Fear of Death and Other Psychological Metamorphosis

Question: In our world, somebody lives, somebody dies. Why is this process happening?

Answer: In our world, everything happens by analogy with the upper world. When in the spiritual world desires and intentions come together and the quality of bestowal arises in them, it is called life.

If these desires fall apart and cannot connect with each other in order to conduct the quality of bestowal and love, this separation is called death.

Question: Are there any special burial rituals according to Kabbalistic laws?

Answer: Absolutely not! Kabbalah has nothing to do with our body. It considers it just an animal and does not talk about it in any way.

Question: Why is there a fear of death?

Answer: The fear of death exists because a person does not know what is next. It seems to him that he continues to exist.

Question: I will clarify the question: why does the Creator cause us to fear death? Imagine a reality in which a person would not be afraid of death.

Answer: God forbid. Then he would not achieve any results in his life but would just exist. The fear of death from our youth pushes us forward to the meaning of life, to achieve, to accomplish, and to reveal it.

Question: What can you say about clinical death? Many people who have experienced it went through the same states: they see light, a tunnel, and they feel they are outside the body.

Answer: I have also experienced them and felt them myself. These are all sorts of psychological metamorphoses that we feel in a state of clinical death. They have nothing to do with spiritual states.

Question: Is it possible to say that a tragic death is a punishment for some sins? Or Kabbalah does not think so?

Answer: No. We cannot attribute different situations to our understanding of why this happened and what will happen next.

A person should always feel in a state of freewill, freedom of choice: what I exist for, what I live for, how can I rise to the level where I actually will do something really useful in my life.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 1/14/19

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Life and Death from the Point of View of Kabbalah

Question: For thousands of years of the development of human civilization, there have been a vast number of all kinds of beliefs. It is surprising but true that almost all beliefs talked about life after death. Everyone believes in it. What does Kabbalah say about this?

Answer: Kabbalah says that life is not the existence of our protein body and its death; it is being filled with the upper force regardless of what state our body is in.

In other words, we have an opportunity to acquire the will to bestow, outside of ourselves, exiting ourselves, our egoism. When a person exits himself and wants to fulfill others, then in this state he receives the fulfillment from above in order to pass it to others. That fulfillment that passes through him to others is life.

My desire to fulfill someone outside of me is called life. I want to fulfill almost everybody. If I relate to the others and through them to the Creator in such a way, then a great light passes through me, and this light, which fills me, is called life.

Question: Then what is death?

Answer: In the spiritual world, death is a fall from the quality of bestowal into the quality of reception. That is, the desire to receive for one’s own sake, to lock on oneself all the pleasures, is spiritual death.

Question: Does it mean that if we are now in the desire to receive, we are dead from the point of view of the spiritual world?

Answer: From the point of view of the spiritual world we are not dead, we do not exist at all.

Question: Does a person determine by himself whether he is alive or dead in the spiritual world?

Answer: Yes. If he has reached the state of life and then this quality falls from him and the light disappears he says, “Now I am in the state of death.”

In the meantime, we are not in either state. With regard to spiritual states, we are considered animals, not people.

Question: Is it possible to say that we exist in potential?

Answer: Yes. We can reach a spiritual degree and become people, but so far we do not have this within us.

Question: What is the spiritual root of death?

Answer: It is a transition to a different state. However, it is not death. In fact, there is no death. We consider death to be the absence of the will to bestow, which is the nature of the Creator. When it is manifested in us, we call it life.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 1/14/19

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The Most Certain Thing in Life is Death, the Most Uncertain Thing Is Its Hour

Question: According to the Latin proverb “The most certain thing in life is death, the most uncertain thing is its hour.” Indeed, a person does not need to know the hour of one’s death although it is interesting.

Buying, let’s say a lottery ticket, he reckons that he will win although the chances are one in a million. Yet when he goes out on the street, he never thinks that something can happen to him even though the chances are much higher. This is how we are arranged.

What is the reason for this behavior?

Answer: This is because we wish good things for ourselves and not bad. Therefore, we do not evaluate circumstances and actions correctly. As a rule we think that everything will be alright.

