Audio Version Of The Blog – 7/31/23
Posted on July 31st, 2023
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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “What Do You Think About the Evolution of Humans and How Far Can Humanity Go?”
The evolutionary process we undergo is in order to adapt us to the upper world, i.e., to lead us to a state of harmonious connection “as one man with one heart,” one humanity functioning as a single system.
We exist in an integral system with interconnection and interdependence among its parts.
In the process, we need to experience that we are enslaved to our egoistic human nature, which makes us want to enjoy at the expense of others and nature, to a state of freedom from this egoistic servitude.
It is a place where we discover integrality, a deep connection from one end of nature to the other, which emerges from the upper force’s desire to love and to bestow.
The upper force of love and bestowal guides and relates to us as a single entity, and leads us to a stage where it will grant us mutual connection, where we will each primarily consider the benefit of others and the whole system we exist in.
In other words, from living in servitude to our egoistic desires, which we are currently locked in, we develop through various crises on personal, social and global scales, through which we gradually obtain the possibility of exiting the egoistic network that controls us, and entering into a new altruistic network of connections.
Why do we need to endure various crises in order to exit our egos?
It is because the human ego is very cruel, and we are incapable of rising above it with our own strength. That is, we lack the ability to convince ourselves that it is worthwhile to be positive, kind and loving of one another all over the planet. It is simply impossible while our egoistic nature constantly pulls us in an opposite direction—to self-benefit at the expense of others and nature.
Therefore, in order to show us how our egoistic attitudes make us suffer, nature sends us various crises that oblige us to face our connection, and the need to realize it positively. Accordingly, we then come to see that we have no choice but to correct our attitudes to each other, from egoistic to altruistic.
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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “What Is Tisha B’Av?”
Tisha B’Av is a very important and prominent state in the development of creation.
According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, Tisha B’Av commemorates the ruin of the Holy Temple, i.e. the shattering of the vessels, the state when we lost consciousness (i.e. the shattering or ruin) of our connection as a single entity (i.e. the Holy Temple).
In the wisdom of Kabbalah, we learn extensively about this state of shattering and how important it is, because there cannot be correction and connection without corruption and shattering. Therefore, on one hand, there is great joy in the opportunity for correction that the shattering brings us, and on the other hand, there is sorrow and crying from foreseeing the oncoming shattering, knowing that we needed to resist it, i.e., to maintain our connection as a single entity despite the forces emerging to shatter this connection. This coincides with the spiritual principle that, in spirituality, we always encounter two opposites in the same place.
Therefore, together with the joy at the opportunity for correction that the shattering brings us, we need to simultaneously be sorry about all the ruins that have taken place, out of necessity, due to their spiritual root. However, what is the destruction that we need to be sorry about today? It is that today, after the 16th century, the time of the great Kabbalist, the Ari (Rav Isaac Luria), which marked the beginning of the opening of the process of correction to humanity as a whole, then all we need to be sorry about is our negligence to willfully engage in this process of correction. That is, we shouldn’t be sorry about ruined Holy Temples from 1,000s of years ago, but that each day we fail to actively engage in the process of correction, we fail to build the new Holy Temple—a correction of the shattering in our connections. That is what is truly considered the ruin of the Temples.
Therefore, what do we need to take into consideration during Tisha B’Av? It’s why we cause the ruin and shattering of the Temple today. We shouldn’t cry about what happened 2,000 years ago. We don’t really know what happened back then. By crying about it, it’s as if we position ourselves as great righteous people and think poorly of the people back then, and that they lost the rule of the Temples. What we need to understand is that this ruin played out according to a necessity for a certain order to unfold. However, since the time of the Ari, the 16th century, when we position ourselves against the process and the method of correction—the wisdom of Kabbalah—then the ruin is the shattering of human relations, the division that is spreading worldwide among humanity. We thus don’t relate to Tisha B’Av as a historical occasion, but as a state that is playing out in our daily lives.
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Question: In order to look adequate for the general mass of people, do you have to assume an image of an ordinary, regular person? Is there another nature within you?
Answer: The other nature that resides within me is an image parallel to me, which is in a state of love and connection with all human souls. There is no way to see it. You can imagine anything you want, each one to the extent of his development.
Comment: The spiritual is opposite to the material. If you are in spiritual attainment, then there are some things in you that can appear very strange to people.
My Response: It is possible. Quite right.
In an event that might seem frightening to ordinary people, I can see, on the contrary, the revelation of the next stage. For example, I greet the global crisis with great anticipation and great hope.
I want everyone to accept it correctly and adapt to it quickly. For me, this is truly a tremendous turning point for humanity; it is when it begins to change itself. It is the revelation of an already outgrown stage! Such an unknown state, uncertain time, marks the ascent to the next stage.
And the next stage is revealed to us as a global, integral, interconnected one; it obligates us to think about everyone together. It begins to show its new laws in the world. And we already see that our previous laws are no longer valid. It is necessary to adapt to some kind of next paradigm, and it is already beginning to manifest.
Kabbalah explains the methodology and practice of the new life that helps us ascend to the next state.
This state has never existed throughout billions of years of the existence of our universe and millions of years of human development.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Laitman ((as They don’t Know Him)” 8/27/11
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Question: Igor asks: “Dear Michael Laitman, I have a direct question to you: is it possible to lie, and if so, in what case?”
Answer: You can lie in the case when you save a person’s life.
Question: Is it definitely so?
