Audio Version Of The Blog – 2/3/21

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Material In The Master’s Hands

936At every step, we discover that correction is the work of the Creator, and we only ask for it. Our job is to raise a prayer.

Overcoming also lies in asking and presenting ourselves to the Creator as broken fragments, agreeing that He will do with us whatever He wants and has planned. We are ready for this and we hand ourselves over to Him as material in the hands of the master.

We are no longer capable of overcoming anything, we can only hold on to our devotion to the Creator and be willing to hand ourselves over to Him for correction as He sees fit. We prepare ourselves for this agreement in advance with the help of our friends and the group.

This is a lot of work, not passively waiting for action to be performed on us from above. We work to discover our shattering, shortcomings, and genuine prayer.

The Creator makes the correction by the force of the light, but we must be ready to connect, having exhausted all attempts and being certain that we cannot do it ourselves. And then we come to the Creator as a child running to his father, crying when he cannot assemble the cubes by himself and asking for help.

But we cannot ask Him in advance. This glue that connects the bricks of our house is made from our dissatisfaction, our tears, our suffering. All this we bring to the Creator with tears, complaining that the cubes do not fit together, or they do and immediately fall apart. So what is missing there?

Our tears lack the upper force. When the prayer (MAN) from our side and the answer (MAD) from the Creator combine, they turn into such a force that glues all the broken fragments together correctly and forever. This is how we reveal our integration with the Creator time after time.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 2/2/21, “Mingling/Inclusion”

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The Point Where The Creator Is

934The entire connection between us and our connection with the Creator is in the center of the ten. The center of the ten is the point through which the Creator addresses the creation, the place where the Creator (Bo-Re), “come and see” is; it is where we reveal Him.

The center of the ten is the place where the attitude of the Creator toward the creation is manifested. Before that, the Creator is only an abstract concept we are unable to feel and understand in any way. Therefore, the center of the ten must be constantly kept as a goal toward which we strive all the time.

Everything that happens should be attributed to the center of the ten: both immersion in darkness and illumination with light. As birds that carry everything into their nest—food for the chicks, straws—we constantly add dozens of our explanations to the center, both positive and negative. We study what causes our distancing from each other (which is also beneficial since it adds desire, Aviut) and how we can draw closer above those obstacles by building a Masach on them and uniting.

And when our unity becomes strong enough, the Creator will reveal itself and it will become clear that it was Him who caused rejection between us, separation, all the levels of egoism from 0 to 4, and that He also helped us to unite over this separation, building a screen for us of the same levels from 0 to 4.

Upon this contrast between egoism and purity, we will begin to understand the Creator because we will have two forms that reveal the concept “Creator” (come and see). Two opposite poles will be there— breaking and connection, concealment and revelation—and we can determine our connection between them, covering all transgressions with love, and we will reveal the Creator on the basis of two opposites.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/29/21, “Love Covers All Transgressions”

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“No More Sacred Cows” (Linkedin)

My new article on Linkedin “No More Sacred Cows

Despite lockdowns, strict guidelines, and new vaccines expected to combat COVID-19, morbidity is constantly intensifying and mortality is at its peak. Regardless of who is in power, world leaders are discovering they are incapable of finding feasible solutions to emerge from the crisis. The impotence to deal with the pandemic and its subsequent effects will eventually exacerbate and exhaust human leadership, reveal its failing and fragile governance, and motivate us to recognize that there are no more sacred cows. The world demands a higher leadership: the leadership of nature.

The threads of connection between the people and their leaders have long been torn, although only now the rift is being fully revealed. Now we can no longer rely on the decrepit and shaky leadership of the past. Instead, we must learn to communicate properly and learn how to support each other. Within this new network of connections, we will create an infrastructure for an entirely new kind of leadership, the supreme power of nature, a power that will raise us from the crisis and help us build a new life.

Nature has its own pace of development which is currently on the fast track due to the pandemic. If we cannot beat nature at its game, we better join it in its trajectory toward a more balanced human society. The systems we have created—family, neighborhoods, cities, societies, and countries—are all based on purely egoistic relationships, on exploitation and competition, on contempt and arrogance. In such systems the spirit of division grows and they are in stark contrast to the form of nature that strives for connection and unity.

