Entries in the 'Body and Soul' Category

Eternal Soul

Laitman_509The Torah, “Numbers,” 15:30 – 15:31: But the soul that doeth aught with a high hand, whether he be home-born or a stranger, the same blasphemeth the LORD; and that soul shall be cut off from among his people.

Because he hath despised the word of the LORD, and hath broken His commandment; that soul shall utterly be cut off, his iniquity shall be upon him.

Question: What does “that soul shall be utterly cut off” mean?

Answer: It is impossible to cut the soul off, for after all, this is the discovery of the characteristic of bestowal, love, the Light, in a person.

If we make our egoistic desire similar to the Light, the upper force, then this characteristic of bestowal and love begins to perceive the Upper Light and be filled with it to the degree of equivalence with each other, and this is called a soul. In this manner we connect ourselves with the Creator, with the Light.

Our main function is to make sure all of our separate internal desires, intentions, thoughts, and feelings gather together under one solitary intention of bestowal and love outside of ourselves.

And then to the extent that at any given time they are joined and connected within us, we create within us an object called the Creator and we feel Him within us. The characteristic of love and bestowal that this person can create within himself is the Creator.

Question: So why is it said that if, “the soul that doeth aught with a high hand… shall utterly be cut off, his iniquity shall be upon him”?

Answer: If a person was on a spiritual height or he had the possibility of rising to this height, but he does the opposite, then he falls, descends from this height. It follows that the previous soul is apparently cut off and he must produce it anew, but already on another greater level. So the descent is necessary.

In every stage you must fall from the previous level and rise to a higher level.

When we read the Torah, we see how the people made mistakes all the time. The question may be asked, couldn’t they learn anything?! But they must commit sins; they must discover the poisons of their egoism within them again and again, then correct them, and rise even higher upward.

Along with this, they must be happy about their descent! As it is said, “A Tzadik (righteous) will fall a thousand times and get up” (see Proverbs 24:16). This is our way.
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From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 5/13/15

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The Wonderful World Of Tomorrow

Dr. Michael LaitmanThe wisdom of Kabbalah is revealed specifically in our time because we are in year 5,776, which is at the end of a 6,000 year period of human development that began with the first revelation of the upper force to a human being.

So it is worthwhile for us to use the knowledge of this wisdom as rapidly as possible to leave all of our troubles behind and attain a completely different life. We see how the higher management influences us and constantly puts us into very difficult situations in order to obligate us to reflect on the question,  “What can help us improve our lives?”

Baal HaSulam wrote in the article, “Introduction to The Book of Zohar”, section 39: Now we have shown that the Creator’s desired goal for the Creation He created is to bestow upon His creatures, so they would know His truthfulness and greatness, and receive all the delight and pleasure He had prepared for them… 

So where is all this?! Every person asks: “Where is this good or at least something that isn’t so bad?” And all of this is because we exist within our five senses and these limitations, and without evolving, we cannot attain what the Creator prepared for us. After all, they are not designed for this. We associate this life in which we now exist with our body. But this wonderful life and all the good that is prepared for us by the Creator belongs to our soul.

Question: Is this what is called the “world to come?”

Answer: Yes. But it is written: You will see your world in your lifetime (Berachot 17a).

We need to attain it here in this life and in this world. A person doesn’t acquire the next world after his death; he attains it here in our world.

Even now, we are in this infinite world, but we don’t feel it because our five senses of sight, hearing, smelling, taste, and touch lock us into this minute envelope called “this world.”

If we expand our senses with the help of the wisdom of Kabbalah, the wisdom of perception, and immediately depart from feeling this world, outside of its limitations, we feel the world to come, meaning the world that comes as a revelation. And there we discover all the pleasures that the Creator has prepared for us.

Baal HaSulam wrote in Shamati #75, “There Is a Discernment of the Next World, and There Is a Discernment of This World”: There is a discernment of “the next world,” and there is a discernment of “this world.” The next world is considered “faith,” and this world is considered “attainment.”

It is written about the next world, “they shall eat and they shall delight,” meaning that there is no end to the satiation. This is so because everything that is received by faith has no limits. However, what is received through attainment already has limits, since everything that comes in the Kelim of the lower one, the lower one limits it. Hence, there is a limit to the discernment of this world.

Faith is the new force that we acquire with the help of studying the wisdom of Kabbalah. We receive the power of faith, a unique sense that helps us open the borders of this world and begin to feel what is beyond it.

We expand the world just like a child who goes out of his room and sees a vast world: However, what is received through attainment already has limits, since everything that comes in the Kelim of the lower one, the lower one limits it. Hence, there is a limit to the discernment of this world.

