Audio Version Of The Blog – 11/21/21
Posted on November 21st, 2021
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Question: What is the first step a person should take when he feels that he is thrown into life that suddenly seems meaningless? He doesn’t know what he is working for and feels that life is just passing under his nose. What can a person do in order to begin discovering meaning and self-determination?
Answer: He should ask what he is living for. In fact, more viruses will come along that will help us in that direction. They help us a lot by shaking us up and detaching us from our previous engagements. Basically they perform internal changes in each and every one of us.
We do not know it, but it does happen and we are changing. The coronavirus is a biological impact with spiritual charge within it that affects all of us.
From KabTV’s “Conversation with Journalists” 11/4/21
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New Life 1321 – Constructive Love, Destructive Love
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Yael Leshed-Harel
Love without any conditions destroys a child. The child comes to feel that the world will give him or her everything without having to do anything in return. Instead, a child should come to know that an appropriate response is expected from them: a thank you, a kiss, or an effort to help out. A child needs to be willing to take part in the family. A common mistake is to do for our children what they could be doing for themselves. We should compliment children for their efforts rather than for their natural talents or qualities. We should teach children to acknowledge what has been given to them by contributing in turn to others’ benefit.
Constructive love draws an appropriate response from the child, while destructive love doesn’t take the child’s actions into account. The goal is to educate children so that they know how to receive and how to give in a balanced manner.
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From KabTV’s “New Life 1321 – Constructive Love, Destructive Love,” 10/24/21
This summary is written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
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How can I overcome any state I am given? If I check it against my friends, I will realize that I can work in any state. You must check yourself from both sides, from below and from above: on one hand to feel lower than all the friends and at the same time to be an active member of the group and invest in it.
This means that at the same time I am in the lowest and in the highest state and then I correctly establish myself relative to the ten. We always check ourselves relative to the spiritual Partzuf that we are building.
I annul myself relative to the center of the ten. The ten is my boat, the ten Sefirot, the group. There is no individual in it, only our common connection that the Creator wants us to achieve on His terms.
He is creating inner conditions in each of us, egoism and inner qualities, in order for me to discover all the qualities that I have and with all this baggage I join my friends and create one circle, sphere, boat, spiritual vessel.
Everyone’s job is to unite all comrades into one vessel, filling them with their own properties, and to feel that this depends on him.
Everyone’s job is to connect all the friends into one vessel to fill them with their qualities, and to feel that everything depends on him. Instead of Malchut, the lowest Sefira of all, I can be Keter, the highest Sefira. This is how I check myself and the ten and work with my friends.
Of course, all this is not done by me but by the upper light. As I annul myself before the Creator and do what He wants from me, I reveal how He does everything and how I, by clinging to Him, understand more and more what is happening to me.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/17/21, Writings of Baal HaSulam, Shamati #62 “Descends and Incites, Ascends and Complains”
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We Do Not Need Competition
Question: The economy is built on competition. What will competition look like in the new society?
Answer: We do not need competition. We must do everything completely differently. Most people must be free from having to work, and humanity must stop depleting the Earth, polluting the air, and wasting natural resources. Out of 8 billion people, we will have 7 billion out of work.
Therefore, we need to distribute the work so that everyone is busy maybe an hour or two a day and the rest of the time they are engaged in self-education, and not only self-education, but also education in general. It is necessary to create a huge global system of education, and then we will be busy all the time.
Our children, grandchildren, and we all together must search for methods of correct connections. They are described in Kabbalah, and it remains for us to realize them.
Question: And here, naturally, we will need music, culture, and everything else?
Answer: Everything is needed for this, we must develop. And everything we do not need, we absolutely do not need.
Question: Will companies compete with one another about how much they give and who will give more?
Answer: Maybe. I don’t want to think about anything right now. This is all in the distant future.
Comment: But competition is the fuel, everything is based on it.
My Response: No. There will be other kinds of competition in terms of returns. I haven’t thought about it yet. I think that everything will be balanced, according to the plan; there will be nothing superfluous and nothing unnecessary, only what is most useful and necessary. And the rest of the people will receive only from communicating with each other, enjoying it, and achieving complete fulfillment.
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From KabTV’s “ Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 3/1/19
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In 1938, after Polish citizens perpetrated pogroms against Jews in Poland, the influential Jewish poet and songwriter Mordechai Gebirtig wrote a song warning Polish Jews of the impending danger. “Fire, brothers, fire! Our city is all on fire!” he wrote. He testified that he cried like a baby when he wrote those words. Even though the song became popular and the refrain was, “And you are holding back and do not lend a hand,” it did not help.
Like him, kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag, author of the Sulam [Ladder] Commentary on The Book of Zohar, foresaw the calamity. Being a resident of Warsaw, he warned the Jews there and tried to arrange for hundreds of Jewish families to come to Israel (then Palestine) and save themselves. Regrettably for the Jews, the leaders of the Warsaw community talked them out of the plan promising that no harm would come to them.
