Preparation to the Lesson
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Lesson on the Topic “To Bestow Contentment to the Creator”
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Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Study of the Ten Sefirot, Vol. 1, Part 1, ‘Histaklut Pnimit,’ Chapter 10, Item 35″
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Selected Highlights
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Zohar for All, VaYikra, Item 80: When he reached her, he saw that she was lying in the dust. Who saw the glory of the queen at that time, and the king’s requests of her?
The queen lies unconscious, unable to do anything with herself. This is the recognition of complete separation from the source. Somehow, she must find at least a little strength in herself to reach out to the king. Even not the strength, not the desire, but the initial movement. The king will add everything else.
All of us, while being in such a terrible, lost, powerless, dark, full of confusion state, must find a small movement toward the Creator. Then His revelation will bring us new strength, new understanding, and open the path for the light.
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From KabTV’s “The Power of The Book of Zohar” #14
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Question: What does it mean that there is no coercion in spirituality?
Answer: It means to make the goals of the Creator your goals. Then there will be no coercion.
Before that, of course, there will be coercion. That is how it works. In nature, there is no such state that something does not pressure something else. This is so not only for the Kabbalists but for every bug, every creature on Earth. Even inanimate nature is under the control of some coercive forces. This is only in order to move everyone to balance.
Question: Is there a state when nothing is pressuring you, and you are in complete harmony?
Answer: The state of absolute stillness, of absolute balance, is the purpose of creation. It is achieved precisely by balancing all the opposing forces.
You are under the influence of many forces and you are constantly in harmony with them, constantly maintaining it. It is the maintenance of this harmony that is your ultimate harmony, your ultimate joy.
Question: Is this the state of stillness?
Answer: There is no stillness! Stillness is an endless, continuous movement that you constantly direct to the most optimal state for all of nature, for everyone.
Question: When a person reaches such a state, does it mean there is no coercion for him?
Answer: Yes. When a person has the task in hand of constantly improving the balance of all nature, then it means that he is not under coercion, but he himself determines, creates, and controls nature.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States. There is no coercion in spirituality.”
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In the wisdom of Kabbalah, we study and then reveal that all of creation, everything that exists in our world and in the world of forces around us, which we call spiritual world, is just one common network of connections.
This common, mutual, supportive, mutually complementing network of connections is called the soul. We talk only about it: how to reveal it between us, how to increase it, how to enter it with our mind and feelings, and how to control it. All this is the attainment of the soul.
In revealing this connection, we begin to discover the force of bestowal and love called the Creator. This, in principle, is all that the wisdom of Kabbalah is engaged in, and in general all that a person can do: during his life in this world to attain the Creator, to attain the soul, i.e., the network of forces in which we all exist, and through which we are completely interconnected.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 12/17/18
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Question: Do we have to go through all the spiritual states, like the flood, the Exodus from Egypt, etc., in the same chronological order or is it not a must?
Answer: We have to go through everything the Torah tells us about in more or less the same chronological order, but each one goes through them according to the state of his soul.
So, being in Egypt does not mean that I will spend four hundred years in exile and then escape from there through the desert.
We need to transform all that to spiritual frameworks, which means that going down to Egypt is the recognition of the ego as evil. At first, it is not evil and there are seven years of satiety when I enjoy my ego and I understand that it leads me forward, as I study the wisdom of Kabbalah, I know more and understand more and more.
Then seven years of hunger come along. If before I felt that the ego filled me, now I feel that it detaches me from spiritual attainment and that I do not want to accept it any longer but want to exit it.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 2/24/19
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My new article on Linkedin “The Case for (the Right) Envy”
“Love is as fierce as death; envy is as hard as the netherworld” (Song of Songs, 8:6). Envy is one of the most intense emotions. We often try to hide it, even from ourselves, because it is such an unpleasant feeling, a direct hit on our selves. Being made of desires to receive pleasure, envy makes us feel that we are not only not receiving, but that others are receiving what we are denied. Nothing is harder for our ego to tolerate than the feeling that we are robbed by others, that they are somehow better, more powerful, more successful than us.