Question: What limits is Baal HaSulam talking about here?

Answer: If we go out of our five senses and acquire an additional sense called the sense of bestowal, love, unity, and connection, then through that, we move to a wider world, a more expanded sphere than the one in which we feel our lives and existence.

It is called redemption when you go out of the framework of this world, like from a dungeon or prison where you feel that everything is pressuring you, is limited in time and space, and you cannot be free of all the troubles that crushes you within it, and so you go out into a spacious and wonderful world.
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From the Israeli Radio Program 103 FM, 8/9/15

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Leading A Human Life

Laitman_931-01Question: What does it mean to connect to other people? What stands in my way of doing so and which force can correct this evil in me?

Answer: According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, our biological bodies will remain corporeal and will continue to exist like all the other animals. But there is another essence in a human being, a human entity, the beginning of a soul. There is a tiny part of that soul in each of us.

This human part in us is our inner world, our psychology, our desires and thoughts, that have nothing to do with our corporeal existence but are above the body. It is our desire to discover what life is, what is the goal of life, and why we came into this world, that is, to respond to all these “childish” questions.

If we begin to distinguish the human parts in us and to connect them with one another, we will put together the system called “first man,” Adam. This interconnected system existed in the past, but then it was shattered into many pieces, which we call the sin of the Tree of Knowledge, and now we have to put it together again.

If we reconstruct this system together and begin to study it, we will understand how it works. When we see the complex web of connections between us, we will understand the plan of creation and its purpose. When we begin to care more about our souls and not about our physical existence, we ascend above our bodies in our feeling, our understanding, and our consciousness. Thus, we build our general soul and feel the new reality, the upper world, the Garden of Eden, in it. This is the goal, and instead of living in a body that belongs to the animate level and lives like an animal, we rise to the level of “first man,” Adam.

If we connect all our human parts, we will feel a human life that is totally different from our previous life. When we lead a human life, we cease to depend on our bodies. The body can die, but the human being will continue to live on a new level.

The goal of our existence is to raise us from the corporeal level to the human level, and this is the difference between this world and the next world.
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From the Israeli Radio Program 103FM, 8/30/15

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The Life Of A Person Who Has A Sixth Sense

laitman_277Question: How will my life change when I attain a sixth sense? What will I feel?

Answer: The sixth sense is the attribute of bestowal that also is divided into five types of senses. We feel this world through five physical senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch.

The wisdom of Kabbalah, on the other hand, enables us to develop an additional sense that also is divided into sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, but on a spiritual level.

This additional sense enables me to feel the upper reality, a broader scope surrounding our world. Then, I can feel how I mutually participate with the upper force and understand the reason for everything that happens in our world.

I understand why the upper force turns to me or to others, and how I should respond to it properly in order to avoid the negative development of events and even to change things for the better and correct them.

By using the sixth sense, the attribute of bestowal, I discover the root of different phenomena that dress in matter before they reach our world.

Question: Will I become a different person then? How will it affect the life of my children and my nearby environment?

Answer: I can explain that by giving an example from our world. Suppose you are a psychologist, but you are also a mother and have a family and children. You understand people’s behavior and all the calculations and actions they make and the reason for the relationships among the family members.

In that case, you respond to what is happening not like an ordinary woman, but you can explain many things, understand, and justify them. This means that you feel life on a much deeper level.

This is exactly how a Kabbalist feels life, but much more deeply. Besides that, unlike a psychologist who only can explain the reason for what happens, a Kabbalist also actually can change our lives.

A Kabbalist sees the deepest reasons for what happens in our lives that are above time, motion, and place that stem from beyond the framework of our world.
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From the Israeli Radio Program 103FM 8/16/15

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The Sixth Sense, The Soul

laitman_600_02Question: You say that the same soul reincarnates into our world, changing bodies. On the other hand, you say that an ordinary person has no soul and needs to build it within himself through connection with others. How can this contradiction be resolved?

Answer: None of us is born with a ready-made soul. The soul is a force that we acquire through studying the wisdom of Kabbalah. When we realize this method within ourselves, we grow a new quality of bestowal and love for one’s neighbor within which we discover the Upper Light or the feeling of the presence of the Creator, the upper force.

This additional “sixth sense,” a feeling of love and bestowal to one’s neighbor, that is acquired by the person, is called the soul. The Kabbalists write that the soul is a Kli (vessel) designed to be filled by the Upper Light. Every person must attain the root of his soul and was created only for this sake.

