Egoism refers not to an average person’s drive to fulfill his physical (food, sex, and family) and social desires (money, power, and knowledge), but to his resistance to unity, bestowal and love for people. This rejection manifests only during one’s participation in the group of integral upbringing, to the extent of one’s efforts to unite with the group members.
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Question: What is balance between the force of receiving and the force of bestowal?

Answer: We see this balance within our body and in different systems that exist in nature. It determines our health, the balance of climatic conditions, and social and economic systems.

Balance means health. However, it is possible on all levels: On the inanimate level, it provides us with calmness; on the vegetative and the animate levels, it provides us with health. Balance is always dynamic, from small to large. It is necessary to always see the levels.

For example, in the development of an apple, it goes from a small balance to ever-greater balance, until it ripens completely. However, on all of the previous levels, the apple was in some kind of partial balance. When the deficiency relative to the next state was revealed, it developed more and more. This is how the process of development works.

Therefore, we need to see what we can do now in order to bring ourselves into balance if today the current state of humanity is like spoiled fruit.

What force are we missing for balance? We see that it is necessary to add the force of bestowal to the force of our egoism. If we balance these two forces, we will live in peace, in good health, in a harmonious family, and in a good world. This is the only thing that we are missing.

It is only possible to arrive at the force of bestowal through a correct environment that teaches everyone how to reach it. It will help him personally in his private life, as well as in the society, and then all of humanity and our entire civilization.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” Episode 12, 1/10/12

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Question: Development takes us from the world of consumption to the world of bestowal. Thousands of generations have lived in a world driven by the power of egoism. If the next step of humanity must bring it to the world of bestowal, then what is this world?

Answer: It is only called the world of bestowal, but both forces exist in it. The force of bestowal exists in the world of consumption, but it is only used for reception. The world cannot exist with only one force in it: There must always be two forces.

The main question is which one is the determining force: Who is in charge? If the force of reception decides everything, then the force of bestowal serves it.

I am willing to give a little to receive more. I am willing to invest in a business to earn more. I develop everything only for more profit and benefit.

The entire still, vegetative, and animate world, and man as part of the animate nature, developed through the dominance of the force to receive over the force to bestow. This is obvious when it comes to man who, as a big egoist, uses this force in a way that hurts his neighbor. In man, the dominance of the force of reception over the force of bestowal is clear, but this dominance is more primitive in the entire still, vegetative, and animate levels.

When we look at man, we simply are able to see more clearly that everything we do is intended for personal pleasure, for benefit. I cannot do anything when I do not see a way to benefit. Nature has made me so that I have no chance to make a single move if I don’t get pleasure from it, a benefit: The fulfillment must be greater than my investment. My investment is bestowal, and reception must be greater than bestowal. This means that the power of reception rules over the power of bestowal.

In the end, we completely blow out of proportion the way we use the force of reception that rules over the force of bestowal; we want to make a profit on everyone without feeling any shame. A person is ready to kill, sell, and destroy everyone only to receive one gram of fulfillment and pleasure; at the same time, he does not take anyone into consideration in any way.

This is how much the force of receiving has grown in relation to the force of bestowal. The difference between them has simply become enormous. When we suddenly come to these enormous disproportions between the force of bestowal and the force of receiving and the connection between them has become completely disrupted, then we experience a crisis and the inability to continue to exist.

This is because the force of bestowal no longer comes near the force to receive and does not help it continue to evolve. Egoism has grown so much that it does not allow me to give even a little to others in order to benefit. I want to receive everything for myself.

Egoism no longer allows me to even tolerate another person near me so that I could make a family. It does not allow me to have children because of the price I would have to pay for it: to yield, consider others, and help one another. I am not ready for this. This is how much the power of reception has outweighed the power of bestowal!

We see this in the world today, in any place and on all levels of a person’s life. I always think about ways to gain the most to the point of not even paying at all. It is better to steal.

