Audio Version Of The Blog – 3/14/21

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My Thoughts On Twitter 3/14/21

Dr Michael Laitman Twitter

I vote for a government that can ensure safety in #Israel. The main idea that drives me is unity of the nation, but unity can exist only with those who are alive, not with those who have died. #IsraElex4

Indifference to the #Elections2021. If we weren’t surrounded by enemies, awaiting our weakness to attack, there would be no point in having elections. If not for national security, we could just sleep. The elections should be taken seriously, without succumbing to despair. It’s time to wake up.
From Twitter, 3/14/21

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Surrender To Win

197.01If we were able to defeat the evil inclination that confuses us, if we could rise against it like heroes and were able to bestow, if we could capture our will to receive and bend it, then we would only increase our egoism. It would have inflated even more!

Therefore, there is no way to reach bestowal unless through a special transition. We discover that the will to receive is not worthy of anything, but we cannot overcome it.

Therefore, we depend on the upper force, which is outside of us. We cling to this upper force and want to grow only with its help, as if we enter the womb of the upper degree as an embryo and there we completely nullify ourselves, we wish that the upper one will mold us into whatever form it wants.

In this form, we are already beginning to grow on the other side of the Machsom in the quality of bestowal.

There is no choice. We must give up and raise our hands, as it is written: “And it came to pass that the sons of Israel sighed because of the work, and they cried out, and their cry because of the work went up to God … and God heard their groaning.” However, this is only after we have done everything possible and have reached a complete breakdown, the point where we cannot continue like this. What we can do is only to cry out to the Creator. And it will be a perfect cry because we are sure that we depend only on the upper force and have no chance to reach what we want with our own forces.

This cry is actually from the unsuccessful work, that is, it requires at least a group, a ten, and only then can we reach a true cry and receive the help of the upper force, the reforming light, which takes us from the intention for our own sake to the intention for the sake of bestowal. Thus, we escape Egypt.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/11/21, “Pesach (Passover)”

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749.02Passover is an extremely important holiday, a state underlying the entire spiritual development of man. Passover means a transition, that is, we leave one place and enter another; we make the transition from the desire to receive for our own sake to the desire to receive for the sake of bestowal.

The direction of this desire changes: to bestow upon one’s neighbor and through it to bestow upon the Creator.

That is why Passover is so important to us. It builds the whole foundation of a spiritual person. By the fact that a person is drawn to learn more about this holiday, you can feel a strong spiritual foundation in him.

The desire to become like the Creator is expressed in a request to Him to correct our egoistic desire: for its restriction, for the screen that does not allow us to use the desire for our own sake, and for its gradual transition into the desire for bestowal.

All this happens with the help of the reforming light called the light of Passover. These are the upper forces that come to us, and just like an adult takes a child by the hand and leads him, so the light takes us out of our egoistic desire to the desire for bestowal. This transition is called the exodus from Egypt.

There is nothing more important in spiritual development than getting out of Egypt. Therefore, all subsequent actions of bestowal are based on the memory of leaving Egypt, that is, they became possible because we made this transition from egoism to bestowal.

This action is caused by the reforming light, that is, a special illumination of the Creator from above to give, which affects us more and more, and grows the desire to achieve bestowal in us. We begin to feel unimportant in this world although it would seem that we have everything for egoistic fulfillment. But we want something more.

We do not yet know what we are missing, but we are approaching the desire for bestowal. In this way, the Creator brings us closer to Him from afar, from within our egoism He grows a sprout of the desire for bestowal, one form within another.

Then we will learn to attract the light that reforms and we will see its action in ourselves: how it overturns the egoistic desire, makes a restriction on it, and then directs it to bestowal. It is in those places, in the desires, where we sought egoistic fulfillment that we now want to be filled altruistically.

It is like a child growing up. While he is small, he just grabs everything and pulls it to himself. But when he grows up, he understands that it is by connecting with others that you can fulfill yourself more, and by giving to someone you love, you get fulfillment yourself. Even in this world we find that it is possible to enjoy the actions of bestowal. Thus, a person gradually grows from the animate to the human level.

Exiting Egypt, from egoism into the desire to bestow, is the beginning of man’s true spiritual development. Therefore, this is a very difficult and lengthy process, and until a person goes through it in all the details assigned to him according to the root of his soul, he will not be worthy to leave Egypt.

