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New Life #198 – Falling In Love, Part 2

New Life #198 – Falling In Love, Part 2
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Nitzah Mazoz

Summary

What influences the process of falling in love? What must we learn about ourselves to communicate correctly? And how do relationships serve as a means for clarifying our need for mutual connection?

Building a true, internal connection with a partner opens up an entire world. We begin to play together with a chord of mutual complementarity. Being a part of a group that aims toward connection in general can support us in our search for the right partner.
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From KabTV’s “New Life #198 – Falling In Love,” part 2, 6/20/13

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Time To Awaken The Deficiency And Shorten Time

Dr. Michael Laitman

Opening the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/24/18

In relation to the topic, “from disturbances to ascent,” the word “disturbances” is imprecise, because if we say that “there is none else besides Him,” that there is only one force, not two or three, but only one force acting in reality, then everything comes from the Creator, and He is good and benevolent.

Therefore, negative and positive influences from one extreme to the other stem from a single force, the “good that does good.” Only in the person does that influence split into two, where he feels good in some of those influences, and bad in others. This just points out the lack of a person’s correction, that he has no equivalence with the Creator, where he needs to feel everything emanating from the Creator as good, and the Creator as benevolent. If one doesn’t feel, at every moment, as being in an ocean of the good that does good, at least as an embryo in its mother’s womb, on all sides, in all discernments, where only good, mercy and love encase him, it’s a sign that he has a problem with his vessels’ correction.

Anyone could say, “Yes, I have a problem with the correction of the vessels, but what can I do about it? I don’t feel its lack. I cannot correct what I don’t lack.”

Therefore, here we need to attain the deficiency for correction. However, at least, we start by determining that we, who are in an ocean of good, benevolence, Light, bestowal and love, don’t feel it, which points out our lack of correction.

Now, how can I wake up? How can I not remain as I was before this calculation? Also, now, after this calculation, I feel a little bad and a little good, but it doesn’t concern, shake or force me to now act and exert. There is no deficiency. Intellectually, I could be saying all the right things, but it’s not enough. Emotion—deficiency—needs to shake me from my stance.

Deficiency can come from above. That is considered as being the path of suffering. Deficiency can come from a person who enters into proper connection with the environment, and through envy, lust and honor, he obligates himself to exit this world and enter the spiritual world.

If he doesn’t do that through the ploys great Kabbalists write about, then he doesn’t progress on the path of Achishena (“I will hasten it”). He is gradually brought closer on the path of Beito (“in due time”), but it is gradual, i.e., it is time dependent, and also dependent on a person’s attitude to the whole general system.

Therefore, everything depends on our attitude to the situation: Can we, even in a state where we feel nothing—where nothing moves me, nothing matters to me, and where I simply don’t care, most of the time when I’m detached from spirituality, where I seemingly know what’s going on and I’m ready to just keep going with the flow—how can we muster all the means at our disposal in order for us to, in the group, somehow create an alarm system that will wake us up, that will impact us. Even if we all fall asleep, in any case, let there be something that pushes and pulls us to the purpose of creation.

That is considered as accelerating time. It is called “Israel sanctifying the times.” Whoever is “Yashar Kel” (“straight to God”) really shortens time, and everything depends on shortening time, because certainly Gmar Tikkun (the end of correction) is alive, even now, but do we reach it or not, now or in who knows how many events, incarnations or years?

The main thing is that our work is not through great ascents and great descents, but on indifference—it’s a war on indifference. That desert consumes us.
[220779]
From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson on January 24, 2018.

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New Life #352 – Controlling Time

The Time When Kabbalah Is Revealed

254.02Remark: Until the 17th and 18th centuries, Western civilization lived with a sense that there is some kind of cosmic order in society and in nature, that there is an upper force.

My Comment: Man in Western civilization walked, as they said , under the grace of God, a God they invented for themselves. This was useful for kings, clergy, and other controlling structures. It gave a king legitimacy that he was God’s representative on Earth.

But then everything turned upside down because egoism grew and it was no longer possible to reign over people. Various movements appeared: Calvinism, Lutheranism, and so on, which gave a powerful push for future development.

Very quickly those movements started to transform religion into new social forms because the old ones were already useless for the development of the population. In its social, economic, and political relationships, the population outgrew the framework of the old religion; it needed a different religion. So various faith-based movements appeared.

The Middle Ages were distinguished by rapid development. It only seems to us that it was somewhat slow. But serious processes were taking place that gave significant impetus for new possibilities in the development of the sciences and arts, and the birth of a new freedom. The individual started to emerge from the control of the clergy.