This is why we create different systems that legally allow us to steal. We distort laws, form corrupt relationships in the government and society, and do all this just to receive as much as possible. In the end, we come to a state where a person is not able to take anyone into consideration, whether it is his family, society, the government, children, or all of humanity.

This is why the common crisis is appearing in education and culture. We have stopped taking nature into consideration completely and we are prepared to do anything we wish with it, discarding poisonous gas and waste into the oceans and contaminating everyone and everything. Nothing concerns me outside of my four walls. The ozone layer is not my business; let others worry about it.

My ego does not allow me to make calculations even one day ahead because it always checks on what I have in my hands right now. If I fail to see an immediate benefit, I don’t care what happens later. Don’t tell me about the future. I do not see or hear anything.

Some 50 years ago, economists and bankers prepared programs for the development of the government for 5, 10, 20, or even 25 or 50 years ahead of time. There is nothing like it today. No one even knows what will happen tomorrow.

The lack of desire to consider one another leads us to the loss of a point of reference. This destroys all the systems that now exist. It destroys the very last remaining minimal balance between the force to receive and the force to bestow, not just balance but also any kind of connection, and even this is lost.

This is why we do not know how to continue living. The solution is to create a system within our community that will help push us and teach us to increase the force of bestowal without which life cannot exist.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” Episode 12, 1/10/12

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No matter how many efforts a person puts forth and what discernments or actions he performs, he has an infinite number of possibilities to make a mistake if he doesn’t hold onto the authentic source that passes the Light onto him.

He will not even know that he is making a mistake. Regardless of his rung, he will be like “a man who is lost in the field” or “a wandering donkey in the field” (the desire to receive pleasure). One needs to have an admiration for the greatness of the source of the Light. Only with its help we can discern our state, determine the correct direction, and steer.

The Light arranges and turns all of this for us, while we don’t know what rung we are at. In the spiritual world we always advance from state to state without any understanding where we currently are. This is because we always rise from the desire to receive pleasure to the desire for bestowal. We change our intention, and therefore, we can never know what is ahead of us even the tiniest step.

This advancement is possible only through faith above reason. Only the Light can take you if you grab it and fulfill the conditions given to you. This is the essence of all our work (raising MAN, prayer) when we prepare all conditions, all our wishes and abilities, so afterward we would hand everything to the upper Light with full confidence that He will do everything.

This requires a lot of effort from us, but in the end all of this is the work of the Light and therefore it is called the work of the Creator.

This is why it is necessary to treat The Book of Zohar with respect as much as possible. Although certainly this will never be enough since a person is incapable to really appreciate this upper radiance called Zohar. However, try to value each word as if you receive from it one more portion of medicine, one more drop of infusion, which pours the elixir of life into you.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/8/12, Writings of Rabash, “Purim”

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Question: What is the importance of a person’s appearance in an integral world? Should a person look good?

Answer: Of course: “A person needs to be beautiful in every way.” Are you familiar with this saying? But in reality things are far from this. Look at the modern culture. Where do you see beauty? We “swallow” whatever mass media “feeds” to us, and they only care about selling us things; they change a few things, to make us start buying and spending faster. In reality this has nothing to do with beauty, aesthetics, or design.

Look at “contrived” fashion which has nothing new to create, so the same fashion returns every twenty years. But by then we don’t have any twenty-year-old things left. In other words, everything revolves around business, and it’s not the feeling of aesthetics or beauty that drives us, but the “feeling of the beauty of money” of certain magnates who instruct the courtier: “Give us something new; people no longer are buying the old stuff.” You know how this works. And then it’s all promoted to you and they convince you that you do not look pretty without it.

Of course all of this will gradually go away, the crises will even everything out, and “high fashion” will disappear. We will experience such hardships that nothing will be left of the fashionable consumer goods. A person will have a normal attitude towards the world, life. His brain will “change.” He will understand that he lives in a very serious world and he can attain eternity, perfection, so he will not waste his life on dressing his “animal” better, constantly buying it things, and fulfilling unnecessary desires: for wealth, fame, power, knowledge.

