Audio Version Of The Blog – 11.02.16

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Images Of Gods

laitman_289Torah, Deuteronomy 12:3: And you shall tear down their altars, smash their monuments, burn their asherim with fire, cut down the graven images of their gods, and destroy their name from that place.

“Images of gods” are within me. It is what I imagine as goals that I worship, giving them importance. Therefore, they need to be destroyed completely.

They all are reference points with which I have somewhere to aim. I must do this, achieve this, and perform this. However, when I set one single goal for myself and all of my aspiration is directed only to achieve it, then all of the rest must be destroyed.

It is written about this: “cut down the images of gods that you yourself have built.”

Question: Are these “gods” our earnings, careers, pension funds, and so forth?

Answer: No, whatever is essential for a person for his physical existence should remain. He must think about it and, by all means, provide for himself and not fall into the hands of society. All of the rest he must give only to the achievement of one common goal.

Question: What does it mean “destroy their name from that place”?

Answer: Name is what you used to achieve before, while walking on the wrong path, and you considered it the spiritual achievement. Now it is necessary to part with it, stop thinking that it leads you to something and see before you completely different, exactly spiritual images in your corrected desire.

First you will see partial images and then a complete image of the Creator, which is the quality of bestowal and love. Only this quality should fill all of our desires, and the desires must be formatted so that they would emanate only this quality.
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From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 6/22/16

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How Can We Achieve A Sense Of Balance?

laitman_214Question: If the world is global, the crisis is everywhere, and we experience these states internally, how can we hold on to the forces of adhesion and rejection at the same time in order to keep a sense of balance?

Answer: First, you should understand you are in a state in which you have one force, an egoistic force, an egoistic attraction, and you need another force to balance it, which is the force of rejection.

You cannot reject what is harmful to you. The ego forces you to draw everything that seems good in your direction, but you cannot really examine what is bad and what is good for you.

Therefore, all of our work comes down to acquiring an additional force. It is written, “I have created the evil inclination.” The evil is the ego that is in us from the start, while the good is not inside us.

We can draw the good force through our desire so that it will exist inside us by our own freewill. This is what the wisdom of Kabbalah, discovered by the First Man almost 6,000 years ago, is for, and it tells us how to do it.
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 7/10/16

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The Secret Of Immortality Of The Jewish People, Part 2

laitman_749_02Question: Is it correct to say that a Jew is a symbol of eternity and because of this, these people survived all the trials that fell to their lot and will live forever?

Answer: Any person can become a Jew if he wants to join us. It doesn’t matter what nationality he is and what color of skin he has.

A Jew is something above nature. The Jew is an ideology of rising above our egoistic nature and connecting with others. A person wishing to achieve unity of people (Yichud) and to live in it is called a Jew (Yehudi). Therefore, after becoming a Jew, a person loses all the characteristics of this world, such as nationality and past relationships; he or she becomes a new person.

Question: Is there a guarantee of eternal life to everyone who aspires to unity?

Answer: Everyone who works according to the original method of Kabbalah, using original sources, and who achieves unity, reveals within himself a connection with the upper force that is called the Creator (Boreh), which means “come and see” (Bo-Reh). And in fact, we do “come” to a state and achieve revelation and “see” in it.

Then we are really called the Jews, the people of the Creator, because by uniting between us we provide a vessel for the upper force where it can connect with us. This way we begin to feel our unity and connection with the Creator. This is called the attainment of the upper world.

Question: Why does the principle of unity that is the basis of the Jewish people protect them and prevents them from disappearing?

Answer: Our forefathers, the founders of the Jewish people, began this process. They rose above earthly egoism and preferred unity above separation. Through all generations they aspired to unity, and this made them similar to the Creator; the Upper Light that influenced them was stronger or weaker depending on the importance of unity to them.

We can’t separate the fate of the nation from its purpose, its responsibility to achieve full and universal unity. At the time when they aspired to unity, their fate was good, and as soon as they were destroying this unity, they fell immediately and suffered from enemy attacks. Their lives became terrible.

The history of the Jewish people goes back almost 6,000 years, from the “first man” Adam who was first to reveal this secret and to start talking about unity and connection. It is clear that throughout their entire history, the fate of the Jewish people depended completely on their unity.

Since this nation always aspired to connection and was connected with the upper force, it was called eternal and passed through centuries. At the same time, it also suffered much more than all other nations. Although this nation is immortal, it receives blows all the time.

The wisdom of Kabbalah explains this by the fact that at any time in their history that the Jewish people weren’t aspiring to unity and drawing the Reforming Light hard enough; therefore, the Light wasn’t strong enough to correct them and dwell in them.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” 10/13/16

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Bring Up A Man

laitman_946Question: If a father wants to give a child an example of advancement toward and longing for spirituality, what must he do? In what way can he express spirituality?

