Preparation to the Lesson
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Lesson on the Topic “Ascents and Descents”
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Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Study of the Ten Sefirot,” Vol. 1, Part 1, “Table of Answers for Topics”
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Selected Highlights
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Question: The annual World Happiness Report 2022 is out.
Finland, is in first place as the happiest followed by Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Sweden, Norway. Israel came ninth. There are a total of 146 countries in the ranking.
The ranking is determined by the life expectancy of the population, the observation of civil liberties, among other factors.
Will the view of such happiness ever change? If it is good for me, my body, I am calm—that is what happiness is. I am safe, there is money in the bank.
Answer: The one who counts is the one who determines. Which means, maintaining animal existence at the appropriate level is called happiness.
Question: Will we ever start from another concept of happiness?
Answer: Happiness means connection with the meaning of existence. And if there is this connection, then a person really sees how he lives, what he aspires to, toward what he floats with the flow of life, and he is happy.
Question: Then maybe, for him, just a little bit of this and there will already be happiness? The main thing is that there is a goal.
Answer: No, I do not think that is the case. The point is how much I am willing to pay for real happiness. If only this is really important to me and not other animal fillings, services, and so on, then this is happiness.
As a result, this is the measure of rising above one’s egoism. Because there you lose the feeling of all kinds of earthly calculations, and it only matters to you how much you rise above all this egoistic, animal state.
Question: Do you think we will ever measure happiness this way?
Answer: Undoubtedly! And I think that time is not far away. We are being seriously led to this. And all these problems, the vicissitudes that we feel on ourselves are all to create the right measurement of happiness in us.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 3/21/22
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Comment: According to Kabbalah, children between the ages of 9 and 13 should be educated in terms of interaction between the sexes.
My Response: It can be done earlier. Abroad, they practice this even in kindergartens.
Question: But today why do we teach the interaction of the sexes only at the level of sex education and do not talk about the internal relationship between a man and a woman?
Answer: Because we do not know what we need it for.
We know that a male meets a female to mate and reproduce. Like in fish, birds, and animals, the same thing happens in humans as part of the animal world.
We teach children about physiology. What else can we explain? About love?
Boys under 20 have a period when they internally mature to make special, big decisions in this life. In other words, not everything is allowed to them. In this life, they are allowed everything except for owning land, that is, except for something big, global, decision-making.
It is because during these seven years from 13 to 20 they have to learn from society what it means to be an adult, but an adult animal. In our time, this is who they become. Moreover, it is in our time that Kabbalah is being revealed, and not earlier. So it all fits perfectly.
People make various guesses that we physically mature early allegedly because we eat foods with pesticides, are affected by radiation, or something else.
Kabbalah, on the other hand, says that everything is based only on growing egoism, which causes us to mature earlier.
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From KabTV’s “Close-Up, Theater of the Absurd” 7/18/10
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Question: What is the intention?
Answer: Intention is a clear sense of the goal and an action to achieve it. You are locked on this goal. The moment the lock clicked, you are fixed on it, closed off, clamped on like a bulldog, and you go only to reach it, to enter this state.
In Kabbalah, the goal is the state. That is, now I am in one state and I must reach another one, the next state. This is my goal.
I describe to myself this future state more and more in greater detail in everything that is possible. In this way, I approach it. This is what is called intention.
That is, what are your intentions? What do you wish to achieve? That is all. Correct intentions are those that coincide with the program of nature.
Question: Is it precisely during the studies?
Answer: No matter when and where! The correct intention in life, in one action or in some consecutive actions and reflections, is when my goal, my next desired state, should be realized in accordance with the program of nature. Then this intention is correct.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Think about Good” 10/21/09
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Question: Today doctors are against cesarean sections. They advocate this due to the fact that while the child is in the uterus he stays there in an absolutely sterile state. During the natural passage through the birth canal he receives the first protective dose of microbes.
Meanwhile during a cesarean section he is left to himself and is unprotected from the possibility of receiving various kinds of infectious diseases. Scientists say that in the case of a cesarean section there is no connection between mother and child. Why is that?
Answer: There are a lot of materials on this topic in Kabbalah. The fact is that childbirth is a huge, serious, and very important process as a mother pushes her child into the world.
If initially all her efforts were aimed at preserving this foreign body developing within her body, at suppressing its rejection, and at perceiving it as her most important organ, now there is a completely different connection of the mother to the child.
She now has to push out of herself what she kept in herself. And the child has a desire to get out of the mother, which was like a small prison and to push the walls. Such a mutual occurrence of dislike for each other generates mutual feelings in the future.
At first, in the inner world when the child is within the mother there is complete harmony between them and they understand each other and both suppress themselves: the child so as not to harm the mother and the mother so as not to harm the child. They suppress their egoistic qualities and interact correctly.
Then, during childbirth these egoistic qualities are as though turned on and the mother and child repel each other, and therefore diverge; the child is born. Moreover, the child turns his head down, which signifies the changes taking place in him. What was the main thing now becomes secondary.
And when a child is born, he already has a different need for a mother and that need exists on another level—feeding. He no longer feeds through the umbilical cord, but through the breast, which is at a completely different level, and instead of blood with milk. The mother’s blood turns into milk and as the child receives it in him, the milk turns into blood and flesh.
