Overview Of The World Kabbalah Convention 2020
Posted on March 5th, 2020
From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 3/5/20
An overview of the World Kabbalah Convention 2020 by Amit Trapoznik
From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 3/5/20
An overview of the World Kabbalah Convention 2020 by Amit Trapoznik
KabNet published my new article: “How to Respond to Questions about Death in the Coronavirus Era”
As the Coronavirus continues its world tour, and panic penetrates populations of people, some are facing the ultimate question about death.
How should we respond to death? What is death? What happens after we die?
The nature surrounding us is wise and great. We are birthed within, and develop in, nature. Many systems function on a moment-by-moment basis to sustain our bodies for 70, 80, and even 100-plus years.
“And part and parcel with our global-scale problems is a global awakening of life’s deeper questions.”
But why? Are we supposed to just be born, live then die?
We endure difficult and painful years between our births and deaths. How much pleasure do we actually squeeze out of them? We care for our bodies in a Sisyphean way, and we feel less and less energy to keep going.
It is as if we’re shifting from living-and-breathing organisms into a biodegradable stage, after which we completely disintegrate.
Is there any benefit to such an existence? Or are we just supposed to struggle for years to make our way in life as best as we can until we eventually perish?
Evaluating the Purpose of Life through Four Levels of Nature
Each and every finest detail of nature holds benefit and continuity.
There are three distinct levels in nature: still, vegetative and animate. The person, in his current developmental stage, belongs to the animate world. Humanity, however, differentiates itself as the “speaking” level, which is higher than the animate.
What, then, makes humans different to animals?
We are fundamentally a two-legged breathing mammal that fulfills its basic animal needs to eat, drink, sleep and reproduce. However, we have additional mental and emotional capacity, letting us absorb knowledge and wisdom. We raise children, pass knowledge from one generation to the next, and develop tools and our society with the aim of making us feel better and more comfortable.
In other words, we have basic survival needs for food, shelter, sex and family, and then we have social needs where we compare ourselves to others, and we thus fence ourselves off from each other, clothing ourselves, housing ourselves and filling our houses and bodies with countless products that we advertise to each other.
So are we just “smart animals” that have worked out how to make ourselves more comfortable in the world?
The Key Difference between Humans and Animals
The key difference between humans and animals is that we humans have a deeper aspiration seeded within us that aspires beyond the boundaries of our temporary protein bodies.
We also have the ability to pinpoint this aspiration. Like animals, we’re afraid of death and want to live. But in addition to animals, only we humans ask about why we live.
Not all humans ask about the meaning of life. Around a tenth of the adult population asks about the meaning of life, and all children ask about it, but soon forget.
Therefore, the coronavirus, conflicts between different countries and factions, falls of markets, and fierce social division: the harm that society’s cells do to themselves spread like a disease throughout the body of humanity.
And part and parcel with our global-scale problems is a global awakening of life’s deeper questions.
The Journey to the Ultimate Sensation of Our Common Origin
I hope that people with such questions will seek their answers, disallowing the billions of materialistic influences to distract our journey to the sublime perception and sensation of our common origin, and learning and implementing the laws of that perfect reality on the way.
By actively seeking to uncover the answers to our inquiries, like peeling layers of an onion, we delve deeper into the understanding of the need to connect positively to others. Through our positive connection, we enter reality’s control room, balancing our attitude with nature’s attitude of mutual love and bestowal in an interconnected and interdependent wholeness.
When we reach such equivalence of form with nature, we become healthy and beneficial parts in the system of our existence, entering into direct contact with nature’s fundamental quality—love and bestowal—and experiencing a new and perfect life, free of fears, mistakes and problems.
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The Method Received at Mount Sinai
Question: The method that the people of Israel received at the foot of Mount Sinai was given to them on condition that they would become “as one man with one heart.” What is this?
Answer: The condition “as one man with one heart” means to be in our connection as similar as possible to one common, unified upper force and to feel that we are unable to do this ourselves. When we invest a certain amount of effort into connecting, we develop a strong desire to become similar to this force.
Such an aspiration to a state where we together want to become as one common whole awakens the upper light. The upper light affects the person or people who awakened it, and it performs certain spiritual actions upon them; that is, it gives them the strength to connect, to rise above their egoism.
Question: What was new in this method that Abraham did not have?
Answer: Firstly, egoism changed. If egoism is bigger, not in quantity but in quality, then, of course, a different method and other actions are required.
The new egoism requires new means in order to rise above it, to start working with it, and to connect with each other precisely because of it, despite the fact that it separates people.
Therefore, this method is called “the method of connection.” The force that we need to apply in order to connect is called “the upper light” or “the Torah.”
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 7/1/19
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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Is the esoteric Kabbalah even approaching legitimacy?“
Kabbalah is not a form of esotericism.
