Audio Version Of The Blog – 1/23/23

Listen to an Audio Version of the Blog
Download:MP3 Audio

The Essence of Sacrifice

509Question: From the point of view of all religions, there have always been sacrifices of plants and animals. Several thousand years ago, there was even a Temple in the State of Israel where animals were sacrificed. How should we relate to it?

Answer: Simply like it is—that it was necessary to sacrifice inanimate, vegetative, and animate, and as if to atone for one’s guilt by it. But in fact, this was done for a person to understand what the real sacrifice is.

It comes down to a person not to kill another but to limit himself, his animate, vegetative, or inanimate nature so as to use it sacrificing his feelings, his desires, his intentions, and thus correct himself.

But since people could not fully realize this or do it inside themselves, the sacrifice began to manifest itself in external actions. It existed among all nations, all religions, all communities.
[307821]
From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 1/8/23

Related Material:
The True Meaning Of Sacrifice
A Small Sacrifice For A Great Goal
Sacrifices That Bring Us Closer To The Creator

How to Survive in the Modern World?

294.2Question: How can one survive in the modern world?

Answer: I think we should not only survive but think about how to simply live well: freely, justly, without being afraid of anything or anyone, not being defensive, so that everyone has everything, and children to have a good future. I think it is this year that we will be able to begin to understand what the path to this should be.

Question: Let’s say a person wants to live his life normally and sees such a terrible crisis around him. How can he deal with it?

Answer: This crisis depends only on our relations. If we really want the world to change, we need to improve our relations.

Nothing more! Then everything will be different: the sun, clean air, everything will bloom, the earth will give good fruits and a harvest. Everything will be fine, but only if there are positive changes in the relationships between us.

Man is the only harmful animal in this world that cannot help but spoil it! He must recognize this and correct the world.

Question: Suppose this tiny little man walks between skyscrapers under the yoke of problems and hears the advice from you that good relationships solve everything. He thinks: “How can I influence this?”

Answer: Just influence. You do not have to learn anything. Just try to look at others in a more friendly way, and life will change. This is pure psychology.
[307667]
From KabTV’s “Blitz Questions and Answers” 1/6/23

Related Material:
Bury the Axes
Why Isn’t There Progress In Relations Between People?
What Is Better For Others Is Also Better For Me

Perform All Corrections within Yourself

209Question: Why are there two gradations in writing: printed text and cursive writing?

Answer: In principle, there should be no printed text. A person should be minimally concerned with his livelihood, and all the rest of his strength, time, and abilities he should use to unite with others in order to reach the level of similarity to the upper force, upper nature. This is his purpose. Everything else he does is completely unnecessary.

This entire worst, small world that appears in our distorted ideas is necessary only to ascend from it to the upper world.

Therefore, there is no need to invent anything, write anything down. You must immediately perform all the corrections within yourself and feel them internally.

Therefore, it is enough to verbally convey to a person the instruction of ascending from our world, and he must live by these laws, revelations, and wisdom. He does not need to read and memorize them. He must see them for himself.

To transmit verbally means that they tell me something, and at the same time I feel and perform, I am in the place that you are talking to me about, at this level, in these halls of attainment.

What was the point of writing or reading?! There was no point!

Records appeared only when there was a descent of generations, and a person no longer had the possibility of direct attainment. There were no teachers, there was confusion, and the mix-up began. Then they began to write books for subsequent generations, in particular, for ours.

What if we didn’t get these books? It is scary to say what we would do. We would be in terrible depression to the point of suicide.

Question: But the Torah originally was written?

Answer: No, it was not originally written. It was written by Moses during forty years of wandering in the desert, describing the states that people went through with him. This is called the “Torah.”

Then he gave his notes to Joshua and everyone else as a spiritual diary of what they went through together. There is nothing else in this book.

