Audio Version Of The Blog – 03.06.15

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From Quantity To Quality

Laitman_931-01The Light and the Sun: “And the main answer is to unite with each and every one with love and in one heart, to worship the Lord and to join an effort, and thus the world of repentance awakens and the world of mercy and the world of desire.”

We reveal everything only according to our vessel because we don’t feel anything outside our desire. Therefore, the more complex the desire is—but at the same time, the more united it is—the greater discernments we can make both in the intensity of the Light and in the quality of the Light.

Therefore, we should try to be both heroes in quality and heroes in quantity, simultaneously. A hero in quality is a result of the quantity. At the beginning, every state grows in quantity and only then it raises itself to an upper level and unites many individuals that ascend from the lower level into one whole, into one individual on the upper level.

Thus, the work is first in quantity and then it turns into quality. It says that there isn’t a wiser man than the experienced, which means that after a great quantity of actions, comes the wisdom, the understanding of these actions themselves and the connection between them.

This is the reason we should exert ourselves as much as we can. You should do everything that is in your power, and the feeling and the mind stem from that. It is because a certain Light does arrive for every mechanical exertion, even if it is very simple, and it eventually brings us to the feeling and perception of the new reality.

It is true that we must unite our hearts, desires, and intentions, but we never do that. We always do only half a shekel’s worth, and the Creator completes the rest of the work for us, as it is said, “The Lord will complete the work for me.”

We only say that I must unite the hearts, but of course I cannot do anything but find out and clarify the right deficiency. If I find the right deficiency—which is called raising a prayer, MAN, investing the half shekel I am required to—it is called a sacrifice (Korban); in other words, I get closer to the Creator [Karov with the same root in Hebrew|, and the second half always comes from above.

Then, we become partners. I invest the deficiency, and the Creator performs the action in correcting and filling it.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/25/14

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Draw Yourself A Good World

Laitman_715Question: Can we change the script of our life, like in a movie?

Answer: This is exactly what the wisdom of Kabbalah recommends that we do to become the director of the movie of our life. We change the reality that we feel by our internal changes.

If we want to ascend to another level of perception of reality we have to correct our desires, to correct and to modify ourselves, we should begin to draw the goodness and improve ourselves of the impure ego and the hatred towards others. We will be able to see a different world to the extent that we improve our attributes.

This doesn’t mean that we should simply become more friendly and kinder to those around us. The wisdom of Kabbalah doesn’t teach us to be kind to our neighbors but rather teaches us to perform a serious change in our nature. We don’t need to change anything around us, but only ourselves. We change the world, the perception of our reality, though our internal changes. We begin to see that all of reality is the Upper Light that fills creation. There is nothing but the Upper Light, but each of us sees the picture that he has drawn with his attributes in it. This means that we draw our world by ourselves.
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From the Radio Program Israeli 103FM 2/8/15

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Scrutiny Of The Heart

Laitman_509M. Weisman, “Midrash Sefer,” Chapter 96: The smoke from the fire that was lighted by the priests rose to the alter in the form of a vertical pillar and there was no wind that could sway it.

The rising of the smoke (Auchan) is the rising of a person’s hopes to the Creator. The smoke refers to the spiritual concept of world, year, and soul (Olam, Shana, Nefesh). A person unites all the actions inside him and performs a complete correction of the crudest and lowliest desire that includes all the desires that are above it.

Then smoke rises as a result of these actions and unites the world (Olam), year (Shana), and soul (Nefesh).

It is by this action that a person’s most concealed devious, egoistic desires are clarified, which a person previously concealed in his subconscious and now brings them out in order to be corrected. Their scrutiny is according to the result of their burning, according to the smoke.

If the smoke rises vertically, it means that the scrutiny has been done full heartedly and that a person’s intentions are clearly focused on bestowal. If it isn’t so, it means that we are not candid yet in the scrutiny of our egoistic desires and are still under certain external influences.

We mustn’t associate the descriptions of fire with our world and imagine any corporeal images. When we enter the story of the Torah, the corporeal description should be transformed correctly into an internal feeling.

Only then is it possible to be incorporated in the story and to start identifying with what is going on, to feel ourselves both as an object that performs these actions and as an object on which these actions are being performed.

It is then that a person begins to understand that the whole Torah is inside him and he performs it in order to unite with the actions that are described in the Torah. He reformats himself with the help of the Torah.

This means that a person performs a spiritual action; a person fulfills the instructions of turning his ego into the state of love and bestowal.

The inner force called Torah helps him perform the action on himself and then he resembles it. It enters him and begins to change all his desires and intentions, and as a result be becomes similar to the Torah.
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From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 6/12/13

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Acting As If I Love

laitman_938_02Question: I don’t have any positive feelings towards the group and the friends since it is merely pretense, a lie! What should I do?

Answer: It certainly is pretense and a lie. After all we are all initially only in our nature of “to receive” and this is what determines our actions. There are people, especially politicians who can pretend and act as if they worry about others, but a person who cannot stand lies cannot act as if he is “good.” He expresses what he actually feels.

