Entries in the 'Inner Work' Category

My Friend, The Great Sage!

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: When a person starts saying something, I form a certain attitude to it, perhaps, disregard, maybe, hate. How should I respond correctly to the friends’ words?

Answer: If I am in the group, then I am engaged in spiritual work, and that is why I must regard each of my friends as a great sage, as a great Kabbalist, as a representative of the Creator, who is in front of me now. And if he just, so to speak, is saying nonsense, I have to see it as I don’t understand what he says: I don’t understand. What he says is absolutely true, absolutely correct, divine ideas, but I don’t understand them; this is how I should accept and relate to him, not condescendingly, not like to a small child whom I love and so I forgive him, etc., and naturally not with hatred or impatience.

I must treat him as the greatest in my generation. I have to approach everything from below; this is the condition of my being in the group. Only then will I begin to feel that the Creator substituted these phrases on purpose so that I properly formatted myself and directed towards Him, to “there is none else besides Him.”
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From the Unity Day Around the World 4/22/04, Preparation to the Congress

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Delighting The Creator

Dr. Michael LaitmanBy eliminating our own “I” and giving the opportunity for the upper Light to flood everywhere, fill everything, and manifest everywhere, we are bringing enormous joy to the Creator, attaining our purpose, and starting to become equivalent with Him. We overcome our old nature, annul it and become nothing. This is what our spiritual development starts from, as a beginning, as a seed inside a mother who begins to develop it.

Right now we need to think about what pleasure that we bring Him so we would receive delight from that, so that the aspiration to please Him would become our fulfillment.

In this manner, we gradually enter the upper Light. It’s still barely discernible, but we are already figuring out which occurrences in our sensations we will go through in order to begin to reveal Him in action.

If my fulfillment will come from providing a place for the Creator to appear and reveal Himself, from delighting Him, from pleasing Him—then this will be all of my joy. Our work begins with this. From this starting point onward, we find ourselves in a state of “There is none else besides Him,” annulling ourselves and creating an opportunity only for Him to fill all of our feelings, all our thoughts. And indeed, in this case only He fulfills us.

We need to be confident that by moving in this way we’ll gradually start to enter into even greater contact with Him, we will begin to feel more clearly that which fulfills us. Out of nothingness, out of concealment, His properties and His ruling over us will be revealed more and more. We will begin to feel how desires and thoughts are created inside us. And we will go along with these desires and thoughts, understanding that everything comes from Him, and agree with it. The main thing is to show and reveal the Creator within us more and more through our common unity, through everyone in the world. We’ll try to bring up the whole world toward this state. And we’re confident that we’ll achieve this.
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From the Vilnius Convention 3/24/12, Workshop 2

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Helping The World Reveal The Creator

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: How can we come to integrality and unification through dissemination and the integral method?

Answer: Dissemination supports us, it obliges us to be together, to communicate, connect, discuss, and so on. But we shouldn’t forget that dissemination will be effective only if we are pursuing a higher goal: the revelation to the world of the state in which it would exist inside the upper Light, in supreme good, in love and bestowal. We are all inside this field: a field of information, a field of kindness.

If we’re pursuing this goal in our dissemination work, then through that, we evoke the influence of the surrounding Light upon us and the whole world. And, of course, through that we become closer ourselves. This intention should be present at least somehow, somewhere, in some form, but we need to take care to ensure that it is there.

We don’t have a right to forget about it, because otherwise, our dissemination won’t be effective, it would simply be a corporeal action. But if we’ll be thinking about how through this action we’re bringing the world, and ourselves along with it, towards revelation of the Creator, then we will succeed.

We can also add an intention that through this, we wish to bring pleasure to the Creator. But this is too high of a degree. I don’t want to talk about this yet, because people get confused: “Who is the Creator? What kind of pleasure are we talking about?”, and so on. Our inner psychology operates with such phrases. We cannot give anything to the Creator, no kind of pleasure. But we say it this way because we feel that this is seemingly happening in the reflection on us.

If we start pursuing this goal, then our dissemination will be billions of times more effective. And this is most important. You have to go to disseminate with an understanding that through this, you’re bringing enormous benefit to the world, helping them reveal the Creator. Moreover, the connection between us will become correspondingly greater. The problem is only in the absence or incompleteness of our intention.
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From the Vilnius Convention 3/25/12, Lesson 5

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Ask Yourself!