And then the question of how to keep the individual reined in arose. All sorts of nationalistic movements appeared, and opposing them, socialistic and communistic movements.

Question: What was the goal of leaving ordinary religion? To prepare humanity for a more enlightened perspective?

Answer: The goal of nature is giving people the opportunity to understand their own destiny and to find the means of solving the most important question of life: “Why do I exist?”

During those years, even if such a question arose, it was suppressed by the fears and opinions of society. But after the Middle Ages, it began to manifest more forcefully according to the inner development of people who no longer feared calling themselves atheist, not connected to the Creator. Theism is connection with the Creator, atheism is the absence of this connection.

Question: Didn’t the atheists also try to build a social system based on morality, but without the control of the upper force?

Answer: Yes. They tried to figure out how a government could be structured if there is no upper power, not in the form of God and not in the form of a king. This was a very serious leap forward, when the individual comes first.

But the individual is not capable of controlling himself, he cannot do anything “without the king at the head” and without God at the head. That is why all kinds of terrorist movements appeared: fascism, Nazism, etc. People were searching for how to control themselves, to hold the system in order, and saw they could not succeed. And so they went, from blow to blow.

Therefore, in the beginning of the 20th century, after rapid development of science, culture, and self-consciousness, the science of Kabbalah began to be revealed. When the era of scientific discovery and arts ended, it became clear they did not provide an answer to the question about the meaning of life, which appeared even before the Middle Ages. Even the Age of Enlightenment did not give us this answer.

Then, Kabbalah was revealed. It began explaining that it had the solution to these problems. But since it is irrational to humanity’s way of thinking, it is as if taking the theory of relativity and trying to apply it to daily life.

In our world it is not understood, and even if it is understood, then only by a few people. So what is there to talk about with the simple person? But according to Kabbalah, everyone must be raised to a new level.

Therefore, even though Kabbalah is being revealed, it is apparent that a great deal of time is needed before people understand that society must exist on its principles and will otherwise not have the ability to sustain itself.

Humanity is gradually approaching this state, but it does not yet exist in it. Right now our Kabbalistic group is engaged with modeling these principles, analyzing them, and developing them internally, like in a laboratory. But, eventually, this will be the realization of the basic law of nature in humanity.

Kabbalists are obligated to demonstrate to humanity that their methodology is the only one that has the answers to the future structure of nature, society, humanity, family, and upbringing. And without it, the world will not be able hold itself in any kind of a framework.
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From KabTV’s “The Last Generation,” 7/3/17

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My Facebook Page: “Vice President Mike Pence Not Only Recognized History…”

Dr. Michael LaitmanFrom My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 1/23/18

Vice President Mike Pence not only recognized history but also the past and future of the Jewish people, as a nation that must reveal the Creator to the world. This is a giant step towards the discovery of the thought of creation—to unite all the nations of the world, “for they shall all know Me, from the least of them unto the greatest of them” (Jeremiah 31, 33)

How To Correctly Perceive The Methodology Of Kabbalah

laitman_250Question: How do we correctly perceive the methodology without introducing an incorrect understanding?

Answer: We must read more and more, passing all the Kabbalistic material through us, like through a meat grinder.

In addition, systematically listen to lessons trying not to miss them because every next lesson, even on a completely different topic, is still at the level following the previous lesson.
[219508]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 1/14/18

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Newsmax: “Parents Must Teach Kids Redeeming Social Media Values”

The largest portal Newsmax published my new article: “Parents Must Teach Kids Redeeming Social Media Values

 

Parents of the 21st century, the Logan Paul controversy must become your wake-up call.

If our kids can swipe their finger to watch a prankster filming the body of someone who committed suicide and then joking about it, then we should realize something went terribly wrong with the younger generation and we are either oblivious to it or simply don’t care.

Parents, after you pinch yourselves to check if you’re awake, please bring yourself up to date with what’s going on: YouTube pranksters in their twenties have become educators and role models for our kids. They aren’t scripted characters in a fictional movie, they are real people doing real pranks in the real world. Kids look up to them more than they look up to their teachers and in some cases more so than their parents.

Here are some questions for parents to ask themselves: Do I know what my kids are learning from Internet idols they’re following? Do I know what examples they are imitating? Do I know what level of explicit content they are exposed to?