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From KabTV’s “Close-Up. Unwanted Children” 11/28/10
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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “Our Security Depends on Our Unity”
In what is probably a record time, Israel has become a thriving country despite being surrounded by extremist countries that seek only its destruction. Yet, the entire enterprise is in jeopardy because it was not built on the right foundations: unity and mutual responsibility. Without these two, Israel’s future remains bleak.
Yesterday, May 5, another terrorist attack in the recent spate has left three people dead and four more seriously injured. Over the past two months, seventeen people have been murdered by terrorists, and many more were injured. For comparison, in all of 2021, only eighteen people were murdered by terrorist activity, twelve of whom were killed during operation Guardian of the Walls, when more than 4,000 rockets and mortar bombs were fired at Israeli civilian settlements.
What has changed? Have terrorists become more accurate in their attacks? Have they acquired new weapons? Has Israeli intelligence become less efficient? Has the Israeli army become less powerful? The answer to all the above questions is a resounding “No!” What has changed since last year is our social solidarity. As our division grows, so does our enemies’ audacity and success.
Israel has always depended, is dependent now, and will always be dependent on its unity. The absence of it is responsible for all our woes since the inception of our nation, and its presence stands behind all our achievements.
Throughout the ages, our sages have been warning that if we are not united, we will have no revival as a nation. “The primary defense against calamity is love and unity,” says the book Maor VaShemesh. “When there are love, unity, and friendship between one another in Israel, no calamity can befall them and by that, all the curses and suffering are banished.”
Similarly, the book Sefat Emet writes, “When the children of Israel become one bundle, Amalek has no control over them. Rather, only in Rephidim [from the Hebrew word Pirud (separation)]. This is why Haman slandered, ‘There is one nation, scattered and separated,’ since their whole power was in unity… This is why it was said, ‘Go gather all the Jews.’”
For Israel, peace with its enemies depends on peace within Israel. If we want to secure our future in this country, we will have to live by the principles of the ancient Hebrews and place unity, mutual responsibility, and love of others above all values. Military measures aside, our first and foremost effort must be to unite our ranks above all differences.
We must not forget that the fuel that emboldens and strengthens our enemies is not their determination, but our division. The more divided we are, the more determined they are to destroy us. If we take the initiative and strive to build a cohesive society here in Israel, we will have security and peace, since they depend above all on our unity.
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This week we celebrate “Independence Day”—the 74th anniversary of the declaration of the State of Israel. On the one hand, there is a feeling of great pride among the people that in such a short time and under incessant threats we managed to build a country with a developed economy and a powerful army on this land.
On the other hand, many people have a feeling that all this is very fragile. Polls show that half of Israelis fear that the Holocaust of the Jewish people may happen again.
When will the day come that we will feel the stable strength of our existence on this earth? It will come, when we really want it to be so. We do not understand that stability and security depend only on us, the Israelis.
It seems to us that we depend on a thousand different external factors. But in fact, they depend on us, not we on them. There is spiritual force in us, but we do not use it. It is the force of connection and love between us, within the people of Israel.
There is no other force in the world on which something could be built. We don’t have stability because we don’t reveal this force between us. It manifests itself if we treat each other with love, warmth – this is the force of the Creator. With the help of this force, it is necessary to build the country, the nation, the whole world.
We have not yet achieved peace on this earth because we do not want to seriously build our people and state on a genuine basis. We just need to stop looking at our Jewish neighbors as strangers, and outsiders. Only this does not allow us to achieve peace and tranquility.
We are obliged to treat each other as brothers, not as friends in need. I hope we will all understand what independence is, how to achieve it, build it and properly use the power of independence.
An independent country is a gathering of people, in the connection of which an upper force is revealed, binding us by the power of mutual guarantee and bringing us freedom from egoism. This means “to be a free people in your country,” meaning, free from your egoistic desire.
This state is called independence. After all, we become independent of egoism, rising above it in our connection, and in this form we build a country, a nation. A country built in this way is guaranteed peace and tranquility.
And Israel will certainly become like that, and how soon it will happen depends on the people of Israel. I wish us all to see it as soon as possible.
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From KabTV’s “Insight” 5/2/22
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Since the Russia-Ukraine conflict started, more and more people are becoming depressed, feeling like they are at a dead end. There is talk about a third world war, which could be nuclear. Prices are rising, and more and more people feel a general sense of panic. Several people feel that the end of the world is very close, and it is just a matter of time.
Indeed, Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag, the greatest Kabbalist of the last century, wrote that we could reach a third world war, a nuclear one, and that there might even be a fourth world war if it would not be enough.
However, there is no end of the world, and it is because nature has a plan.
The plan is that we need to undergo these very unpleasant processes that are full of problems and suffering unless we correct ourselves in advance. “Correcting ourselves” means changing our attitudes to each other so that we would positively connect above our divisive drives.
There are thus two possible scenarios to the script playing out before us: The bad scenario states that our civilization will collapse and we will need to restart it from its remnants. The easier option is that we continue into the future without wars and nuclear bombs. However, the latter option requires that we make a significant attitude shift to each other.
We need to realize that everything depends on our connection to each other and with nature. By positively connecting among each other, we can influence nature for the better, and protect ourselves by doing so.
Based on the video “Are We Nearing the End of the World?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Photo by UX Gun on Unsplash.
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