People want to label Kabbalah as esoteric or mystic, and connect it with blessings, curses, charms, and many other phenomena. These labels became linked with Kabbalah because there was a prohibition on the study of Kabbalah in the masses for 1,000s of years since humanity’s spiritual desire still hadn’t ripened. In the 16th Century, when the Ari (Kabbalist Isaac Luria) lifted the prohibition on the study of the wisdom of Kabbalah, claiming that the time had come for Kabbalah to be revealed to humanity, he also mentioned the prohibition on the use of charms and blessings, since they have nothing to do with Kabbalah.
Kabbalah is a science that teaches the law of reality, of which we are a part. Through this science, we discover those rules and the spiritual world, which is the reason for everything that happens here with us. They are collective rules, which encompass the laws of all the sciences in our world.
Kabbalah is not another belief or an imaginary view of life. Instead, it offers precise and clear laws that depict the structure of the upper worlds.
It is when we study Kabbalah that we first acquire knowledge of the world outside our own. We discover the higher, spiritual world, and then we gradually attain the ability to affect it. Through tests and experiments, we learn how to do it, and then we enter the comprehensive reality.
At this point, we begin to work not from within our own bodies, but from our souls, which are our true essence. The human being is not the physical body that is replaced at the beginning of each new life. The human being is the soul that we currently do not sense.
The purpose of creation is that we will act from within our souls, from the upper world, and live at the highest degree possible, rather than in the lowest (our world), which is at an animal level. By discovering our souls, we attain contact with the upper world, and thus achieve a whole, complete, eternal and blissful life.
Question: You say that our world doesn’t exist. In what sense does it not exist and why? What does “illusory” mean, and whose illusion it is?
Answer: It is our illusion. In reality, our world does not exist.
What does “in reality” mean? In the property of bestowal, which is the only thing that exists in reality; our world does not exist.
Our world is the property of reception, it is pure egoism. And the world itself does not exist, it is purposefully created as a ghostly and illusory one so that we live in it as at the starting point of our true spiritual development, so that we exist outside of the spiritual worlds, outside of true existence.
Our world is simply a black dot.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 1/5/20
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New Life 1200 – Communication In Relationships
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Tal Mandelbaum ben Moshe
Rather than blaming, putting down, or confronting others, we need to find a way to communicate so that the other person can receive it. We always want to be right, but by conceding to an angry person, one disarms them immediately. Every fight can be stopped with a kiss. Children also need to be allowed to express all of their emotions, including anger. Accepting others as they are without wanting to change them is important. Instead, my focus should be on changing myself.
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From KabTV’s “New Life 1200 – Communication In Relationships,” 1/16/20
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Writings of Baal HaSulam, Shamati, 37 “An Article for Purim”
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Writings of Baal HaSulam, “The Peace”
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We must rejoice at the descents and falls, since to the degree of one’s readiness, broken desires, spiritual vessels are revealed to him. If a descent, a bad mood, darkness in the mind and heart, comes, this is given for correction. We understand and feel this darkness, and are obligated to correct this state.
The passage, detachment from the egoistic intention entry into the reign of the intention for the sake of bestowal, is the passage from the material world into the spiritual one, from being under Pharaoh’s rule to being under the Creator’s rule, from Egypt into the land of Israel, Flag of Israel
We must strengthen the mutual guarantee, unity, the group, in advance—prepare all the means so as to maximally correct one more empty part of the common soul that is being revealed. Until you connect all parts of the soul into one soul, you won’t attain the end of correction.
When the spirit of life disappears, we think we move farther away from the Creator. But in reality, new empty cavities are being revealed to us, from which the upper light departed during the fall of sin with the Tree of Knowledge. They were concealed, but are now being revealed in each one of us along the order of degrees, according to a program.
From Twitter, 3/4/20
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The time has come to begin to advance toward the holy goal, that is, to the revelation of the Creator to the creations in this world. Everything is in our hands; nothing prevents it from us. All the events taking place in the world that supposedly delay us actually help us advance toward the goal of creation, to a better understanding of life’s purpose. They help us realize how much our world needs a spiritual ascent: not to be corrected in the same place but to rise to a spiritual level.
It will become increasingly clearer to every person in the world that there is no way out and that cardinal changes in our existence must begin here. Existing in the present form, we will run into a dead end time after time. We have no chance to continue living like this.
The time has come to use all our strength and open the path to a spiritual, perfect life, to open it to humanity as quickly as possible. In fact, all people subconsciously wait for this, but have no idea what it depends on.
Our Bnei Baruch group is made up of people who the Creator has invited to enter the spiritual world and draw close to Him. We must understand our responsibility and realize this opportunity. We have two weeks of very intense spiritual work before us, and we will try to make every effort, to the utmost extent, and will certainly achieve life’s lofty goal.