Last week, on the eve of Polish Independence Day, hundreds of protesters gathered in the Polish town of Kalisz and vowed to chase the enemies of the homeland to Israel, referring to the 3,500 Jews living in Poland today. They burned books, shouted “Death to the Jews!” and no one stopped them.
This is happening not only in Poland. Every day we hear of another demonstration against Jews in some place in the world. Jews are spat on in New York, beaten up in Belgium, their stores are daubed with neo-Nazi graffiti in Germany, they are murdered in France, and synagogues and cemeteries are desecrated around the world.
Unlike the days of the Third Reich, today everyone sees what is happening. In some cases, the attacks are broadcast live on social media. The one thing that has not changed is our complacency, our blindness to the truth that we are in the midst of an antisemitic wave that is growing like a snowball and that no one can or wants to stop.
We must not succumb to such obtuseness. We must acknowledge the (very) inconvenient truth: If Jews before World War II had somewhere to run, at least to some degree, today there is nowhere left to run. There is no safe haven for Jews.
The only refuge we have left is the bond between us. We must forge a bond so tight that it forms a shield against those who want our harm. Now is the time to return to our core values: “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and “as one man with one heart.”
There is a spiritual power in the bond between us. It is the bond that bound us together in ancient times. It has always been our protection; when we nurtured it among us, it melted the hatred of the nations toward us.
We are not an isolated nation. Our ancestors came from all over the Fertile Crescent, and the people who lived there eventually spread throughout the world. The Jewish nation holds within it representatives from all those nations, and that tiny, indistinguishable link connects us to every nation on Earth. Therefore, when we make peace among ourselves, the nations of the world respect us and make peace among themselves. On the other hand, when we are disunited, humanity spurns us and blames us for the fights that break out among them.
To help ourselves and help the world, we must stop running away and look at one another, the brothers we hate. We must rise above the animosity we feel for each other not because we want to, but because it is what the world needs, and the only thing that will make it stop persecuting the Jews.
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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “How do we fix evil or things going wrong?“
The door is always open for anyone to change, to improve themselves, and to become a beneficial part of society. Even people who have committed the worst crimes toward human society, and I am not just talking about murder or theft toward one or a few people, which we hear about on a daily basis, but even those who are considered the wicked of the world will have an awakening moment where they will understand what they have done, and will also desire to change.
Take, for example, the example of Adolf Hitler, who implemented mass murder and genocide within his own country, as well as devastation throughout Europe. Such people have no free choice. The upper providence guides them to perform such atrocities, and they themselves have no idea what they are doing.
In later incarnations, they will have to acknowledge the harm that they brought to humanity. It is said about such people that “the hearts of ministers and kings are in the hands of the Creator.” That is, there is an upper providence guiding human development, and certain times come along whereby humanity needs to experience certain blows, and then the upper providence—which can be called “the Creator,” “nature,” or several other names—acts through a certain person such as Hitler in order to implement a certain amount of suffering that humanity needs to experience in its development.
There are also other people through which good comes to the world, but unfortunately, barely any good comes to our world, so these examples are much rarer.
However, if we discuss ordinary people committing felonies here and there toward society, such people always have the ability to rise above their divisive inclinations and become beneficial contributors to society.
If we take serial killers as an extreme example, these are still very complicated matters to understand because in order to understand them completely, we need to understand how incarnations work. For instance, a person that someone harms in this incarnation could become their child in a future incarnation whom they will need to take care of.
We simply lack the tools of perception in order to understand the complete system we are parts of. In our world, we have no choice but to judge people according to specific actions that they perform at specific times, because we have no other ways of evaluating them. Moreover, we have to sustain a certain amount of balance in human society, and to not let all kinds of forms of evil break out into the open too much.
Yet, in order to perceive the truth in nature, we have to see nature’s beginning and end. And in such matters, there is none as wise as the experienced. There are people who have attained access to such perception of the order of reality and how our future states need to unfold until their very final state. Such people can also see what took place throughout every nook and cranny of human development, understanding the reason and purpose behind every form of suffering that took place, and accordingly, they can justify every event that has taken place throughout history.
Without such perception, then we operate in our narrow perceptions here in this world. It is very difficult to understand and agree with what I am saying here, but to put it as simply as possible, if we gain the full perception and sensation of reality, seeing nature from its beginning until its end, then we will be able to justify literally everything that has taken place.
This is why I teach and spread the wisdom of Kabbalah. It is a wisdom that guides us on how to achieve the complete perception of reality. By doing so, we will know how to operate our lives mistake-free, and free from all kinds of terrible outbursts. We will gain the tools to build a harmonious and peaceful society, where a heightened sense of unification and love will dwell among all people. Also, we will see exactly why certain people are born with certain inclinations.