My teacher used to say that for himself, he would love it if he could wear nothing but pajamas. It’s comfy, it’s got big pockets to fit anything you might need, it’s warm in the winter and pleasant in the summer, what more could you ask than to wear pajamas? But we can’t wear pajamas because people will gossip about us; they will not appreciate us if we don’t dress according to the social dress code, so we have no choice. In order not to be humiliated, we wear uncomfortable clothes and do what other people want us to do. Therefore, envy, and the fear of being humiliated, dictate our entire lives.
However, envy doesn’t have to be negative. It makes us envy what others have and that we would like to have, as well, but if we wanted to have positive things, then envy would increase our motivation to obtain those positive things. By positive things I mean things that embolden us, that strengthen our society, increase our solidarity, and boost our sense of self-fulfillment. For this to happen, our society needs to nurture pro-social values. When society values people who contribute to society, who make people happier and more connected to each other, then everyone begins to envy them and want to become like them.
In this way, using envy, we turn society from competitive and abusive to supportive and inclusive. When people compete at being kind, there is no end to the achievements they can make. Moreover, when they perceive helping others realize themselves as an expression of their kindness, it helps everyone become the best they can be, and at the same time want to contribute their achievements to improving their society even more. There is no end to the achievements that such a society can make.
Therefore, envy can be bad or good, depending on the values that we envy. If we teach ourselves to value what is good for all of us, our envy will become an engine for happiness.
Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What are the limitations of AI?“
AI will be able to do a lot, but its ultimate limit is that it will never be able to be like a developing human being. It is impossible, because there is a greater force of nature that is above us humans, which created us, and which cannot be programmed. AI would never be able to realize the level of that higher force, because it would require a certain connection to it that AI lacks. The connection to the higher force is a point that exists in the person from that source. This point is called “a part of Divinity from above.”
This point is a tiny desire among all of our desires, which is connected to a higher altruistic nature, one of love and bestowal. We cannot program technology to develop these kinds of qualities just as we cannot program desires. All we can program are actions that stem from those desires, but not the desires themselves.
Programmers working with AI explain that we can build smart systems that learn and develop over time, becoming much smarter than how we initially built them. However, there is a limitation that AI will never be able to cross: it will never become truly feeling and sensitive. It could perform several actions that would make it seemingly become sensitive and feeling, but it will never truly be able to feel because feeling belongs to desire.
Technology cannot feel or be made to feel. It could simulate feelings but true feelings would elude it. Therefore, all AI will remain robotic in the end. Its brain and its reactions have potential to make it a trillion times smarter or more useful than people. People, however, will end up on top, just as long as we will not program AI to finish us off.
In order to secure a better future for ourselves, we will have to reach the realization that AI and other new technologies do not matter. What matters is the soul’s development. By developing the point within us that has the potential to resemble the higher force of love, bestowal and connection, then we develop something that is truly unique, and which has the power to improve, enhance and even upgrade our lives.
Nature will always be more supreme than any AI or other technology that we create. When we learn that nature itself—the force of love, bestowal and connection—has no interest in our dabbling with AI, but that it has only one demand for us: to become similar to it, and to realize the total harmony, happiness, peace, confidence and love that comes from our achievement of this resemblance.
Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash.
Question: The basis of the spiritual world is the importance that we ascribe to it. It is written in the sources that there is only a gram of light and a gram of desire, and everything else is determined by the way we treat this, what importance we give to certain phenomena. How does this happen?
Answer: We are accustomed to the fact that in our world, desires and fulfillments have some kind of standard of proportional measurement: meters, cubic meters, parsecs, distances, tons, etc.
