Question: If you want something, you start seeing it everywhere. I know this myself. For example, when you want to buy a car, you constantly see this particular make of car everywhere, and before that, you did not pay attention. There are many such psychological studies: suddenly you begin to see things that you did not value before, they were not in your field of vision.

It turns out that we do not see the Creator because we do not appreciate Him. He is not important to us.

The Creator is the quality of bestowal. Is it that bestowal is not important to us? Is it only the quality to receive that is important? Is only this valuable to us? Is that why we do not see Him?

Answer: If we received something from the Creator, we would not pay attention to Him.

Comment: But the whole world still prays to the Creator, and we remember Him when we feel bad.

My Response: This is just in case. We do not pray to the Creator, but to the golden calf—”people perish for metal.” Everyone prays to what they receive egoistic pleasure from.

Question: Which Creator should I turn to?

Answer: To the true one, to the property of bestowal and love. If you have the quality of bestowal and love for your neighbor, then you can turn it to the Creator. If not, you will not turn to the Creator in any way, He will be hidden from you.

Question: Do you want to say that the Creator created other people instead of Himself and gave me a field of activity? If I treat them with love, is it identical to the fact that I treat Him the same way?

Answer: Yes, you will gradually come from love for your neighbor to love for the Creator.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States.The Significance of the Spiritual” 5/24/21

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The Book of Zohar is an internal commentary on the Torah. When you study it, its most important effect is the shining of the upper light on you. Therefore, it is called “Zohar”—”radiance.”

This light enlightens you and brings you to a state where you begin to float along with the flow of words, letters, and sentences. According to what you read, you change internally. You do not get impressions as if you were reading a novel, but you undergo changes that happen inside you.

Thus, you adopt the phases of all the metamorphoses described in The Book of Zohar and eventually you reach the very end of creation, its goal, the complete merging with the Creator.

Question: In the initial period of studying when a person does not feel the influence of The Zohar, does it nevertheless take place?

Answer: Yes. The impact is happening, but we do not feel it yet. Therefore, the initial period is called the preparation period. You practice, you read, you hear, you try to understand.

Question: Is preparation not yet an action?

Answer: No, this is not an action. This is only the inner development of forces, qualities, and thoughts in you, which you will afterward begin to feel. In the meantime, they develop latently in you.

This is a rather long and not simple period because a person does not even understand how radically everything should change in him.
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From KabTV’s “The Power of The Book of Zohar” #8

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Question: How is striving to feel the Creator connected to descents and ascents?

Answer: In our world, the desire to receive is constantly working in us automatically, and I feel our world more or less in relation to it. In the spiritual world, my natural desire is the desire to bestow, and I feel my states in relation to how it fluctuates in me.

That is, a bigger sensation of the Creator (the quality of bestowal) is an ascent, and a smaller one is a descent.

Naturally, descents and ascents in the spiritual world are completely different from descents and ascents in our world, because in spirituality they all come from our efforts. In the corporeal world, we do not need special efforts because we automatically exist in egoism, the property of reception. And in the spiritual world, in order to exist in it even to a minimal extent, we must make constant efforts to rise above egoism into the next property, the property of bestowal.

These are special, internal efforts when I consciously attract the upper light and it organizes a new property in me. I cannot just automatically exist in bestowal because then I again fall into egoism, which is our main natural property.

Just as if you would want, suppose, to be above the ground, you have to make some efforts to do it. And as soon as the effort disappears, you fall to the ground again.

Comment: But Kabbalists write that if a person has crossed the potential barrier between the two worlds called Machsom, then he will never fall into corporeality.

My Response: He still has to make constant anti-egoistic efforts.

Question: Is  it hard to exist in the spiritual world?

Answer: No, not hard. It all depends on how much we care about the greatness of the Creator, about the greatness of the property of bestowal. If we devote ourselves to this force, to its importance, its greatness, then it is not difficult and can be permanent.

However, it will be permanent when we begin to make the effort. That is, the application of this effort can turn to our permanent state. And it is a pleasant effort. To the extent one feels the greatness of the Creator, it becomes pleasant.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States”

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Question: The story of Purim is told in the Megillat Esther (The Scroll of Esther). What does this name mean?

Answer: “Scroll,” “Megillah” from the word “Gilui” means revelation. Esther means concealment. That is, Megillat Esther is the revelation of concealment.

The fact is that the entire creation is concealed from us: why, for what, and how, what forces act in it. Why do we have to go through the states from one absolutely shattered end to the other end, which is assembled and perfect? What is it for? What forces can we use?

We do not know anything! We do not understand anything! All this is “Hastara,” meaning concealment.

However, gradually we will be able to reveal this. After all, from a certain stage of human development we are given the wisdom of Kabbalah. “Kabbalah” is from the word “receive,” meaning to receive the upper knowledge, the forces of our development, where we can already begin to advance consciously.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States”

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We need a serious reform of our attitude toward children—not just a reform of the educational system of teaching itself or of upbringing, but in general, of our whole life in which children learn from us, take all kinds of examples from us with which they cannot agree and cannot implement on themselves.

