Entries in the 'Free Will' Category

The Road To The Future State

624.07Question: 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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The State Of Freedom

715Question: 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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The Environment Determines Fate

528.01Question: 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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Does Kabbalah Give A Person Freedom Of Choice?

567.04Question: Why do we actively disseminate the wisdom of Kabbalah because it affects a person and, as it were, takes away his freewill?

Answer: A person in our world has absolutely no freedom of will. It is because freewill assumes that one has at least two opposite forces and exists between them. Or there can be many forces in the center of which he exists, as if independently of them, and chooses under the influence of which force he is at each moment of time.

Therefore, since our world exists under the control of only one force, the egoistic one, it is the wisdom of Kabbalah that gives a person freewill because it reveals to him a second force, the altruistic one, the opposite of the one that exists in a person initially. Then, between these two forces, a person begins to really feel and attain his freedom of will.

This is an amazing feeling! When you feel that you are independent of either good or evil forces and you are between them, here you choose! Here you become above these two forces and feel how this upper force that created our world, feels its actions and leads us to the same state it is in.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 3/4/21

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What Is The Expression Of True Freedom?

744Question: What is the true freedom of a person expressed in?

Answer: In rising above one’s egoistic nature.

When you rise above egoism, you begin to feel everything that is beyond the ego, meaning, beyond you, beyond what you are feeling now—after all, both you and your current universe are imprinted in your egoism—all this completely disappears and is replaced with an entirely different picture of the world.
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From KabTV’s “Challenges of the XXI century. Introduction” 4/24/19

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The Mystery Of The Unification Of The Masculine And Feminine, Part 2

425The Two Forces of Nature, Male and Female

Our whole world, the still, vegetative, animate, and mainly the human levels are one big ego.

All the elements of nature and their unification into living organisms, whether on the levels of the still, vegetative, or the animal level, operate according to one principle only: to swallow as much of what is beneficial for them and to extract as much of what is not necessary for them, what is not right or good for them. This is the pure ego, the plan of creation, of nature, which is inside us and manages us.

Can we manage it? Actually, we cannot. In our state we are puppets on a string and we are operated on. In each of us the egoistic program by which we operate is seemingly imprinted. We think that we operate independently, but in fact it is the force of nature that manages us. It turns us from left to right and from right to left, wherever it feels like and whichever way it feels like, according to different vectors, and we execute this plan without even imagining that we are controlled by it. It is actually in this egoistic nature that we exist as elements that are totally managed by it.

When the question of “what am I living for” emerges in a person, it is seemingly an error in the program of nature, some malfunction. How can it be that a person who is absolutely managed suddenly asks: “What am I? What am I living for and how?”

But it is nature itself that awakens us and summons this question in us, and which gives us some kind of freewill so that we will begin to ask ourselves about our fate.

It is not a simple matter. Such questions emerge in very few people, but in the process of our egoistic development more and more people ask this question.

Basically, this is the only question that nature awakens in us so that we will be interested in the plan of our actions and of our development, of our life: “What for? Why? What are we doing?

Do we do everything instinctively or can we somehow change our actions or at least assess them in a critical manner as to where such thoughts stem from?”

From that moment onward a person becomes a human being. Later he advances toward understanding that he is managed, that he doesn’t want that, and that the guidance that nature has designated for him is bad and harmful and that he needs to do something about it. Generally speaking, a person’s spiritual development actually begins from the question: “What is the meaning of my life? What am I living for?”

It seems like a depressing question, but it is in fact crucial, since it is actually from this state that a person begins to explore: “What manages me? For what purpose? Do I agree with it or not? I want to understand the source of my control. I don’t agree with it and I want to act differently, to live differently. I want to ascend above the source of my control, above that force. I don’t agree with being enslaved to it.”

When a person begins to explore himself, he reaches the right books. Generally speaking, it is the wisdom of Kabbalah. Sometimes he may find psychology books first, but if he continues to dig he certainly arrives at the wisdom of Kabbalah.

Then it becomes clear to him that he is controlled by a higher force, nature or the Creator, which is actually the same thing. He wants to find out where the Creator is leading him, what he lives for, and how this force manages him.

A person begins to understand that he is managed seemingly by two forces, the positive force and the negative force, while he is actually neutral. Even his typical egoism, the desire to enjoy, is not his, but guidance from above.

This means that he is a totally neutral body, which is influenced by an egoistic force, on the one hand, which forces him to act in a certain way, and on the other hand, there can also be an altruistic force that is constantly in contrast to it.

In general, a person begins to explore himself.

The negative egoistic force that exists in every object in nature, including man, the force that absorbs, sucks  everything into itself, consumes, and receives, we call the female force. While the positive force that bestows, gives, and fills is called the male force, the Creator. So it turns out that nature divides us into two parts.

But this has nothing to do with men and women in our world. Here we are totally identical in the egoistic sense. In fact, only the negative force operates in us and the positive force is necessary only in order to develop the negative force in us even more.

Question: Is the question about the meaning of life which we arrive at, the female question in us?

Answer: No. when the emptiness a person feels reaches a certain point and he understands that his whole life is totally useless, that it has no value and is merely different mechanical actions on his part, he already begins to ask: “Why and what for?” Although this action stems from the negative force, it already belongs to the positive force.