The wisdom of Kabbalah, however, doesn’t call it a lie but acting! You should act as someone who loves, and only with regard to the friends, and don’t lie to them but to yourself in order to reach the goal, in order to set an example so that the friends will also act as kind and loving before you. As a result, the habit of acting becomes second nature in both directions, despite the fictitious behavior because a person begins to draw the Returning Light.
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The Nation’s Servants

laitman_937According to The Book of Zohar everyone should reveal an action below. Therefore Aaron performed an action below, seven days of holiness during which he didn’t come out of the Tent of Meeting, and then he offered sacrifice on the eighth day in order to invoke the action from above by which general unity is revealed. Then all the worlds that the priest (Cohen) awakens receive the blessing, and the priest himself is filled by the wholeness as required.

It is about the need for Aaron’s bestowal (the complete attribute of bestowal) unto the people (the other attributes) just as unto a group, which by gathering, affects the force that is above it since Aaron cannot influence it.

He has to perform an action below in order to unite the people and then they influence the upper force. Then the upper force can influence Aaron even more so that he can unite the nation even more strongly and then they influence the upper force even more. This is a continuous cycle.

It turns out that Aaron and the nation depend on each other. The upper force responds to the request of the nation, to its call, to its prayer (the prayer of many).

Aaron can only be a teacher and raise the prayer of the nation upward, but the nation operates him. It is thanks to the nation that Aaron receives spiritual elevation and all the others ascend through him in their turn.
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From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 12/18/13

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Like A Bundle Of Reeds—A Nation On A Mission, Part 3

Like a Bundle of ReedsLike A Bundle of Reeds, Why Unity and Mutual Guarantee Are Today’s Call of the Hour, Michael Laitman, Ph.D.

Chapter 4: A Nation on a Mission
The Role of the Jewish People

 The Legacy of the Jews

The Jews that remained in Babylon after the ruin of the First Temple developed a flourishing community that spread throughout the Persian Empire. Later, when the Second Temple was ruined and the Romans conquered the land of Israel, the Jewish people lost its sovereignty over the land.

But the conquest of the Jewish people introduced the world to two tenets that were to become the basis of all three predominant, aptly named “Abrahamic” religions: “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and “monotheism,” meaning that there is only one God, one force governing the world. These notions are paramount to the success of the correction of humanity because when understood correctly, the former defines the mode by which we will achieve correction—through loving others, and not kin, but our neighbors, meaning strangers. The latter defines the essence of our attainment once we are corrected—the singular force of reality.

Accordingly, Professor T.R. Glover from Cambridge University wrote in The Ancient World, “It is strange that the living religions of the world all build on religious ideas derived from the Jews.”[i] Likewise, Herman Rauschning, a German Conservative Revolutionary who briefly joined the Nazis before breaking up with them, wrote in The Beast from the Abyss: “Judaism, nevertheless … is an inalienable component of our Christian Western civilization, the eternal ‘call to Sinai’ against which humanity again and again rebels.”[ii]

The exile of the Jewish people from the Land of Israel was a long process by which Jews, and therefore Jewish values, were gradually absorbed by their host nations. Yosef Ben Matityahu, better known as Josephus Flavius, the Romano-Jewish historian, describes the expulsion of the Jews by the Romans at the beginning of the exile. In The Wars of the Jews, Flavius writes, “And as he remembered that the twelfth legion had given way to the Jews, under Cestius their general, he expelled them out of all Syria, for they had lain formerly at Raphanea, and sent them away to a place called Meletine, near Euphrates, which is in the limits of Armenia and Cappadocia.”[iii]

In Chapter 3, Flavius elaborates, “For as the Jewish nation is widely dispersed over all the habitable earth among its inhabitants, so it is very much intermingled with Syria by reason of its neighborhood, and had the greatest multitudes in Antioch by reason of the largeness of the city, wherein the kings, after Antiochus, had afforded them a habitation with the most undisturbed tranquility.”[iv]

Today, narrates author Yaakov (Jacob) Leschzinsky in The Jewish Dispersion, the Jews have spread the world over, and at a surprising pace. “When we scan the diaspora of Jewry over the entire globe and throughout the entire civilized world,” he writes, “we are surprised to see that this nation, which is almost the most ancient in the world, is in truth the youngest in terms of the land under its feet and the sky above its head. Because of the relentless persecutions and forced expulsions, most Jews are but recent newcomers to their respective lands of residence. Ninety percent of the Jewish people have lived in their new homes for no more than fifty or sixty years! (The Jews) are dispersed over 100 lands on all five continents.”[v]

Interestingly, their mingling with other nations is precisely what was required to complete Moses’ corrections. While it is true that, as long as Israel was apart from other nations, the above-mentioned tenets at the heart of Judaism could not be tainted, it is also true that the Jews had much to gain from their exile among the nations. This is why the Book of Psalms (106:35) tells us that the Jews were exiled to “Mingle themselves with the nations and learn their works.”

[i] Terrot Reavely (T.R.) Glover, The Ancient World (US: Penguin Books, 1944), 184-191.

[ii] Herman Rauschning, The Beast From the Abyss (UK: W. Heinemann, 1941), 155-56.

[iii] Josephus Flavius, The Wars of the Jews, Chapter 1, translated by William Whiston in The Works of Flavius Josephus (UK: Armstrong and Plaskitt AND Plaskitt & Co., 1835), 564

[iv] William Whiston, The Works of Flavius Josephus, 565.

[v] Yaakov (Jacob) Leschzinsky, The Jewish Dispersion (Israel, World Zionist Organization, 1961), 9.

Unity Convention, Day One – 03.06.15

Lesson on the Topic: “Preparation for the Convention”

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Unity Convention, Day One, Lesson 1

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