Answer: Definitely.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 7/17/23
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Question: Why is there a parallel between self-annulment in Kabbalah and totalitarian suppression of personality? After all, both paths are very similar.
Answer: In totalitarian suppression of personality, you are not offered a different personality! You are being suppressed against your will.
On the spiritual path, you have the freewill to annul yourself at each next degree and thus ascend to it. This is called the law of equivalence. When I wish to ascend to the next degree, I am obliged to take its form, and then I leave the previous form of the lower degree and ascend to the next one.
At the next degree I become completely filled with it, recognize it, understand it, feel it, analyze it, and synthesize it within myself. Once I finished it and became it, I have to voluntarily, consciously, and by my own effort, annul myself before the next degree, before the higher mind and sensation. This is how I grow each time.
Otherwise, I will never become a human being from a cat. If I like being a cat, I use its brains and feelings. Therefore, I have to annul this degree in myself and want to become a person. That is, by annulling the cat’s states in myself, I take on the image of a person and rise.
This is not totalitarianism! I force myself to do this, no one else does. This is how it is set by nature. You want to accuse the Creator that, allegedly, He forces us in this way! Offer me another way to climb from degree to degree. How else will you rise if you do not annul your present degree and accept the next one as necessary, in advance, before you ascend on it?!
However, the desire for it you develop by yourself, no one can force you. You yourself realize that the state you are in now has worked itself out. Like in a rocket, that stage should fall off and burn, and you fly on.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. How can We Trust You?” 9/16/11
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Question: In the Preface to the Wisdom of Kabbalah, Baal HaSulam describes how worlds emerge from the four phases of the development of desire. World (Olam) comes from the word “Olama,” that is, concealment. What should be concealed after the Creator has created a desire?
Answer: Creating a desire is one thing, but making a creation from it is quite another.
The creation must sense that it was created by someone above it, and feel what it should do to implement the actions of its maker. This is a continuation of the development of creation based on what is in it, because the last phase of Malchut consists of the previous parts and can begin to transform itself, and adjust to the form it chooses.
And it chooses to be similar to the Creator, that is, to become not a desire, but a source of desire.
Therefore, it begins to receive light in the way that the first phase wants to give it. That is, Malchut begins to transform itself to become a giver.
The creation must be a source of light, i.e., become similar to the Creator and be like Him. Therefore, all concealments are necessary for the creation to become independent, and to want to be like this source itself.
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From KabTV’s “Preface to the Wisdom of Kabbalah” 7/16/23
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Question: People come to study Kabbalah not only because of the lack of meaning in life, but also because they are searching for answers to their problems, like for example, their children’s autism or something else. But you immediately dismiss these topics saying something like “Do not talk about this.” Maybe it is worth revealing some things?
Answer: I do not know what to answer to this because these are border areas that are not clearly clarified in our world. I do not like to talk about inexact scientific data.
I examine psychology because it relates to Kabbalah and speaks about the perception of the world in the five senses. Kabbalah also speaks about an additional perception of the world in five spiritual sensory organs.
By itself, the wisdom of Kabbalah operates with clear physical data. We dissect the desire into parts, grade it, and show in which part and depending on what, a person feels and attains reality one way or another.
But when can I talk about this with him? When can this be explained to a person? When he is already in this.
Before that, he himself does not know what he is learning. Even if he enters into The Study of the Ten Sefirot or something else, what is the use? This makes no sense because in our world there is nothing analogous to spiritual sensations.
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From KabTV’s “I Got A Call. Why are You Scaring Everyone?” 9/5/11
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Question: How can one not turn from a person who bends himself before others, into one who simply believes in the power of the Creator and crushes himself?
Answer: I do not understand this! I nullify my corporeal properties in order to find my spiritual appearance above them, to create my soul, to mold it into the likeness of the Creator by the fact that I now rise above myself.
What does this have to do with religion and everything corporeal? After all, everything that concerns the spiritual has no relation either to the body or to our world. I reveal completely different desires!
I am my point in the heart, which relates to others, to their desires, to their points in the heart. Between these desires for the Creator in you, in me, in him, and so on, I create a network. In this network, I treat everyone as “love your neighbor as yourself”; in this network I want to feel the Creator.
From the love for the other, I wish to create such a substrate on which the common quality of bestowal and love, called the “Creator,” will be manifested. This absolutely does not exist in our bodies or in the world around us! The inner area that you reveal is a new dimension. It exists outside of matter! And then you find out that there actually is no matter!
Question: But until I attain this, do I, in principle, take everything on faith?
Answer: Start to practice this and you will see that this is actually the case.
Question: What exercises do you do? How did you motivate yourself?
Answer: I have been working very seriously on clarifying the perception of reality: What is it, where is objectivity, where is subjectivity, where is the thing in itself, where is the thing outside of me? I am within myself, I am outside of myself, some are in me, and others are outside of me.
This is how I thought all the time until I really began to more or less actually feel and perceive everything. But this is not some kind of self-conviction, but work with doubts, with internal obstacles.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Entrance Into Spirituality” 8/18/11
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Preparation to the Lesson
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1st part of the Lesson — Writings of Rabash, Article 23, “What Beginning in Lo Lishma Means in the Work”
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2nd part of the Lesson — Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Preface to the Wisdom of Kabbalah,” Item 127
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2nd part of the Lesson — Lesson on the Topic of “The 15th of Av: the Day of Love”
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Selected Highlights
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