The conflict between the laws of society and the laws of nature—the gap between the egoistic and the altruistic—is what led us to the current crisis. This conflict became the tipping point that toppled us into the coronavirus plague on a global scale.

But there is room for subtle optimism. Alongside the sickness and the difficulties, the despair and helplessness, a great new desire is arising; a desire that has always been present but only now emerges in clarity from the harsh grip of the pandemic that is squeezing the breath out of us. The public is beginning to realize that all the paths we have walked throughout history are of no use to us in this difficult time of crisis. Even in all the research and academic knowledge we have accumulated and the sophisticated technology and advanced medicine, there is no lasting benefit. Within the span of a year, the tower of cards we had worked so hard to construct for generations collapsed before our eyes.

The virus that nature has sent us requires us to recognize that nature is spurring us on to the opposite direction from our selfish human calculations, toward a trajectory of complementarity, of support and help, of consideration and solidarity, of concern and mutual guarantee. Such social behavior, which includes choosing values of brotherhood and friendship, strengthens the bonds between us and brings us closer to creating an entirely new social fabric that exemplifies harmony with nature.

If we respond positively to nature’s redirection and strive for a cordial connection, we will discover that we are strengthened by a great connecting force, a supreme power that allows us to overcome contradictions and oppositions, a force that solidifies the human race into a new cohesive unit. And the more we increase love above transgressions and factions, the more we will invite this positive force of nature, the more a unifying source will arise between us that will bring us to higher states.

It is a fruitless hope to expect anything from the government or organizations and politicians to lead toward a positive change. Because the peaks and plateaus they promise us are not in the direction of social unity, their offers are empty and irrelevant.

Although this desire to harmonize with nature as a united humanity is growing gradually and awareness of it is increasing organically, there is still a requirement and duty to proactively focus on and explain extensively the program and evolution of nature. Otherwise, our growing egotistical tendency threatens to continue to pull us apart while we trample on others.

We do not need connection for the sake of control, nor do we need separation in order to govern, but what we need is a type of connection whose purpose is mutual complementation in order to create a sense of equality. This equality we will build is not equality that flattens everyone, but equality that empowers through differences, one that respects every individual’s desires and singularities, yet wisely complements them and shapes them into patterns of connection similar to the trends observed in nature.

The threads of connection between the people and their leaders have long been torn, although only now the rift is being fully revealed. Now we can no longer rely on the decrepit and shaky leadership of the past. Instead, we must learn to communicate properly and learn how to support each other. Within this new network of connections, we will create an infrastructure for an entirely new kind of leadership, the supreme power of nature, a power that will raise us from the crisis and help us build a new life.
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“Wars Are Just Too Risky” (Linkedin)

My new article on Linkedin “Wars Are Just Too Risky

It’s not as if struggles are a thing of the past, but it seems as though people are beginning to grasp that war is a bad idea. From Khamenei to Putin, from Xi Jinping to you name it, world leaders are realizing that the world is so unsteady that if they start a war, no one will win.

Even regional wars seem more and more like a bad idea; everyone is terrified of what they might lead to. It does not mean that there are no power struggles. There are struggles and there will continue to be struggles, but I don’t see an all-out war on the horizon.

The thing is that the world has become so interconnected that if you start a fire somewhere, you have started a fire everywhere. Previously, you could use proxy wars to provoke other countries. If a certain country wanted to provoke the US, for example, it would instigate a military conflict in Latin or Central America. Countries also used Africa as an arena for provoking other countries, but today we have become too globalized and wars have become too risky.

We are governed by connection. We may call it globalization or we may call it a pandemic; either way, we are all inexorably connected. Therefore, the only smart thing to do is use the connection imposed on us to our benefit.

Connection itself is not bad. It is actually very good for us, if used correctly. It saves costs, saves efforts, utilizes advantages in one country to benefit other countries, and has the potential to make our lives much better. The problem is that we are trying to use connection to deepen our exploitation of each other rather than for positive purposes.

The solution is not to disconnect; connection has past the point of no return. The solution is to fix the connection so that we don’t use it to exploit and control one another but to embolden and support one another. If we do that, everyone will benefit from it.

