advancement in the directions that we have developed so far. The egoistic force, the basis of our progress has exhausted itself. We can already see that it has begun to consume itself.

In the past, a person wanted to have a family, bring up his children, build a home, and become rich. Only a decade or two ago, these goals and demands were clearly understood. But today, many people are not attracted to it. The old values are suddenly gone. It is therefore better to sit and smoke a joint, which has become practically legal, and that’s it.

Humanity has lost the hold and supporting pillar of the ego, which has been our engine of progress throughout history. Although governments and the media still manage to blur reality, there is actually nowhere else to which we can advance.

If we continue to hold on to the peak and keep on delving deeper into the diminishing pool of opportunities, the troubles will only increase. The more we continue to advance along this path, the quicker our negative development will be. The wrong use of the ego and its overuse in our times will eventually show us that it doesn’t work anymore. The uselessness of self-love is now becoming evident.

We already see behavioral mutations in the relations between people and countries. Many don’t even want to think rationally as to whether it is good or bad for them, but simply act out of their impulses and prefer not to think about the outcomes. Thus the ordinary egoistic behavior is gradually changing.

This is a very dangerous phase since it can lead to an outburst in any possible direction. Therefore, the wisdom of Kabbalah is being revealed, and although it is seemingly an artificial thing, unnatural for us, it is actually the right and natural thing.

If we have already exhausted our human egoistic impulse to advance and develop, then there is only one thing left to do: ascend to the next level that is above self-love. There is another force in the world besides the force of receiving, which is the force of bestowal. So why don’t we establish a new humanity on the basis of this attribute? Why don’t we establish our relationships upon it? Let’s use the second force in nature. We mustn’t continue to ignore bestowal. It has always been at our disposal, but we didn’t feel a need for it because the ego pushed us forward and considered the force of bestowal redundant.

The force of receiving burnt in us more and more and we didn’t even think that bestowal provides us with greater opportunities to advance. It is because with the help of bestowal we use the external vessels of the environment, which are the desires, the attainments, the connections and the great mind, the great force that is on the outside. We never even thought that we could develop along the positive path with the help of the force of bestowal.

Bestowal is based on mutual benefit. It opens up infinite perspectives because humanity can finally unite powers instead of wasting them on inner struggles, because it is actually the separation that weakens us. It is just like a rich couple who gets divorced and their lawyers get all their money. Eventually the two sides are left with nothing compared to what they had before.

On the whole, competition and ambitiousness help us advance only if we don’t directly compete with one another on the basis of mutual hate, but instead, we do this on the conceptual level, for the sake of humanity. Today the competition between us is who is better and whose merchandise is better. In this kind of struggle each one wants to wipe out the competition, which is a destructive state not a constructive one. In such cases it isn’t the general wellbeing that wins and it is therefore harmful to all of us.

We have now begun a period of destructive competition. As a result, the ego begins to consume itself and becomes an illness that destroys people. In the past the ego was the developing force, but now it has become a destructive force.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 10/26/14, Writings of Baal HaSulam

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They Are Already Tired Of Waiting For Us On The Second Floor, Part 1

laitman_940We are a result of the shattering that has left such a breach between us that no one feels anyone else, although all of humanity is part of everyone’s soul. No one can imagine that we are one soul and that we have to correct the relations between us to such an extent that there will be no difference between the way a person feels himself and the way he feels others.

What is more, we have to reach “love thy friend as thyself.” I should love others more than I love myself just as I love myself now by making myself stand out among others. This means that I have to totally ascend above my desire to receive and to see the whole true reality.

We keep on failing in this work, and so we have to constantly help one another and spur each other on. A person cannot awaken himself; only the friends can awaken him to connection.

The connection has to be whole, and it is from this whole connection that we learn and attain the Creator’s attributes. It is because we can never learn the actual phenomenon that takes place in our vessels but only the impressions and the feeling a certain phenomenon invokes in us and the actual vessels.

The soul is filled with Light, yet we don’t feel the actual Light but rather the reaction of the vessel to it, the impression of the vessel. It is just like how instruments in our world work: the dial in an instrument moves and the instrument responds to the effect of a certain force. We identify and see its reactions and attribute it to the force that operates in the instrument.

We don’t feel the actual force, but only the response of the instrument to a certain unknown influence. This is how we discover the Creator, through the feeling and the impression of the vessel from His presence. This means that the filling of the vessel is also vessels, letters, in addition to the initial HaVaYaH.

These additional letters are like a code, a key that stands for every filling in the vessel. It is as if there is a dial that moves in this vessel or numbers on a counter. This means that we can never feel the Light itself, but feel and notice the changes that the Light performs on us.

We measure these changes, feel and count them and then we call these changes Light. We have no access to the Light itself since the Light is already the actual upper force.

Therefore, we should understand that the revelation of the Creator is a certain kind of vessel, the impression in a vessel. We have to study and to reveal how the vessel should be impressed and how it should respond, how it has to prepare itself so that it will be sensitive enough and ready for the revelation of the Upper Light in it.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/2/14, Writing of Rabash

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The Whole World Is Ancient Babylon

laitman_944Question: Recently, you gave a series of lectures in the United States. Who was your audience?

Answer: My audience is ancient Babylon from where Abraham wanted to take all the people and bring them to the next level of existence.

We do not divide anyone by their skin color nor on any other grounds; we relate to all of humanity exactly in the same manner. After all, who are the Jews? They are those who in their desire try to find the meaning of life followed by Abraham. There are millions of such people today.

Question: Do you believe that the Jewish people are chosen?

