Today, we feel that the world is changing—but why? It’s because the Creator is becoming revealed. He is getting closer, and we feel changes in our world. These changes are turned against our egoistic desire, and that is why we perceive them as something obscure. For the first time in our lives, it seems to us that we can’t fit into this world, into this life. We can’t understand what’s going on.

Usually, we performed this job ourselves; we made changes, instead of life forcing them upon us. We simply saw that it would be better that way. But today everything is to the contrary. Life is changing, the world is changing, and we are falling into confusion, as if losing control over what is happening and ceasing to understand it. All of a sudden, we find ourselves in a new world full of unpleasant surprises—more and more with each day.

We feel absolutely helpless, like people who went astray or like scared and confused children who don’t know or understand anything. And all of that is because the quality of bestowal and love towards the other is getting closer to us and beginning to gradually cover us like a cloud.

So far, this cloud is light and translucent, but it descends onto us from Above, and we start losing our regular senses in it: vision, awareness. Nothing works in this fog anymore. Little by little, here and there, we still use what is left from the past. But there are many actions we can’t perform because this cloud hides the cause and effect from us, and doesn’t let us understand the correct course of action.

In fact, this means the Creator is approaching us. And until we begin to change accordingly, we won’t be able to see what to do with our lives through this cloud, through this new quality of bestowal and love, connection, unity, globality and integrality.

Certainly, we can try adjusting ourselves to this cloud. We won’t be able to drive it away, but only to get adjusted to it somehow. And then, the more it descends onto us, the more we become alike.

If not, it will happen the other way around. It will shroud us with such a fog that it will force us to become like it because we’ll feel increasingly weaker and unable to understand, feel, react, and deal with our lives.

We can wait until the situation becomes absolutely frightening, desperate, and uncertain, and sufferings will finally push us toward action. They will be greater than the efforts required of us, and then we will run searching how to save ourselves from these sufferings, to lessen or sweeten them. Or we can start looking for energy and force, cause, and motivation, which let us advance against our nature and change it in order to conform to this cloud, in advance.

Then we will understand what is going on here. Our new qualities will help us understand the nature of this cloud, according to the law of equivalence of form, and we will be able to get settled in it. It won’t appear as a fog anymore; on the contrary, it will become a revelation of a new governance that is much better, stronger, and more desirable then the previous one.

After all, we were governed by our ego before, while now it is the upper force ruling. To the extent we understand it, we enter the same area of revelation and begin to exist in it, to understand and sense it.
[53809]
From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/2/2011, Rabash’s Letter

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In the News (From Reuters.com): “Europeans are plagued by mental and neurological illnesses, with almost 165 million people or 38 percent of the population suffering each year from a brain disorder such as depression, anxiety, insomnia or dementia, according to a large new study.

[These are the results of] “a three-year study covering 30 European countries — the 27 European Union member states plus Switzerland, Iceland and Norway — and a population of 514 million people.

“Wittchen’s [director of the institute of clinical psychology and psychotherapy at Germany’s Dresden University and the lead investigator on the European study] team looked at about 100 illnesses covering all major brain disorders from anxiety and depression to addiction to schizophrenia, as well as major neurological disorders including epilepsy, Parkinson’s and multiple sclerosis.

“Mental illnesses are a major cause of death, disability, and economic burden worldwide, and the World Health Organization predicts that by 2020, depression will be the second leading contributor to the global burden of disease across all ages.”

My Comment: In the harsh egoistic world, a person fights for his existence and spends all his energy, health, and life on this. Only the transition to an integral society will give people inner balance and peace, relieve them of the causes of all illnesses and disorders. When the whole society becomes like one family, every person is permeated with a common concern—the energy of a healthy space, Light—and the cause of all ailments disappears.
[54064]

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Today, the Creator puts the condition before us: “If you do not connect as one man with one heart, you’ll get nothing! It’s for you to feel that such a life is not a life…. And moreover, I will appoint a king as cruel as Haman over you.”

