Audio Version Of The Blog – 1/18/23

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What Will Prevail: Good or Evil?

157Question: Why is the situation in the world constantly getting worse?

Answer: I do not think it is getting worse all the time. We just start demanding something more from the world because we are developing. If we look at the current examples of world politics, we see that people are already beginning to understand that you cannot throw bombs, you need to somehow talk to each other.

I think the world is sobering up in some ways and starting to understand better how ugly it is and how much it needs to change.

Question: What will happen in five years? In ten? In fifteen?

Answer: I hope it will be good. People will understand that they have no other choice: they will either destroy each other or encourage each other. We live in a state where we have to decide what will prevail: good or evil. The need for this decision is already facing us.
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From KabTV’s “Blitz Questions and Answers” 1/6/23

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Above Place and Time

137The Zohar speaks nothing of corporeal incidents, but of the upper worlds, where there is no sequence of times as it is in corporeality. Spiritual time is elucidated by change of forms and degrees that are above time and place (Zohar for All, “VaYetze,” Item 139).

Question: Kabbalah speaks of states that are above time, space, and motion. Can you explain what it is? What kind of change in forms and degrees are we talking about?

Answer: There is nothing permanent or temporary in the universe. We introduce all this with our sensations, our attitude to what is happening. Only the Creator, the upper force, is absolute.

If we change ourselves relative to Him, then we change time, space, movement, and the world in which we exist. We can only speak about this in relation to the Creator.

Question: Can time end?

Answer: If time by itself does not exist, then how can it end? It exists only in our sensations.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 12/25/22

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Spiritual Body

232.01Question: A person can feel his body when it hurts. What happens with the spiritual body?

Answer: Everything we feel in our world, we feel only from some kind of pain, limitation, pressure, and so on, even the most pleasant sensations. Feelings come from the sense of the boundary.

In the spiritual world, however, it is quite the opposite. I rise above the sensations of my body; for me this egoistic boundary does not exist.

As a result, I stop feeling my body and this world in general because I annul the egoistic boundary and rise above it into altruistic qualities. This world begins to gradually dissolve for me. I see it not as material, but as still depicted for me. But in the end it disappears completely.

I have no problem with this, let the imaginary world disappear.

The spiritual body is my qualities associated with others, that is, what I build on the basis of adhering and connecting with others. My spiritual qualities are where I can treat others the way that the Creator treats them.

In such cases, I am not limited as well. My spiritual body does not give me any problems.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Spiritual Body” 2/23/12

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A Conduit of Spiritual Energy

234Question: What happens at the moment when a person choses how to correctly convey information to others, meaning, he is not giving a canned speech, but speaks through his heart? Let us say when you are speaking you give out certain feelings through your words. What is happening at that moment?

Answer: At that moment I exist inside of my words, inside of these actions. At that moment I am connected with the upper rung. From there, the upper energy is passing through me to the one with whom I am speaking. The upper energy is working on that person to the degree that he wants to hear and agree with me. If not, the upper energy will not act upon him even if he listens.

Therefore, everything depends on the relationship between the people. There cannot be any coercion.

Remark: You are doing this consciously, but your student is simply speaking with someone and passing along the information. It is clear that he partly conveys himself.

My Comment: No, it doesn’t matter. The “himself” is to a very small degree, even if it carries a lot of nonsense. In general, he is connected to the group and to me and through this, with the upper rung.

Whatever he talks about it is still manifested more positively in his listeners. In this case he is simply a conduit even if he says something from himself. It doesn’t matter. He has nothing to say from himself.

He is speaking in plain words about something that he heard, and perhaps he still has no clear understanding what notion is instilled in these words. It still conducts our energy.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. The Conductor of Spiritual Energy” 4/12/14

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Egoism Uses Us

260.01Question: Can egoism temporarily take over a person who is not in attainment?

Answer: Yes, it can take over specifically in order to lower a person. The person’s job is to turn that egoism back into an ascent. Twenty kilograms of egoism were added to an individual, and now he must correct it by twenty kilograms of bestowal and love.

Why else would he get such an addition?

Question: What if he plunged into the ego very deeply?

Answer: Do not worry. The upper degree works in the same way as we teach a child to walk: we step back from him and wait for him to take a step toward us. This is the way the upper system works. We do not go far from the child, and this is what is done to us as well, although it seems to the person that he has been completely abandoned.