It is written that the soul is “the portion of God from above” (Job 31:2) through which one begins to feel the upper force.
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From the Israeli Radio Program 103FM, 9/6/15

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Discovering The Secrets Of Life

laitman_214Question: It seems to me that you need to be a very wise person to reach a discovery of the higher system that manages our world.

Answer: No, in The Book of Zohar, as well as in the writings of the Ari and Baal HaSulam, it is written that the wisdom of Kabbalah doesn’t require any special outstanding abilities or talents, and every person can attain it.

Just as you are aware and attain this life from what you see, so you also discover the system of higher management, begin to understand and see how it works around you, how people and yourself are activated, and how you can build a new world.

This vision gives a person many powers. First of all, he begins to feel eternal; his life does not end in a few decades. The person begins to feel life within the soul, not within the body. Our bodies belong to the animate level. Those that belong to the levels of the still, vegetative, and animate are limited to their lifetime.

However, the person who begins to resemble what is higher, the Creator, enters into an absolutely different plane of his existence called living the life of the soul. So, he begins to feel eternity and wholeness in his life within the soul.

To move from the corporeal life to the life of the soul while living in this world—meaning to begin to feel the world eternally and completely, understanding how to conduct himself, helping others to also attain a vision like this—is given to us by the wisdom of Kabbalah.

Question: You talk about existence on a higher level, but along with this does a person also begin to understand our world? After all, people are very confused today.

Answer: I have spoken about this more than once; in sum, the corporeal desires are what motivate a person: desires for food, sex, and family, which also typify animals, and the social desires for wealth, respect, education. These are three types of corporeal desires and three types of social desires.

But this is not enough because questions are awakened in us. What are we living for? Why are we alive? What is the meaning of life? What is its purpose? What is its secret? We cannot lock ourselves only in this life and say that there is nothing more. I live my 70 years and fill them according to my ambitions, and that is all.

We have developed. Especially in our generation we have reached questions that if we don’t find a solution to them, a person won’t want to live and will sink into despair. According to the process of the development of nature that works on us and influences us, we must discover the secret of life, its purpose and its essence. So, the wisdom of Kabbalah was revealed.

If the question grabs a person—beyond the desires for food, sex, family, wealth, honor, and knowledge, which typify this world—the question that is beyond our world, beyond our lives, and the person feels that he must discover it, he reaches the wisdom of Kabbalah.
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From the Israeli Radio Program 103FM, 8/9/15

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The Secret Of Life Discovered By Adam

laitman_744Question: We usually celebrate our birthday and that of our relatives. What is the meaning of celebrating Rosh Hashanah, which is the birthday of a person who lived thousands of years ago?

Answer: We celebrate the anniversary of the day that the opportunity to discover the secret of life, the purpose of our life, and the meaning of life, which makes it worth living, was first revealed to mankind.

These questions about the meaning of life awaken in many people today. Adam HaRishon (First Man) was the first to discover this secret. He explored it and found out that we are living in this world in a special reality so that we will ascend from it to an upper level, to a whole and eternal existence.

We can actually attain this existence right now and don’t have to die in order to do so. Death itself doesn’t provide us with the right to enter the upper world. If it were so, why would it be worthwhile to do anything in this life?

People think that by living without the revelation of the upper world they will be able to enter it after they die. So what do we need this world for?

Many don’t even believe that there is anything else other than this corporeal world. This is exactly the secret that Adam discovered. And this is the event that we celebrate when the Jewish new year begins.

It is because we discover that we have nowhere to advance to since this world is only a passageway, a corridor, through which we can arrive at the revelation of the Creator (Bore), which means to come and see (Bo – Re).

Question: Will this happen after we die?

Answer: It will not happen after the death of our body, but after the death of our ego. It says “you shall see your world in your lifetime.” So please see it while you are alive!

Adam discovered that anyone who wants to has the opportunity to discover the upper world, that is, the next level according to the order of our evolution, here and now in this world.
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From the Israeli Radio Program 103FM, 9/6/15

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The Sixth Sense

laitman_276_01Question: Is there any connection between Kabbalah and religion? Is Kabbalah a religion?

Answer: Kabbalah is not a religion; it is a science. Kabbalah is about the part of reality that is hidden from us but with which we have an opportunity to work, like in science. Therefore, Kabbalah is called a science.

Through special actions that we perform on ourselves, we can reveal our senses for perceiving a higher level. We have five corporeal senses—vision, hearing, taste, smell, and touch—through which we perceive this world, but in a very limited form. Yet we perceive it to some extent and live accordingly.

