New Life 738 – Decision Making
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Yael Leshed-Harel

How can we make the right decisions? What motivates us to reach a certain decision and why is it easier to make rational decisions when we have an important goal in life?

People find it difficult to make decisions because generally they have no clear guidelines in life. Our mind helps us decide where there is no room for emotions, but a person must balance the two.

A person needs to make major decisions when he tries to find out the meaning of life and then he has to listen to his inner voice. At the peak of his development, a person has to reach a point in which he critiques his decisions from above. In order to do so, the wisdom of Kabbalah teaches a person what his nature is and what the nature of the world that surrounds him is, and where he is headed.
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From KabTV’s “New Life 738 – Decision Making,” 6/28/16

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In the News (Society for Personality and Social Psychology): “Diminishing a person’s belief in free will leads to them feeling less like their true selves, according to recent research published in Social Psychological and Personality Science. In a pair of studies, researchers from Texas A&M University manipulated people’s beliefs in free will to see how this would affect the subjects’ sense of authenticity, their sense of self. …

“‘Whether you agree that we have free will or that we are overpowered by social influence or other forms of determinism, the belief in free will has truly important consequences,’ says lead author Elizabeth Seto, a Graduate Student at the Department of Psychology at Texas A&M University. …

“‘Our findings suggest that part of being who you are is experiencing a sense of agency and feeling like you are in control over the actions and outcomes in your life,’ says Seto. ‘If people are able to experience these feelings, they can become closer to their true or core self.’”

Answer: Psychology is not a science. It is based upon experiments in limited conditions.

First, there is no person who can accept and live with the knowledge that are managed. If we could reach a state like this, it would be good.

Question: Does this mean that psychologists cannot convince a person that they are controlled?

Answer: Certainly not. They can’t even start.

You can tell a person that all kinds of external and internal forces govern him and in fact not his. And he is not the one who chooses what to do because a few seconds before making an alleged decision, the information has already been formed and shaped in his brain and he only expresses the prepared result.

Science has already proven this is so. But a person cannot agree with the fact that he does not make decisions on his own because it is against his egoistic nature.This negates his identity, his “I,” his freedom of choice.

He can agree intellectually, but in another second he will forget it anyway. His nature erases this data from him automatically and he begins to live again as usual,  as if everything were up to him.

Comment: Psychologists say that attempts to reduce a person’s faith in freedom of choice increases aggression and gives rise to deception.

Response: Theoretically yes, but in fact, if speaking about a normal, sane, and balanced person, he cannot act according to this belief and respond negatively.

Question: Does this mean that a person always feels that he is free?

Answer: Yes. When teaching “The Freedom” (written by Baal HaSulam about freedom of will), we see that even when one hears that he is managed, he agrees, “Yes, yes, yes,” and continues on his way; he doesn’t even ask how to become free. It doesn’t concern him because he needs to feel confident in himself.

So I should feel within myself that there is a higher power that controls me through all kinds of systems, circumstances, and events, both external and internal, in everything that I do.

I have to feel it, not just hear it from someone. That is when I will feel I am bound hand and foot; no matter what I did, it all came from somewhere but not from me. I begin to strive to this “somewhere.” Where is the source of my behavior, the source of my future, my fate?—so at least I will know how this is works in nature.

No matter how much we talk about this, we cannot convince a person. It requires much work for him to discover his lack of freedom. But when he does discover this, simultaneously he will begin to feel who it is that manages and controls him. This is a revelation of the Creator.

Psychologists, as usual, are immersed in their speculations. And this, of course, will not lead to anything.

We need to show man that he is not free, but along with this he must be given the opportunity to find free will. When he sees the big picture and begins to realize it correctly within a particular small society, he will begin to understand where to move.

Therefore, the correct message is: freedom of choice exists, but only in choosing the appropriate society.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” 6/26/16

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Question: Why is a person responsible for approaching the Creator if he is basically not responsible for anything?

Answer: A person is not responsible for anything except adhesion with the Creator since he was created for this. Therefore, all of his actions in this world to which he doesn’t respond by attempting to get closer to the Creator are useless and aimed completely in the opposite direction from the goal of creation.