That is, for every action in which He made us unequal to each other, forcing us to hate, envy, and blame each other, we have to make corrections and achieve complete equality. And after that we will not be concerned about how much each of us gets, so much so that even if a person receives nothing while the others receive infinity, he will rejoice as if he received the infinite fulfillment himself.

It will be enough for a person to see that everyone receives fulfillment and fully enjoys, while he himself has nothing and needs nothing! Then, he will become similar to the Creator because he receives nothing and only gives.

Today, we are beginning to see such tendencies and steps in this direction in our world. It is the first time that the Creator says: “You have come to the threshold, and you will get nothing more. You will have great difficulties, exist in crisis and other problems, until you reach the solution that equality does not mean ‘just take and share.'”

You can start counting family members so that each has an equal amount, but in reality we must come to a different correction. After all, this is simply social egalitarianism that does not correspond to absolute justice.

The Creator wants us to reach the state when due to our love for the others, we will only care about satisfying their needs at our own expense. But first, we should think about our own correction because without it, we will not receive fulfillment.

Today’s economic recommendations and new theories will not be able to fulfill us without correction. On the contrary, they will lead us to a greater awareness of evil and our inability to do anything. Therefore, we can only distribute, as widely as possible, the knowledge about our current state, the way the wisdom of Kabbalah explains it.
[53929]
From the 5th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/7/2011, “The Nation”

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Opinion (Mark Mazower, a professor of history at Columbia University): “This is hardly the first time that to understand Europe’s future, you need to turn away from the big powers at the center of the continent and look closely at what is happening in Athens. For the past 200 years, Greece has been at the forefront of Europe’s evolution.

“In the 1820s, as it waged a war of independence against the Ottoman Empire, Greece became an early symbol of escape from the prison house of empire.

“Over the next century, the radically new combination of constitutional democracy and ethnic nationalism that Greece embodied spread across the continent, culminating in “the peace to end all peace” at the end of the First World War, when the Ottoman, Hapsburg, and Russian empires disintegrated and were replaced by nation-states.

“It is ironic, then, that Greece was in the vanguard of resistance to the Nazis, too. In the winter of 1940-41, it was the first country to fight back effectively against the Axis powers, humiliating Mussolini in the Greco-Italian war while the rest of Europe cheered.

“Only a few years after Hitler’s defeat, Greece found itself in the center of history again, as a front line in the cold war.

“Greece was an emblem of a new phase in its history. The fall of its military dictatorship in 1974 not only brought the country full membership in what would become the European Union; it also …prefigured the global democratization wave of the 1980s and ’90s…

“The European Union was supposed to shore up a fragmented Europe, to consolidate its democratic potential and to transform the continent into a force capable of competing on the global stage. It is perhaps fitting that one of Europe’s oldest and most democratic nation-states should be on the new front line, throwing all these achievements into question. For we are all small powers now, and once again Greece is in the forefront of the fight for the future.”

My Comment: This approach is more akin to the opinion of a foreteller, such as the Greek “Delphic oracle,” than to the scientific approach. But today it is clear to everyone that unless the EU overcomes the natural tendency of each member state to take care only of itself and does everything possible to preserve and consolidate the union by moving towards a single government, above all national and economic contradictions, Europe will cease to exist. Only the final decision that there is no other way will give the world an example of complete future unity and will bring the EU out of crisis.
[53925]

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Opinion (Albert Einstein, “Why Socialism?” 1949): “’I have now reached the point where I may indicate briefly what to me constitutes the essence of the crisis of our time. It concerns the relationship of the individual to society. The individual has become more conscious than ever of his dependence upon society. But he does not experience this dependence as a positive asset, as an organic tie, as a protective force, but rather as a threat to his natural rights, or even to his economic existence. Moreover, his position in society is such that the egotistical drives of his make-up are constantly being accentuated, while his social drives, which are by nature weaker, progressively deteriorate. All human beings, whatever their position in society, are suffering from this process of deterioration. Unknowingly prisoners of their own egotism, they feel insecure, lonely, and deprived of the naive, simple, and unsophisticated enjoyment of life. Man can find meaning in life, short and perilous as it is, only through devoting himself to society.’”