It describes how they tried to come together and then separated from each other, whether they were similar to the Creator or not, all the problems that they solved in their correction, why they made long stops in the desert and their crossing dragged on for 40 years. After all, this whole path could be covered in a week. But 40 years were necessary precisely for the past state to die and the future to be born.
[307493]
From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. The Difference between Handwritten and Printed Text” 1/21/12

Related Material:
Don’t Put On Paper What Is Meant For The Heart
The Group Makes You A Hero
Defining The Terms Is Key To The Study Of Kabbalah

The Past Needs To Be Cut Off

627.2Question: Marina writes: “We are immigrants. We left the country recently. And everything seems to be fine. My husband works and I study. But we can’t get used to our new life in any way. We dream all about our life where we grew up and became adults, where we were happy, met, got married, and had children. But we understand that all this happiness will never return. We harass each other when we remember how good it was for us, and we can’t stop. My question is: how do we break away from the past and start a new life? How do we do it?”

Answer: It seems to me that this is a psychological problem, not any other. There are people who have moved from one country to another and the next day they are already walking the streets and feel free.

And there are people who even after 30 or 40 years feel that they are still new immigrants. There’s nothing you can do. It is psychology. It is probably necessary to involve doctors, scientists, and psychologists who could fix this problem.

Question: Do you think it is necessary to love this country where you have moved to? Do I need to accept it slowly with my heart?

Answer: This is a must! And forcibly fall in love! Because there they put into you a forced love for the former country. And here you have to do it yourself.

Question: But do I have to start entering the country and learning the language?

Answer: It is necessary even to do it in advance if there is time. I studied the history and geography of Israel. I knew and understood a lot of things. I even knew the language a little. I had no problem going to town and buying something or asking for something.

Question: Tell me, please, you keep saying that you can’t turn back to the past, that you need to cut it off and not look back to the past. How is this done?

Answer: I think it is just a belief, a self-persuasion, that I have no connection with the past. The past falls off, is cut off, disappears, vanishes, and melts like a haze.

Question: And do I have to master the present?

Answer: Yes.

Question: If these two, husband and wife, are like a group, how do they work with each other? I really want to help them.

Answer: They must mutually support each other in the fact that they find themselves in a new environment, and this environment is their real one. Meaning, it is their today and tomorrow. And there is no other and there will not be, and there is no need for it to be. They have to convince themselves of this. It is all just psychology.

Question: Tell me please, if we take the upper governance, the Creator, and look at the human world, look at these eight billion people as the Creator does, is there any place in which a person should be and in general is his place? Or does nothing particularly belong to him? He thinks he has a homeland.

Answer: It is all psychology. A person can be thrown anywhere and he will get used to it there and will consider it his home.

Question: So a person can take this step and say, “This land is my home”? And move from place to place, and live like that?

Answer: Yes. As soon as I realized that I had to leave for Israel, I immediately moved from Belarus to Lithuania. And I got into a different condition.

Question: In order to make it easier to leave?

Answer: Yes. There the first question was: “When are you leaving?” And in Belarus they were afraid to say this. And it was all very simple.

Question: So a person should accept what already exists now and enter into it?

Answer: Yes. Cut off the past.
[307226]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 12/8/22

Related Material:
There Is Nothing Worse Than Regretting The Past
Live Not In The Past, But In Anticipation Of The Future
People Live In The Past

Not a Trust, but a Check

49.01Question: How can we use the environment in order to attain the Creator? Who can we trust in this world in order to come to the Creator?

Answer: Nobody. What does it mean to trust? What is this childish attitude? A child trusts an adult, gives his hand, and goes with him where he is told to go.

On the contrary, we train a person to constantly check, constantly analyze: Where do you exist, what for, how, and why? In no case can there be any unfounded faith in someone or in something; there is no such thing in Kabbalah!

Faith is the upper force that clothes in you and gives you the quality of bestowal. It is not like in our world when I believe something and go ahead with my eyes closed. There is no such thing!

Here you are taught to look at everything with open eyes, to check, and to trust nothing. This is a science— absolutely clearly coming from practice. Even things that are not attained experimentally in ordinary science are attained here.

Question: Let us say a person comes to the society of Kabbalists, people moving toward a goal, what should his attitude be?

He must perform constant analysis and at the same time try to trust this system. How can he not trust in this case? After all, he needs to move forward.

