When we first start studying Kabbalah we feel confident, masters of our lives who know what to do. But after studying for a while, we suddenly lose this confidence. And this is given to us on purpose, not as a direct consequence of studying Kabbalah, but as a result of a new, more serious attitude of the Creator toward us.

The Creator wants me to connect my whole life only with Him, that is, to go through life holding on to two forces. One force is the knowledge of this world, that is, the ability to organize your material life normally as it should be. But at the same time, I must go with the force of faith, which is spiritual.

All your attitude should be divided into two distinct parts: the attitude to spiritual life and to material life. With regard to material existence, I must try to be as calm as possible so as not to transfer the tension and dissatisfaction that I feel from my spiritual progress.

This is our work, and if a person knows how to put everything in its place correctly, he will very quickly advance in the spiritual. We need to understand that material life is given to us not only to provide for our daily bread, but as an integral addition to spiritual advancement. We are obliged to develop in the material plane as well as in the spiritual plane, and in the end try to connect the two worlds together.

You will see how well everything fits together. My teacher Rabash worked at a construction site as a reinforcement fitter, a concrete worker, then a shoemaker, and an office worker. He took any job he could get because it wasn’t easy to get a job in those days. A person must work, be married, support a family, and try to balance everything. It is with the right balance of all areas of life that a person can optimally advance.

But in any case, it will take years because being in from this lowest, worst world, we gradually build ourselves a ladder to reach the summit of all creation. And you have already climbed this ladder a little, but these steps are still unconscious, like a baby who lives, but does not understand his life, where he lives, what for, and why. To understand this, he still needs to keep growing. But one day we will definitely grow up to it.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 6/15/21, “Advance By Overcoming”

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What are the main reasons for increased divorce rates?“

The enveloping reason for increased divorce rates is due to natural human evolution. Our times are characterized by exiting the animal level of development and rising to the human level. In other words, nature is urging us to connect as a single global interdependent framework of humanity.

Since there is a growing need to connect as a single global system, we find our personal connections breaking more and more. Nature wants us to look beyond the family framework in order for us to later return to it on a different level, i.e. where we feel humanity as a single family.

In our individual lives, we experience a feeling of being in love, where we are overtaken by powerful emotions, excitement, inspiration, and a seeming perfection that was worth striving for in order to be together and upon which we could build a family. However, over time, we lost this feeling. Why, then, do we naturally fall in love if later that feeling dissipates?

What we need to understand is that we are in a system that nature runs. In this system, nature wants us to discover true eternal love, i.e. as love exists in nature itself. In the process, it wants us to detach from the conceptions and feelings of being in love that we experience temporarily in our current reality. We thus need to change our instinctive attraction to the other sex, which is fueled by natural passion and hormones, to a more goal-oriented connection.

We form the connections we currently know because we live for our children or our shared household. Moreover, being together is convenient because it lets us support each other as we grow older. Today, however, we need to find a new deeper kind of connection. We thus see more and more cases of divorce because we are in this transitional era where we already start feeling an increasing lack in the traditional frameworks that once held us together, that there is an additional and more sublime drive that we need in order to sustain and grow a happy family in our times.

If we can tap into this drive, which we have yet to accurately identify, we can set ourselves off on a path to discover a completely new feeling that emerges in a more goal-oriented connection to each other. We can then springboard from our increasing distaste toward our current frameworks to seek connections on a whole other level: a much stronger and warmer family-like connection among all humanity. If we enter such a sensation, then we discover a fulfillment that we have never felt before. It is as if we float freely, becoming very light and feeling an eternal thrush of life permeate us.

While we have the opportunity and the ability to determine these new goal-oriented connections through connection-enriching education, we see how these explanations go largely unnoticed. Nature thus prods us from behind by means of pain and suffering, and we find all kinds of connections that we once held shattering, with divorce being a key indicator of our broken connections in relation to the family. The purpose of this increasing feeling of detachment we feel, including the increasing divorce rates, is in order for us to get sick of our separation and develop a sincere new desire to connect on a whole other level. Eventually, we will make motions to connect in this new way, since we will find that otherwise we will be cornered. When we start connecting as nature requires us to, we will then discover the beauty in such connection.