Question: When a person feels superior to everyone else and neglects them, can he unite with anyone?

Answer: If a person feels superior to others, he cannot be in a spiritual state. This contradicts the qualities of the upper world.

If the upper light influences him, he feels inferior to others, indebted to them, and treats them like a father would treat his son because the son is the central figure and the father takes care of him, and all the attention of the father is directed to him.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Egoism Uses Me” 1/28/12

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Without Creation, There Is No Creator

712.03Question: You say that the whole development of the world unfolds in our egoistic desire. But if there is no time in spirituality, how did it happen here? In some short timeframe?

Answer: There is no time in spirituality. Development does not occur in parallel in two worlds: the spiritual and ours.

There is nothing at all in the spiritual world, not even the spiritual world itself. There is what you perceive. If perception occurs in egoistic desires, then you feel our world, and if in altruistic desires, for bestowal and love, the upper world.

There is neither our world nor the spiritual world at all. The upper world exists only relative to the perceiver if he perceives his similarity to the upper force, the upper light.

There is no Creator without creation. There is no time, there is no life if there is no one who would feel it as existing.

If the world is something that manifests itself in our sensations, then it exists only relative to us. It has no form outside of us.

We do not know the source of this force. The light descends on me. I can identify this source only to the extent that I am like the light. Then I can say that the source probably has the same quality.

It is impossible to understand. For that, you need to change yourself.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. The Real History of the World” 1/21/12

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Daily Kabbalah Lesson – 1/18/23

Preparation to the Lesson

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Daily Kabbalah Lesson – 1/17/23

Preparation to the Lesson

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“Does anyone desire what is bad?” (Quora)

Dr. Michael LaitmanMichael Laitman, On Quora: Does anyone desire what is bad?

We should first understand what is desire and what is bad about our desires. What is bad about our desires is that they control us and our intellect.

Desire—or to be more precise, the desire to receive—is our entire essence, and it wants to be filled with pleasure all the time.

What pleasure does it want to be filled with? It does not care, as long as it gets satiated, and so killing and stealing, and the exploitation, manipulation and abuse of others, could easily be what gives it its fulfillment. Positive altruistic actions could also fill our desires, but that is usually not the case.

In the wisdom of Kabbalah, this desire that enjoys at the expense of others and nature is called the “evil inclination.” It is evil in that it cannot take others into consideration.

This desire constantly bosses us around, making us cater to its demands, unaware that it is not actually us. It is a desire that exists in us like a virus or a germ, and it controls us.

We relate to it as if it were us, but it is not us. It controls us from within to our detriment because it makes us follow its demands when we ourselves would wish to develop differently. Instead, it leads us into all kinds of negative situations. For instance, even at the level of our basic health, our bodies wish to simply be healthy yet due to our desire for pleasure, many of us fill our bodies with all kinds of drugs, chemicals, alcohol and smoke in the name of pleasure that our desire constantly directs us to. It does not ask our permission, but it dictates to us what we seemingly want.

Eventually, via the accumulation of life experiences as well as various indirect supporting systems in the environments we encounter, a siren goes off in our intellect: “Wait a minute! What your desire is leading you to is not at all to your benefit!” It discerns that simply following the dictates of our desires has led us to all kinds of suffering and blows. In other words, the intellect emerges in order to balance out the desire to receive’s demands.

The desire belongs more to the animate level within us, whereas the intellect belongs more to our human level. The intellect is cold. It tells us what is right and wrong, but then it becomes difficult to activate in order to control our desires.

We can understand the difficulty of controlling our desire with our intellect from our childhood where our parents told us to be good kids and to study, but we only wanted to play and mess around. Later in life, we can say that our parents were right, but it does not help us at the time when we could have benefited from following their advice.

How can we, throughout our lives, the moment we have detrimental desires, control them with the intellect and balance them out?

Instead of having to live our lives in ways where we run after desires that constantly surface—which we end up paying for and regretting—the wisdom of Kabbalah offers an alternative: a method of reaching an experience of life where we realize our desires beneficially: balancing them out with our intellect in ways that lead to our optimal state.

Based on the video “What Is Bad about Our Desires?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.