Answer: What is there to trust? I can only move forward through the acquired quality of bestowal, which is called faith. I work with it like with a force that exists in nature and not in my imagination, like in our world.

Question: Usually a person relies on his opinion because he has an established analysis mechanism. But this is wrong to some extent because it is egoism that creates such a box that I perceive. Is it possible to find some tools here, but not stupid faith, so that there is an analysis and you are not mistaken?

Answer: You are dealing with a clear analysis of states; you are exploring everything on yourself, and therefore there can be no mistakes here. So many repetitions on yourself, within yourself, according to the book, and with others. You see that they describe the same things that happen to you. Then you see that they are really right, that you do go through such things. This is a completely different matter.
[307619]
From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Whom to Believe in This life?” 1/28/12

Related Material:
Faith According To Kabbalah
Faith Above Reason Is Bestowal Above Reception
Faith Above Reason

Pile Up the Flaws

528.02Question: How can we determine what elements pull us away from spiritual development and oppositely, which ones help us advance?

Answer: There is only one thing that leads a person to the goal. It is his aspiration to the center of the group in order to reveal the Creator within it. Everything else is only for support, if indeed it gives any support at all.

We are talking about people who seek the revelation of the upper world, but not about those who merely live in our world, suffer, and want to improve their life. There is a different method for them. They do not wish to reveal anything above our world; they want to get fulfilled with something that exists here.

Comment: But there are different criteria for connection when people are doing something together.

My Response: We are uniting with the purpose of assembling our single enormous desire, sufferings, aspirations, uncorrected properties, and all negativity to the degree that it would express within us and we would cry out for correction.

We pile up the flaws together and say “We want to correct them. Please correct them!” And this is it. Just like kids  scream and fight, but you calm them down, in the same way we have to fight with one another, scream, and go to our mom (the upper mother Binah) so she will correct us.
[307292]
From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Arava or How To Overcome Yourself?”1/21/12

Related Material:
The Spiritual Development of Abraham’s Group
The Basic Principle Of Spiritual Development
What Is Needed For Our Spiritual Development?

Daily Kabbalah Lesson – 1/23/23

Preparation to the Lesson

[media 1] [media 2]

Zohar for All “Introduction to The Book of Zohar,” “On the Night of the Bride,” Item 127 

[media 3] [media 4]

Writings of Baal HaSulam “Introduction to The Book of Zohar,” Item 66

[media 5] [media 6]

Selected Highlights

[media 7] [media 8]

“How can you balance emotions?” (Quora)

Dr. Michael LaitmanMichael Laitman, On Quora: How can you balance emotions?

We can balance our emotions with the help of the environment.

What I mean by “environment” is our society and its influences, that we can surround ourselves with such influences that will guide us on how to direct the emotions that awaken in us.

For instance, we know the example of peer pressure, when our friends tell us to do or not to do something, and their influence makes us follow their recommendations. Using this force of our surrounding environment, we can choose our environment—the kinds of people, media and values we surround ourselves with—and accordingly change our attitude toward certain emotions.

We can then build our intellect with our social influences. Our desires constantly grow, and we correspondingly need to build a greater and greater intellect with which we can deal with our growing desires.

Adjusting our environmental influences in order to build the intellect so that we can best deal with our growing desires is the essence of education. It is what we need to teach the younger generation, that we can balance our emotions with our intellects, and by doing so, come to see our perfect state in life.

We should thus try to find an environment that would be able to supplement our constantly-surfacing emotions in a certain direction. Our environment should act as a damper, helping us mediate our inner excitements and eruptions, bringing them to a state where we would be able to realize them—but to realize them in ways that benefit both ourselves and others.

In other words, we need to examine ourselves in relation to our environment, whether the environment accepts what we want to do. If we find that our desires match those of the environment, then we can continue realizing our desires. We can then determine that we can carry out what we want to do, that it will benefit both us and those around us, and that everything will turn out just fine if we go ahead and realize our desires.

This is how we can balance our emotions—by learning how to balance between our intellect and our emotions via our surrounding environment.

Based on the video “THIS Is How You Balance Your Emotions” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Writtem/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.