Therefore, together with the increasing irreconcilable hatred and disagreements that break up more and more families, there surfaces a new sincere need for love. If we all understand the sublime fulfillment that true love brings, then we will want to have these feelings in our families. We will then return to the family after we learn how to love the entirety of humanity, and we will then wish to share a deeper and more uniquely personal and internal version of this connection with a spouse.

Based on New Life episode 19 on February 2, 2012 with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman, Oren Levi and Tal Mandelbaum Moshe.
Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.

Filed under: Man and Woman, Marriage, Q&A, Quora | Add Comment / Ask Question →

We should try to see the Creator behind every friend, who is concealed behind him. After all, the Creator conceals Himself in such a way; He has no image, no opportunity to reveal Himself. This is why He builds such a special envelope and projects Himself through it, through humanity, through the universe, through all the phenomena of this world, through inanimate nature, plants, animals, and people.

The Creator is behind all of them, and therefore, through our attitude to the inanimate, vegetative, and animate world, and humanity, we can come closer to the Creator. We just need to correctly treat the inanimate, vegetative, and animate degrees, that is, to use them only to the extent necessary for our existence.

And to humanity we must relate in love your neighbor as yourself, through which we come to the love for the Creator. As it is written, “Love your neighbor as yourself, I am the Lord.” That is, the Creator as if signs it as His order to each person to reach love. Through it, we correct our soul, finish with the corporeal reality that we now see before us, and begin to ascend to the upper world.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 6/15/21, “Advance By Overcoming”

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Question: On Purim traditionally sweet cakes are eaten shaped to resemble Haman’s pockets. What is it about this symbol?

Answer: In our world, there is a connection between the root and the branch. Therefore, we must somehow display all this in the branches. The people should be attached to such things.

Question: Isn’t it primitive that in the 21st century we are following these traditions?

Answer: I believe that our century is the most primitive of all previous centuries. The more we develop, the more our egoism grows. Therefore, we suddenly begin to feel like some kind of greatness and criticize previous centuries, scientists, and everyone else. But they understood much better than we did about the structure of the worlds, the forces of creation.

They knew these roots, saw them, guessed them, and understood what they were dealing with, not in order to make some kind of historical story out of this, but to include in the system of correction so that each generation makes its own correction and gradually we would come to complete correction, which is called “Purim.”

Question: Is that why they introduced the tradition of eating sweets shaped like Haman’s pockets to the people?

Answer: Of course. All this was done by the great Kabbalists. There are innumerable allusions to spiritual properties and actions that we must perform.

Question: It is customary to give gifts on Purim. In honor of what? In honor of joy?

Answer: Yes, because when we connect with each other, we fulfill each other: I am you, you are me. And each individual cannot fulfill himself.

Purim is the final correction. The Creator created egoism, an evil inclination that is completely corrected.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States”

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Question: Are the fragments of the common soul that has been shattered placed in almost every one of us?

Answer: Yes, there is only one common soul, one common desire, that the Creator created. There’s nothing else but Him. Everything that we perceive as existing around us and in us happens only in this desire.

As we grow closer together, the common desire will manifest itself more and more until we begin to feel like one person with one heart, one thought, and one intention.

And then we will really come to feel like one structure that is completely dependent on each other, perfectly understands and coordinates itself with others.

Question: Where is the place for the Torah here?

Answer: We see in our lives that when a person is born, he does not need any Torah, guidance, instructions, nothing. He lives like a small animal. This is how we develop our young children.

And then the child manifests more and more as an independent, individual person, and we have to treat him accordingly, as it is said: “Bring up the boy in his ways.” In the same way, gradually, the correction of the initially broken common soul manifests itself.

Now we are at the very last stage when all the previous four stages have already been more or less passed and are ready for the final correction. In general, it all depends on the last stage.

At this stage, we must properly understand ourselves, our origin, our history, our purpose, and realize all this.
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From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 5/19/21

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Question: According to what you say the Creator does not exist in our world. So who pushes us from behind to reveal Him?

Answer: You can say anything you like about that. For example, who is it that makes the sun go round? Who creates all the laws of nature and provides the energy for everything to exist? Where does it all stem from?

Our world is very small and it exists only in our imagination. If we did not look at our world, it would not exist. Kabbalists spoke about that ages ago, and scientists are beginning to find this out only now.