“This article was originally published in the first issue of Monthly Review (May 1949)…” [at the request of Paul Sweezy (a famous American Marxist political economist, the author of the theory of monopoly capitalism)].
[53905]

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Success in our days depends on how we execute the program of nature. Nature wants us to connect, and today it clearly shows it to us from its part, the part of the upper force. This force comes closer to us so we would reveal it, but we perceive it as evil.

The upper one reveals his lower part to you, the AHP, to give you the opportunity to attach yourself to Him. He is revealed as the form of bestowal, but you perceive it as darkness, confusion, and weakness. And now, regardless of it all, you need to attach yourself to Him.

We represent two adjacent degrees: the upper one and the lower one. And now the upper degree, AHP de Bina, Elokim, the Creator, is revealed to us in the smallest degree. And we need to make an effort to perceive it with understanding. Such is nature, and nothing can be done about it: It reveals itself to us, showing that we must be connected.

The AHP of the upper one demands it from us, revealing the desired form to us that we must accept, and then we will feel good. Otherwise, He will shine for us, but His shining will be darkness for us, not Light (Ohr), but night (Orta). And we will keep receiving this influence from Him until we feel completely bad, and we will still need to change under the pressure of this evil and agree with His power.

This is why whatever we refer to as the crisis, is not a crisis in reality, but the revelation of the next higher degree, which we must ascend to. The quicker we understand this, the more we will ease this entire process for us, which we will have to go through one way or the other, at our own will or by force.

This is why we come out to people and try to explain this to everyone. And the more people find out about this, even if they do not listen or understand much, still, if this information somehow penetrates the public, it will start influencing them. Public opinion has a special power because it is based on a large number of people, and this is why people will suddenly begin to feel and understand this.

They will begin to act in the direction of unity, not even knowing why this desire suddenly appeared in them. If the opinion spreads through the masses, it will be enough to hear a fraction of a word for it to become obvious to everyone that they should connect, and that it is a good thing.

This state refers to the revelation of the Creator to the created beings, once He is ready to be in a contact with us on the very first degree. And this is why this degree reveals its lower part, AHP, to us. But we call it a crisis—lack of correspondence, balance, connection, harmony, and homeostasis—between the lower one and the upper one.

We must equalize our qualities with His because the law that obligates to correspond to the upper governance operates everywhere. When we do not correspond to it, we suffer, and if we begin to correspond to it, we will be happy. But the upper one does not change; He simply tries to make His qualities clearer to us—His AHP, which we must attach ourselves to.

And when we do not do it in our current state, His AHP operates according to a preset program and gradually becomes revealed more and more. It is as if He is turning His back to us until the darkness coming from Him becomes completely unbearable to us. And then we will need to do something with ourselves under the influence of blows and great suffering.

The upper one always reveals Himself in a higher form, in the form of an idea, and thus gives us an opportunity to develop. He does not reveal Himself in a form of the lack of provision or safety; He mainly reveals Himself as a lack of understanding, confusion, and the inability to control. He primarily strives to develop the human degree in you; He wants you to understand, agree, and begin to change yourself and your environments—to reconstruct your degree, the entire world, in accordance to Him.

But if you do not comply, He turns a little more since this operates like a mechanism in Him, called “at its own time” (Beito), like a clock. He keeps showing His AHP more and more, and so at the end, you will have to react. This is why we should not wait!

We can say that here we are already dealing with practical Kabbalah.
[53701]
From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/2/2011, Baal HaSulam’s Letter

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Question: During the breaking, how did it happen that the upper one knew that the creature was going to break, but still responded to its request?