A particle of the Creator begins to speak in a person, a particle of the attribute of bestowal, and in it there is already the resistance between the two forces.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 3/3/19

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The Correct Algorithm Of Behavior

707The correct algorithm of behavior is harmony with nature from which we will understand what the “human” level means. We see and study the animal level. And what does the “human” level mean? We do not know how nature created it.

Inanimate, vegetative, and animate nature exist instinctively, they are subject to strict laws that are implemented unquestioningly. And man was created with freewill in order to learn from nature how he should act, agree with, and perform these actions. Then he will be happy.

The law of equilibrium is the basic law of all nature. If there is no balance, then problems immediately arise. As in our body, the pressure goes up, the temperature rises, some other parameters change, and a person immediately falls ill, since his internal systems are not balanced.

We are the same with regard to nature. Heat, cold, change in atmospheric pressure, natural disasters, all these are changes between different systems of nature.

Nature created us so that we ourselves can discover the formula for our balance with it. And then we will become as absolute, harmonious, perfect, and even eternal, as nature itself. But we must get to this by ourselves.

Question: Is the “human” level the level of balance with nature?

Answer: Absolutely! Moreover, it is according to man’s choice, man’s effort, unlike all other parts of nature that are in natural, instinctive balance with it.

Having reached balance with nature, a man will receive complete pleasure. All his desires will be fulfilled.
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From KabTV’s “Close-Up. Marriage Contract” 8/19/09

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Who Governs Us?

424.01Question: By striving for pleasure and running away from suffering, is it possible to predict your next step?

Answer: You cannot predict the next step because you do not know exactly what desires will awaken in you and what will be needed to realize them. But you will always reflect based on the desires that arise in you how to best realize them: give as little as possible and receive as much as possible in all your actions.

See how you sit, as comfortably as possible in the present condition, how you talk, how you behave, subconsciously or consciously, no matter how.

Question: What is wrong with this behavior? What doesn’t work in it?

Answer: In principle, this model itself could be correct. It is aimed at ensuring that we realize ourselves with maximum profit, and at every moment of time maintain greater confidence, security, fulfillment, and advancement.

But the fact is that I am commanded by the values ​​that I receive from society. And it imposes on me things that I do not at all need.

Each of us brings our aspirations for wealth, fame, power to society. And it turns out that I want to use society to make money, to impose on it absolutely not the values ​​that it needs, but what I need to get from it. I invent all sorts of things in order to sell and thus gain knowledge, power, fame, and money.

As a result, I impose my values ​​on others, and since this already becomes a legacy of the whole society, it imposes on everyone else in the form of advertising and everything else. It turns out that we advertise to each other absolutely unnecessary things, on which each of us wants to earn something, either fame, or power, or money. Thus, we sell each other completely unnecessary stuff.

Question: But why are we sure that we need it?

Answer: Because society makes us believe it. If society says that this is good, then striving to win recognition and respect in its eyes, I do what it imposes on me.

For example, now I am sitting in a suit. It would be more comfortable for me to sit in my pajamas. Why am I not doing this? Because society forces me to dress like this, and I want to get approval in its eyes so that they will listen to me, respect me. Therefore, we behave this way, whether we understand it or not.

Thus, society forces us to actions that, in principle, are opposite to my natural impulses and desires. In fact, I would not want this, I would just like to exist in peace. Society is constantly developing in its desires and it forces me to desire what I absolutely do not need. But this is how we go.
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From KabTV’s “Close-Up. Marriage Contract” 8/19/09

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A Generator Or A Receiver Of Thoughts?

143Question: Am I a generator or a receiver of thoughts? What is my freedom in terms of thoughts?

Answer: No one is a generator of thoughts. Good and evil thoughts come only from above.

We are merely small consumers at the end of the chain, but our reaction to them depends on how we reflect the evil or the good signals that we receive. This is our mission.

Question: Can thoughts intersect, reinforce, or interrupt each other?

Answer: Yes if they are not for the sake of unity. But if they are thoughts for unity, they are swallowed in the center of the group and the group grows.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 2/3/19

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An Amazing Adventure: Attaining The Purpose Of Creation

760.2Question: Why did the perfect Creator create place for the dense tales of simpletons in His design? If it were not in the design, it would not exist in our world either.

Answer: Initially, the Creator created the light, which contains everything formed by Him and is under it.

Each upper level includes all lower levels, so the upper light includes the whole plan of creation, its goal, the method of its implementation, and its ultimate state.

Everything in creation exists in this light in the form of a very precise original record. Just as in the human genome there is everything that can be said about men’s past, present, and future. If we took all the genomes from all the people and connected them correctly, we would know everything about humanity.

It is the same regarding the upper light; it contains everything.

Question: So it is the ultimate scenario that contains all records?

Answer: Yes. Now everything is revealed to us as if we are at a certain stage along the path (to give us the illusion of freewill), and we supposedly have to reach this goal by ourselves.

But when you move forward, your own path opens for you because you are given “obstacles,” which you seemingly overcome and thus acquire a new feeling and begin to understand the Creator, to justify Him, identify with Him, and this is already worth something.

As a result of going through this path, we become aware of who created us, what He has done for us, and we feel immense gratitude.

But everything is predetermined, of course. Everything initially exists in its ultimate form. But by discovering this, we perceive everything as a great adventure.

Even when we watch some movie again and already know the end and what leads to it, we still enjoy it. Moreover, the second time we watch it, we enjoy it even more than the first time.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 2/10/19

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