That is how he makes his situation worse. About this it is said: “To sit and do nothing is preferable.”
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 3/20/16

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Question: How do bad thoughts influence life, and why is a person responsible for them if they are sent to him from the Creator?

Answer: A person is not responsible for anything, except one thing: realizing the opportunity that he has been given to become independent and to ascend to spirituality.

Only in this does he have freedom of choice. Everywhere else, he is completely subject to the forces from above that influence him. He carries out their instructions without understanding that he is a puppet on a string.

Question: Do the prayers of the parents influence the destiny of the child? Are children responsible for what their parents have done?

Answer: No one is responsible for anything. A person is not even responsible for what he did yesterday. All the more so, he is not responsible for the deeds of others. This is all irrelevant to a person. He must only turn to the Creator and discern things in relation to Him because he is completely managed by the Creator.

I do not hide these things so people will get a bit of the feeling that the wisdom of Kabbalah speaks sharply, directly, and openly.
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 3/20/16

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In the News (Atlantic): “For centuries, philosophers and theologians have almost unanimously held that civilization as we know it depends on a widespread belief in free will—and that losing this belief could be calamitous. …

“The sciences have grown steadily bolder in their claim that all human behavior can be explained through the clockwork laws of cause and effect. This shift in perception is the continuation of an intellectual revolution that began about 150 years ago, when Charles Darwin first published On the Origin of Species. …

“Galton launched a debate that raged throughout the 20th century over nature versus nurture. Are our actions the unfolding effect of our genetics? Or the outcome of what has been imprinted on us by the environment? …

“In recent decades, research on the inner workings of the brain has helped to resolve the nature-nurture debate—and has dealt a further blow to the idea of free will. Brain scanners have enabled us to peer inside a living person’s skull, revealing intricate networks of neurons and allowing scientists to reach broad agreement that these networks are shaped by both genes and environment. But there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams. …

“Many scientists say that the American physiologist Benjamin Libet demonstrated in the 1980s that we have no free will. It was already known that electrical activity builds up in a person’s brain before she, for example, moves her hand; Libet showed that this buildup occurs before the person consciously makes a decision to move. The conscious experience of deciding to act, which we usually associate with free will, appears to be an add-on, a post hoc reconstruction of events that occurs after the brain has already set the act in motion. …

“The 20th-century nature-nurture debate prepared us to think of ourselves as shaped by influences beyond our control. …The challenge posed by neuroscience is more radical: It describes the brain as a physical system like any other, and suggests that we no more will it to operate in a particular way than we will our heart to beat. The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond. In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.

“Saul Smilansky, a philosophy professor at the University of Haifa, in Israel, has … come to a painful conclusion: ‘We cannot afford for people to internalize the truth’ about free will.

“Smilansky is convinced that free will does not exist in the traditional sense—and that it would be very bad if most people realized this.

Answer: According to the wisdom of Kabbalah there is no free will according to the common definition. All of a person’s actions are unconscious, and are performed unconsciously and only then understood, and some of them are not always understood either. According to many Kabbalistic texts, like Baal HaSulam’s articles “Thou Hast Hemmed Me In Behind and Before,” Shamati articles, etc. speak about that. Another part of Kabbalistic literature describes what does depend on a person. All of the Kabbalistic literature is divided into two parts: the part that depends on the Creator and the part that depends on a person.

The study of Kabbalah actually comes down to the study and implementation of our free will, but we can define and implement it only to the extent that we understand the Creator’s actions and when our attributes become equal to His through adhering to Him like to a partner. The meaning of our actions is in our understanding and our complete connection between all of a person’s actions and the Creator’s. This is called adhesion.
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Int the News (Hi-News.ru): “Why is there something rather than nothing?

“Our appearance in this universe is too strange an event that words cannot express. The vanity of our daily lives makes us take our existence for granted. But whenever we try to deny it and think deeply about what is happening, the question arises: why the universe is all there is and why does it have and is subject to such accurate laws? Why does anything exist? …As for philosophers, they came to this anthropic principle that our particular universe manifests itself in such a way because of our presence in it as observers.”