Our world exists only subjectively in our imagination and not more than that. If we want to transcend our limits, we need to hold on to the group and together create a new system of perception. Thus, we will begin to feel the real existence, the true system of providence of the world.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 3/17/19

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Jerusalem is considered the center of the world, the eternal city. It was founded by King David as the capital of the Kingdom of Judah and it is the capital of Israel today. Jerusalem is mentioned 800 times in the Tanakh, which means it is given great importance in all three major world religions and especially in Judaism.

Jerusalem is considered an eternal city despite the fact that it has been destroyed and conquered by invaders several times over the course of history. Today, Jerusalem is at the very center of controversy for the entire world. Why is the attention of the world focused on this tiny piece of land?

The spiritual world, as well as the material world, must have a center. It was once believed that the center of the universe was the sun around which everything revolves. And this is actually the case if you look at our solar system from the point of view of astronomy.

And in the human system, everything emerged from Jerusalem even though Jerusalem existed as a small settlement even before Jews came to the land of Israel. They conquered the land by defeating seven other nations that lived on it, and they populated the place according to instructions from above. Since then, Jerusalem has belonged to Israel.

Jerusalem is a special place that is the heart of Israel. It did not immediately become a central city; there were several other such places before it. But after a while, Jerusalem became the most important center and received the names “city of peace,” “city of David,” “perfect city,” and since then, it has been proclaimed as the capital of Israel forever.

Why did King David chose this particular location for the capital of his kingdom? It is the place where the spiritual and material centers of the world come together. That is why people are so attracted to this point and many feel special phenomena in it. Even today, many tourists who come to visit Jerusalem say that it has a special glow, an unusual feeling of certain vibrations.

There is even such a phenomenon in psychiatry as the “Jerusalem syndrome” in which a person begins to imagine himself as a historical character from the Tanakh and forgets who he really is.

If we could look at Jerusalem from the inside, as if through an X-ray, we would see that it contains many spiritual properties: the Temple Mount, Mount Scopus, the city walls, etc. We would see the special atmosphere that reigns in every corner of Jerusalem. Every smallest fragment of this city bears the imprint of a special spiritual quality.

These symbols have existed in Jerusalem for thousands of years, but for us they have become familiar and commonplace. On the other hand, we must understand that the main thing is not the thousands-year-old walls, but the people who look at Jerusalem.

It is the people who must give a special spirit to this city, the correct spiritual symbols. Because on one hand, Jerusalem is called the city of peace, and on the other hand, it is constantly torn by strife and wars so it is not clear how to bring it to perfection and peace.

We still have a lot of work to do in order to understand what Jerusalem is and what needs to be done to make it whole and perfect. Jerusalem is not only a city of peace but also a city of perfection and integrity. How can we bring it to a state where the ten spiritual Sefirot would unite with the soil of this world, that is, so that the end of correction would come?

For this, we study the science of Kabbalah and strive to reach the state where this will happen. We ourselves must become whole and perfect. It is thanks to the people who live in this city and achieve unification of everyone—all races and nationalities—that it will become the city of peace, the perfect city.

To do this, we need to learn how we can create such a form of humanity where all people will be united by good, correct, friendly ties to the full extent. Then we will understand the power that is contained in this city. The more we unite together, the more we will reveal the power hidden in Jerusalem. Then it will be a perfect city.
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From KabTV’s “The Peace” 5/25/21

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Question: After leaving Egypt, the people approached Mount Sinai to receive the Torah, spiritual instruction. Why did they not need it up to this point?

Answer: Because a person develops like a small child. He does not need instructions for the first years of his life. Later we begin to teach him. He paints pictures, everything is shown and explained to him, and he is taught in school. That is, he must gradually be included in society in the correct form.

Comment: But a demand arose among the people: “Give us such a system so we will stop hating each other!”

My Response: We are talking about a ripe nation that has gone through a great deal of suffering and realized that if they are not connected with each other, then the force that influences them will affect them negatively.

After all, a nation that is not united is forcibly dividing this force and it manifests itself in contradiction in each one toward the others. Naturally, everyone will suffer. So, they demanded instruction.

After receiving it, they began to move on and wandered in the desert for forty years until that generation died that knew what it was like to be enslaved, meaning, to be in one’s egoistic desires that you indulge and that seem necessary, and good—work for your egoism and you will be fine.

That generation had to die, i.e., completely abandon the use of egoism for one’s own sake. Now as we approach the last generation this should work in us. We must realize that we have no other path than to rise above egoism in positive union with one another.
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From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 5/19/21

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