To change how we use connection, we have to change our mindset. We have no choice but to shift from a mindset of power struggles to a mindset of support. Why? If we don’t change our mindsets, we will suffer more and more until we surrender and agree to support each other nonetheless, so the sooner we change our mindset, the better. Bit by bit, we must sink into our minds that the era of wars is over, and the era of connection and mutual support has begun, and we must act the part. This is where reality is going, and behaving any other way is, well, out of touch with reality.

Heads of states will continue to struggle for power, but we, humanity, must sink into our minds that connection is our only option for a decent life. If we embrace connection, our governors will have no choice but to play ball. If we let the idea permeate into our minds, it’ll permeate into our lives. Wouldn’t we all want that?

“History’s Clock Is Ticking” (Linkedin)

My new article on Linkedin “History’s Clock Is Ticking

If you look at the world from a bird’s-eye view, you will see that its parts are gradually coalescing. We may approve or disapprove of the process, but it is both involuntary and irreversible. And the more we coalesce, the more frictions emerge. The trajectory of reality is unchanging—toward greater connection, greater interdependence, and greater integration. What may change is how we experience it. If we object to it, it will be painful and bloody. If we embrace it, it will be easy and joyful.

There used to be ideologies, ideals, and doctrines that people strove to implement in order to establish what they believed was a successful way for society to conduct itself. Now, the masses are awakening the world over, and they don’t care about ideals or doctrines. If they feel solidarity among them, they will support the government that makes them feel it. If they feel division, they will revert to aggression and violence, as is happening now.

No regime, anywhere in the world, will succeed these days, and the world will decline into more and more chaos, since no regime aspires for connection. None of today’s world leaders are suitable for the task of uniting the people since the motivation of all of them is power, and not the well-being of the people. While this motivation was enough to establish a stable government before, today it will not work. If it goes against the movement of nature—the trajectory of reality toward connection—it will not work.

It’s not as though governments will fall to pieces tomorrow, but the trend is clear, and nothing that leaders might do can change it. The direction of today’s governance must be toward connection in the public. If leaders want the public to connect to them, while they are on top and the public is subordinate to them, this is not connection and it will not work.

History has its own clock. One tick at a time, it is moving toward its final goal: the union of all of humanity into a single entity. As it moves, it exposes our inherent aversion to it. The abhorrence of otherwise civilized people toward people who hold different views is only the prelude. The chasm will deepen and so will the suffering until we decide that we have no other way to live except together. We, humanity, can choose to go by the short and pleasant path of connection, or by the long and painful one of division and hatred.

We should not wait for leaders to take us on the path of connection. As stated above, their sole interest is power, their own. Connection among people contradicts their aim since if people are united, they don’t need many governors and big governments. Only when people are divided do we need to compromise and governors can alternate seats, and in the end, benefit themselves at the expense of the public. Therefore, we should let governors govern, while we nurture our connection regardless of their intentions to divide.

Also, and this is important, connection does not mean sameness. In order to build successful societies we must cultivate our differences, not bury them. When we use our uniqueness to complement each other and create a more complete society, rather than to compete against others and strive to supersede them, life becomes simple and easy, and there is abundance for everyone.

When we use our differences for the common good, we create flexible and responsive societies that can adapt to any situation and make the most of it. Just as a body utilizes different parts of itself to perform different tasks, whenever social or economic conditions change, a diverse but unified society will be able to respond to it much better and use its diversity to grow stronger rather than disintegrate and leave its members vulnerable.

The bottom line is that we must not wait for leaders to do our work for us, and we must not expect them to improve our lives. If we want a good life, we will find it in unity with everyone, when we make unity our topmost value, rather than this or that political idea. Society, as I said in the beginning, is coalescing. Only if we embrace our differences and use them to forge unity will we go through this process successfully. But if we succumb to the notions of separation and aversion, we will sow wind and reap the storm.
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“Can Society Govern?” (Linkedin)

My new article on Linkedin “Can Society Govern?

Today’s society is divided because it is in the interest of politicians to divide. If you never heard about racism, and you and your family lived next door to a family of a different faith, ethnicity or skin color, would it cross your mind to doubt their decency because of these differences, or would you relate to them according to the people they are?