Answer: The reason for everything that exists is thought; it is primary and gives rise to matter, the desire to fill itself. It gives the desire, matter, its attributes and consequently matter, the desire yearns to resemble the thought, its Creator.

Question: Is our reality real? How do we know that what we see around us is real and not a big illusion that was created by some invisible force? Could it be that we are the product of an intentional simulation, that our civilization is an illusion and that we are not who we believe we are? What should we consider real?

Answer: Everything is manifested in our sensations, in us, and there is no way we can discover what is beyond us. Kabbalah develops within a person the ability to feel what is external to him by faith above reason and thus enables us to answer all these questions.

Question: Do we have freewill? Are our actions managed or do we make our own decisions of our own freewill? Neuroscience shows that the brain makes a decision before we understand it. Quantum mechanics indicates that we exist in a universe of probabilities and any form of determinism is basically impossible.

Answer: There is freedom of will to explore the intended path of development and to advance along this path either by force or consciously. (See the article “The Freedom” by Baal HaSulam).

Question: Does God exist? We cannot know whether God exists or not. We don’t know about the inner workings of the universe in order to make grandiose claims about the nature of reality and about the fact that there is an upper force behind the scenes.

Answer: We have to reveal the Creator. This is the only way to solve this issue! The method for the revelation of the Creator is called the wisdom of Kabbalah.

Question: Is there life after death? We cannot ask the dead, so we can only guess. Materialists assume that there is no life after death, but it seems impossible to prove this scientifically.

Answer: Our biological life is born, lives, and dies. The eternal element is the desire, which when connected to the biological body has to undergo different phases and grow. The desire grows by drawing the force that created it, the Creator. We were given life in order to reveal the upper state, in order to attain the Creator’s level in this life.

Question: Can we perceive anything objectively? We can observe the environment only through the filter of our senses, thoughts, and minds. Everything that we feel has gone through a multi-layer filter of physiological and cognitive processes. Our world view is subjective. The only way to check this is by somehow seeing the world through another person’s consciousness. We can observe the universe only through our mind and interpret it only subjectively.

Answer: The wisdom of Kabbalah develops senses in us that are external to our body, through which we discover the true reality, the upper world and the reason for it, the Creator. Our efforts in uniting the group spur and summon the correcting Light, the Surrounding Light (Ohr Makif), and it develops a sense of perception in a person that is external to his egoistic subjective filter. This is called the revelation of the Creator and of the upper world to a person.
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Question: It turns out that there is still slavery in the modern world. 45 million people around the world are abused as slaves. This number is equivalent to the population of Spain.

According to recent research, slavery is the exploitation of a person who cannot leave because of threats of violence, coercion, or deception. People can be enslaved because of a debt and so forth.

Answer: Before the destruction of the Second Temple the slaves among the nation of Israel had many privileges. The landlord was required to take care of his slave, and the slave was obliged to work for the landlord according to his powers and his abilities. At the same time, the relationship between them was normal and mutual, just as they are today between an employer and an employee. A slave did not want to leave his landlord because the latter provided everything he needed, as it is written, “… give your slave your pillow.”

As for other nations, they had a completely different attitude toward slaves. They beat them, humiliated them, killed them, and did not treat them as human beings, not even as domestic animals, which were looked after, cherished, and fed.

Question: What is slavery from a Kabbalistic perspective?

Answer: According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, slavery is total obedience to your landlord, “This is what the landlord wants, so this is how I move.” A slave constantly looks to the landlord and carries out his will, and at the same time, totally suppresses his own desire. His efforts, his opinion, his desires, and his thoughts all are aimed at the landlord’s desire so as to continue the latter’s desire. A slave has no desire of his own, but only the desire of the landlord.

Question: Can we say that, in this world, we all are slaves to our egoistic nature?

Answer: Of course! We also can say that we are the Creator’s slaves, but unconsciously! This is because the Creator is the only force of nature that manages us, but He wants us to be independent. This is our problem: to be independent of Him and even above Him!