 Dr. Michael LaitmanPeople who study with us for years ask me: “Well, when will I finally…? What will be in the end?”, and I don’t know what to answer them.

You are in the upper world already, start feeling it! And if it is concealed from you, do what you have to do so that it will be revealed! After all, I will not give you this key!

Why do you all see in me someone who executes things and not a guide? I cannot fulfill anything!

Suppose I were a coach of an athlete who has to participate in the Olympic games. I can’t participate in his place. I am a coach. I can advise him and show him, I can give him different activities to carry out: psychological, physical, massage, etc., everything that an athlete needs. But I cannot participate in his place. It is the same here!

A Kabbalah teacher is like a school or university teacher, he brings you out into the world. Then you have to reach your own goal by yourself, attain your own achievements using the knowledge you received from your teacher. It is the same thing here.

So it is futile to ask me: “When?” You should only ask yourselves.

I can even sit here on the stage and not say a word for two days, while you are working on your internality. This would be a wonderful convention! We could transmit it all over the world, and our friends all over the world could do the same thing. We will get to that state. You cannot even imagine what force would reside among you then. This could be an amazing experience!

So only internal concentration!

And on the outside, the help of the friends and my instructions.
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From the Vilnius Convention 3/25/2012, Lesson 5

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The Need For Training

Dr. Michael LaitmanWe must understand that our training is the example of what we should be engaged in every day.

It’s not necessary to meet with the group for this. They can be organized 10-15 minutes before the lesson, as the group preparation for the lesson. They could be conducted and during the break between studies and at the end. This can be done at the end of a workday—at any time.

This regular training should bring us to the point that we will begin to feel during all our life that we are in the higher information field that creates everything in us and works through us. But a person doesn’t exist.

Then, we will begin to feel that a human being is a completely different structure, which we cannot imagine today. But we are already entering and approaching this.
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From the Vilnius Convention 3/24/12, Workshop 2

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A Very Special Mission For Our Generation

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: What exactly is our work in unity?

Answer: I have to yearn for a connection with the text that we study, to want that everything it says to be fulfilled in my connection with the general vessel, with the whole desire. I want to discover all the phenomena The Zohar talks about in my connection with the group.

The Zohar talks about the still, vegetative, and animate levels of the desire, nothing more. So there, it speaks about the sages, land, trees, animals, and donkeys—everything applies to the four phases of desire. We shouldn’t be distracted from this internal meaning and imagine an external picture.

Even if it “diverts” us, we have to hold on to the internality as hard as we can, and we always keep this struggle inside us with mixed success. The main thing is to try, which means that you are performing corrections and raising the internality over the externality, raising it higher and higher.

These are the greatest corrections, which only we can perform as the lowest level of the system. Until now no one could do that, not even the great Kabbalists of the past. We, in our generation, perform this most important work by raising the internality over the externality at the base of the system.
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From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/24/12, The Zohar

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The Music Of The Light

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: How can we picture to ourselves an ideal state: a general vessel (desire), connection?

Answer: We are all interconnected. When the very first connection is revealed between us, it means that all of us, no matter how many of us there are—billions or millions, reveal 10 Sefirot between ourselves. Such is the structure of the system.

And then, these 10 Sefirot begin to vibrate and generate sounds, as if strings of a guitar. They are in constant movement, in harmonious relationships with one another. Not a single sound is out of tune from the general harmony.

This entire system reveals to us more and more perfect 10 Sefirot. Besides, they become increasingly clearer to us in their various kinds. These various forms that become revealed to us appear because each individual Sefira consists of its own 10 Sefirot.

And when all these inner 10 Sefirot that comprise the 10 main Sefirot also start interacting between themselves, generating the upper harmonies of the main waves, as if in music or voice, they create the entire impression, transmitting inside all information about the vessels and the Light that fulfills them.

Different Lights are essentially impressions inside all these desires, experienced from the connection of singing strings, from the emerging chords. All this music is what revelation is.