Now let’s talk about why Logan Paul did what he did. Obviously, because he makes over $50,000 per video, he wants to attract as many viewers as possible, and he turned to showing a dead body to increase his fame and fortune. But how on earth did he get the idea that filming a dead body is appropriate?

My answer. Logan Paul is a 22-year-old who grew up in a culture that surrounded him with visual depictions of gore and violence, and naturally, he got somewhat used to it. Like typical Americans his age, Logan had watched more than 200,000 acts of violence that include more than 16,000 murders by the time he was 18. He also watched children’s programming that displays up to 20 violent acts per hour.

Long story short, we allowed Logan’s generation to pick up their examples, role models and values from a media culture that’s extremely saturated with violence, and now we are letting them be the role models for today’s kids.

Also, Logan Paul’s “We Found a Dead Body” video was liked by about 600,000 people before the backlash began, which means he wasn’t just intoxicated by his ego when he thought this video would fly. He actually knew his audience well enough to know that many of them would accept it.

Parents, it’s time we take a look at the bigger picture and recognize the downward spiral of violent media, the degradation of social values, and the horrifying results. If we continue down this road, we will be growing human beings that are completely numb to blood and gore, show little respect to human life, and take into account nothing besides the instant gratification of their ego.

Parents, It’s Time to Act

So parents, if you’ve had enough to make a stand and take back control over your children’s upbringing, first I suggest you join hands and demand from YouTube and other social media platforms to toughen up their regulations, and dedicate the resources needed to make sure their users cannot upload inappropriate content. Saying no to violence and gore should be one area we can all agree on. There’s no reason we should allow anyone to make money by filling our kids’ minds with violent content.

That said, regulations, sanctions and precautions are more like emergency band-aids compared to what needs to happen. Sooner or later, there will be no escape from taking our education system and its methods through a complete makeover. We will have to apply the formats, mediums and styles that appeal to kids, and repurpose them to spread positive values, set good examples and, most importantly, raise human beings that are considerate of others.

Parents, understand your kids’ world. Growing up with the Internet in the palm of their hands has turned them into the first “global-virtual” generation. It’s no wonder that we sometimes think our kids are entirely different creatures. They spend 8–11 hours a day glued to their screens, mostly on social media. They get bored easily, and quickly move on to the next attraction with a swipe of their finger.

And as more of the world goes online, their thinking, interactions and sensibilities become global too. 58 percent of adults worldwide ages 35 plus agree that “kids today have more in common with their global peers than with adults in their own country.”

Spending most of their waking hours being glued to their screens, our kids have become more attracted to the global and virtual than the local and physical. Keep in mind we are all moving into the global-virtual reality, and in that respect, our children are better prepared for these shifts.

We passed the stage where education was about information and knowledge. Today kids can look up the answers on Wikipedia faster than what their teacher tells them at school.

Our education must now focus on building the human being. And that means building a value system within the person and a social environment around the person that balances the human ego and directs it towards positive realization.

This isn’t about preaching moral values. Our kids won’t buy it since their egos  have evolved beyond it. We have to help them realize their potential and find their expression in a world that is becoming increasingly interconnected, by giving them tools to better understand themselves and to forge meaningful, healthy connections with others.

This does not need to be boring and didactic for them. We can certainly find exciting ways for them to experience positive human connections, through circle-style discussions and collaborative projects with their peers, both virtually and physically.

But for all of that to start happening, parents must get on board. We have to make a decision to get involved in our children’s future, and recognize the need to cultivate the global mindset that matches the conditions of the new global era.
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Kabbalah And Mental Abilities

laitman_623Question: You say that one doesn’t need any special intellectual aptitude to study Kabbalah, that the only thing needed is to attract the upper Light. Wouldn’t it be best if you just had uneducated students?

Answer: The fact is that you are talking about an animal, egoistic mind that helps a person in this world. The range of his intellect can be from a fool to Einstein, but it will not have anything to do with Kabbalah.

Therefore, the main thing for a person is a desire to attain the Creator, and it does not depend on any mental abilities.

Nevertheless, most of my students have higher education.

Question: But if they had no education, would it matter to you at all?

Answer: Absolutely not! Only the question about the meaning of life is important and a very great desire to realize it.
[219479]
From the Lesson in Russian 9/24/17

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Daily Kabbalah Lesson – 1/24/18

Preparation for the Lesson

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Lesson on the Topic: “From Obstructions to Ascents,” (Prep For World Convention 2018)

[media 3] [media 4]

Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Introduction to The Book of Zohar,” Item 56 

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