Audio Version Of The Blog – 12/28/22
Posted on December 28th, 2022
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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “Is Road Rage Happening More Often?”
Road rage has recently escalated in a display of violent incidents in Israel. One person was murdered at a pedestrian crossing for making a remark at a motorcycle driver, and in another incident, a driver threatened to kill another driver and then sprayed him with pepper spray. In a recent survey, 50 percent of the public stated that they witnessed violence on Israel’s streets, a number that was 20 percent just a few years ago.
Where are such escalations of violence leading us? We can reach states where we head into the streets as if we head into a jungle, with no idea whether we will return home because we might get eaten alive. We see how everyone sits in their vehicles with no consideration for others, wanting to treat others as if they were their slaves.
It is a matter of attitude. An attitude of mutual understanding, responsibility and closeness would obviously dramatically decrease road rage and its outbursts.
Take a common scenario for many people: You’re driving. You’re late to work. The traffic jam seems to get worse each day, making it take you longer and longer to get to work. You’re aggravated, and someone suddenly cuts you off.
What should you do? Very simply: you should give way to them out of love for them.
“What!?” you ask. “What could they possibly have that I should love!?”
They are your fellow human beings. And if you’re angry that the other driver should also act lovingly toward you and not cut you off, then you should think about how they depend on your example—and give them a proper example of how to behave.
We live in an era that demands our self-transformation. Today’s tightening interdependence in human society makes us responsible for one another. Therefore, our shift to a better world depends on the extent to which we feel, think and act out of our mutual responsibility.
In practice, we need to realize our mutual responsibility first by taking care not to harm others, that we first and foremost consider the safety and well-being of others. We can become accustomed to a state of mutual responsibility the more we absorb this idea and examples of its behavior from our surrounding environment.
If we saw that our own child sat behind the wheel of every car we encountered on the roads, then we would indeed behave differently. We would no longer worry about being late for work. We would instead care for the people around us, and the more such mutual care would spread, the more harmonious and peaceful our world would become.
We should thus try to see our loved one or our close friend in every driver on the street, and more generally, in every person.
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Based on the video “Is Road Rage Happening More Often?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
The year 2022 was marked by difficult events: war, climate change, protest demonstrations around the world, and much more.
This year has been difficult for humanity, and we enter 2023 with a feeling of complete uncertainty about the future. The one thing that is clear is that we are facing a very difficult period accompanied by high inflation and unrest in different countries.
People do not want to understand each other; countries cannot make peace and stop wars. There are many problems: climate change, epidemics, fires, water and electricity outages. Humanity does not behave correctly, and therefore, with every year our life is falling apart more and more. And in this new year 2023 we will have to realize this.
Unfortunately, humanity has not learned any lessons from the past year; it has not made any attempts to improve and change, but simply continues to sail with the flow of life to where this stream carries it.
I look at the future of humanity very skeptically because we don’t have enough intelligence to work on our mistakes, as at school we worked on mistakes so as not to repeat them again. And therefore, there is concern about how we will move forward. Everyone looks to the future with great uncertainty and does not know what to do with our lives and how to resist our egoism.
It is unclear where to put radioactive waste from nuclear power plants and from weapons, from nuclear bombs. The problem has grown so much that it is already out of our control. Who knows how it might end.
We see that two countries, Russia and Ukraine, are waging a war that has no end in sight. The confrontation is only intensifying; the last thing left is for it to turn into a nuclear war. China demands to expand its zone of influence in the world, and conflicts are growing in other countries. I don’t see a good future for the world ahead.
It looks like we will have to go through the realization of the evil of our nature and answer for all the mistakes made in the past and the ones we are committing today. And after that, we may have hope to come to a good life.
And the main thing that we lack is the heart! We do not have a cordial attitude toward each other, and therefore, unfortunately, we cannot feel someone else’s pain, and we cannot unite to help each other. We burn and destroy natural resources, destroy the globe, and at the same time we cannot have a good life.
To fix everything, we need to change a person, and we do not want to learn this and do not even believe that this is possible. We have not yet come to the realization of evil and do not know what the true cause of such a comprehensive crisis around the world is. The true enemy of man is his egoism. And even if we sometimes admit it, we don’t know how to resist our ego.
Therefore, we still lack a genuine recognition of evil.
We need to rethink our past and draw the right conclusions from it for the future. Everyone already understands that by continuing in the old way, we are burying ourselves. After all, we have neither mind nor heart, our only acquisition is a weapon with which we can destroy the entire globe. And with all this, we are not able to stop and turn to a new path.
Even the upper governance cannot say exactly what our future will be because a person is given freedom of choice. Humanity can determine for itself the way it wants to move forward. Whether he will be good or bad depends on our choice, both today and tomorrow.
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From KabTV’s “The World” 12/15/22
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Initially, there was only one desire—it was the desire of the Creator to delight His creations. But the Creator broke this desire into tiny pieces, and they scattered, distancing themselves from each other according to the difference of their qualities, which was revealed during the breakage.
Thus, scientists assert that our universe was formed as a result of the Big Bang. In the beginning, it was just one point that exploded, and its particles began to scatter in all directions in search for balance.
The universe is still expanding, moving away from the central point where the connection once existed. We are still in the process of dispersing. But scientists say that this expansion must end, and the universe will begin to collapse back, meaning, we will begin to get closer and connect.