Question: Is the formula “maximum pleasure with minimum efforts” the program of our existence?

Answer: Yes, because our entire life is designed so that we would go through states of pleasure. In every moment of our existence we always put ourselves in the most comfortable state.
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From Kab TV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 1/14/19

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What Is the Basis of Life?

Question: In the old Soviet encyclopedic dictionary, life is defined as “a form of existence of matter, which naturally occurs under certain conditions in the process of its development.”

Living objects differ from inanimate ones by metabolism, irritability, ability to reproduce, grow, various forms of movement, and adaptability to the environment.

Do you as a Kabbalist agree with this definition of life?

Answer: If we are talking about the form of existence of protein matter, about the way life originated and how it developed over billions of years, then, of course, this is true.

Life is one of the possible ways of existence of matter. In our world, this is protein matter because we discuss the organism’s animal existence. Yet, it is entirely possible that it can be built on other foundations.

Question: What is the basis of life?

Answer: At the basis of life is a force that develops any matter to the point that it captures and absorbs the environment for its further development. That is, development itself is the goal of life. Since this development cannot be continuous and infinite, it is interrupted by individual deaths. However, it still constantly progresses.

Question: What distinguishes living matter from inanimate matter?

Answer: Оnly the desire to realize oneself at the next, higher degree.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 1/14/19

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Why Do We Suffer?

Baal HaSulam, “Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot”: 2) Indeed, if we set our hearts to answer but one very famous question, I am certain that all these questions and doubts will vanish from the horizon, and you will look unto their place to find them gone. This indignant question is a question that the whole world asks, namely, “What is the meaning of my life?” In other words, these numbered years of our life that cost us so heavily, and the numerous pains and torments that we suffer for them, to complete them to the fullest, who is it who enjoys them? Or even more precisely, whom do I delight?

Question: The meaning of life is to attain the Creator. If so, why do we suffer so much in our world? Why do we experience so much pain?

Answer: It is because we do not want to attain Him. We balk with all our limbs in order not to get closer to Him. After all, such nearing can cause great suffering.

The Creator is the quality of bestowal and love. We are an egoistic quality of reception, the quality of hatred, rejection of others. Therefore, when we start gradually coming closer to acquiring some of the Creator’s qualities—qualities of bestowal, love, empathy, and so on—we start feeling very bad. We immediately instinctively run back.

Remark: It seems to me that, on the contrary, a person suffers from the lack of reception and not because he is not as bestowing as the Creator is.

My Comment: I am talking not about people who instinctively act in our world, but about the ones who have heard what the wisdom of Kabbalah says and the way we can approach the state where we will be above egoism, which humiliates and limits us all the time.

Question: A person is a will to receive. The Creator causes him suffering by not letting him receive and creates a deficiency in him from which he begins to look for the meaning of life and finds the Creator. Can a person start thinking about the meaning of life when he feels good, is fulfilled, and enjoys himself?

Answer: No, he cannot.

Question: In one of the interviews, they asked you, “Does it mean that Kabbalah is only for losers?” Do normal people who have found themselves and have things to do not need Kabbalah?

Answer: They will be unable to do anything. They sold themselves to a good life. As for a person who feels suffering, to suffer does not mean that he has nothing to eat or he is poked from all sides. We are talking about the suffering when I want to know what I am living for. It is about the suffering on the level of “human,” not on the level of animal in us.

After all, suffering is felt on different levels: I can suffer because I am in pain or because I have a low salary.

Question: So, a person does not come to study Kabbalah because of bodily suffering?

Answer: No, he does not. And not because of the lack of means for living. Only because he has no purpose in life. That is, he has everything but that. Even if you take our generation, people today live in ten times better than a hundred or thousand years ago, but humanity feels unhappy.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 1/14/19

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The Purpose of Life According to the Upper Thought

Question: Throughout the entire history of humanity, people were looking for the meaning of life. In ancient Greece and ancient Rome, they believed that the goal of all human actions was the search for happiness, although everyone understood happiness in one’s own way.

Cynics were content with little: to avoid evil.

