There are two ways in the development of humanity. One way is terrible and full of suffering. There is constant growth of egoism without something to oppose it, when suffering gradually beats us to death time after time, generation after generation, drives us to war, famine, diseases, all kinds of climatic disasters, into all sorts of troubles!

Any problems may arise here! Suddenly, such a disaster can sweep across the globe that half of the population will die of some kind of infection. We have a lot of all kinds of infectious and genetic problems ahead of us, anything at all. Therefore, we are given the wisdom of Kabbalah so that we do not go through all this, and gradually test our egoism, which would push us forward.

After all, we have to reveal egoism from the smallest egoistic level of our world to the great egoism of the highest spiritual degree. If we move from our current state, the lowest on this scale, then until we reach the 125^th degree, we will have to experience enormous, incredible suffering. At the same time, people will not be able to die, because death for them is a salvation, they will not even be able to help themselves by committing suicide.

We see how easily our world turns into people devouring each other. We have no idea how the upper forces are playing with us, how shaky our civilization is.

We need to show the world how we can advance in a good way and gradually establish  our interactions with the help of the upper force. People do not believe that this is possible because there is no way to attract the upper force into their arsenal. Only we have it. We are establishing this contact because we are studying Kabbalah, which passes through us, through me.

The group receives and will receive through me, even if I am not physically there. This connection does not disappear anywhere, it stays no matter what. In the same way, all other Kabbalists are the connecting links, the chain, to the upper light.

Therefore, we need to give this opportunity to people. It is like we are saying to a person: “Take it! Look, I have a tube through which the upper force, the upper light descends. You can take it, correct yourself and behave in the best way in this life, in this world. This will give you spiritual energy, a sense of where you live, why, how, and for what. You will be able to adjust your life correctly.

Now, from this moment on, you will be developing in our world without suffering, in attainment of the eternal good pleasures of the upper world. You will attain the entire universe, the Creator, such levels and such dimensions that you cannot even imagine. This is not Hollywood with its fantastic pictures. You will be a person standing in the middle of the universe, in the middle of all the worlds.”
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Two Ways of Development of Humanity” 10/19/13

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Question: What does a Kabbalist dream of when he sleeps?

Answer: A cat dreams of mice, Don Juan dreams of women, a hungry man dreams of a loaf of bread. What a person wants, what hurts him, what he is afraid of or aspires to is what he dreams about.

What does a Kabbalist dream about? It depends on what you go to bed with: either issues in the group, the students, or, conversely, serious preparation for the next events. In accordance with this, all sorts of thoughts slip through. I have not seen dreams in the form of images for a long time, they are in the form of thoughts.

Once it was in the form of all kinds of scenes where people argued, debated, and empathized in my dreams. But for the past 20 years or more, I wake up with thoughts of what I was thinking in my dream—thoughts mind you, not visual scenes. I don’t know why.

I think it is because I don’t pay attention to the visual scenes in life: not to appearance or to the world. I’m practically not interested in it. I don’t attach any importance to this. What difference does it make how you are dressed, what accessories you are wearing, etc. I realize that this is all just boosting our egoism, to somehow charm somebody or show who I am compared to him to put him in his place.

Question: Did Rabash tell you his dreams? Did he dream of anything?

Answer: No. I don’t think he did either.

I think visual dreams in the form of images stop happening in the early stages of a Kabbalist’s work on himself. It all goes away very quickly because you rise above this seeming theater that is being played out here, and you enter the world of forces.

For example, if there is some kind of problem on the computer screen, the one who fixes it does not look at the screen, the main thing for him is to fix it on the inside. The screen for him is just an indicator.

So does the Kabbalist. He very quickly passes the stage when the screen is even an indicator for him, and he enters directly into the world of forces. There are no images there, including dreams.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. What does a Kabbalist Dream About?” 10/12/13

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Question: Is it necessary to develop a person’s responsibility for what he does?

Answer: No! And for what can you beat him or reward him? For the society in which he is. So, society overlooked it.

Question: But he still needs to understand his responsibility. Or is he like a child who broke a cup and says, “It fell by itself!”? But it never falls, a sane person should somehow understand this?

Answer: There is no such thing as common sense! Any person, including a Kabbalist, understands everything only within the limits of his level and no more than that.

All of us are, at best, on the “ladder,” and sometimes under it. So, everyone, to the extent of his spiritual correction, can clearly understand, know, and be responsible for his actions up to this stage. And above that, no. He will always be wrong.

This is the only way we can evaluate a person. If I know exactly my measure or the measure of someone else, then I can load myself or him with any actions up to a certain level, and this will be done correctly in accordance with the program of nature.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Ideal Punishment” 10/5/13

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The spiritual degrees that Baal HaSulam talks about are built on a digital principle. These are absolutely clear laws: the influence of light, the reaction from the desire, and the emergence between them of a means of balancing them called a screen.