Nobody is to blame for having certain inclinations. Just as some people aspire to become scientists, and other people aspire to become musicians, and so on and so forth, likewise some people have inclinations that society considers evil, like killing and stealing. If we developed a sensitivity to the precise inclinations different people have, then we would be able to guide them to channel their energy in ways that benefit society. For instance, we could channel such people to catch fish instead of catching people, to work as butchers, to cut people open as surgeons in order to heal them, instead of stabbing people to death, or to steal from our own egos in order to give to others, instead of stealing from others in order to gain selfishly for ourselves. All in all, we are made of desires to enjoy, and the type of enjoyment depends on the values and examples in society that we are raised with.
We have to understand that nature implants our inclinations into us, and we should not be punished or blamed for having certain inclinations. Instead, society has to discern each of us according to our inclinations, and to the extent by which we direct them at society’s benefit, we then undergo certain corrections. We would then gradually come to see how each and every inclination exists in order for us to decipher how to direct it for a positive purpose.
Directing our inclinations for positive purposes depends on the enveloping values and examples that society instills in us. For instance, if a person has an inclination to kill, and that person grows up with examples in society, such as the media and entertainment he consumes, coupled together with cutthroat competitive “every man for himself” values and divisive drives that promote hatred to blossom among people, then such a person is more likely to use his inclination in a negative and destructive way.
If, however, the enveloping social values and examples were enriched with positive examples of people aiming to benefit others and nature over their own benefit, with media and entertainment striving to promote such values, and also if our education systems shifted from raising us to compete with each other materialistically to instead cooperate with each other in order to positively connect above our divisive drives, then the person with an inclination to kill would also seek how to use that inclination in order to best serve the positive social environment that embraces him.
We are all born with different inclinations, and if we each supported each other to rise above them to relate positively to each other, then we enter a new network of connections with nature’s positive force of connection holding us together. We can then find our optimal places in society, and we can then each realize ourselves in a perfect and whole fashion. Then, even our worst inclinations—killing, raping and stealing—would find a positive expression as we would seek how to use these inclinations in order to positively contribute to society.
Based on the show “Ask the Kabbalist, episode 11: How to Correct Evil Inclinations” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Joseph (Asaf) Ohayon. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
In the News (The Guardian): “‘UK judge orders rightwing extremist to read classic literature or face prison’
“A former student who downloaded almost 70,000 white supremacist documents and bomb-making instructions has avoided a prison sentence ‘by the skin of his teeth’ after being told to read classic literature by Dickens, Austen, Shakespeare and Hardy.
“Ben John, 21, from Lincoln, a former student at De Montfort University in Leicester, has to return to court every four months to be tested on his reading, Judge Timothy Spencer QC said. He also sentenced him to a suspended two years’ imprisonment plus a further two years on licence. …
“Sentencing him at Leicester crown court, the judge concluded his crime was likely to be ‘an act of teenage folly’ and an isolated incident. …
“After making John promise not to research any more rightwing material, the judge continued: ‘Have you read Dickens? Austen? Start with Pride and Prejudice and Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Think about Hardy. Think about Trollope.
“’On 4 January you will tell me what you have read and I will test you on it. I will test you and if I think you are [lying to] me you will suffer.’”
Question: How do you like such a way out of the criminal code, such a decision?
My Response: The judge can do it. Such a human approach, instead of putting a person in jail, launch him into reading.
Question: Do you think it can change a person?
Answer: He still has to read and analyze for a long time. This engages your mind, activates completely different parts of the brain. Therefore it can accomplish something, pull him out of it. He will move into a completely different understanding of history, geography, himself, and the country. He will fill himself with different values after all.
Question: And how does Kabbalistic literature work when we read it?
Answer: This is already heavy artillery. This is a very serious thing. From the first reading, depending on what he’s been given, he can be taken to a whole different place.
He will discover such things for himself! After all, where does Kabbalah begin? With discovering the structure of the world, the human being, and everything else. Here, completely different desires and their combinations begin to work. They will take him far away from a bomb.
Question: So you personally would advise a person to read gradually from easy to difficult texts?
Answer: Yes. “Here, my friend, within a month you have to work on, for example, a book about the structure of the spiritual worlds, about the five worlds between us and the world of infinity, how they affect us, and we affect them. Make a brief summary of the whole thing. And draw everything as you understand it.”
Question: And he won’t even notice how it starts working on him internally?
Answer: Naturally! I would advise it.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr.Michael Laitman” 9/9/21
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Comment: Baal HaSulam in his article “Science of Kabbalah and Philosophy” welcomes empirical psychology in which everything can be measured and rejoices that the period of philosophy has passed because it studies abstract concepts such as God, the soul, and so on.
In particular, he writes: “The time of philosophers has passed, and the power of those who adhere to philosophical concepts has ended. For this, we should thank the researchers of empirical psychology, which built its foundation on the ruins of philosophy and won public opinion.
“Everyone already recognizes the insignificance of philosophy since it is not built on a real basis. That is why we are grateful to empirical psychology, which dealt a crushing blow to philosophy.”
My Response: We can learn about people, their behavior, everything that lends itself to our measurements, but we cannot rise above this. Empirical psychology still gives us the opportunity to exist on some real basis, while philosophy is just bare words.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 10/15/21
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