In essence, all of humanity goes through these stages of development. That is why we exist in this world. But there are people who have already felt the need to know the root of life, the spiritual root. Therefore, we only have to actualize this exit into spirituality: to finish the whole process of development in Egypt, in our egoistic desire, to hate it, that is, to realize its evil and to pray to the Creator.

Then the Creator will act on us with a special light, a force that can pull us out of egoism and into bestowal. And if we unite to be one nation, one group, we will come out of our egoistic intention and feel that we are rising above it to the force of bestowal. Then we will begin to experience the spiritual world beyond Egypt, beyond the waters of the Final Sea.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/10/21, “Pesach (Passover)”

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The Secret Of Eternal Spiritual Fulfillment

527.03In the corporeal world, fulfillment extinguishes pleasure. If I am hungry and start to eat, then gradually I satisfy my hunger and lose my appetite, and along with the appetite, the pleasure disappears. As a result, I remain empty, a complete zero, and so it is with everything.

Fervent love that flared up at first gradually becomes routine and cools down. Habit dulls the taste of pleasure and eventually kills it, which leads to death.

But spiritual life is eternal and perfect because even before entering spiritual actions, we learn how to make them eternal and perfect, that is, our desire does not disappear but only grows. You must understand that desire is the main thing, and you must constantly work on its growth and quality.

Therefore, spiritual progress is determined by how developed and multifaceted our desire is that includes all sorts of shades of properties prepared for us by the Creator when Adam HaRishon was shattered.

And we cherish this desire so that not a single particle disappears from it. We make sure that all desires exist and support each other, that they grow enriching one another, and it is through this that we reach the full light of NRNHY, the end of correction.

The difference between the corporeal and the spiritual world is that in corporeal actions, fulfillment extinguishes the desire. And in spirituality, we learn how to increase the desire more and more by receiving pleasure.

Therefore, desire is the main thing for us, not the fulfillment. After all, the fulfillment depends entirely on the growth of the desire and its correct positioning. I begin to enjoy the desire itself, the fact that it grows and gets stronger.

This is a completely different work because I do not care about fulfilling my desire. After all, there is always infinite content in the upper world, and I only need to worry about having the right desire all the time and growing it as much as possible.

Therefore, our prayers, requests, and praises to the Creator are so important, any appeal to Him, because they determine our state and fulfillment. In fact, I enjoy the desire that I have in me.

That is why the torments of first love are so sweet. They are the ones that give pleasure, not corporeal fulfillment. Fulfillment comes and goes and leaves emptiness behind. It is the yearning that is capable of filling the soul and remains in the memory.

We see that all works of art speak of mental anguish, aspirations, and prayer. Therefore, we must not forget that genuine fulfillment comes from yearning for the loved one.

If fulfillment only increases the desire, this is a sign that we are in spirituality. Only when striving to give out from myself do I not suppress the filling but expand the room for it and increase it.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/8/21, “Everything Is Obtained by the Power of Prayer”

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We Can Only Ask

558Man must be convinced of his complete helplessness, must have lost all hope to reach spirituality by his own forces. This is a very important conclusion, and it takes a long time for a person to understand that there is not even one quality in him with which he can succeed except for the only chance the Creator left—connection with Him.

The only thing a person can do is to ask and nothing else! In everything else I am just an animal, and only a tiny thread connects me with the Creator. By grasping this thin thread, I can climb from the degree of an animal to the degree of man.

This discovery can take years for a person to understand and start asking. He asks for one thing only: for the force of bestowal. I want to bestow to my friends, to bestow to the Creator; I do not want to remain an animal, I want to become a man.

And here a question arises. Why do I need the degree of man? What is my intention? Is it unpleasant for me to be at the animate level or do I want to bestow? Maybe I hope that at the spiritual degree it will be better for me, for my egoism? This still needs to be clarified in order to cross the border from the corporeal to the spiritual world.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/5/21, “Everything is Obtained By the Power of Prayer”

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In The Labyrinth

239The Creator arranges all states of man in such a way that they all direct him to search for the upper force, the source of life. He engineers everything so that man constantly stumbles against a wall.

After many bangs against the wall, this labyrinth finally brings him to the correct appeal. A person learns how to turn to the Creator and with what request, and in return, the Creator gives him the force of bestowal out of His own forces.