Answer: By the Jewish people, I mean those who are descendants of the Babylonians who followed Abraham and created the people on the basis of the rule of “love thy neighbor as thyself,” i.e., connected to each other, and those who today aspire to attain the upper existence as once did the disciples of Abraham. And it does not depend on skin color.
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From KabTV’s “A Special Opinion” 8/17/14

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A Lesson As Change Of States

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: When you disseminate the wisdom of Kabbalah you give a lecture or a lesson. How do you feel the audience sitting in front of you and how much can you give them?

Answer: A lesson is very different from a lecture because a lecture more abstract, as from a watering can water all the flowers in a row without distinction, and they grow individually according to their own potential. A lesson, on the other hand, is measured. When I take the average level, enter it and turn myself into two levels: an inner level (which isn’t personal but collective) and an external level. The external level is conveyed in a language that is more common and the inner level in a language of those who have undergone the state that is being described to some extent.

Question: Do you feel the threshold of how much you can give in a particular lesson?

Answer: No. When I speak on such a level I am not afraid. First, I still hide inside myself and even my inner level is still mine.

Second, the way we usually display things is not harmful. It can deter a person who is still unfamiliar with it, but his feelings change internally and he goes through different changes of states. He needs to go from one state to another and to feel that he is in a whole world in which there is room for everything we speak about and he is like a central point, an observer and an usher carrying it all out.

There are quite a few people who cannot focus themselves that way. They have other reactions, which are coarser and slower with regard to what we study. Thus, during a ten minute lecture, they feel two or three states while someone else may feel twenty or thirty states.
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From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 4/2/14

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Laitman_077A development consists of two processes: interface and expansion of parts. As nature becomes more complex and developed, it acquires diversity, it is enriched by new forms and facets. As a result, each of nature’s elements connect, interact, and fulfills its role exactly in its own special place for the benefit of the overall system.

Question: How does this relate to the development of humanity at this time?

Answer: We’ve come to a new stage, and it appears before us already. Suddenly everyone became interconnected, and humanity became a small “village” where all depend on each other for good or for evil.

It’s impossible to slip out of this network; we can’t make any steps on our own. Some still think that they are capable of making decisions about the destruction of half of humanity and the interruption of the connection between us. However, these dramatic events won’t reach the goal. We can’t break the connection.

Question: That reminds us of the lentil seeds in a saucepan, once ingested they lose their shape. Isn’t that how we lose our individual form while being boiled in the boiler of history? What are we required to do today?

Answer: We need to unite rationally, in a mature way, understanding WHAT we are doing and why.

Question: What if we continue on the same course of egoistic individualism?

Answer: This trend won’t bring us anything but misery. After all, the world has become different. It manifested integrated forces that affect us from all sides, and we see firsthand how the individualistic approach causes harm instead of good.

Suppose we’re in the same room. I want to play the drums, the other person wants to sleep, the third one wants to watch TV, and the fourth person is going to cook the same lentil soup. Can we all get along?

Meanwhile, everything is just like that. And the situation is heating up on all levels. For example, climate shocks have only just begun, and their impact throughout is already enormous.

Therefore, it won’t be possible to live as before anymore. After all, we are like insects on the surface of Earth that built themselves fragile shelters. Our forces are no match for the forces of nature.

However, we demolish the foundation of wellbeing ourselves. That’s why there isn’t an alternative, it’s time to recognize that the world is integral, that all depend on each other and live “in one room,” on one “ball” and there’s no where to run from it. Other “rooms” aren’t available here.

Perhaps due to hopelessness, while applying our mind as intended, we’ll be able to “control” our own egoism, so that it would allow us to agree among ourselves. It follows from what we know about the development of nature, today, it obliges us to be like the integrated system. And the integrated system contains two parts: the “plus” and “minus,” giving and receiving. We get plenty of force of reception, but not enough of the force of bestowal. The force of bestowal is what we have to find and develop.

This can be done, and there is a special technique called “integral education” in order to accomplish it. With its help, it’s necessary to “implant” each person with the basics of bestowal, and then one will learn how to use two parts of nature. A person will build oneself by gaining confidence in the future, self-confidence, and confidence for one’s children, and for the whole world.

Otherwise, if we choose an egoistic way, then all our strength, all the wealth and resources we have will be spent to fight the forces of nature, heat and cold, drought and floods, disease, etc.

For instance, if the extinction of bees continues, we will have nothing to eat. We desperately depend upon natural systems to the extent that we can’t fully realize this.

And indeed, a violation of the integral law entails a number of consequences in the world.

After all, everything in nature is an interconnected system; in fact, it’s a single mechanism. Crops and orchards provide food not only for us but also animals that we breed. This means that the system interference threatens our vital needs, and it’s very dangerous.

On the other hand, these misfortunes have to show that we lack the second force. After all, if we aren’t connected to each other, we won’t be able to negotiate and conclude agreements necessary for survival. From this we see that all the forces are designed to compel a person to study and draw conclusions upon the process through which the planet Earth has passed. And the main conclusion is that everything comes from the connectivity of parts. Development derives from the compilation, interface of parts into more complex systems, and this is what we have to come to understand.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” 3/2/14

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Daily Kabbalah Lesson – 12.08.14

Writings of Baal HaSulam Igrot,” Letter 1

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The Book of Zohar “Introduction,” “General Explanation for All Fourteen Commandments and How They Divide Into Seven Days of Creation,” Item 10

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Talmud Eser Sefirot Vol. 6, Part 16, Item 56

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Writings of Baal HaSulam “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah”

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