Answer: Of course, the upper one knew, He Himself arranged the breaking! Otherwise, how would Malchut connect with Bina if it were not for the breaking?

When people speak of the current crisis, they also refer to it as some kind of breaking (the word “crisis” comes from the same root). But this is not correct. A crisis is the creation of a connection between two qualities that cannot connect any other way.

In technology, we often use this method of connection, when the defensive forces of some material need to be destroyed in order to connect it to another material. This method is used to weld metals, incorporate one into the other. When things cannot connect, we thus destroy their defensive forces, the boundaries between them, and force them to connect, enter one another. This becomes possible through their breaking, forcefully, through an explosion.

It might seem strange why we would need to blow up and break things, but we do not break them; on the contrary, we achieve a connection. And it will be impossible for us to connect with one another if each one of us does not break his defensive barrier. After all, the force of egoism, the force of the desire to receive pleasure, which exists in all matter, will never allow anyone else to enter its territory. This is why we need to use a special force against it, which would break its boundaries, in order to introduce a second material, a second quality within, like an unwelcome guest.

This is what happens during the breaking with Bina and Malchut. But if Malchut never receives the quality of Bina, it will not be able to correct itself. And it is not able to receive the qualities of Bina because it has put restrictions on itself, defensive screens—it does not wish to receive anything. It needs to be broken in by force! It will never agree to do it on its own.

It will not agree to break and receive for its own sake. Yet, without the revelation of egoistic reception, it is impossible to reveal Malchut’s true qualities that are opposite to bestowal and do not allow it to attain it.

This is why the breaking was arranged from Above. We call it so, but in reality, it is the connection of Malchut and Bina because as soon as it happens, the qualities of mercy and justice intermix.

At the end, we get Bina and Malchut, which are tightly connected with each other, but broken. This also is an attainment because even though they feel distanced from the Creator, they have an ability to correct this distance because they are connected!

It follows that the breaking is a great correction in the building of a vessel. It is impossible for us to attain continuation or any correction without this intermediate state. This is why we need to see a turning point, a point of “bifurcation,” in the current crisis—a possibility for a sharp turn into a completely new state.
[53712]
From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/4/2011, Preface to the Wisdom of Kabbalah

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Question: We have been discussing the fact that excessive consumption has brought humanity to a troubled state. However, some economists surmise that if we start consuming less, this will also have a negative effect….

Answer: Every phase of development has its own spiritual HaVaYaH sequence. It includes phases of bestowal and reception, idleness and a combination of different factors of interconnection. Therefore, we cannot draw a direct interconnection between the level of consumption and the solution to the problem.

Previously we might have been able to improve the situation by distributing goods among everyone because the egoistic desire was developed to a certain level where the gap between the layers of the population could really have been ameliorated in this way. However, today we have risen a level higher, and the methods that were suitable at the previous phase are no longer working. The accent is shifting from the receiving desire to the bestowing one, and you cannot attain real improvement through mere “hand-outs.” You have to understand that by giving out products, you are trying to block the path of the crisis and are thereby depriving yourself of the opportunity to get down to its causes, the bestowing force, the Creator. But in the meantime, our troubles are already acquiring a goal-oriented nature.

Analogously, at the second phase of the expansion of Direct Light, it is impossible to act the same way as at the first phase. That’s because the second phase derived from the first precisely because it was time to realize the primary cause of the Light. Even though it is entirely filled by the Light, this is no longer sufficient.

Likewise, today simple distribution does not solve the problems. The goal of creation is not to satiate our egoistic desires or for us to “stuff our bellies.” That is why we are discovering the second phase of development: by giving out goods to the poor, we will only accelerate the collapse.

So what should we do? After all, this is contrary to all logic. Previously egoism ruled the party: The more we received, the better we felt. But now consumption and restraint, selfishness and concessions in favor of the weak are equally destructive for the economy. Stated differently, we have no more effective methods left to work with the egoistic desire. It has depleted itself both in reception and bestowal.