I think humanity will realize this very fast. They will only have the aspiration to attain the meaning of life; they will have this question. And other than finding the answer to this question, they will also be able to attain the meaning of existence and see it for themselves.
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From KabTV’s “Foundations of the Integral Society” 2/12/12

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Question: If I feel that I don’t look for pleasures in life, is this a sign that I am lying to myself?

Answer: You are simply not aware of how much you depend on receiving pleasure and that you must have it. You don’t determine whether you want pleasures or not. Now you are simply in a state that you are not attracted to any pleasure.

But don’t say that this is your own will. You are given certain feelings and calculations at the moment and the next moment everything can be reversed. We have to learn what we are made of so that eventually we will be able to understand and use it.

If my intention is bestowal, like the intention of the Light, if I can connect to others in the group in order to attain bestowal, and through the group reach the Creator, then I will really turn into a spiritual vessel that bestows upon the Light. On the whole, there is nothing but the Light and a vessel. But I will be able to bestow upon the Light in my turn only if I yearn to be on its wavelength.

If I simply receive, it is a sign that I am on such levels of development in which the Light fully controls me in every respect. But if I yearn for bestowal even a little, then I already begin to bestow, not upon the Light itself, but on the way I perceive the Light. If I can be in a state of to bestow in order to bestow, which means to relate to others and to the Creator that way, although I don’t actively participate in His revelation, I am in the Light and am not an obstacle for it in any way.

I am a kind of a small material ball that is in the middle of the ocean, swimming freely in the water, not floating and not sinking to the bottom of the sea. And so even if the material rises or sinks a bit, it isn’t a foreign body.

But is it possible that I could use my power that is in my connection with others with the intention of in order to bestow?

But it may happen that I can no longer use my power that is in my connection with others with the intention of in order to bestow when I reveal the hatred towards others in me, a great desire to receive in relation to the group, which I didn’t even suspect earlier.

Before, I had an egoistic desire on a beastly level that had nothing to do with spirituality. But when I begin to connect in the group, I first lose myself in it. This is called the transition in the level of Bina, to bestow in order to bestow (Hafetz Hesed).

When I begin to take an active part in the group, I discover hatred towards it, the evil, my ego. In fact, all this exists not toward the group, but toward the attribute of bestowal itself, meaning toward the Creator. It is only felt in me, in my perception that it is toward the group. The group doesn’t exist separately from me. It is my own revelation that reveals to me my attitude towards the Creator.

It only seems to me that I work with in relation to the group, but actually I work in relation to the Creator. Hatred is the left line, which I overcome, and thus I begin to work in receiving in order to bestow.

I cannot skip any level, and I must go through all the necessary stages. This is an obligatory development. The Creator is concealed, and the group is concealed at first, and there is only me and my animal nature until I rise above this beast and understand that it is bestowal that is the source of pleasure.

Thus I rise to bestowal in order to receive and then gradually I move on to bestowal in order to bestow, from zero to one hundred per cent. It all depends on my calculations.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/2/12, Shamati #35

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We don’t go through the level of the “forefathers,” and all that happened at the beginning: “First Man,” Babel, the Land of Canaan, Jacob and his twelve sons, the descent to Egypt. We begin to discover ourselves as already in Egypt. The time before that belongs to the “forefathers” and is incorporated in us in the form of Reshimot (reminiscences, informational genes), our internal attributes.

We begin to work in Egypt until we discover that we are in an egoistic desire and that we have to escape it because we receive less and less vitality from it. Years go by until we discover this in order to escape.

If at the same time we are in a group and we help one another, it says “and the Children of Israel sighed from the work,” which means everyone together. The exodus from Egypt takes place together.

The exodus from Egypt is called the exodus from detachment and separation to connection and unity. It isn’t a physical exodus from a geographic location. In Egypt we discover that we are separated by our ego. All the work in the exile of Egypt is in trying to connect with each other and our not being able to do so. We discover that it is Pharaoh who disturbs us because he stands in our way and separates us.