Somewhere in this process, a state of equilibrium will be reached depending on how we influence these huge cosmic forces and star clusters with our thoughts so that that they begin to get closer back to the center of the Big Bang.
We will see that we can influence all these billions of stars and bring them closer to each other to such an extent that perhaps they will unite again into one nucleus containing all the desire created by the Creator.
There are parallels in this between astrophysics and the science of Kabbalah. The fact is that every day and every moment we influence what is happening in the sky and what will happen to us with our thoughts.
When parts of the universe that seemed empty to us became accessible for observation by space telescopes, billions of stars suddenly opened up there. In place of an empty, dark space, it was as if another universe suddenly opened up to us.
This shows how infinite the world we are in is: both the spiritual world and the material world are endless. And we need to learn how to approach each other with desires and hearts, and then we might be able to see a response in the sky too.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/14/22, “Each Day They Will Be As New in Your Eyes”
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To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often (Winston Churchill).
Question: Are perfection and harmony the same thing? Does it mean that true perfection is harmony?
Answer: Perfection is an opportunity to constantly feel that you are able to move toward harmony. Ideal harmony on its own is unattainable; it means the end of everything, the freezing of the universe if we can imagine it that way. Therefore for us, perfection lies in the fact that we can move toward such harmony.
Perfection is the way to stop everything. This happens when all parts of the world, the universe, and everything in general are in such a state that none of them want to change their state because each is in perfection. Then the system is perfect.
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From KabTV’s “Kabbalah Express” 11/18/22
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Question: The state of heartbreak results from what actions? I can’t just feel like my heart is broken. It’s a consequence of something.
Answer: First, you start by desiring everything in this world. Therefore, in your heart, in your desire, you want to be filled with everything that you see that is useful, good, kind, and in general everything that you can wish for.
After you see that this is impossible, you come to the question: Then what is possible? This is where various states arise in you that gradually lead to the fact that you should not strive for this, it is better to wish for something else.
Thus, through many, many disappointments, the Creator brings you to the state where it becomes clear to you that what you really want is to be closer to the Creator, closer in likeness to the Creator.
How can you do it? Gradually, through many actions, trials and errors, you begin to understand that this must be done only through connection with other people. And the more you unite with them and wish to be like them, the closer you get to the Creator.
This is called “from the love of created beings to the love of the Creator.” This, perhaps, is what a person must go through.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 11/27/22
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Rabash made a revolution by agreeing to teach people who were non-believers, absolutely alien in spirit, that did not have the mentality of Polish Jews of sitting separately somewhere in a corner, in a small community, and studying.
Suddenly forty students come to you from Tel Aviv, who are totally non-believers, and you accept them and give them your heart. All this happens in Bnei Brak, in a closed [Orthodox] community.
It was something incomprehensible: “What? Has Ashlag started teaching non-religious people?! And they are young and not married?! How can this be?!”
It was believed that Kabbalah was only for people over forty. I brought twenty-five-year-olds to him! It was believed that Kabbalah was only for the religious, those who already know the Talmud. I brought guys who never opened these books, did not know, and despised them to him! They only wore the kippah at funerals or if something happened.
He accepted such people to study Kabbalah against all customs—under forty, not married, not filled themselves with the Torah! How can this be? But he went for it. A different time had come.
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From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 2/12/10
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This is what Rabbi Elazar would pray and say when he fasted, “It is revealed and known before You, Hashem, my Elohim and the Elohim of my fathers, that I have offered up before You my fat and blood, and I have seethed them with the heat of the weakness of my body” (The Zohar, Shemot: Verse 368).
There is a big difference whether I read these words from the prayer book or something happens inside of me and I explode from within in my yearning for the Creator with such words.
These feelings were created inside me, formed into words and phrases. I may not even know this language. I do not know how it happens, but this is the result of my efforts to make my desires similar to the light and connect them with the light.
Light and desires produce this reaction in the soul, they are recognized in my brain, the brain transmits instructions to the organs of speech, and I pronounce them without knowing where these words came from!
This is the way the real prayer should be, when everything comes from within, when from the connection of lights and Kelim, from the deepest foundations of creation, light and desire, the filling of desire with light, the whole TANTA (complete Kli – Taamim, Nekudot, Tagin, Otiot) is gradually built until they are expressed by the speech apparatus.
It is clear that Rabbi Elazar did not read this prayer according to the prayer book, but while he was in this state, about which he spoke to the Creator.
Before the Second Temple was ruined, the people of Israel were in connection with the Creator, in the qualities of bestowal and love, and their prayer was the feeling in their heart—desire. It is said: “What is prayer? The work in the heart.”
But the sages of the Great Assembly (Knesset HaGadol), knowing about the imminent fall into egoism, meaning the concealment of the Creator from everyone, compiled a collection of prayers for us, states to which a person must come.
They called it “Siddur“—the order of spiritual states that we must go through within ourselves, in our heart (desire).
But since we are not capable of such a thing in times of exile, the absence of connection with the light, with the Creator, when the upper force is concealed, we mechanically read the words from the prayer book, and someone may be trying to imagine what it would mean in spirituality.
Only the light, when we are studying Kabbalah, will evoke in us feelings, thoughts, sensations, words, and phrases of our prayer as work in the heart, and not in the speech apparatus.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/22/10, The Book of Zohar, Shemot (Exodus)
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