Integral Education Convention, Day One “Convention Begins”
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Integral Education Convention, Day One, Workshop 1
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Integral Education Convention, Day One, Workshop 2
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Integral Education Convention, Day One, Workshop 3
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Integral Education Convention, Day One, “Discussion with Dr. Laitman”
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Arava Convention Day One, Workshop 3
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Arava Convention Day One, Workshop 4
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Overcoming the Ego with the Help of the Environment
Having attained a certain point of mutual guarantee, I hold on to it, value it, enjoy it, and want to develop in it. But as a result of the Light that Reforms that I summon, this point begins to grow in a way that is not desirable.
The Light never operated so as to simply bring me to Ein Sof (Infinity), to correction. On the contrary, according to its plan, in its relations with the vessel, it has to show me how opposite I am from it. So to the extent that I make efforts to unite, my yearning, my work, and my efforts turn into darkness.
The moment I accept mutual guarantee as the mutual unity that has to dwell between us in spirituality, the place where we feel that we are together and not separated, the obstacles called egoism are revealed. This egoism is no longer part of this world, but is actually the real egoism that is revealed in contrast to our unity, our connection, and our mutual guarantee.
All the discernments during the descent are merely an indication of how weak we are when it comes to mutual guarantee, and nothing but that. Here the mutual guarantee of the next level is revealed: What is the connection between mutual guarantee and the Creator? What is His attitude towards this? How does He dress in it? How can our mutual guarantee depict Him to me? And so on.
There are two types of mutual guarantee that operate during the states of descent and ascent, and it is the gap between them that determines the height of the level you reach.
Thus we advance. On one hand I should feel the influence of the Light on me as much as possible, and on the other, I should clarify this feeling: “Where does it come from and why? How can I turn it to its opposite form and advance to the desired state?” Later these two discernments become the head and the body of the Partzuf: The head determines what happens to the body and how it should operate. But this is only if you control the desire.
In the meantime you constantly try to look at yourself from the side as well: What is happening to you? What is the Light doing to you? How do you change and how should you change? How should you respond to each and every state?
On one hand it occupies your whole mind and all your feelings, and you experience such states which you simply don’t know how to exit. But on the other hand, you should know that the Creator sends you these states so that you will solve the problems that are created only in the connection with Him and with the goal. The solution to the problems begins with the fact that the goal is the resemblance to and the equivalence of form with the Creator and this is more important than the problem. On the whole, everything is less important than mutual guarantee.
The key to mutual guarantee is the recognition of the importance of the goal. It is because mutual guarantee is a kind of inner feeling which we have to attain: I determine the inner state and how it depicts the new reality. It isn’t just the point of our unity; it expands and becomes the point of the new reality. It is this recognition of the importance of the goal that sustains it and develops it.
We have to constantly clarify what we need and what we don’t in order to raise the importance of the idea of mutual guarantee.
From this point, we return to the greatness of the group and its effect on us. This effect should be versatile; we should use envy, lust, honor, ambition, everything that can pressure me, push me, and shake me. This should be the way everyone operates on everyone else.
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Arava Convention Day One, Workshop 3
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Arava Convention Day One, Workshop 4
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Question: How is it possible to hold onto the balance between the inner concentration and communication within the convention?
Answer: This is a perpetual problem that must be solved regardless of what you are doing. Very heavy or light moments can come, different pleasant or unpleasant feelings, but the person must always be composed of two parts. In one part he feels his beastly body, what is happening to it. And in the second part, he is like a person riding on his donkey (Hamor), on the egoistic substance (Homer).
Such a split feeling must be with us everywhere, in completely different moments in life; it should be with me when I am alone, with friends, with my family, with my wife and children, or when I am just walking down the street. I must divide myself into two parts: the donkey and me sitting on it.
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From the Talk at a meal 1/26/14
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Question: What do you recommend for those people who cannot come to the convention? And how can those who are in the convention support the friends who stayed at home and continue with integral education activities?
Answer: During the convention we must bring everyone together into local centers or in someone’s home, gathering as many people as possible. The minimum of many is two. Even if two people can connect, it is better and worthwhile to do this instead of sitting alone.
During the convention we must free ourselves from all work and be together with us all the time. Follow all that is happening in the convention and join with us heart and soul. And also we must not forget to think about all the friends throughout the world constantly.
But during the convention we don’t think about external dissemination activities in integral education; we concentrate only within us, only in our connection. The convention must be conducted with constant thoughts about our ascent. And only at the end of all of these conventions, from this growth, will we begin thinking about and going out to external dissemination.