And then we keep working on the connection, each time discovering that it is impossible. Then Moses appears, kills the Egyptian, and escapes to the desert for 40 years. We work on the connection all the time, until Moses returns, goes to Pharaoh and demands “Let my people go,” which means, let us connect.

I want to connect with those who seem to be strangers now. It is Pharaoh who shows them to me as strangers by depicting them as being outside myself, while I am asking for a chance to connect with them. Let Pharaoh stay. I want to connect above him. In order to do that I need an even greater force, above all his great desire and ego that spins me around as he wishes.

So I have to ask my ego to restrict itself and to stop controlling me. With this demand I come to Pharaoh. Pharaoh answers: “Do you want me to come down from my height, from my throne?” He only hardens his heart, and so I need the Creator to be even stronger than Pharaoh.

This is Pharaoh’s mission, to raise the Creator in my eyes so that I am forced to increasingly appreciate the general power of bestowal prevailing in nature. Only this will give us the opportunity to connect with each other.

We have to imagine what Egypt is correctly. The Creator should constantly become more important for me; otherwise, I will never be able to connect with the friends, and that is the “exodus from Egypt,” and I will stay in exile forever.

Egypt is called separation. And where am I running to? I want to connect above this separation, above the hatred that is revealed to me, above Mount Sinai (a mountain of hatred), and so I leave Egypt. Such an act is called “exodus.”
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 2/5/12. Shamati #159

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Question: Today an expert has to study his whole life in order to “catch up” with the changes in his field. One way or another, science discovers accurate absolute laws. Do such laws exist for those who yearn for spirituality? For example, are there clear, unchanging formulas without which we will not attain our goal?

Answer: What are you actually studying in the lessons? We can describe our egoistic desire as a “box.” This is the material. Above it there is the intention of in order to receive, and that is the problem. The material of the desire is stable, unchanging. It is only the intention that changes by changing all of our reality.

So ignore the material, it is unchangeable. But if you change the intention, then the feeling within the material will change drastically. You will be able to do that only by evoking it to change.

Today we fill ourselves by the egoistic intention. It is among us in our mutual relations. The desire to receive is aimed at itself; it wants to receive in order to receive. As a result, we all feel reality in the form of “this world.”

There are five phases between the intention of in order to receive and the intention of in order to bestow, or 125 steps. It is only about the intention! If I learn to use it correctly, a greater desire is revealed time after time. This is how I transcend the “Machsom” (barrier), I restrict myself by keeping myself from treating others badly, then I build a good attitude towards others, and then I bestow upon them. Then it turns out that others, and in fact the whole “field of work,” is actually myself that is gradually revealed to me.

All this is according to the stabilization of the intention. There is nothing we should worry about except the intention. The only remedy is to evoke among us a concealed internal power that will change our intention. Then, gradually, in our environment, we will discover the worlds of Assyia, Yetzira, Beria, Atzilut, Adam Kadmon, and the world of Ein Sof. We will discover them here, among us, and not somewhere in unknown distances.

I should only discover an attraction, a vector inside my desire that is aimed at changing the attitude to others, which is the intention. Let’s hope we succeed in preparing and doing that in the Arava convention in the desert.
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From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 2/3/12, The Zohar

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Opinion (Gustavo Caetano-Anolles, from NewScientist): “Once upon a time, 3 billion years ago, there lived a single organism called LUCA. It was enormous: a mega-organism like none seen since, it filled the planet’s oceans before splitting into three and giving birth to the ancestors of all living things on Earth today.

“This strange picture is emerging from efforts to pin down the last universal common ancestor – not the first life that emerged on Earth but the life form that gave rise to all others.

“The latest results suggest LUCA was the result of early life’s fight to survive, attempts at which turned the ocean into a global genetic swap shop for hundreds of millions of years. Cells struggling to survive on their own exchanged useful parts with each other without competition – effectively creating a global mega-organism.