The political protests in Russia and Belarus, the Covid-19 riots in Western Europe, the disputed presidential election in the US, and the coup in Myanmar mirror the crisis in governance that the entire world is experiencing. People have lost trust in their governments, so they take to the streets, take up arms, and try to force their opinion on their countries. But the days of forceful governance are coming to an end. If people have no trust in the government, the government will not be able to govern. We are on the doorstep to a new era, where connected societies will govern themselves. Not without administrators, of course, but society will call the shots and not elite groups of manipulators who preach one thing and do another.

Today’s society is divided because it is in the interest of politicians to divide. They sound divisive rhetoric into every microphone that gives them voice, and the hatred they spew sets people off against each other for no reason at all.

Think about this for a minute: If you never heard about racism, and you and your family lived next door to a family of a different faith, ethnicity or skin color, would it cross your mind to doubt their decency because of these differences, or would you relate to them according to the people they are? We are approaching a threshold beyond which the vitriol of hate-politics will stop working. People will gradually begin to see that hating other people for their ethnicity, faith, political view, color, or culture does not do them good. It hurts them and benefits the politicians who use this technique. When this happens, people will truly be willing to connect, and true popular leaders will rise.

They will not be politicians; they will be people who are true servants of the public, who make sure everything runs smoothly only so that people can engage in what really makes them happy: being together, socializing, forming bonds and uniting.

Connection is a power in and of itself. Connection is the engine of reality. Everything we see around us consists of countless parts and items intricately connected in perfect harmony that enables them to work flawlessly together. Every animal society also works this way, as do the animal societies within the overall ecosystem where they live. Only we, humans, through our hate-politics, strive to part what can’t be parted, break what can’t be broken, and we become frustrated when the work of our hands, the society we’ve built for ourselves, does not function and does not provide for our needs.

When we give up on the lunacies of hate-speech and cancel-culture, and embrace the different elements that make up who we are as a society, we will find that there is abundance for everyone, and for anyone who wants to join. The only criterion for good living is connection among the individuals that make up a society. Thanks to opportunist politicians who seek to profit from our division, we have now learned that hatred doesn’t pay. We have broken everything and we are not happy. Therefore, now we can begin to build. Now we can begin to establish a society that follows one and only principle: connection. Everything else will fall into place naturally. And that governance of connection will be the real governor of society.

“Do Not Believe In Yourself Until The Day You Die”

961.2 Dear Michael Laitman,

I went through all the spiritual practices: I was a Buddhist, a Hare Krishna, I studied the Vedas, converted to Islam, I was baptized, and lived as a hermit for two years. If I tell my story, everyone would be stunned.

But for three months now, I have been sitting here watching your videos, unable to stop. Why is that? I don’t want to be disappointed again. What would you advise me to do? I feel like I have finally found what I have been looking for all my life.

Answer: Well, I congratulate you!

Comment: I understand his fear. He is afraid it will be yet another disappointment.

My Response: It all depends on him, not on Kabbalah, because this is the truth and is absolutely infinite, but on him. How much he is able to invest himself into it, in fulfilling the conditions for the revelation of the Creator and beginning to reveal Him. Then he will not have any more problems. But it can take a very long time.

Question: What is your advice for how he can stick to it so that he does not fall off the path?

Answer: He needs to seriously start studying, read everything that we have on our websites in the archive, and be in our lessons. As he reads it, he “flushes” himself with this material. It all gets absorbed, purifying him from the inside out, and so he advances.

Question: Is there a point of no return that he can reach past which he would not fall off the path?

Answer: No. “Do not believe in yourself until the day you die.”

Comment: Meaning, the Creator can play such a joke on him again that it will divert him altogether?

My Response: Yes. The Creator puts such obstacles before a person that he can only advance by faith above reason.

This is done so that he acquires a serious spiritual Kli, a vessel in which he can truly reveal the entire universe. This is an anti-egoistic, above-the-ego state. This is the creation of a new world inside a person, a spiritual world inside him.
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From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 11/26/20

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How Not To Go Along With Biases?

629.3Question: Our brain categorizes everything it feels. From these categorizing what is known as bias grows. That is, a person thinks in patterns and often makes decisions that were originally ingrained in him. Sometimes these decisions can be wrong, unfair.

