Audio Version Of The Blog – 2/13/23
Posted on February 13th, 2023
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Question: What are optimal connections and the optimal state between people?
Answer: The optimal state is when a person reaches a benevolent attitude toward another person. Not because today they are beneficial to each other and tomorrow they are not or someone outbids someone, but because my nature must become completely good.
Why? What is my benefit? Well, if you pay me, I understand that. If I benefit from this, I understand. But just to be kind to each other so that this relationship would be eternal and I would not be able to spoil it, how can I achieve this?
This requires the next degree because if I treat you well, I will reach a higher degree, adhesion with the upper force, attainment of eternity and perfection. In this case, you become a means on my path to reach my perfection and eternity. In this case, I am ready for this, I value this.
In principle, this approach is also egoistic at first, Lo Lishma (for one’s own sake), and then it turns into an absolutely altruistic quality. When I begin to realize what my attitude toward others is correct, pure, eternal, and real, which in itself carries a great upper force, then I am already completely protected from my egoism and I will never become your enemy.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Why do We Need Countries?” 2/4/12
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The main thing when reading The Book of Zohar is to be naive and simple in relation to it.
After all, this Book is so high and great that in relation to it we are small children who have been given an encyclopedia in our hands and hardly know how to even flip through it.
We do not understand anything written in The Zohar. But it does not matter. If you study it to the best of your ability, then the effect of the light contained in this Book is very great.
After all, you do not just read or listen to what is written in The Book. It is like you are in front of a touch screen of the computer controlled by the touch of your fingers. This is how The Zohar works.
Looking at some word, you as if click on it and turn on a certain system. When you read or listen to a word from The Zohar, you “press” on it and from its spiritual root, you attract the illumination (Ohr Makif) upon yourself. And so on, word by word, one illumination after the other. Moreover, The Zohar is written in such a way that it knows how to advance you.
In the spiritual world, we must grow the same way as babies grow in our corporeal world, naturally and instinctively.
Just as the external influence works on a baby in this world and he just opens up toward it, so must we open ourselves to spiritual influence.
Only as a result of its influence, will we acquire spiritual feelings and mind.
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From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 2/26/10, The Book of Zohar “BeHaalotcha (When You Mount the Candles)”
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Question: After performing some joint tasks, it seems like it is even more difficult to mutually overcome subsequent tasks.
Suppose we agree to shoot a video. We are on this mission together, and it is kind of a little unification process. But after that, it is much harder to gather the same people again. If you want to gather them for the third time, it is even harder! And the fourth time, it is completely unrealistic! Those who can overcome do it, and those who cannot don’t.
Is this the difficulty of connection? Moreover, a person understands in his mind what is needed, but he cannot do anything with himself.
Answer: Of course, he cannot until a real need arises and the goal set is above his current state. Everything is built on pure arithmetic: this is more, and this is less. I always take what is bigger, as my egoism is never wrong.
But I can vary more or less; I can imagine that this is more important than that according to the values of the environment. This means that I must always choose such an environment that will point out to me the greater weight of what advances us toward spirituality although it is against my egoism.
If the environment in my eyes is more important than my egoism—and it can develop and show itself in this way, using my pride, my desire for power, for fame, and so on—then I can move forward.
A person receives a practical method of working with his properties. And if he works with these properties correctly, he has no problem moving forward by using them.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Two Kinds of Disturbances” 3/11/12
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Comment: As a child, when my parents and I watched a humorous program on TV and they laughed, I automatically laughed with them in order to participate in this game.
My Response: Of course to be like the adults, as if you also understand.
Question: Yes, I saw how they reacted and also laughed like them. After some time I began to understand this humor because when you play this game, whether you wanted it or not, you suddenly turn on and understand what it is about.
In our spiritual work there is also a level of “monkey.” What is the correct mechanism for this game? After all, a little person is still ignorant and an adult already has a lot infesting him.
Answer: An adult is ashamed and uncomfortable; he does not know how to behave; he alienates himself and hides behind some stunts, behind rudeness, only in order to save his completely stupid pride. What does it give? But that is what nature makes us do.
If we imagine ourselves as little children again, then we are ready to play. In the group you can play and be a little kid no matter what. Friends understand both you and themselves and give each other such an opportunity. Therefore egoism is not afraid to act like a little child. So what if we run, dance, clap our hands, etc.?
We do all this because we agreed to do that, because we understood that we should not be shy, but on the contrary, we must communicate with each other directly, like children. We have to get to that level.