Answer: A person who aspires for spirituality goes through two stages:

  1. He learns about the structure of the world and discovers that the world is a closed integral system, as all of science and research have also verified.
  2. He understands that the role of a person is to match himself to the general integral world.

What this means is that a person who longs for spirituality shows how important it is to take himself out of the state that is opposite to nature and bring himself to a state of full connection with it, similarity to it.

This desire for connection with all parts of creation, to mutual harmonious cooperation with nature, to be similar to it, is called “raising a man.”
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 6/26/16

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European Paradise

laitman_426Comment: On the one hand, the standard of living in Europe is high with the security of social support. On the other hand, the level of social problems is also very high. People don’t feel satisfied with their lives. There is a feeling that we have created a “paradise” in which everyone suffers. There is complete disonance.

My Comment: You can feed, clothe, put to bed, cover, and put the “beastly” physical body to sleep, but the Adam (man) in you, within this beast, will not be able to be clothed, fed, put to bed, and surely will not go to sleep! Like a little child doesn’t want to go to bed and doesn’t want to sleep, a person looks at his life and sees that there is no meaning in it, he no longer gets any satisfaction from anything.

Question: People used to be satisfied and now they aren’t?

Answer: Egoism grew! What can be done? People have grown.

If we read books that were written 50 years ago or see movies that were filmed then, we not only think of them as naïve people, but completely different. Immense changes have happened with humanity!

Europe is in the opposition between material abundance and inner emptiness. This is the problem of our times, a terrible paradox that leads to depression, alcoholism, and drug addiction.

Until people discover the answer to the question about the meaning of life, nothing will be good. This is the main question. Most Europeans still don’t clearly understand things are bad for them, what is eating them, but the question is coming up more and more clearly for everyone.

Nature is moving us toward a scream, “Why is all this happening to me?!” Later, specifically thanks to the suffering, when we want to attain the essence of nature, then the meaning of life will be revealed.

Question: Does this mean that it is possible to return to the “paradise” they built there?

Answer: No. When they built the bourgeois paradise, they internally rose above it, queries became different. They are no longer satisfied.

Question: Does that mean that paradise on Earth is impossible?

Answer: No. If we were to stop human development, the development of his internal desires, they would not grow qualitatively, then everything would be fine. But we take only their quantitative growth into account.

More and more material fulfillment has been given to people, but this is not what they need. They already want loftier things, and they don’t exist. So we have to give them what they want now, and this is the meaning of life.
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From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 9/19/16

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Praying For The Creator

laitman_534Question: What is “a prayer for the Creator?”

Answer: To pray for the Creator means to do everything with the purpose of giving Him the opportunity to be revealed within the creatures. This is what He wishes and the reason He created a single desire, i.e., the entire universe.
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From the Convention In Moscow, Day One 5/2/16, Lesson 3

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Advancing Wisely

laitman_629_3Question: Before coming to the wisdom of Kabbalah, I felt totally indifferent. I had no desire to live and I could hardly crawl through life. Can this happen again?

Answer: You didn’t have a group at the time; you didn’t have the support of the group; you had no method and no influence of the Upper Light, and so it isn’t the same thing.

Baal HaSulam refers quite often to the fact that it is impossible to enter the upper world unless you are using the method of Kabbalah.

This method wasn’t invented artificially. Kabbalists who transcended to the upper world have included their spiritual experience, described it, and thus enable us to advance more wisely by taking steps that we understand better.
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New Life #377 – The Female Approach To A Real Change

New Life #377 – The Female Approach To A Real Change
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Tal Mandelbaum ben Moshe

Summary

What is the man’s place in complementing a woman who adapts to the integral world, and how can we carry it out in society by education?

Women’s organizations that operate in an aggressive male-like manner to achieve equal rights will not accomplish their goal. It is impossible to equalize what nature has differentiated. We have to find a way to reconcillation between the sexes. Aggressive women are successful in a competitive egoistic society,  but this is not exercising the female force.

The nature of the change we need today: in the past the strong prevailed, but today the one who is positively connected to others prevails. The fact that the world has become integrated makes it very difficult for the men, who cannot act in this network.

A woman, on the other hand, is a home, a family, connection, giving birth; she can annul herself for others and complement them. We need a transformation in the heart and mind of every person. We have to realize that the world is integrated and that we depend on each other. Women will digest this change in our perception more easily and thus will lead the change.

The change will start with learning. When we all learn where we are headed, both men and women, then we will act. Managing the change will be in combining the male and the female forces. The feminine demands and the masculine fulfills. The right mutual complementation will lead the world to peace and wholeness, without any distortions and pressures, to perfection.
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From KabTV’s “New Life #377 – The Female Approach To A Real Change,” 5/20/14

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Daily Kabbalah Lesson – 11.02.16

Preparation for the Lesson

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Lesson on the Topic: “Shame”

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