Question: On one hand the created being is a puppet on a string. On the other hand, he can seemingly choose something. So can he choose or not? What does he need in order to have a choice?

Answer: The only choice we have is the ten. It comes down to entering the right society that will lead you forward and that you too will help. This is the ten.

So, organize in tens and then you will feel that you can really find different directions and landmarks correctly and thus change yourselves.

Comment: But in the article “The Freedom,” Baal HaSulam says that a person chooses according to the desires and the tastes of the society that surrounds him, not by its best part, but by the majority. But you say the ten.

My Response: A ten does not operate according to its desires!

How does a society choose its ideals? Is it according to its strong and clever members or according to the fools, the thieves, the bribe-takers, etc.? Who gets to the top of the egoistic ladder? The greatest criminals. Everyone understands this.

The tens, on the other hand, were created according to different rules, according to different values! A ten is a totally different system. It is mutual help, mutual love, and developing the right relations with each other that do not exist in our world. We want to create the relations of the upper world in the ten; you try to do everything in order to bestow.

Question: Does this mean that I build a healthy cell in this ill body?

Answer: Of course.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 5/12/19

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Question from Facebook: Freewill is how to attain the Creator, but if our actions are predetermined, is the way to attain the Creator also predetermined?

Answer: The way to the Creator consists of two branches. One way is straight, smooth, and comfortable, like a highway. The other way is bumpy and you cannot drive a Mercedes on this road, but only a cart pulled by a pair of worn out horses. So our choice is in which way; a person chooses that.

The goal is set, the starting point is also. It is only which path that depends on a person. There are people who overcome it quickly and are already at the end of the way, already enjoying the attainment of eternity and wholeness above this world. You don’t need to die in order to attain this. You can attain it in our world. There are, however, people for whom it will take a long time to reach the ultimate goal. Still, everyone will reach it, but the question is how much suffering they will have to undergo.

The role of the wisdom of Kabbalah is to guide a person on how to follow the fast and easy road toward the predetermined goal.
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From KabTV’s “Answers to Questions from Facebook” 3/10/19

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Question: What reason does the Creator have for looking at a reality that has already been determined?

Answer: The reason is very simple, first, bring the person to the possibility of a true freedom of choice. And to do that, the person must transcend himself, transcend his nature.

Second, he must replace his nature with the nature of the Creator because only the Creator is free. And then, by ascending to the level of the Creator and acquiring the characteristic of bestowal, he will constantly be able to measure himself in relation to the Creator. Achieving the level of the absolutely free Creator is the result of all of our work.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 5/12/19

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Question: Freedom has been the most important thing in my life. I sacrificed a lot for my freedom, but last year I realized that I am enslaved to freedom. Where is the borderline between freedom and being enslaved to freedom?

Answer: You are not defining the concept of freedom correctly. Freedom is the choice of the right goal of life that is independent of us, and which was predetermined by nature. It is the attainment of the level of the Creator.

When a person uses every means in his disposal in order to attain this goal, he can consider himself a free person.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 5/12/19

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Baal HaSulam, “The Freedom“: …we exist in the world as beings with a “self,” where each of us regards himself as a unique entity, acting on its own, independent of external, alien, and unknown forces, and in what this being—the self—becomes revealed to us.

If it does exist, we are bound to reveal it above all other attributes and develop only that one, because all the rest will necessarily be realized against our will.

Where is my “I”? Once I define it, I will be able to hold on to it and understand when it can be free.

And what can this give me? If I reveal that I am absolutely not free and that I am somehow controlled by some global management or aliens that hover above me in a spaceship and control me, will this change anything in me?

Will I behave differently? No. I can only discover that I act according to someone’s wicked desire. So what? It does not matter at all because I will continue to act the same way I do.

That is, all our work boils down to determining who is actually influencing us, who controls us.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 5/12/19

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This is the way we are designed. Those, who seem reckless, imprudent, self-sacrificing romantics are actually no more than calculating people, for whom the past manifests as the present so obviously that they are ready to accept anguish unusual for others, which we take as a heroic feat (Baal HaSulam, “The Freedom”).

Question: Does it follow that there are no heroic acts?

Answer: No, for people there is no other way out. Cowardly acts or heroic acts are programmed and expressed from a person’s essence and do not belong to himself. They belong only to the system of governance.

Question: Are people led by either pleasure or pain? Even when a person is about to die?