We cannot even imagine that in this world around us there are so many other phenomena because our senses do not reveal them in a manner similar to that we cannot see what happens far away without binoculars, or without a radar we don’t see what exists in the air except the sound waves that are in our voice diapason, and so on.

We have so many instruments that we created in order to broaden the range of our senses. But they can only expand them while the science of Kabbalah creates an additional sense, “the sixth sense,” through which we can reveal the rest of reality, which is hidden from us. Then we know what we live for and how to live correctly. This is precisely what a person needs to attain.

Question: What kind of additional sense is it?

Answer: This sense works like our corporeal senses, only our five senses act in the form of receiving, consuming, attracting within all the data that is outside. And this additional sense, which we develop through Kabbalah, operates according to the desire to give, bestow, and love.

We come outside of and rise above ourselves, and thus we are not limited by our body with its five senses. Our spiritual sense exists outside of our corporeal body. It is like we deploy this sense onto all of reality. Then we can perceive everything. In fact, this sense is the soul.
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From the Israeli Radio Program 103FM, 8/9/15

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How To Uncover The Future

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: What does it mean to reveal the higher force, to uncover its intention, to reveal where it is leading me, and to uncover what it wants?

Answer: Ramchal (Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, a great Kabbalist who lived in the 18th century in Italy), wrote that the wisdom of Kabbalah is intended only in order to learn the governance and purpose of the higher desire: why the Creator made all of these creations, what He wants from them, and what will be the end of all the incarnations of the world.

You shall know everything in terms of what happens in your body, in your thoughts, desires, in the mind and in the heart, everything that is happening in the world and where it leads. I am talking about a high attainment when you are on the same level as the upper force, as it is written in Hosea 3:5: “Afterwards shall the children of Israel return and seek the Lord their God… .”

You reveal the entire program of creation, all the forces that activate it, and you begin to receive the right to enter this program and control it, instead of the Creator. It is like with a child who grows up, and a father hands over his business so that the child will continue running it instead of him.

This is what it means to become a human being, man, since “man” (in Hebrew “Adam,” from the word “Domeh,” similar) means similar to the Creator, similar to the upper. This is what we need to reach.

Question: Does this revelation affect the everyday life of a person?

Answer: Of course! First of all, you become the master of everything that is happening. You know what you are living for and how to arrange your life in order to extract from it the greatest benefit.

Baal HaSulam writes in the article “The Teaching of Kabbalah and Its Essence” that the wisdom of Kabbalah is the revelation of the higher governing force in all its properties and manifestations unfolding in the worlds and subject to the revelation by man in the future, until the end of all generations.

In other words, you see all the prospects ahead, until the end of the existence of our world at 6,000 years counting from the first revelation of the Creator to Adam HaRishon 5775 years ago. You will reveal the future.
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From the Israeli Radio Program 103FM, 8/8/15

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Listening To The Advice Of Kabbalists

laitman_227Question: Does a person have a soul?

Answer: We must create the soul inside us. The soul is the mutual connection between us, which means the complementing of the hearts. If we attain at least a partial mutual connection, we will feel the next upper state inside of it. Therefore, “Love thy neighbor as thyself” is the main law of the Torah.

Question: Does that mean that spiritual values and mental attributes are empty words?

Answer: These concepts are typical of the level of our world and serve only to establish some pleasant form of communication between us and nothing more than that.

In order to call myself a spiritual creature, which means a creature who has an upper mind and not just a creature who can create the next generation and hurt others, we need to make internal efforts in studying the wisdom of Kabbalah.

There is no other method like it because all the other methods stem from human thinking, while the wisdom of Kabbalah stems from the revelation of the upper system, of the upper providence.

Question: Does this mean that you suggest that we throw off the ship of today all of the greatest philosophers in human history who made up ideas that stemmed from their own mind?

Answer: No, the wisdom of Kabbalah relates to science with great respect, but to real science. If you refer to philosophy, then as a doctor of philosophy, I believe that it is a science because philosophy doesn’t explore nature and cannot claim to bring the truth because it is only about speculations stemming from human imagination. On the whole, everyone relates to it today anyway.

Question: Can we say that if we listen to what Kabbalists say, we could prevent different natural disasters?

Answer: If people had listened to Kabbalists, everything would have been different a long time ago. However, the moment we begin to read about and fulfill the rule of “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” everyone immediately turns their back. When you use nice words and say things that we don’t understand, we feel that you are asking us to do things that are impossible to do.

People don’t understand that it is the general law of nature, the harmony nature will bring us to in any case, but through the path of suffering. We, on the other hand, must understand and realize that we can advance by positive actions and avoid different crises.
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From an Interview on RTN, New York, 7/21/15

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