Audio Version Of The Blog – 12/17/20

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Why Does The Creator Hide From Us?

249.01It is written: “You have made Me.” Yet, how can this be if the Creator is the only force that exists in the universe? This force contains everything, and apart from it there is nothing, nothing extends beyond its borders. Everything comes to life within the Creator, including us.

How can we create the Creator? Didn’t the Creator create us, because there is no one else? The Creator faced a difficult task: to create a creation and develop it so that it becomes independent. It is what we do when we want to foster independence in our children. The Creator, however, had a more difficult task because there is no other force beside Him.

Let’s say we grew up and found out that there is no one else beside the Creator and we are inside this force that influences us. Then what can we do by ourselves?

Therefore, on one hand, the Creator fills the entire universe and controls everything, but on the other hand, we do not see this because He is hidden. This is what we sometimes do with our children, we don’t want to help them so we hide so that they can work on their own and learn how to build something. Apparently, the Creator is concealed because He wanted to make us independent.

On the other hand, we need to learn to live in the world as if the Creator is present. And if He were revealed, we would do exactly what we are doing now when He is hidden. This state is called complete faith. First and foremost, we must reach it: faith above reason, bestowal above the force of reception, above the force of our egoism.

It is possible to overcome egoism only if there is something bigger than it, the force of bestowal. We are made of the of the desire to receive pleasure, and it is not impressed by words but bows to power. If my egoism feels the greatness of the Creator, it will do everything that the Creator commands. Yet, if my egoism feels its own greatness, it follows all the orders of egoism. It is obvious that either one or the other force governs: either the force of our egoism or the force of the Creator’s bestowal.

We behave according to the one that influences us. If egoism were openly active in us, we would obey it in everything and would be called wicked, complete egoists. In fact, this is what is happening now.

And if the Creator were revealed and allowed us to see that He fills the world, if the force and superiority of the will to bestow were revealed, we would immediately bow before it and obey its orders in everything. Sometimes it even happens; suddenly the greatness of the Creator is revealed a little, and we are ready to give and love for a while until this miracle disappears.

Such impulses come and go in order to show us that this is possible, but only if we are more impressed with the greatness of the Creator than with the greatness of our egoism. In other words, the question is who will rule: the will to receive or the will to bestow? There are only these two forces in nature.

However, if we behaved in this way, we would either be criminals who follow only our will to receive or angels who act according to the will to bestow. One or the other force would fully govern us, and we would remain animals, either predatory or holy, acting according to inner instinct. In this form, we are not similar to the Creator, we are not human, Adam, because we did not choose to be egoists or saints.

Then how to make us free so that we can choose whether to receive or to bestow, whether to be opposite from the Creator or like Him? The Creator was faced with the task of making man free so that he will choose what he prefers: either to be an egoist like creation or an altruist like the Creator and become His son, partner, ands similar to the Creator.

The Creator thought and found a solution: put an intermediary between the will to receive and the will to bestow, between the two opposite forces, so that the creation can consist of the will to receive, but will be able to shift to the intention for the sake of bestowal. The Creator created a situation where the creation can be impressed with the greatness of the Creator, the greatness of bestowal, but not directly from the upper force so as not to bow before it, but to study this state to the extent of its desire.

If a person really wants to recognize the greatness of the Creator, but not as His slave, then it is necessary to build a special state for him called the group. In the group, he has the opportunity to decide how much to surrender to his friends, and to this extent to be impressed by the greatness of the Creator.

The Creator is always present in the group but in a concealed way. To the extent that a person yearns to feel the greatness of the Creator through the group, he can feel Him. However, he will feel the Creator and His greatness, not directly but through his friends, through his subjugation before them. In this way, he acquires the force of bestowal and gradually becomes man, Adam, similar to the Creator, an independent person and not an angel.

By connecting with his friends, with the ten, a person shows his desire to be included in the quality of bestowal and operate with this quality received from the Creator through the ten, gradually growing in spirituality. He uses the quality of bestowal creatively, not under coercion, and builds himself as an independent individual similar to the Creator.

This will be true love and bestowal, not forced like in a slave out of fear or under pressure, but as a free person.
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From the 3rd lesson of the Virtual Congress 12/12/20, “You have made Me, building the greatness of the Creator”

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We Must Not Stop!

963.6Hanukkah is a special holiday, which means that the created being ascends from Malchut to the level of Bina. That is, it makes a restriction on its desire to enjoy for its own sake and is corrected by the upper light, and acquires the intention for the sake of bestowal. Bestowal for the sake of bestowal is the level of Bina.

Hanukkah is a celebration of the victory over the “Greeks. “Greek” is the name of the force that pulls a person into knowledge and not above it. This force appears precisely when a person who strives to approach the Creator already acquires some properties of bestowal, that is, he wants to reach the level of Bina.