However, in the spiritual world, there are no material dimensions. Everything there is measured only sensorially, by the relationship of one to the other. Therefore, if I care about a gram of some material that may be more precious to me than the entire universe and my entire life because, let’s say, this gram is the beginning of a new life, then I treat it as something that fills the entire universe. To me, it is greater than anything else. This measures the spiritual value of an object.
In other words, a spiritual object has no geometric or metric dimension, and is determined only by the size of my attitude, my attention, and the greatness of the object in my eyes. These are purely subjective measurements.
Question: In principle, does a person who is in spiritual attainment or a Kabbalist enjoy not from what the Creator gives him, but from the importance of the Creator in his eyes?
Answer: He does not feel what the Creator gives him. He feels only to the extent of the greatness of what the Creator gives to him.
Question: Let’s take an example from our world. Let’s say that a cup of coffee is also from this unified force. I can just have coffee. But if some important person made it for me, I will naturally be fulfilled not only with the drink, but also with the importance of this person, how great he is in my eyes and in the eyes of the society. Is that how it works?
Answer: Yes.
Comment: But still, there must be some kind of material.
My Response: There must be material in our world. That is why we start from the corporeal world, which is created so that we can move from it to other, more abstract categories.
Question: Does it mean that I should treat all the pleasures of this world in the following way: This is given to me by the Creator, and the only thing I lack is the importance of the one who gives this to me?
Answer: Yes, but when I begin to develop importance for the one from whom I receive, and to me it is more than the importance of the received object, then I move to other dimensions.
That is, the object itself no longer matters in my eyes. The only thing that matters is the importance of the one who gave it to me. Then I pass from the sensations of our corporeal world to the dimensions and sensations of the upper world: I received this from the Creator.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States”
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Zohar for All, VaYikra, Item 80: Who saw the glory of the queen at that time, and the king’s requests of her? Finally, the king held her in his arms, raised her, and brought her to his palace. And he swore to her that he would never part from her again and will never be far from her.
The queen is the gathering of all souls. Take both hands, that is, for the right and left lines, for the egoistic and altruistic qualities, for everything that is in our souls.
Question: To do this, we need to be brought to the state of dust?
Answer: Certainly! Only then will we match the greatness of the Creator when we can become His partner. Because the difference in the states of complete connection with Him and complete disconnection from Him is necessary and must remain in us. In it, we will feel all His qualities, all His power, and they will become ours.
Question: Do people need to learn that it is necessary to reach the state of “in the dust” in order to reveal the upper force?
Answer: It’s not up to us. They may or may not know, but we will come to it anyway.
Comment: It sounds pessimistic.
My Response: Not at all. If I know in advance that a state of disconnection will soon arise in me, and I will feel bad, but this state is good and, having experienced it, I will rise to the best, to light, infinity, eternity, perfection, and harmony, then it will be a pleasure for me.
Question: When in the dust, do I understand what is happening to me?
Answer: If you prepare for it, then yes. To do this, you need to read Kabbalistic books. They contain everything necessary for preparation.
The fact is that we are not one person who is in front of the Creator. We are deliberately separated and are in different states. Therefore, by properly supporting each other, we can connect our minds and feelings in such a way, even before the physical fall, by realizing this fall in advance, that we will not need it at all.
We are not required to physically be in a state of complete powerlessness and decomposition. It is enough to realize and feel it internally. That is, now as a normal person in this life, I can call upon myself such a manifestation of the Creator that will give me the maximum distance from Him. Therefore, two worlds were created: the spiritual and the material.
We exist in a body, in some physical volume that does not change. Nothing happens to it, so that in our souls we can feel the lowest possible state, distance from the Creator, and lead an ordinary life, not lying physically in the dust and lowering ourselves to a comatose state, but mentally, with understanding, we realize this within ourselves. And then normally, reasonably, sensibly feeling, knowing and measuring everything, we will begin to rise from this state.
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From KabTV’s “The Power of The Book of Zohar” #14
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