During the two days of the integral education convention, we will think about and discuss how to go out with this method, but nevertheless, the focus is devoted to our assembly. Therefore, stop all external activities for these days and join us.
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From the Talk at a meal 1/26/14
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In order to better understand the process of educating a person, we have decided to present the nine phases that the public goes through with the analogous root in the nine phases for those who study the wisdom of Kabbalah.
Familiarization with the Concept of Mutual Guarantee
The feeling of mutual guarantee appears when a person feels the group and not himself, when the concept of a group seems great to him and dominates him, replacing the feeling of the self. This is exactly how the feeling of the self disappears and the concept of the group appears. This doesn’t weaken a person because the feeling of mutual guarantee is stronger and is actually above us.
This feeling is attained by mutual help, by everyone’s mutual bestowal upon each of the friends. Everyone wants to identify with the group, join it, embrace, and be incorporated in it, to be as one man in one heart and one mind. Everyone feels that he has to dissolve among the friends without a trace. Everyone wants to drown in the group. And all help each other in this.
Each of us turns to all the friends and together we speak about one thing: about how to connect. How to imagine the good mutual connection between us, the way it was before the shattering of the vessels: one vessel, one desire, one thought, one intention, one feeling, where everyone feels the others as if they are one whole.
We shouldn’t clarify the negative aspects because we want to establish the positive ones, Noah’s Ark. We want to rise from this world, so why should we penetrate it even deeper and delve into it?! We only want the good. The Creator brings a person to the good fate and says: “Take it.” What do we need the bad fate for?! We don’t want to know how opposite we are from others. We must unite in order to exit to spirituality. We unite and that’s it, period.
We reach a state, as it is said: “as one man in one heart,” “all of Israel are friends.” Then we complete this action. So the first phase is the phase of mutual guarantee: We become one whole.
At first glance there is nothing left to do afterward, but it is clear that we only speak about mutual guarantee according to the principle of “the end of the action is in the initial thought.” The road before us may be long because we have to establish ourselves. It is thanks to this self-construction that we come to know the Creator.
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A person comes to an educational course as a result of a certain need. First he doesn’t understand where he is. Then as time goes by, he accumulates different impressions and feels the excitement in connection and unity time and time again, to such an extent that he begins to cry in the circle.
Eventually he feels that he has caught fate by the tail and that he has an exceptional chance to improve his life and the life of those around him. The goal of bringing the world to unity becomes so sublime that he is ready to dedicate his time to it.
A person who begins to study the wisdom of Kabbalah expects a similar process. First he wants to know about the structure of the worlds and has no desire to hear anything about unity. Gradually he feels a growing desire to read articles about the group, but only about the fact that we will feel good together, like in a synchronized society or a team.
We gradually move from the message about the group to the message about unity, mutual guarantee, without clarifying why we need it yet.
Then we yearn to be as one in the group, and we understand that all our yearnings and longings have to bring us to unity with the Creator, according to the law of the equivalence of form.
As we yearn for unity with the Creator we discover that we don’t have the power to do so and we begin to realize that the only way to receive forces is from an external source. Why do we suddenly think about that? Because this is how the system is arranged: When you complete a certain part, it places the next part before you.
We have to achieve this state in our work with the external environment, with the public, so that we feel that these people are like our own children. Then, having no other choice, we will turn to the Creator with a request concerning them.
Once again we understand that as a result of the law of cause and effect, all this is done so that we will be able to focus on Him, so that all of humanity, everything that exists in reality, will focus on Him, yearn for Him, and want to delight Him, so the created beings will go through the process of evolution and will eventually realize that He is actually the One who has created all of creation as the absolute good. Thus, everyone will reach unity with Him.
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Everything Begins From The Group
The first Rabash article about the group starts with the words: “We have gathered here to establish a society…” since without it a man cannot reach the goal. Only through it can one implement oneself and only due to it one grows.
One’s spiritual growth has nothing in common with material development when one is nurtured by a group and thus develops. Spiritual development takes place within the group to the extent of the connection and unity among the friends, to the degree of my disappearance in the group, my dissolving in it.
Once a person understands that this is one’s spiritual growth and focuses solely on this, one can consider he is on the right track.
Before that, one represents “an unplanted seed”: it is stored somewhere, but nothing can grow out of it, and nobody knows if anything at all will ever grow out of it. This is why it is a way by which we can evaluate a person who belongs to our organization, who comes to us, studies in the Kabbalah Education Center, the Kabbalah Academy or takes any other Kabbalah course.