The person put a lot of effort into his or her correction, invested in the group, in the ten, in the studies, and started to feel what bestowal is. And it is at this time that forces opposite to bestowal awaken in one: forces of separation that pull a person back into egoism.

It is written about this: “The Greeks attacked me.” Egoistic desires awaken inside me, and I must declare an internal war on them and fight the thoughts that one should not go by faith above reason to bestowal and connection. They persuade me to remain in this world, to settle as much as possible in it and enjoy it.

This is the approach of the “Greeks” as opposed to the approach of the Maccabees who call to rise to bestowal to the Creator. There is a war going on in a person between these two opinions. On one hand, I want to reveal the Creator and my soul. But on the other hand, life draws me in, urging me to enjoy its pleasures and not to dream of spirituality.

It is this war that Hanukkah symbolizes, and it takes place in darkness. A person feels that he has fallen under the power of the Greeks, that is, under the complete power of the desire to enjoy, and one has no chance of defeating it. This is how one was created by the Creator.

And then a person seeks inside himself at least some kind of connection with the Creator and finds one thread, grabs it, and prays for salvation. And when the Creator unites with a person and begins to pull him out of his egoism, He seems to light a candle for him. In this way, a person is gradually going out from darkness to light.

He lights a tiny candle of one’s connection with the Creator, and it cannot be smaller. But since the candle lit by the person is connected with the Creator and the Creator is eternal, this candle burns and burns, and the oil in it is not burning out. This is how a person exits one’s egoistic intention and reaches intention to bestow, Hanukkah, the level of Bina, bestowal for the sake of bestowal.

The virtual convention “Uniting Above Reason” at which we attained the previously unattained connection with the Creator just ended. Let us keep this connection and try not to extinguish it. Then we will begin to feel how inside this tiny connection, this thin candle, we are kindling an ever stronger fire until we reach reception for the sake of bestowal until the end of correction.

Hanukkah is only the middle of the path. Let us feel that we are halfway there, and that we just need to preserve the connection that we have reached at the convention and develop it more and more.

We must not stop. Stopping means death! Just continue all the time. We have reached the parking place, and we need to reconstruct ourselves in a new way in order to attack our egoism with renewed vigor and achieve even greater unity.

Everyone should feel that he has the strength to rise above his egoism. And now we can begin to unite on top of our egoism and the egoism of our friends, cover all crimes, both mine and his with love, and build a connection.

Let us begin to implement this law: “Love will cover all crimes.” This is our work after the convention. Good luck!
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From the 3rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/13/20, “Hanukkah

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“Legal Drugs — The Convenient Way To Cull People” (Medium)

Medium published my new article “Legal Drugs — The Convenient Way to Cull People

On November 3, Oregonians decided on something more than their choice for the president of the United States; they chose to decriminalize personal use of heroin, methamphetamine, LSD, oxycodone and other hard drugs. “Today’s victory is a landmark declaration that the time has come to stop criminalizing people for drug use,” said Kassandra Frederique, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, which led the initiative. According AP News, “The Oregon Academy of Family Physicians,” who support the measure, said that “One in 11 Oregonians is addicted to drugs.” We’re not talking about recreational, occasional use of marijuana; we are talking about addiction to hard drugs, the kinds that make you commit crimes just in order to get another dose, and to do it every day. One out of eleven people in Oregon are in that state.

As I see it, the authorities don’t want these people clean; they want them dead. And until they die, they want to keep them from harming other people, so they will allow them to get their daily dose until they stone themselves away. Sooner, rather than later, the state will realize that it’s best to open distribution centers just like today’s soup kitchens, dispense each one their daily dose, and send them back happy and off the streets, away from the (dwindling) regular population.

The Oregon decision also states that “Instead of going to trial and facing possible jail time, a person would have the option of paying a $100 fine or attending new ‘addiction recovery centers’ funded by millions of dollars of tax revenue from Oregon’s legalized, regulated marijuana industry.” However, I don’t think anyone is taking this part of the decision seriously, for two reasons: 1. If drug addicts had $100 they would buy drugs with them, not pay fines. 2. No one truly recovers from drug addiction. And because of it, the authorities are trying to keep them quiet until they wither away.

I can understand why the state would want to put out drug addicts. From the perspective of the authorities, the world is already grossly overpopulated, so tacit culling is the most reasonable solution. If we don’t see a reason for having that many people in the world, then we should find a (preferably) humane way of shrinking the population.