Our egoism can allow us to do this because in the group we are among our own kind. In this case, we can show each other how open we can be, we can help and be included in each other. This leads us to mutual love. You suddenly discover such a commonality, such a force that is never manifested anywhere else!
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Monkey” 3/10/12
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Question: You say that there is nothing stronger than a thought connected with a desire. What do thought and desire mean separately?
Answer: This happens only with respect to us. We are constantly talking to each other on a level called psychology.
It does not give us the opportunity to clearly explore our desires as forces with information records that can be divided into ten Sefirot (emanations). We do not study them in three lines: in receiving, bestowing, and in the middle line between them, in balance as on a scale. All this is impossible to study at the level of psychology.
But from it, we slowly rise to the level that Kabbalah speaks of, to the level where these forces are weighed and their vector orientation of interaction with each other is correctly evaluated. From these forces, we can create an entire vector field, check it, analyze it, change it, and thus control ourselves and the rest of the world.
This is what Kabbalah allows us, but only in the right direction and by no means forcing others to do so, since you are entering a realm where you have clear limitations. As soon as you cross a certain threshold and you suddenly have the opportunity to do something wrong, everything immediately disappears.
In the spiritual world, there is a safeguard; it is impossible to harm the world more than on our small, insignificant, earthly level.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. The Power of Thought is the Manipulation of Consciousness.” 23/01/27
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Question: You constantly say that the Creator talks to a person all the time and that everything that happens around us is a theater. If this is a theater, then how do you play your role correctly?
Answer: In spiritual work, you play with yourself against your ego. You have to play the next level as if you do not have egoism in you, as if it has already been corrected.
The best thing is not to resist what is in you—listen to good advice. Instead of fighting at the lower level, raise yourself to a higher level, and it becomes easy and good for you. You play this state together with your friends.
Indeed, this is a theater! The theater causes a surge of the higher force on you because you are trying to reveal it within yourself. It exists around you in nature; it is a universal field of information and energy.
You do not have to fight with yourself. You just have to rise above yourself all the time! Do not pay attention to your egoism, do not live in it, and do not engage in beating yourself up, that I am such and such. Break away from the ego as if you are already above it. It will become easy for you. And it is very difficult to be in it.
This technique is very simple. The one who remembers it allows himself to save time and energy.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. How to Realize Your Destiny?” 3/11/12
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New Life 256 – Good Neighboring
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Nitzah Mazoz
How do we turn from merely tolerating our neighbors to a loving connection with them? In a certain way, our neighbors are closer to us than any other people. They affect us in our homes when we perceive their noise, music, odors, arguments, conversations, etc. When we create positive relationships with our neighbors, our homes and neighborhoods become places of safety, serenity, and tranquility, enveloped in a cloud of goodness and calm.
Dr. Laitman offers a set of practices that turns bad neighbors into good neighbors so that it becomes a pleasure to be around them. It begins with a set of five or ten meetings between neighbors, perhaps twice per week, in which we introduce the principle of “Love covers all crimes.” Rather than focus on any complaint, we leave the crimes “downstairs” while we build connection above them. Even if it is far from our actual experience, we must imagine our neighbors as ideal neighbors. When I pass their door, I bless them and only think positive thoughts about them. And so on.
Within a month or two everything will change. It will start to hurt my self-respect to think anything bad about my neighbors.
We can evaluate the shift that occurs by asking: How did my opinions about my neighbors change? How much did unpleasant thoughts about them awaken in me? How much was I able or unable to overcome these thoughts? How many transgressions are now occurring compared to what was happening before? We will find that we not only have much better relations with our neighbors, but also within our family and work relationships. Our efforts will lead to warm embraces filled with mutual love, to good feeling and contentment in our shared environment.
This summary was written and edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman
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From KabTV’s “New Life 256 – Good Neighboring,” 11/18/13
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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Why are there ‘self hating Jews’?“
Indeed, throughout history, the Jewish people have seen fellow Jews turn against their own people. Titus’ Chief of Staff, Tiberius Julius Alexander, who was Philo’s nephew and whose father donated the gilded gates to the Temple, commanded both the destruction of Jerusalem and the massacre of 50,000 of his native Jewish community in Alexandria. In the 15th century, Tomás de Torquemada, of Jewish descent, was Spain’s first Grand Inquisitor, and the architect behind the expulsion of the Jews from Spain.
During World War II there were Jews who fought and spied for Nazi Germany. Stalin’s personal assistant, Alexander Poskrebyshev, was a Jew and assisted him in everything, including his plan to exile all of Russia’s Jews to Siberia.