Scientists say that one of the methods of preventing bias is to stop a person in time and ask him the appropriate questions. Basically, make him pause so that he asks himself, “What assumptions do I have? What influences me in order to make the right decision?”

We are subjected to bias from birth. What can I do about it? How can I not succumb to it?

Answer: I believe that nothing will help except the right environment, which will influence a person. If one begins to question himself, to remember some of his schemes, habits, and patterns implanted in him from childhood, it will not have any results. The only remedy is to be constantly under the strong influence of the right environment.

It turns out that you can only fight against bias by changing it to another. That is, a person is initially under the influence of one society, which forms something in him. Then he gets under another influence and it forms something new in him.

Nothing can be done otherwise. Then there will be a third society, a fourth, and so on, which will influence him more and more. However, from each environment, he will receive what it imbues him with. In this way, he will begin to comprehend everything better and go up the degrees.
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From KabTV’s “Kabbalah Express” 1/12/21

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“Is Spiritual Love Different From The Love We Know? If Yes, Can We Do Something To Nurture It?” (Quora)

Dr. Michael LaitmanMichael Laitman, On Quora: Is spiritual love different from the love we know? If yes, can we do something to nurture it?

The love we know, or corporeal love, involves loving whoever or whatever gives us pleasure. Spiritual love, by contrast, is built on feeling an inner distance, rejection, and opposition to others, and building love upon that distance.

In other words, the love we know is that which appears in our inborn ego, where we feel a natural attraction and closeness to one another. Each person who feels such love does so based on the calculation that they will ultimately benefit from that love. Such is the calculation of our egoistic nature, which is a desire to enjoy from other people and things. Therefore, according to the love we know—corporeal love—we feel love, attraction, and closeness to each other sometimes, and at other times, hatred, rejection and distance.

Spiritual love, however, requires feeling distance, rejection, and opposition to each other together with an attitude of love, connection and attraction that we build above those sensations. In our current reality, we cannot simultaneously feel love and hatred toward others, but we feel those sensations at different times. Spiritual love, therefore, requires great artistry in the spiritual process of rising above the ego to positively connect with others, and we need to become worthy of attaining that lofty level of love.

However, we are reaching a level in our development where we become increasingly prepared to experience spiritual love. On one hand, we see that the love we know is leading us into more and more problems. The bigger our ego becomes, the more we demand in order to fulfill ourselves, and the harder we find it to become fulfilled. On the other hand, we are getting prepared to become more mature.

Sweet food can help us see an example of this maturation process. Children usually like sweet food that is only sweet, but when we grow up, we often like to have sweet food together with or after something spicy, bitter or sour. The more we mature, the more we feel incapable of enjoying from one thing alone, but require the thing and its opposite.

We also see how if we had experienced only positive states in life, without the need to strive and overcome, and without feeling boundaries and criticism, then we would feel as if our life lacks something. We are built in a way where we desire to have graspable points for other calculations, and thus we develop a need to add bitterness, sourness and spice in order to taste and enjoy the sweetness. This tendency stems from the basis of our existence, where we—created beings—were originally created opposite from nature: Nature is a quality of love that solely wishes to bestow pleasure and fulfillment, and we are made of an opposite quality that solely wishes to receive pleasure and fulfillment.

Therefore, in order that we “taste the sweetness” of spiritual love, we need to attain the quality of love and bestowal that does not exist in our inborn receptive nature, and thus need to build that quality in us upon our natural rejection and distance from those qualities. This is possible with the guidance of a method—the wisdom of Kabbalah—which teaches the ways of rising above the transience and incomplete nature of the ego in order to discover the quality of spiritual love, which is eternal and whole.

Kabbalists have written about spiritual love—“Love will cover all crimes” (Proverbs 10:12)—where the “crimes” are the distance, rejection and opposition we feel in our ego. The more we implement such a form of love in our spiritual development, the more we will attain everything that nature laid out for us in order to attain our ultimate purpose of existence: the sensation of love in its perfection, wholeness and eternity.

Based on the Daily Kabbalah Lesson with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman on January 29, 2021. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

Photo by Tamanna Rumee on Unsplash.