The life ideals of stoics were equanimity, calmness in relation to external and internal irritating factors. Most of the Eastern methodologies also followed the same principle.

In medieval Europe and in India, the idea of the meaning of life was associated with respecting ancestors and following religious ideals. If we look at later religious approaches and theories, it is clear that the meaning of life is to know God.

Of course, everyone understood God in their own way. Yet, righteous living, keeping the commandments, and loving God was the essence of their existence.

According to Buddha’s teaching, the meaning and ultimate purpose of life is to end suffering. The absence of suffering is already, in principle, pleasure. Naturally, to stop suffering means to stop using your egoism, your will to receive.

According to Confucius, the main goal of human existence was to create an ideal society in which a person is a “cog” and thus, is in harmony.

According to a survey of modern people, 26% believe that this world is meaningless, 32% that the meaning of life is in love, 22% in getting to know the world and transferring this knowledge to others, 8% in achieving complete contact with God.

What is the meaning of life from the point of view of Kabbalah?

Answer: There is a purpose of creation, initially embedded in the creation of a person and the world in which he was created. It consists in the fact that through our development in this world, in the environment in which we are placed among the inanimate, vegetative, and animate nature and human society, we could reveal the Creator who controls that. The meaning of life is in attaining the Creator during our corporeal life.

Question: How does this differ from other methods that also profess the attainment of the Creator, love for Him, and following His commandments?

Answer: In Kabbalah, we mean an absolutely explicit revelation of the Creator in everything that surrounds us when we attain Him as we attain any other absolutely explicit part of nature.

Question: Where is this attained? Do I see Him, feel Him, and hear Him?

Answer: This is attained in everything that happens within me and around me: I begin to reveal the upper governing force, which is in all actions, properties, and phenomena. The manifestation of the upper force gives me the idea that I am in a completely new world: a world in which there is the one who controls it.

The upper force of governance is manifested in absolutely all properties, changes, in nature, in me, in my mind and feelings, in everything that happens to each of the inhabitants of this world. Moreover, it manifests itself through them and thus reveals its goal: how to lead countless creations on different levels—inanimate, vegetative, animal, and human—to absolute harmony, to connection with each other, to complete integral interaction.

This perception of the single force, goal, and plan, when all actions are connected into one and everything comes down to a single state that we should reach according to the upper thought, is called “the Creator.”

We come to a state when we clearly see, feel, and perceive that there is nothing besides the Creator. There is only this force that created us specifically in order to demonstrate its singularity, its greatness, its strength, and its universality to us.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 1/14/19

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Does a Soul Have a Gender?

Question: Does a soul have a gender? For example, if a person in this life is a woman, will this soul in the next life be clothed in a female body? Or this is not so?

Answer: Let’s say it is so.

Question: What does Kabbalah say about this?

Answer: Kabbalah does not deal with these concepts at all because our world is illusory, imagined by us in our sensory organs.

Remark: But we were talking about souls, about the fact that this bundle of energy undergoes all kinds of metamorphoses and constantly clothes in some kind of body until it comes to the final correction.

My Comment: For simplicity, let’s say that a male soul clothes in a male body and a female soul in a female body.

Question: Is this bundle of energy or this set of qualities unique to people? Can it clothe into some lower forms of matter?

Answer: No, not into anything else. This is not Hinduism.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 12/31/18

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Question: Shamati Article 94 refers to the beastly and spiritual soul of man. What is the difference between them and how can a person harm his spiritual or beastly soul?

Answer: We cannot harm either the beastly or the spiritual soul until we acquire this soul.

The beastly soul is what we have now, like any animal. On the corporeal level, we must properly communicate with each other, be in the right human community. This is called the beastly soul.

The spiritual soul must first be revealed. It needs to be built, i.e., you need to feel the need for it and attract the upper light, which will restore it and create a good connection between us. Then we can already interact with each other.