More recently, we have the infamous Bernie Sanders example where, as a Jew, he believed that Israel killed “over 10,000 innocent people” in the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict, when even Hamas’ highest casualty assessments were a quarter of that number.
Jews are said to be unique, but this profound self-loathing is not only unique, it is also very dangerous.
From the very beginning, we Jews were different. Even in the days when we were called “Hebrews,” we lived by different moral and social codes. While the rest of the nations lived by the sword, the ancient Hebrews exercised brotherly love and attempted to love their neighbors as themselves. And while the world nurtured individualism, the Hebrews fostered selflessness.
Our ancestors were an eclectic “bunch.” They did not come from a specific tribe or locality, but were a collection of individuals who took to the idea that mercy and brotherly love were the tenets by which to live. Unlike their Babylonian and Canaanite contemporaries, they did not try to hurl ego against ego to see who was left standing. They had come from just such societies and no longer wanted to live this way. Instead, they acknowledged that the ego, which they termed “evil inclination,” is indeed evil, that it is an inherent trait (“evil crouches at the door”), and that the one way to overcome it is to cover it with love. To put it in the words of King Solomon (Proverbs, 10:12): “Hate stirs strife, and love covers all crimes.”
Granted, it is not easy to constantly aspire to correct your ego and love your neighbor as yourself. From the very beginning, some Jews could not live up to that ideal and left the creed. In fact, after the exile in Babylon, the majority of the Jews abandoned their faith and mingled with the nations. The few who did return to the land of Israel became the Jewish people we know today. They were the ones entrusted with passing on the ideology of their forefathers: the idea that “love covers all crimes” is the way to live, and that “love your neighbor as yourself” is the great klal (all-inclusive law) of the Torah, the Jewish law.
When Israel’s remaining Jews had declined into unfounded hatred, they could not keep their unity, the Temple was ruined, and the Jews disintegrated into exiled communities. It seemed only fitting that the one who ruined the Temple, Tiberius Julius Alexander, was himself a Jew.
Soon after the ruin of the Temple, anti-Semitism in its more contemporary form of blood-libels, conspiracy theories, and accusations of disloyalty, began to dominate the nations’ attitude toward the Jews. At best, the aristocracy tolerated them for their economic and financial acuity. At worst, they were murdered and driven away.
Devoid of the ability to live up to the tenet they themselves had engendered, the Jews became as selfish as their host nations, and a great many of them could not understand why they should maintain loyalty to their religion. These assimilated Jews became our nation’s fiercest enemies, holding profound rancor toward their kindred. They knew that they were born into a creed that was meant to be “a light unto nations,” but they did not want to be the chosen people and resented the fact that the world expected them to be different, more ethical than others, when in fact they weren’t.
Non-Jewish anti-Semites have it relatively easy; they simply hate Jews and they rarely need to rationalize it. Jewish anti-Semites have a much harder life: they feel constantly obligated to justify to themselves and to the world why they hate their own people.
In doing so, they perpetuate and deepen Jewish disunity, driving us further away from the brotherhood that had originally propelled us into nationhood. And when we cannot form brotherhood, we cannot be “a light unto nations” and we therefore intensify the nations’ hatred toward us. This is the reason why the worst catastrophes happen to Jews in countries where we are the most assimilated and least united, as it happened in Spain and later in Germany.
We all have a part within us that resents its origin and objects to our task. Just like our forefathers, this is something we all have to overcome by uniting above our egos. If we let that Jew-hater within take over, we will increase the separation among us and the hatred toward us will grow even more.
The deeper the world falls into unbridled egoism, the more it needs a method to cope with it, and the more it will turn against the Jews. Being the ones who once had a successful way of working with the ego—by uniting above it instead of making futile attempts to crush it—the world will blame us for its woes, not realizing that all it really wants is for us to connect and set an example of unity.
While we may be unable to change the self-hating Jew without, or within us, we can use them as reminders of our task: to unite by covering our hatred with love, in order to share it by way of example with the world. We owe the world our unique method of connection. Until we implement it in order to share it, we will remain the world’s pariahs, whether we espouse socialism or capitalism. Our way to freedom lies not in hating one another and bonding with the world; it lies in loving one another first, and then bonding with the world.
Preparation to the Lesson
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Zohar for All “Introduction to The Book of Zohar,” “The Sixth Commandment,” Item 219
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Zohar for All “Introduction to The Book of Zohar,” “The Seventh Commandment,” Item 223
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Zohar for All “Introduction to The Book of Zohar,” “Reinforcing Ourselves with There Is None Else Besides Him”
| [media 7] | [media 8] |
Selected Highlights
| [media 9] | [media 10] |
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