“It was around 2.9 billion years ago that LUCA split into the three domains of life: the single-celled bacteria and archaea, and the more complex eukaryotes that gave rise to animals and plants. It’s hard to know what happened before the split. Hardly any fossil evidence remains from this time, and any genes that date that far back are likely to have mutated beyond recognition.

“That isn’t an insuperable obstacle to painting LUCA’s portrait, says Gustavo Caetano-Anollés of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While the sequence of genes changes quickly, the three-dimensional structure of the proteins they code for is more resistant to the test of time. So if all organisms today make a protein with the same overall structure, he says, it’s a good bet that the structure was present in LUCA. He calls such structures living fossils, and points out that since the function of a protein is highly dependent on its structure, they could tell us what LUCA could do.

“To reconstruct the set of proteins LUCA could make, Caetano-Anollés searched a database of proteins from 420 modern organisms, looking for structures that were common to all. Of the structures he found, just 5 to 11 per cent were universal, meaning they were conserved enough to have originated in LUCA.

“By looking at their function, he concludes that LUCA had enzymes to break down and extract energy from nutrients, and some protein-making equipment, but it lacked the enzymes for making and reading DNA molecules.”
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To help us identify the intention, to receive or to bestow, special conditions have been: Each one sees himself existing in a big world of still, vegetative, animate, and human nature.

When the intention to receive approaches the very surface of consciousness, a person becomes despaired of this life. He might not yet realize it, but in reality, his despair was evoked by the egoistic intention. Everything is evaluated in relation to the intention, and everything is revealed in thoughts.

We need to clearly analyze ourselves to see the evil of egoism and acknowledge that the altruistic reality, which is opposite to it, may end up being good. This is why we suddenly end up in a group, which is given to us for this reason. No one thought or planned to join it, to study, and to work on establishing a connection with friends. However, since our egoistic intention has exhausted itself, the time has come to elucidate how evil it is. And then we find ourselves among people, who strive towards the same thing: They also wish to figure out what our life is about. And it is nothing like life in the egoistic intention. And even though the realization will come later, the analysis of the situation has already begun.

As a result, these people are gathered by a root, which created our egoistic existence; it gathers them so we would get our lives in order. It brings us closer (also in space) according to the similarity in qualities, that is, our intentions. It does not matter where we live and what we do; we become close in our analysis of the intention and then we suddenly become acquainted with each other. We begin to recognize each other all over the place only by our intention to receive, and we get together only in accordance with it.

All the friends are selected above and come to this final stage of development in our world, coming closer to the line, where it becomes clear that the love affair with egoism has come to an end, it is impossible to go on this way, the time has come to change the vector and move on to a different kind of existence, the intention to bestow.

So we would feel the need for it, the same root has prepared accordingly: Suddenly all our actions show how evil they are, the world appears broken, and we are broken between us. The crisis grasps the entire humanity, and us as its inner part.

• For the masses, this
 manifests as a deterioration of living conditions: They simply cannot live
 as before, even though they are not yet able to discover the cause of the
 events. People want to continue using their neighbors—and they are
 unable to do it. This also makes them recognize the evil, but so far instinctively,
 and not in the form of the egoistic intention: They fail to achieve things
 in the given conditions, and do not know the recipe for success.
• Moreover, there
 is our group where friends recognize the reason: They are failing because of the intention.

People, who identify the intention as the cause of all the evil, are called “the head,” while people, who are simply unhappy, are called “the body.” This way the group becomes “the head” of the entire humanity.

This way, together with his friends, man discovers their breaking, and together they discover the reason for it. And the world, which also discovers the breaking, gradually receives the realization of evil from this group: the understanding of why things are the way they are. This way the group and the world connect between them.

In reality they are initially connected, and they are just gradually beginning to realize it. Soon, we will discover how much the people need our analysis, which uncovers how evil the egoistic intention is, because they are unable to do it on their own. Our objective is to reveal this knowledge to the world, in other words, to provide integral upbringing.
[71257]
From the Arava Arvut Convention Lesson #1, 2/23/12

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