All this is built on very clear principles: five degrees in the desire (zero, one, two, three, four), five degrees in the light (Nefesh, Ruach, Neshama, Haya, Yechida), and the screen that binds them together. This is how the system of our soul is built.

But its feelings are analog, not digital. They are not digitized by squares or cubes, although everything grows in this way, but sensory and infinite. After all, when light fills the vessel, it does not leave any empty places in it and it produces this complete integral.

An integral is always a limitation. Instead of calculating the area of some figure, we fill it with squares and then sum them up. The sum of the squares supposedly gives us the area of this whole problematic figure. In fact, it does not, but this is approximately the way we use it, depending on how accurately we divide it into squares.

Here, however, we have a perfect integral. Perfect! Because the light fills all the empty spaces of the Kli (vessel). Therefore, the feelings that we receive are analog, perfect, despite the fact that the gradation of information transmission, its perception, reproduction, and in general, everything except feelings (the sensation of light in the vessel) happens by degrees, meaning it is clearly determined.

Question: Why was the analog system not created in the right way? Why should there be exactly two systems: digital and analog?

Answer: Because in this way the digital system gives the accuracy of measurement, analysis, and synthesis, and the analog system gives the height and perfection of sensation.

In this form, the connection of both systems takes place, but only because we are dealing with light, which fills the Kli and absolutely all its empty spaces. That is, there are no small tails left in our sensations that are not yet filled, not yet included in the integral.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. The Difference between Analog and Digital Systems” 10/15/13

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Preparation to the Lesson

Lesson on the Topic “Faith Above Reason”

Writings of Baal HaSulam “Study of the Ten Sefirot,” Vol. 2, Part 6, Item 20

Writings of Baal HaSulam “The Arvut (Mutual Guarantee), Item 25″

Selected Highlights

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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “Who’s a Beauty Queen?”

For the first time since 1950, there will be no Miss Israel beauty pageant in Israel, and Israel will not send a contestant to the Miss Universe contest that will take place in the United States in January. According to i24 News, the decision “aroused many reactions, some deploring the event’s end while others rejoiced. In recent years,” the story continues, “the pageant has been criticized on the grounds that women are only judged on their physical appearance.”

I sympathize with the critics. I do not think that the length of a woman’s legs is a yardstick for her beauty. Besides, how can anyone decide who is the most beautiful woman in the world when every race and ethnicity has its own characteristic look? How can we compare the Japanese standard of beauty to the European standard beauty, and who can say which is more beautiful?

To pretend as if these girls are treated as anything but objects, the judges ask the contestants silly questions, which no one even expects them to answer sincerely. If we were to believe them, we would think that all the girls wished for world peace, and they are all deeply troubled by climate change.

A student of mine told me that the contest is losing popularity and asked why I thought this was happening. I was happy to hear about this; I think it could be a sign that we are maturing, and we are beginning to look beyond the physical.

It is time to start looking for inner beauty because at the end of the day, this is what makes people happy. When you search for a woman’s inner beauty, you will find that you cannot measure it. This is true not only of women, but of all people. When you search for their beauty, it is always hidden.

A person’s beauty evolves over time. It is defined by one’s connections with other people and with the environment. Beautiful people are caring people, people who sympathize with the sorrows and hardships of others, and want to help them feel better.

Such feelings are a gift, but we can also develop them. Once we recognize how self-centered we are, we can learn to change.

It is not a process that one can do on one’s own, but if we, as a society, decide that we have had enough of the Me! Me! Me! culture, we will be able to teach ourselves to think more in terms of We! and less in terms of Me! This will do a world of good for everyone. It is certainly a better way to promote world peace than conducting Miss Universe beauty pageants.
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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “The Meaning of Being Jewish”

I received an email from a man who converted to Judaism in a Reform synagogue in Arizona, U.S. To his dismay, he discovered that his conversion was not recognized by Conservative and Orthodox denominations. As a result, he started looking into the meaning of being Jewish and asked me what the wisdom of Kabbalah and The Book of Zohar say about it.

To begin with, the wisdom of Kabbalah does not relate to a person’s body or to one’s material actions whatsoever. It speaks of and relates only to the desires in one’s heart, and how to help us unite with each other and with the power of unity, the Creator. As a result, the wisdom of Kabbalah does not relate to one’s formal religion, but only to one’s spiritual state. In other words, a person can be Jewish and a member of the Israeli nation at one moment, and a gentile (non-Jew) the next. At the same time, one can be born into a different religion altogether, yet be regarded as a member of the people of Israel in the spiritual sense. I hope my explanation below will clarify what I mean by these statements, which I know will surprise many people.