Answer: Suppose you were a gladiator who shouts to Caesar when he is about to die, “We who are about to die salute you.” Everything depends on the calculation.

But in fact, even in this case our body makes a conscious or subconscious calculation. Psychologists know that each man’s priorities may be changed so that a coward will turn into a hero. The future may be so elevated in man’s eyes that he will agree to any kind of destitution for the sake of it.

From this it follows that there is no difference between man and animals; and if so, free and intelligent choice doesn’t exist.

Of course not. If we exist in nature, in which pleasure is the goal, then the only choice is in the choice of the form of pleasure. And we confuse this with the concept of “freedom.”
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 5/12/19

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Baal HaSulam, “The Freedom”: Moreover, even determining the type of pleasure and benefit are entirely out of one’s own free choice, but follows the will of others, as they want, and not he. For example: I sit, I dress, I speak, and I eat. I do all these not because I want to sit that way, or talk that way, or dress that way, or eat that way, but because others want me to sit, dress, talk, and eat that way. It all follows the desire and fancy of society, and not my own free will.

Society absolutely determines our free will. If you go to China, for example, and live there for 20 to 30 years, you will begin to gradually share their tastes and see things and think like them.

What is more, I do all this according to the majority.  Of course the majority has an impact on us and not unique individuals.

It is more comfortable for me to behave simply and freely, but I am enslaved in every movement I make and tied down by iron chains to the tastes and manners of others who make up the society. So where is my free will?

There is no freedom in the frameworks we speak of.

Because I am operated on, however, unknowingly and having no choice, there is no room for reward and punishment.

What can there be reward or punishment for if we are constantly forced to behave the way we do? If the Creator has created me the way I am, I cannot do anything about it. No matter how hard I try, even if I try to change myself tens of times and turn upside down, everything is still His doing and His nature.

So initially (even before I am born) and when I have completed everything, everything is His actions inside me, and I have absolutely no free will.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 5/12/19

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Question: The predetermined states that I must go through—isn’t this fate, an ominous fate, because I feel them as bad and painful?

Answer: No. You are capable of not feeling pain and evil. But you must be in the next state. That is, you must rise from state “X” to state “Y.” Your future state has already been predetermined and you must be in it.

The question is how you reach it. If you refuse to reach it voluntarily, you will be “beaten by sticks.” And if you agree, you will be led to the desired state. Everything depends on your attitude to your development.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 4/28/19

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Question: In the history of mankind, there are millions of sayings about and numerous qualitative characteristics of what freedom is, as well as a million aspirations of people to find it and a million illusions that they have achieved it. Voltaire wrote: “It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.”

Could you describe some characteristics of the state of freedom?

Answer: Freedom from selfishness is freedom in the most general sense of the word. This is freedom from myself when nothing in me dictates what I should be.

When this is realized in a person’s sensations, he begins to feel free, that is, detached from any limitations in which he previously existed. In his thoughts, he begins to understand what it means not to act egotistically, above egoism.

Question: Can we say that death is a limitation for a person?

Answer: I would not say that something happens in death. We are very afraid of death and think this is the cornerstone of our development, after which everything will be different or something else. I do not think we should be particularly impressed by it. The fact of passing through death does not give anything.

Question: Is there no interdependence between freedom and death?

Answer: No. There is another death in mind, the death of egoism, not the death of the animal body.

Question: Is it possible that egoism dies, does not exist?

Answer: Selfishness does not die. A person must rise above it, master it, and only then, by neutralizing egoism, will one be able to reach an understanding of what death is.

Question: What does this give to a person and to all people?

Answer: Freedom from selfishness.

Question: Will everyone have a common feeling?

Answer: Yes. Above selfishness.

Question: Then is there going to be some new work, a new movement, a new development?

Answer: Rising above egoism.
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From KabTV’s “Kabbalah Express” 6/13/21

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Question: Where do desires come from and how do we determine which are small and which are big?

Answer: Desires fall on us from above, but you need to determine how to sort them. You need to be in an environment that will help you sort which desires are important and which are not. Everything depends on the society you are in.

Read the article “The Freedom” by Baal HaSulam about the importance of the society you connect to. It is actually the environment that determines your fate, your future.

If you get in the right environment, listen to what is being said in it, and become imbued by their ideas, these ideas gradually become yours and you begin to move forward in that direction.

So, from all your desires you take the desires that are most important to advance in this direction, add your thoughts to them, your mind, and thus develop correctly.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 4/14/19

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