Everything is inside the vessel. The sound is felt inside our desires, organs of perception, it doesn’t exist by itself in the air. The music of the Light is always revealed as the inner filling of the letters (the matrixes of desires), existing inside other letters. The Light manifests only inside the vessel, or desire, as a result of its changes.
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From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/24/2012, The Zohar 

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The Taste Enhancer

Dr. Michael LaitmanWhen a person comes to the point when he perceives reality as a certain force field, he begins to attach to it various properties of this world, clarifying how they should change so as to fit into this allegedly spiritual picture. Then it becomes clearer to him that he and everybody else are desires that repulse one another, but must unite.

And in order to unite, they need an additional force that would connect them together. After all, each of them possesses only an opposite force that repels others. But all of them exist in an ocean of Light that is able to perform any change since this is the force of the Creator. However, He acts only as the correct desires become revealed from the part of the created beings.

And if despite their mutual repulsion, these egoistic desires begin to show the slightest, even artificial, aspiration to unite, the force field, the upper Light, the Creator, begins to act upon them. For the meantime, it acts from afar, in accord to a great distance that separates an artificial request from the true one. Yet, it nevertheless affects them and begins to gradually bring them closer to Him.

On one side, the Light acts upon the created beings in order to draw them closer to itself. And from the other, as a result of coming closer, the created beings, in accordance to their inner properties, begin to feel an even greater contradiction with and repulsion from each other. It follows that two opposite sensations manifest here.

On one hand, the Light works and lets us feel an increasingly stronger connection. But at the same time, we feel how we ourselves do not correspond to this connection and don’t want it. However, we need to understand that all these revelations come from the Light itself, and specifically thanks to our coming closer together we now see how opposite to each other we are.

We feel two components in every state: our own egoistic broken nature and the nature of the Light, which penetrates us and holds us together.

The further we advance, the deeper we will reveal our evil nature and the good nature of the Light, until this gap between these two poles turns into a distance between the point of this world and the point of the world of Infinity. The difference between these concepts is what determines the volume of the vessel in which the creature senses the essence of the Creator relative to its opposite nature. The entire might of the Light of Infinity becomes revealed specifically in this vessel.

Until the creature discovers these differences, until the entire difference between the egoistic intention and the bestowing one becomes clarified, the upper Light remains at the first, “still” degree of Nefesh. After all, it acts only according to the desire and the program of the upper one, without the participation of the creature, and thus only the most basic Light of Nefesh de Nefesh manifests here.

When the lower one reveals its entire dissimilarity to the upper one, the revelation of the Creator, which it receives relative to its own qualities, is “620” times greater in its might.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/26/2012, Writings of Baal HaSulam 

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My New “Self”

Dr. Michael LaitmanIf the Creator is the only force that governs, maintains, and enlivens everything, then even the words that I utter, the thoughts and desires that arise in me now, all of it is also Him. Hence I need to unite with what passes through me now and comes out from me to others. All of it is all His work as well; He is carrying all of it out. I’m not here. I am only what perceives itself filled with the might, force, intention, and desire of the Creator who thereby addresses others.

I need to connect and to merge with what is happening inside of me now, to feel that I’m entirely filled by Him because there is no other force besides Him. And when I try to eliminate my own “Self” within me, that everything is only Him, this is exactly when I find my new “Self,” based on “there is none else besides Him.” That is, everything that I think about, it is all Him.
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From the Vilnius Convention 3/23/2012, Workshop 2

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A Field For Inner Work

A Field For Inner WorkQuestion: What can I get from the friends’ words during the workshops, but can’t get from the lesson with the teacher?

Answer: When the teacher speaks everyone is silent, that is, they agree with what he says. There is a plus and a minus in this.

There is no internal work during this time because you are involuntarily suppressed, silenced by the knowledge, the height of the teacher as he is initially higher than you.

When you are together with the friends, you are working with someone who can be higher, lower, or at the same level with you. And here, you have a lot of work on lowering yourself, removing your “I,” canceling yourself. And in addition, you need to consider any of your friends to be the greatest. In this way, you “adjust” yourself to the Creator, prepare yourself to go by bestowal above reception, faith above reason.
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From a Lecture on Unity Day Around the World, “Preparation for the Congress” 4/22/2012    

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