There are times that are determined from above, and there are times when we trigger ourselves from below. We have set aside this special time for our gathering, the World Kabbalah Convention, and we approach it through great and long efforts. At the same time, we see extraordinarily fearful events unfolding in the world. Yet, it is amazing how nothing stands in the way of our friends traveling to Tel Aviv for the convention. We await everyone with even greater impatience than usual, ready to welcome them with open arms.
Let us hope that for the time remaining before the convention, we will better prepare ourselves for connection so that in the depths of this unity, we will begin to reveal new qualities in which the Creator calls for His revelation. From our efforts to unite together as much as possible and even more, we will see how the Creator shows us the conditions for His revelation. We must feel it.
We need only reveal the need to achieve equivalence with the Creator, to want to feel Him precisely in His very quality of bestowal. May He give us the quality of bestowal, and we will be happy to work with Him. We await that quality, although we do not even know exactly what it is. We ask the Creator to work on us, we are ready for this operation. Let Him make this change in us, implant the quality of bestowal in us, develop and teach us. We want to be clay in the hands of the master, let Him model His likeness from us.
What is required of us is only an initial desire and no more. We have no real need for bestowal, and are unable to understand what it is; we just accept that the Creator will make of us what He wants. This is enough for the Creator to begin to correct us.
It is difficult to realize how connection between friends, between people, can be connected with the attainment of the Creator. Why does the revelation of the Creator suddenly depend on unity of egoists above their egoism? If they hate and repel each other, but nevertheless make efforts to unite, these efforts, penny by penny, accumulate to a large amount, and they build a connection network.
Inside, this entire network is filled with hatred, forces of rejection, and stretched over it are our timid attempts to connect with each other. The system of hatred is as solid as iron. Atop it, we try to sew these iron blocks with thin threads, but as we try, we manage to knit them more and more. We begin to discover that in these very thin threads connecting us with each other, there is a special quality: the upper force of the light, which is much more powerful than the iron rods of egoism. We thus begin to feel each other.
It is a very long process, and it repeatedly leads us to despair, but time does its job and ultimately saves us.
We must believe that the Creator will organize the group and the friends for us so that we have the opportunity to reveal Him, to become like Him, and thereby give Him contentment. Everything has already been arranged from above, and all we need is readiness, a little effort, and it will happen. The Creator arranges all the conditions for us above and we need only give our quota of effort that is in our ability to give. Everything is already calculated above. The upper one is ready to help us and as soon as we complete what we need, we will immediately find the correct result. The Creator will open up and ask: “Well, where were you? I have been waiting so long, but you were not there!”
We will reveal all this as soon as we will provide our desire, the Kli, which is in our power to reveal.
We are ready for revelation; we need only combine our despair, efforts, and aspirations, and it will be sufficient. The power of prayer depends on two factors: on the awareness of one’s powerlessness and one’s lowliness. On one hand, we feel that we have insufficient strength to reveal the Creator, but desperation from the insignificance of our condition is even more necessary. And if we combine these two feelings together, then this becomes enough for the right appeal. The Creator sees that we have realized our worthlessness and is revealed to us.
If the Creator does not help us, then we are lost. You have to feel it with all your gut. We really want to achieve merging with the Creator due to the equivalence of our qualities, to become bestowers, and we ask only for this. Otherwise, this is not life.
There is nothing more to do, we have reached the limit: if the Creator does not give me the quality of bestowal, then I disappear. If He does not connect me with the group, I am lost. I pray to let me cleave to my friends in order to support them with all my might, to serve them, to give and to help them achieve their goal. What will happen to me is unimportant, I want only their good. In order to do so, I come to the convention in order to help my friends achieve their goal, and completely annul myself.
We go through many different states. Sometimes such apathy attacks that a person is incapable of any movement in feeling, thought, and words; one is completely disconnected. And sometimes a person burns with desire, ready to turn mountains. The rest of the time, one is somewhere in the middle between the two, in different states in mind and heart.
The question is how to awaken ourselves in every state for the sake of the ten. We should not wait for the Creator to awaken us, and we should not awaken ourselves individually, but we should wake up with the help of ten, awakening the ten by ourselves. That is the whole point. Everything is only through our connection with the ten: to awaken them with our own efforts and then be inspired by them and act.
Even if there is no feeling and thought for the Creator, but we perform material actions in relation to the group, then this all adds to my account.
Therefore, we do not have to await the Creator’s mercy. The Creator’s worker is the one who works: where the Creator does not awaken him, does not give any incentives, one seeks how to add effort oneself, like an old man looking for something lost even before losing it.
From the Tish 2/14/20, “Preparation for Convention”
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