One can stay with us for a long time, but only when one starts regarding oneself not only as a part of the group, but as a seed that has to be planted into the group as it would be planted in the ground or it won’t ever grow—when one starts sensing and evaluating oneself this way, one’s spiritual preparation begins.
Seriousness and effectiveness of our preparation depend on the ability of the group to absorb new people and on the degree of the group’s ability to attract people and have them literally dissolve in it and feel that it is the place where each one can fit physically, morally, materially and spiritually.
We have to position ourselves in the group as a seed that practically disappears when growing and turns into “nothing and nobody.” We should consider ourselves to be a material that originates a qualitatively new entity: the group. This is what our spiritual growth is about.
We have to measure and evaluate ourselves relative to our spiritual growth with regard to our absorption into the group. Therefore, our rises and downfalls, all sorts of changes in our moods, sensations, understandings, and so on and so forth have to be sensed not individually but collectively.
It doesn’t matter how much one knows, whether one is able to sense spirituality, what one understands or realizes, or how deeply one knows the study material. Those are not the units of measurement, but false ideas of what spiritual growth is, because spiritual growth is measured solely by a quality and to the extent of one’s ability to unite with others.
That’s why the first thing that we have to reach is a zero level, when we become as a drop of semen or a seed that is planted in the ground and that becomes nothing.
In other words, all our egoism, our whole lives, everything that happened before, should not be taken into consideration at all. Naturally, we have to take care of our material life. At the material plane we have to continue being who we used to be previously, but the main thing for us is to turn into a drop of semen that initiates the spiritual life, the development of the fetus. That’s how we should visualize ourselves.
Only when one senses that one has almost achieved this state, continues aspiring to it, and evaluates oneself only through this prism, when this state becomes one’s goal, one’s dream, when anything one does and exerts at is aimed at achieving this result, only then one gets on the right track. The rest of one’s alleged achievements and attainments are not important to one anymore. This basic re-loading and re-evaluation of oneself is the change that is far more important than anything else. This kind of re-evaluation places a person in the very beginning of the spiritual ladder.
Then, when one turns into a zero, i.e., when the first restriction (Tzimtzum Aleph) takes place, one draws a line, and from this moment on, one’s appreciation of the group and one’s environment continues increasing. One clarifies whether one is just positioned inside the group or one represents the group’s active part that fully contributes oneself to it and is able to enter one’s friends and the entire group as an active element not out of one’s past, but out of one’s present moment, when one absorbs the desires, hopes, and goals of the entire group as one’s own, when one works for others as a mother for her children, serves them and makes everything one can for their further advancement.
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From the St Petersburg Convention 7/12/13 Lesson 4
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Question: How should a woman ideally carry out her role at the three upcoming conventions?
Answer: The ideal woman includes all of the women of our world group within her. All of the women are connected together; they nullify their ego, their desire to gossip, to criticize, and their mutual disdain.
And it is not that they have forgiven each other’s shortcomings; rather, they truly feel that we are becoming one body. Our intellect and emotions detach us and bring us out of this common collective body by giving each one the illusion that she exists separately from the others.
We come to the convention in order to discover the truth, to see with the undistorted view that the whole world is one system. There is only matter that was created by the Creator “from nothing” in which the power of “something from something” dominates. Only love and connection dwell in the world. And that it seems to us otherwise is only because we are not like this ourselves. If I change myself in order to connect with others, then I will directly feel the upper world, here and now. Nothing else is needed other than changing our perception.
The ideal woman of Bnei Baruch feels this higher system, is included within it, and looks at the world with corrected eyes. I dream to see such women.
Question: How do we do the maximum? How do we focus on the inner work in order to attain this ideal image most rapidly?
Answer: We start from here, that all of the particular problems that exist in a group begin to be perceived and corrected as a common problem in a family. And we are even more than a family, we are one body. Even a hundred years ago Baal HaSulam wrote that the world of today is one family, one system. But we didn’t see this until now. We hope that now our Bnei Baruch group will ultimately become one united woman and one united man. And then these two halves can connect with an immense merger in which the Creator is discovered. We are already very close to this condition; so come, let’s hasten our advancement towards this.
I expect to see everyone as great as a result of the convention. And the women will play an even more important role here than the men. We know that women quietly determine the whole order of our lives. Therefore, I very much hope that the women will help us to rise over the course of the next two weeks in a meaningful way. After the convention we will already meet on the next level. I wish all of us success!
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From Kab TV’s Preparation to the Convention 1/24/14
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