But there is a reason why we are here. Humanity is becoming more crowded precisely because we are meant to connect, not to stay apart in our own little slots. Our unwillingness to connect is why we suffer, since reality is forcing us to be in constant contact with people, while our antagonism toward people grows relentlessly. When the chasm between our growing narcissism and compulsory connection to people becomes unbearable, we seek refuge. Some find it in violence, others in various forms of escapism, including substance abuse, and most everyone finds it in depression.

There is only one solution to this mess: education toward connection. There is a reason why so many people, with such different views and attitudes to life, exist in the world. If we look at the world from a bird’s eye view, we will find that what we experience as dissonance is actually diversity. From a higher perspective, the contradictions on the ground create a beautiful, rich embroidery of colors and streams that weave together to become the fabric of life. Imagine oceans without land, mountains without valleys, forests without deserts, males without females, life without death, summer without winter or fall without spring. Everything we know about life comes from distinguishing one thing from its opposite. Life is not one state; it is the flow between them, from one extreme to the other.

If we were aware of it, and if we knew that this diversity is here for us to enjoy, we would be grateful for the things that irritate us because they are different from us. In fact, we wouldn’t feel them as irritation but as life’s pulse, telling us when it’s time to stream on to the next phase. Our struggle with life would be over and we would not need to run away from it. We would realize what is our purpose in being here — to grasp life in all its depth and richness — and we would never want to get away.

There is no solution to substance abuse except to show people that they are here in order to connect with one another in gratitude, and especially toward those who are different from us since we and they together make the stream of life flow. Alone, each of us is nothing. Together, we are life.
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“What It Takes To Make Peace With Iran” (Times Of Israel)

Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “What It Takes to Make Peace with Iran

With the flurry of normalization agreements that Israel has reached over the last few months, you’d think that we are nearing the end of the Middle-East conflict. I wish it were that easy. These agreements, as great as they are, are mainly business arrangements that appear lucrative to both sides. As long as they yield profit, “peace” will remain. But if they stop doing so, the relations will cool off again. Either way, no real gain (other than economic) has been made by the recent agreements, and no real loss will occur if they are gone. What really counts is our relationships with those who have declared war on us. However, they count not because of what peace with them means for the region, but because of what it means about us, the Israeli people living in Israel.

It is clear that the normalization agreements with Arab countries that have no active conflict with Israel focus on the economic benefits that both sides gain from them. In that sense, I think that Prime Minister Netanyahu’s dealing with these countries is brilliant. However, things get complicated when concerning peace with countries such as Iran, where the motivation is religious.

First, Iranians are very clever people. From our perspective, we are not in conflict with Iran more than we are with any other country. I understand that they need to show their power and want to position themselves as the spearhead of the resistance to the existence of the State of Israel, but in the end, this struggle only drains their strength and doesn’t help them.

However, although we do not consider them enemies, peace with them depends on us and not on them. Wherever there is a conflict, with Israel or not with Israel, resolving it depends on Israel, and for one and only reason: Nations are fighting against us, and against each other, because we are fighting among ourselves. Israel is the barometer of the world. When we fight among each other, it incites and intensifies wars all over the world, and the nations hate us for it, even when those wars look as if they are unrelated to us.

We may not see the connection, and the whole notion may seem bizarre to us, but if you look at the history of the world, you’ll notice that Israel and the Jews are always blamed for wars. Many historians have already noticed it and decry the nations’ relentless tendency to make Israel the perpetual scapegoat. However, you cannot refute the scapegoat argument when people’s anger with Israel is genuine and comes from their gut feeling. Many people who hate Israel have never been to Israel, don’t know where it is, never spoke to an Israeli person, never met a Jew, and can’t even explain why they think their troubles are Israel’s fault. But what can you do if they feel this way? You can’t reason with hatred; reason and feelings work on two parallel planes and the feeling always prevails.

When Israel unite among themselves, it projects calm throughout the world and conflicts the world over subside. This is why The Book of Zohar writes (Toldot, 171), “When the good inclination [people’s kindness] prevails, his enemies, too, make peace with him.” Even more explicitly, in the portion Aharei Mot, The Zohar writes, “‘How good and how pleasant it is for brothers to also sit together.’ These are the friends as they sit together and are not separated from each other. At first, they seem like people at war, wishing to kill one another … then they return to being in brotherly love. …And you, the friends who are here, as you were in fondness and love before, henceforth you will also not part from one another … and by your merit, there will be peace in the world.”

In other words, we cannot complain that Iran hates us. All we need to do is watch the news and acknowledge that Iranians don’t hate us as much as we hate each other. Everyone is looking at us, and we are projecting intense internal odium. If we projected unity and solidarity, it would instantly reflect in the world. Once again, we should sink into our hearts that Iran, and any other enemy for that matter, doesn’t hate us for any other reason than our hatred for each other.