That is when a person becomes a man, Adam, that is, similar to the Creator according to the force he received from Him. This is how he begins to come out of his egoism, like a sprout breaking out from the ground, and to correctly build himself with understanding and awareness.

However, the Creator constantly sets new conditions for him against this growth, and each time a person must find a way to turn them into favorable conditions and advance until he reaches the goal.

The most important thing is to see that all the conditions we receive both in spirituality and in corporeality, individually and collectively, come from above, from the Creator, in order to arrange us and take us through the labyrinth that leads to the entrance of the spiritual world.

It is important to discover in each state that we will not achieve anything through the force of our egoistic desire. Only by breaking away from it spiritually and fully relying on the Creator, on His force of bestowal, the second force that exists in nature, and connecting our spiritual life with it can we move forward step by step. The Creator will put obstacles in our way each time by placing new conditions, and we will turn to Him again and again above these obstacles.

All states must be perceived as necessary stages, degrees that we must go through in order to build the correct appeal, and external accompanying conditions. Everything is arranged in an optimal way to lead us to the correct request. As it is written: “And it came to pass that the sons of Israel sighed because of the work,” from the slavery, from being under the control of the egoism.

This is when we emerge out of the control of egoism, that is, from the Egyptian exile, enter the upper world, and reach the revelation of the Creator to the created beings. The Creator gives us the force of bestowal, the force of faith above reason above the force of reception.

The main thing is to realize more and more clearly that everything depends only on the Creator. The difficulties, their resolution, and the correct answers, everything comes to us from the Creator. Only one thing depends on us: not to give up our attempts, but to pressure and pressure the Creator through the ten, to ask and demand He give us His force in order to resemble Him. Then we will become “…sons of the Lord your God.” having received the force of bestowal, like the one He has.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/5/21, “Everything is Obtained By the Power of Prayer”

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New Life 1300 – Listening Connects

New Life 1300 – Listening Connects
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and NitzahMazoz

A Kabbalist doesn’t listen to himself or the person before him but to the force of love and bestowal that we live in. If I want to connect to someone, I have to show him that he is dear to me and that what he says is important to me. The speaker also needs to pay attention to the response of the listener. As human beings, we look for attention, respect, and appreciation rather than solutions. We want to feel a sense of security and support through an internal connection. What is important is not how much I understand but how much I show my respect for the speaker.
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From KabTV’s “New Life 1300 – Listening Connects,” 3/7/21

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“When The Ego Rots” (Linkedin)

My new article on Linkedin “When the Ego Rots

For as long as we can remember, the ego has been our ally. It has earned us great achievements: We came out of the caves, developed agriculture and learned to produce our own food, became lords of the earth and of the sky, defeated plagues and enabled every person on earth to potentially have a life that only two centuries ago, were fit for kings.

In the past several decades, the ego has taken over everything we do, and our relationships with others are now based not only on the desire to build ourselves, but to a great extent, if not mostly, on the aspiration to hurt, humiliate, and even destroy others. Once the ego begins to focus on destruction, it ruins everything. When this happens, it is time to bid it farewell before it drags us into another world war.

But we have not come to this. While some of us enjoy unimaginable affluence, others are worse off than their ancestors had ever been; they die like flies without food, water, or dignity. We could have defeated the plagues, but it seems as though we ourselves have become a plague that is infesting the world with bile and abhorrence for our fellow humans, for all of life, and for our planet. The ego, which has gotten us all that we have, appears to have rotted and is now destroying everything that we’ve achieved through it.

As long as we used the ego to grow and develop, it worked in our favor. We’ve always used the ego not only for development, but also to defeat enemies and rivals, but we did not let it take over. In the past several decades, the ego has taken over everything we do, and our relationships with others are now based not only on the desire to build ourselves, but to a great extent, if not mostly, on the aspiration to hurt, humiliate, and even destroy others. Once the ego begins to focus on destruction, it ruins everything. When this happens, it is time to bid it farewell before it drags us into another world war.

We still don’t see it yet; we still think that the ego is our friend, but as all parents tell their children, “Stay away from bad company!” The ego is now bad company because it looks for nothing but troubles, to fight with everyone and destroy everyone, so we must turn away from it or it will drag us down along with it.