Once upon a time, a boy would look at his father, a girl at her mother. If the father was a shoemaker or a tailor, no matter what, a child knew: “I will grow up and also be a shoemaker or a tailor.” Back then, children did not have internal demands.

Crafts have been passed down from generation to generation. Children lived with their parents. They did not yearn to be different. In those days, the whole way of life, all the examples that parents gave them: how to live, how to communicate, all this was normal, all this suited the children.

Today—no! Today, children look at us and feel in an empty world. They have nowhere to get examples from. They have to invent their own world. And we, fools, don’t understand why they are engaged in all sorts of fanaticism, use drugs, and everything else. It all happens because we are not ready to give them examples of living correctly.

We do not agree that they are different. This is our most basic point. We need to take into account that they are different, that they have different souls. And we must live for them, not for ourselves. By living for them, we will correct ourselves as well. So it is said: “Lo, I will send you Elijah the prophet before the coming of the great and awesome day of the Lord, that he may turn the heart of the fathers back through the children, and the heart of the children back through their fathers-lest I come and smite the earth with utter destruction.” Meaning, children should teach us.

When a woman becomes a mother, the child as if requires her to grow up so that a completely different attitude to life would appear in her. It is the same here. We must understand that by having children, we have to be more responsible. And they should dictate to us what we should be like.

First of all, we must study the next stage in which our children should live. They ask for it, but we do not understand it. We are in such a generation, in such “scissors,” in such a transitional process, that we stand as if between two epochs.
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From KabTV’s “Close-up. Depression in Children” 8/24/09

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Question: Why should we study the Creator’s control?

Answer: First, so that we will feel better. Second, we will not be able to escape it in any way no matter what.

We will live this life, we will exist, feed our corporeal body, grow old gradually, and die. Everything will repeat itself over and over again. What is the point in that if we do not eventually begin to impact the general system and to gradually balance it?
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 3/17/19

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Preparation to the Lesson

Lesson on the Topic “To Bestow Contentment to the Creator”

Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Study of the Ten Sefirot, Vol. 1, Part 1, Table of the Answers for the Meaning of the Words”

Selected Highlights

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “How will society keep human labor relevant in an era of increasing automation?“

In an era of increasing automation and mass unemployment, we will need to readjust our concept of work. We are developing to a state where we will first and foremost need to learn how to live harmoniously as a single collective. The most important factor that will hold us together as a society will be positive attitudes to each other, which we will need to develop upon growing divisive drives and egoism that will naturally make us increasingly distant from one another.

We will thus need to learn how to become satisfied with what we need for our sustenance, and this will be possible if we emphasize the need to unite positively as a single human society. In other words, as the need for a human workforce will lessen the more that we automate labor, then instead of trying to make new jobs that we do not need, we should instead set up a system of education that upgrades our knowledge, awareness and feeling of the world we live in. This new system of education should prioritize the establishment of positive connections throughout society.

Ideas of universal basic income that are being explored more and more today would serve such a system well, with one caveat: that basic income is not given on its own, but that it is given in exchange for a certain level of participation in a unity-enhancing educational system.

Basic income given on its own would stagnate society. It would demotivate people to work because it would eliminate the competitive work atmosphere that makes people thrive to advance when they see others progressing.

However, if we start prioritizing unity as society’s leading value, and do so through extensive connection-enriching educational activities, then through such a framework, we will fulfill our competitive drives in a new way: we will increasingly understand the need to unite together with seeing more and more unifying examples emerging within society. Then, as we enter into a new drive to want the best for other people, and to relate altruistically, kindly and with care toward each other, then we will start feeling a new positive force surfacing within this new attitude we apply and nurture.

Therefore, we would be wise to view the era of increasing joblessness and automation as key moment of transition within human development, one in which we will need to get used to positively connecting to each other in society as our principle work.

Based on KabTV’s “Challenges of the 21st Century” on April 24, 2019.
Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Photo by Sai Kiran Anagani on Unsplash.
For more information on this topic, visit the following page: Universal Basic Income: Pros and Cons

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Two Versions of Waging War

Comment: Baal HaSulam writes that there are two versions of waging war against egoism: either it will take place at the level of thoughts, clarification within each person, or if we do not do this, it can somehow manifest itself on the corporeal level.

My Response: Then it will manifest itself much worse to shake us up and make it clear that we must begin to get closer to each other.

Comment: Indeed, Baal HaSulam writes that there could be a third or fourth world war.

My Response: But everything can run in a gentle and short manner. This is the problem. If there is a force called Israel (straight to the Creator), then it is said that Israel shortens the time of correction. This is what we are trying to do within our organization, with all the people in the world.

Question: What does it mean to fight your ego? And what kind of egoism to actually fight?

Answer: With the one that is directed against the other.

Question: Is it precisely this narrow egoism that is against connection with other people?

Answer: Yes. Only connection with others is what we must accept as the only direction of our development.

Israel, the Jews, must prove themselves in this. That is why they are so selfish. But if they do this, they will be able to lead the whole world with them.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 4/30/21

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