The Hebrew word for “Jewish” is Yehudi, from the word yechudi [unique or united]. Unity is the heart and soul of Judaism, and particularly unity above differences and divisions. King Solomon said (Proverbs 10:12), “Hate stirs up strife, and love will cover all crimes.” The Book of Zohar (portion Aharei Mot) describes the relation between uniting precisely above hatred, and what it means for the whole world: “‘How good and how pleasant it is for brothers to also dwell together.’ These are the friends, ‎as they sit together inseparably. 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, you will not part henceforth … and by your merit there will be peace ‎in the world.”

The ancestors of the people of Israel united so deeply that they became as one, or as the great commentator RASHI described it, “as one man with one heart.” Only once they achieved that profound unity, they were proclaimed a nation, having united with the power of bestowal that we refer to as the Creator, and with each other. Once they achieved that unity, they were commanded to lead the world to unity, as Prophet Isaiah (42:6-7) described it: “I will appoint you as … a light to the nations, to open blind eyes, ‎to bring out prisoners from the dungeon, and those who dwell in darkness from the prison.”‎

Indeed, if we examine the ancestry of the founders of the Israeli nation, we will find that the greatest among them had non-Jewish roots. They achieved greatness because they united the people, not because of some ancestral privilege. Abraham, the founder of our nation, was not born Jewish; the nation did not exist before his time. Moses’ wife, Zipporah, led the women of the people of Israel along with Moses’ sister, Miriam, after they came out of Egypt and crossed the Red Sea. Rabbi Akiva, the greatest sage after Moses, whose disciples wrote The Book of Zohar and the Mishnah (the basis of Judaism), was born to parents who were not born Jewish. Another one of Rabbi Akiva’s greatest disciples, Rabbi Meir, who is the third most frequently mentioned sage in the Mishnah, and whose wife Bruriah is cited in the Gemara, descended from the Roman Emperor Nero. And last in this list, but certainly not the least, Ruth the Moabite, the heroine of the Biblical story, was the great-grandmother of Israel’s greatest king, King David, and whose dynasty were the kings of the people of Israel for centuries, during Israel’s greatest times.

We therefore see why the wisdom of Kabbalah pays no attention to one’s physical ancestry. If a person believes that unity of all people is the ultimate value, that everything else is secondary to it, and strives to unite all the people “as one man with one heart,” in the spiritual sense, that person is regarded as a member of the people of Israel.

From the spiritual perspective, as the wisdom of Kabbalah sees it, being Jewish has nothing to do with one’s color or creed. The only “test” is whether one strives for unity or for self-centeredness. As long as one chooses unity, one is Israel. If you ever watched one of my lessons, you will see that I have students from all over the world and from every ethnicity and background. The one thing that unites all of us is our aspiration to unite above all differences. This is the spiritual people of Israel.
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Comment: They say that a person produces about 60 liters of tears during his lifetime.

My Response: But they are no longer tears of grief or joy, which are the result of some experience, but tears necessary for washing the eyes.

Question: Yes, probably all the data were mixed up during the research. Interestingly, people can cry from birth to death tens of thousands of times, including crying in childhood and all our subsequent states.

German scientists have estimated that women can cry from 60 to 70 times a year, while men do it ten times less. They determined that men cry for 2 to 4 minutes on average and women’s crying can last much longer.

What is the spiritual difference between female and male tears?

Answer: I cannot say that there is a difference in the spiritual world because a woman and a man are slightly different structures there than in the corporeal world.

It is clear why in our world women’s and men’s tears are so different. A woman is experiencing everything more emotionally externally, and a man is experiencing everything more emotionally internally. Therefore, women’s, men’s, and children’s tears differ in levels—in the threshold of experience. They all manifest themselves in different ways: more often, less often, deeper, in different forms.

However, in the spiritual world, there is no difference between male and female tears. That is, the external manifestation has a certain form, but there is no internal difference at all. There is no difference between a spiritual man and a spiritual woman in the release of tears.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 11/6/22

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Now we shall come to clarify the thought of creation. Certainly, “The end of the work is in the preliminary thought.” Even in corporeal humans, with their many thoughts, the end of the work is in the preliminary thought (Baal HaSulam, The Study of the Ten Sefirot, Part 1, “Restriction and Line,” Inner Observation, Chapter 1, Item 10).

The thought of creation is to reveal the great desires in all created beings and fill them with what they want.
In other words, the thought of the Creator is to delight the created beings.

Question: Why do we not feel this thought?

Answer: We feel it in some measure. After all, we do feel the desire to enjoy, but in a very minimal dose.

The will to bestow in the Emanator necessarily begets the will to receive in the emanated, and it is the vessel in which the emanated being receives His abundance.

Since the Creator is the will to bestow, the result is that the will to receive automatically appears in creation according to the law of cause and effect.
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From KabTV’s “The Study of the Ten Sefirot (TES)” 10/30/22

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