There is an alternative: The way forward is by joining hands and joining forces. The ego may not be satisfied in this way because we will not destroy anyone, but we, as opposed to our egos, will gain security, joy, and confidence in our future. Today, only a united society can thrive. Only when people of different backgrounds, faiths, and ideologies join hands, they can create a vital and pliable society that can adjust to the changing circumstances in the world. When only one ideology reigns, it quickly becomes rigid and fragile, and will collapse before long. Just look at what happened in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Communist Soviet Union to realize that to succeed, diversity is a requirement, and diversity cannot thrive where the ego reigns. It’s time to dethrone the ego.

“The Case For Paradoxical Thinking” (Linkedin)

My new article on Linkedin “The Case for Paradoxical Thinking

Paradoxical thinking is something that various systems, such as educational systems or various advanced organizations, are trying to promote. We feel comfortable when matters are unambiguous, but it turns out that the ability to keep in mind conflicting ideas develops people’s minds very effectively. Paradoxical thinking contributes to people’s mental health, mental development, and builds a better society overall. But what is the highest level of paradoxical thinking that we can achieve? Let’s examine some insights.

Another paradox that can develop the world is our relation to our raging egos. On the one hand, the egoistic desire to subdue everyone is destroying our lives. On the other hand, if we learn how to use our egos correctly, we will be able to turn them into what is called “help made against him.” In other words, we will be able to turn them into levers for development that will raise us from one level to the next on the spiritual ladder.

When we are confined to one system of thinking, contradictions confuse us and create internal collisions. Alternatively, when we develop a dual system of thinking, we can maintain one thought in one system, and a completely opposite thought in the other. This allows for complete opposites to exist within us simultaneously, since each thought is in a different system. Therefore, our challenge is to know how to build an additional system of thinking. This is what the wisdom of Kabbalah is all about.

Imagine that there are tiny insects that do not grasp the dimension of height, and live only according to their perception of the surface. They can move from side to side in their space, but not up or down. In relation to them, we have another level of perception. Similarly, a person who lives in one system of thinking feels the world very differently from one who lives in two systems of thinking.

It is one thing to understand this notion, but it is a different matter altogether to achieve it. To do that, we must awaken evolutionary forces that will develop that system within us. We cannot really know what these forces are, but we don’t really need to. It is enough to want to develop them to make them act on us more forcefully. The trick, if you will, is to know how to approach that evolutionary force and make it build in us that advanced system.

One good example of an exercise in building such a dual system is the Biblical story of the tying of Isaac. God said to Abraham about Isaac, “Through Isaac your descendants shall be named” (Gen. 21:12), meaning that Isaac was to have children of his own and continue Abraham’s dynasty. But on the other hand, God instructed Abraham to “offer him … as a burnt offering” (Gen. 22:2), which would prevent the continuation of Abraham’s dynasty. How can one reconcile such contradicting instructions? This is when the third party must intervene. In such a case, we cannot use reason since it will direct us one way or the other. Instead, we must “summon,” meaning want a higher intellect—from which the contradiction came, the root of the paradox—to come and reconcile the conflict.

In the wisdom of Kabbalah, the root, where all the conflicts are reconciled, is called “the Creator.” The Creator is the general force in nature; it is the force that sustains all of reality, the root of the universe and everything that evolves in it, the origin of our lives. In the end, each and every contradiction points precisely to it, to the source from which everything comes and in which everything unites.

Since we cannot connect the opposites with our current mind, we must replace our minds with an “upgraded” mind that we receive from that higher source. This is how paradoxes elevate us to a spiritual level.

Another paradox that can develop the world is our relation to our raging egos. On the one hand, the egoistic desire to subdue everyone is destroying our lives. On the other hand, if we learn how to use our egos correctly, we will be able to turn them into what is called “help made against him.” In other words, we will be able to turn them into levers for development that will raise us from one level to the next on the spiritual ladder.

Our spiritual aspiration should not be to erase the ego from the world, but rather to want it to remain and even grow. As we strain to rise above it, to cover it with a good relation toward others, we also rise to higher degrees in spirituality.

The key to dealing with paradoxes is therefore in shifting from a system where we shift from thinking only of ourselves into a system where we think about others, feel their needs and understand them. In this way, we build within us an additional system, which will provide us with contradicting views. Then, when we learn how to connect those views, a higher intellect will appear among us, which will resolve today’s paradoxes at a higher level of connection and complementation.
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