In the meantime, no one has a real soul. The soul is either a common bond between us, or, as it is said: “We are all like beasts.”
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 2/13/9

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In the News (MedicalXpress): “Mystical near-death experiences where people report a range of spiritual and physical symptoms, including out-of-body sensations, seeing or hearing hallucinations, racing thoughts and time distortion, affect around 10 per cent of people, according to a new study that analysed participants from 35 countries. …

“The new findings were presented at the 5th European Academy of Neurology (EAN) Congress by researchers from the Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen University Hospital, University of Copenhagen, Denmark, the Center for Stroke Research, Berlin, and the Norwegian University of Technology, Trondheim, Norway. …

“The study group who reported NDEs variously described feeling at total peace, having their ‘soul sucked out’, hearing angels singing, being aware they were outside their body, seeing their life flashing before them, and being in a dark tunnel before reaching a bright light. Others spoke of being aware of another’s presence before they went to sleep, or of a demon sitting on their chest while they lay paralysed unable to move.”

Question: What do you think about this?

Answer: When I was in a near-death state after an accident, I also sensed all sorts of images. I did not hear anything; I had a noise in my ears. But I saw all sorts of unrealistic images. I understood that what I saw was not real because I was in such a state.

Question: But is it true or not that a person feels this way?

Answer: The fact that they see this? Is what a person sees the truth?

I, as a Kabbalist, see this completely differently. What we see now is also not the truth. It is an imaginary and illusory world. Where is the truth? Everything is reflected in me, there is nothing outside of me. It is what I imagine. Thus, it is the same there.

The exit into the next dimension is completely different. It must be above egoism. If a person does not reject their egoism, then in the end, one has none of this.

One has all sorts of far-fetched ideas about the future world. Maybe he thinks that this is the future world. I do not think that anything is presented to him; he is just taking his brain, his intracranial fluctuations, for some kind of another world.

He has no other world in such a form. He must understand that in our world he must exit his egoism in order to feel the next degree—the upper world. Yet, for this, he must rise above himself. The ascent, however, in a real form, can only be in this world.

Question: If you would rise above your egoism, what would you see?

Answer: A person would see positive and negative forces interacting with each other and as a result would depict for him or her  a completely different picture—forces.

Question: It is not very clear. What does it mean to see the forces?

Answer: I cannot tell you this. It is impossible to convey.

Question: Can it only be conveyed to a person who has already attained and felt this?

Answer: Yes. This is serious information. It is transmitted and can be felt only by those who are ready for it and able to perceive it. There is no prohibition here. A person just has to be able to perceive this information; then one will see. Just as a small child does not notice what adults notice.

Question: So, when they say “The hidden wisdom of Kabbalah,” this is not about the hidden wisdom but about the fact that I, so far, do not see this?

Answer: Yes. This is why it is called hidden. Everything is revealed only to the extent of your ability to attain. Unfortunately, we are in a state when nothing can be explained. Only if you want, if you are consumed by the desire to attain, then you will be able to overcome this.

Question: Then what are you always trying to explain? You are making TV programs, writing. Why?!

Answer: I am trying as much as possible to reveal to people, at least a little, the opportunity to see the way to this. Nothing more. All the rest depends on a person himself.

Question: Does a person need to reveal this or only to make an effort?

Answer: A person needs to make an effort in order to reveal, and to make an effort all the time, an effort to advance in order to constantly rise above oneself.

Question: How will this desire occur in a person?

Answer: It is either through corporeal suffering or through spiritual aspiration from the right environment. There is no other way.

This is not an easy task, but humanity cannot escape from it. I am sure that we are in a state that is very close to that.
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From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 7/23/19

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Question: What is the spirit of the body that brings us into interaction with each other?

Answer: This is a common force that binds everyone together and provides us with eternal existence. We must leave individual existence from the sensation of our personal life, which ends with the death of the body, to the existence of our common life, which we will begin to feel as circulating between us.

For example, in the human body, millions of cells die during a day, and others are born instead. The same way as one cell dies in the body, when we die, we become like this cell in the common body of humanity, which dies and disappears from the body.

In order not to disappear without a trace along with the death of our animal body, we need to connect with the life of a common body, which means to strive through our connection between us to the Creator. This is what the science of Kabbalah does.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 7/21/19

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