Internal peace is therefore the only peace we need to make. If we achieve it, all other agreements will come naturally and effortlessly. If we radiate internal unity, we will unite the world.
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Feel People At A Distance

962.1Question: Can you feel your students by teaching them virtually? After all, there are millions of people in front of you. You don’t even know their names. You don’t know what they look like. What exactly do you feel?

Answer: It doesn’t matter. How does it happen in a large audience? Let’s say I am teaching at a university where there are several thousand students sitting in a huge hall. If I’m in front of them on the screen, how is this worse? I believe that modern technological innovations do not interfere at all. It all depends on what we fill our channels with.

Comment: Still, I am still trying to understand what it means to feel a huge number of people, even the whole of humanity? For example, my body is made up of billions of cells, but I don’t feel every cell.

My Response: The body knows how to manage itself; it has all of this under control.

Question: However, can a person only feel a few close people or the states that they are going through?

Answer: No. If we aspire to implement one common theme and want to come to one mutual conclusion, then I can have a very clear, close contact with all the people in the audience. There are no problems here. Everything depends only on how much we understand and accept our one common goal.

Question: Let’s say, sometimes I feel that I have something going on with my liver or stomach or lungs. Can you feel, in the same way, that something happened to the students in Latin America, let’s say, somewhere in Chile? Do you feel them in this way?

Answer: That way also, but it’s not just that. Through our connection, we can support each other, motivate, take care of, and carry each other within us. In general, we can make the connection more dynamic.
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From KabTV’s “Communication Skills” 10/7/20

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By The Whip Or Voluntarily?

294.2Question: Failure to comply with moral norms does not entail corporeal punishment, and a person decides for himself whether to follow them or not. Do you think it is necessary to introduce a system of punishments and rewards regarding their implementation?

Answer: I consider it necessary to raise a person to the level where he sees that the implementation of moral standards itself leads one to receive reward or punishment from nature, directly, on the spot.

Question: But since it has not yet happened, is it possible to introduce punishments in the form of a state law?

Answer: Probably you could. But this is not right. This is a policy by the whip. Suppose, you did not give up your seat on public transport to a woman, then a thousand dollars disappears from your account. And if it were a pregnant woman, then ten thousand dollars.

Question: Is it possible to teach a person to comply with norms in this way?

Answer: It is. But it will not correct a person.

Question: What will correct him?

Answer: Only if he consciously, not from fear, realizes that by doing so he is approaching a common force, a common soul.

The method by the whip helps only in the beginning, in order to draw attention to these laws, but not further on.
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From KabTV’s “Communication Skills” 10/9/20

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Let The Kind Win, Not The Strong

552.02Question: Multiculturalism is a concept that recognizes that all cultures are equal and have the same right to exist. Do you agree with this statement?

Answer: It depends on which cultures and what they lead us to. I do not believe in pretty words. “Multi” does not exist in nature at all. There is only one upper force in nature. If we want to be like it, then we come to a good denominator. If not, then we come to the bad.

Comment: But there is such a variety in nature!

My Response: This variety only exists in human nature in which the strong always win. If we want to rise above our nature so as not to devour each other, then we need for the kind to win, not the strong. Only then will we be able to survive.
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From KabTV’s “Communication Skills” 10/16/20

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So That The Concealment Does Not Hide The Creator

260.01Question: What happens when the Creator is revealed with respect to the mind and feelings? Do I fully justify Him or not?

Answer: Naturally you justify the Creator. But the fact is that the revelation happens over the concealment, which does not go anywhere.

Let’s say I reveal something in the actions of the Creator with respect to myself. He appears to me as good who does good, and leads me to the goal. And then this gets hidden from me, and as I enter the concealment, I have to try my best to act as if I am in revelation.

In other words, concealment does not isolate me from the Creator but, on the contrary, makes it possible for me to act as if I am in revelation.

Question: Can I say that I myself conceal the Creator?

Answer: Naturally. My egoism hides Him from me. In the state of revelation, I do not associate myself with my ego and I conceal it from the Creator.

Question: So in double and single concealment, the Creator hides Himself from my egoism?

Answer: There are many different nuances: either the Creator hides Himself from me or hides me from myself.

The fact is that any state consists of four degrees, and we must on each of them establish ourselves as if we are in maximum revelation. Whatever states I go through, I must try to treat everything that happens to me as if I am in full revelation so that no darkness, no concealment, will lower me.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 1/14/19

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Daily Kabbalah Lesson – 12/17/20

Preparation to the Lesson

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Lesson on the Topic of “A Time of Contraction and A Time of Expansion”

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Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Study of the Ten Sefirot, Vol. 1, Part 3, Chapter 3, Item 2″    

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Lesson on the Topic of “The Law of Love in the System of Adam HaRishon”

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Selected Highlights   

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