This is the beginning of the two-sided realization of egoism’s evil—the total recognition of the fact that it cannot be used.

So how can man survive? Several million people in the world will manage to feed themselves with the fruits of the earth that they farm. And what will the others do? We will not be able to maintain the previous connections, and moreover, we will not be able to exchange goods and production the way we once did. The word is starting to reduce its circulation, to “freeze up.”

Under these conditions, the only thing that can really help humanity is a clear attitude to what is happening, the understanding of the need to change the nature of our connections. This is the only thing that will give us good results.

Therefore, first and foremost people need to study. Leave everything else. Provide everyone with the base minimum just above the poverty line, and use the rest of the efforts to improve our interpersonal relationships.

“Fair distribution” and “social justice” are pretty words, for the sake of which tens of millions of people were killed or killed others. Slogans such as these will only help on the condition that we change people’s consciousness. And for that we need upbringing. A person just needs the vital necessities and the willingness to listen, and that’s all.

However, he won’t be learning about “how to consume properly,” but about how to relate properly to others. Everything else will become a natural consequence. When people’s desire changes, they will understand how to manage life of their own accord. By virtue of upbringing, all the practical solutions will become obvious.

First of all, a person has to be educated and changed at least slightly. This is the only way we will avoid Nazi regimes of different kinds, by building an environment that changes people for the better.
[54057]
From the 5th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/8/11, “The Nation”

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The rudiments of Kabbalistic teaching originate from Abraham’s book Sefer Yetzira (The Book of Creation), where he explained the main principles of the structure of the upper system that governs our world. This system is called the “upper world.” In relation to it, our world is called the “lower world.” We need to know the structure of the upper system because we are under its constant governance.

The upper governance divides into the private and general. Private governance affects each one of us, and general governance influences all of us simultaneously.

We are under the influence of forces that constantly change according to their specific program. Our destiny depends on them. However, we have the ability to influence these forces and, accordingly, affect our destiny.

Kabbalah says that we practically have no affect on anything in our world. Our world is the result of the forces that descend from the upper world. However, our interaction with these forces, our reaction to them, changes their effect on us—we and these forces mutually interact with each other.

If we understand the essence of this interaction, we will be able to consciously control the influence of the upper world upon our world. Basically, this is the purpose of Kabbalah: It is the reason we need it so much in our time when the upper world keeps descending closer and closer to us.

We feel it getting closer quite clearly because we can no longer continue acting egoistically, as we did over the course of thousands of years of our evolution. Today we are no longer able to control our world since the upper world keeps getting closer, and we do not know how to influence it.

Let us hope that ultimately, our studies will give us this ability. Besides improving our life and making it safe, we will be able to add a new and very special parameter: not simply a comfortable existence in our world, but the perception of the upper system, entry into it, and existence on its level.
[53889]
From the Sunday Virtual Lesson Series 9/4/2011

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Opinion: (Christine Lagarde, the IMF Chief): “The new head of the IMF on Saturday urged global policymakers to pursue urgent coordinated action, including the mandatory recapitalization of European banks, or risk descent into renewed world recession.

“‘Developments this summer have indicated we are in a dangerous new phase,’ International Monetary Fund Managing Director Christine Lagarde said on Saturday at an annual gathering of policymakers from around the world hosted by the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank.

“‘The stakes are clear; we risk seeing the fragile recovery derailed. So we must act now,’ she said.

“Two years after the end of the worst of the financial crisis, growth in both the United States and Europe is sputtering, and debt crises and indecision on both sides of the Atlantic have shaken public confidence in a global recovery.”

My Comment: Lately, everyone begins to blame everybody else for negative impacts. Such impacts do take place, but they always have. It’s just that now we reveal that everyone is connected with everybody else in a single network of relationships, and thus, the sensitivity to actions increases. Unless we take measures towards mutual understanding (mutual guarantee), these relationships will quickly lead to war.
[53743]

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