It is written, “My sons have defeated Me,” which means becoming free of slavery, becoming totally independent, and taking the leadership of the entire world from the Creator’s hands. This is His real desire, His dream. And we, unfortunately, do not want to think about something higher, more sublime, and thus we remain slaves and live as animals.

Therefore the Creator pushes us through suffering so that we will perceive and understand our absolutely poor, paltry, miserable, and limited state, and will want to rise from it.

I hope that as the sufferings grow, people will begin to perceive and understand that. There is no other way to influence people. Then, people will use what the Creator offers them: His knowledge, His method, His wisdom, the wisdom of Kabbalah.

If we begin to implement it, we will see how much we gain from becoming the masters and ceasing to be slaves. This is how we enter a completely different level of existence, a world of eternity, infinity, and perfection, a totally different entity, a different dimension. But this is for free people.
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From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 2/6/16

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Question: Should a person be aware of the influence of the upper force?

Answer: A person may or may not know. He has to attain his fate and become the master of his destiny; he has to ascend above matter, above our world, and exist on the level of decision making.

In our world everything is predetermined: the forces that manage it descend from Above and a person is helpless in the face of these forces.
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 3/20/16

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In the News (planet-today.ru): “US researchers have combined data on the majority of galaxies known to mankind and created an impressive scale of it in their Cosmic Web project that illustrates the structure of the universe by means of links between individual clusters of stars.

“’Ultimately, the universe is a network of individual galaxies, combined with gravitational interaction. We have built a visual model of these relations and got something that with the proper proportion of imagination can be called, “A view of the universe from God’s point of view”,’ – explains one of the authors of the project Kim Albrecht.”

My Comment: Kabbalah says that not only our world but all of creation is a single organism, and among all the worlds, only the human being has freedom of choice in his behavior. The rest of the creatures are instinctively run by nature.

So the balance of the entire system depends only on human behavior, and only humans bring it out of balance, and conversely, can restore it to balance.

Kabbalah explains how to manage the system correctly and maintain its balance. Currently, the egoistic behavior of humanity takes the system of creation out of equilibrium. Kabbalah warns of the consequences ….
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Question: There are scientists today who say that we exist unconsciously. Can we say that the difference between the spiritual world and the corporeal world is in existing consciously or unconsciously?

Answer: We automatically exist in a totally unconscious manner and don’t understand who we are at all. We don’t understand what we are and why we are living. All the organs and the cells in our body, everything that surrounds us, plays on us and we feel the moment we live in.

Therefore, we have no opportunity to change anything. There is no freewill whatsoever. Everything is predetermined and we are operated in different situations so that at a certain point in our development we will be disappointed with our existence as it is and recognize its worthlessness, pointlessness, and emptiness and will begin to yearn to find the meaning of life.

The meaning of our world is to enable us to ascend consciously above it to the next spiritual dimension.

Question: What does consciously mean? Different desires constantly arise in me and I run to fill them with pleasure. Will I have to make up these desires by myself in spirituality?

Answer: At some point, a person grows tired of chasing the fulfillment of his desires and doesn’t identify with them anymore. He realizes that these are the intentions of his desires and that he constantly has to fill them. Although he feels pleasure in that, he doesn’t want it to control him anymore; he wants to independent and not addicted to these pleasant feelings.

Then he begins to think: “How can I rise above this? Why do I constantly have to chase various pleasures? Why do I always sell myself to these pleasures? Is this enough for my life? Does this satisfy me? Should I think about whether I need all this for? These are fleeting pleasures that change every second so my whole life comes down to chasing pleasure and minimizing pain.”

Question: What is the alternative for that in the spiritual world?

Answer: In spirituality a person begins to attain the meaning of his existence and this attainment fills him with an inexplicable feeling, an indescribable feeling, of attaining harmony, the upper existence, the truth, the real goal, everything that does not exist in the corporeal world.

If a person feels bad in our world, he has to change it immediately to a good feeling, and thus over and over again, and this becomes the goal of his life. In the spiritual world a person who attains the meaning of everything that happens and what is beyond him, creates a feeling of wholeness harmony, balance and eternity within him.
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 2/21/16

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