Question: The famous Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti believed that school’s should teach children about love and a holistic approach to life.

Krishnamurti said, “Man has built in himself images as a fence of security—religious, political, personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs. The burden of these images dominates man’s thinking, his relationships, and his daily life. These images are the causes of our problems for they divide man from man.” (Krishnamurti, “The Core of the Teachings”) How does the wisdom of Kabbalah relate to this?

Answer: The wisdom of Kabbalah regards all the philosophies that speak about love and friendship positively. At the same time, it asks how do we implement this because this is the problem. Every person in the world will say that friendship is excellent! Love of others? Wonderful! Mutual help? Vital! But how do we fulfill it if we have a completely different nature? A person looks at everyone like a wolf, thinking about how he can grab them by the throat.

This is our egoistic nature. Man is a creature who is operated by a subjective egoism that only thinks about how to sustain itself in the most comfortable way. Therefore, the main problem is in the implementation. Where does one find the power to overcome the ego?

If we understood that egoism is bad, we probably could agree. At the same time, we don’t see any alternative for the ego. We don’t know how and cannot overcome it. Sometimes, we try to do good deeds, but we feel even worse than when we do bad deeds.

We need an upper force in order to overcome the ego, an upper force that is above our nature, above the ego. If we could find it in nature or somewhere to get it, and find a way to draw it, then we would have something we could talk about. If not, all of the wonderful projects and all of the philosophies remain merely theoretical.

Question: Despite the Indian philosophies of love and friendship, in India there is an untouchable caste.

Answer: It is indeed strange that there are sectors that are untouchable in a nation that speaks about love. If every religion is based on love, compassion, and sympathy, where is that love and sympathy?

In fact, there is a huge range of separation between people: caste, society, family, and clan. These examples clearly illustrate how sweet, but empty, such ideas can be. There are philosophies according to which you should sit and self-reflect.

Where is a person’s creativity? Is it inside himself? Searching within yourself will lead to nothing but mistaken philosophies and psychological methods to change a person, but it is impossible to change that way.

A person who has a certain character will remain the way he is unless an external force called the Upper Light will correct him systematically according to what the wisdom of Kabbalah says. It is our only hope.
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From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 6/19/16

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Question: What is the difference between the attitude of the Kabbalists toward the Torah and the attitude of the masses toward the Torah?

Answer: The masses believe that a holy person or an angel is engaged with the Torah, and that if a person actively performs Mitzvot (Commandments), he fulfills the Torah. The sages of Kabbalah believe that the Torah was not given to angels, but to humans. Therefore it is written, “I have created the evil inclination, I have created for it the Torah as a spice, for the light in it reforms it” (Babylonian Talmud, Kiddushin 30b).

Only someone who has an evil inclination, egoism, needs the Torah. This is what Rabash wrote in the article, “The Claim of the Angels” (Articles, Volume 3). In other words, the difference is in the relationship of a person to the Torah: either it was given for performing mechanical actions or for the internal correction of the person’s essence, egoism, and from it, the creation of the soul.
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New Life 502 – Magic For Sale
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Nitzah Mazoz

Spiritual Weapons

Question: Is there really such a thing as magic or witchcraft? Can we use supernatural powers in order to change our reality?

Answer: No. In fact, the term “supernatural” needs to be reset. If we speak about what is above our nature, it includes all the natural phenomena.

We cannot influence the movement of the earth and other planets, but we can calculate them. Thus, many phenomena moved from the mystical realm to scientific concepts.

But at the same time, there are still many things we don’t know and the roots of which we cannot perceive, and this is an area we are still weak in, still faced with nature that we cannot calculate in advance. Meanwhile, man aspires for security; he needs an insurance policy for all his troubles.

This is where magic stems from. First it allegedly provides protection from any possible threat, including enemies, which a person can now resist with “spiritual weapons.” Second, there is the option to switch to the offense and establish one’s superiority, to clean the area of any troublemakers that stand in a person’s way.

The Supernatural, Affordable

Here many make promises declaring they know how it is done and that they will help a person if only they are paid for their services.

There are concepts such as black and white magic. The former is meant to cause harm and the latter promises to help a person. But this division is random, just like children play good and the bad guys. A person feels that he is weak when confronting the forces that determine his life. He would like to control his own fate and he goes to “experts” to hear their advice.

Moreover, the inevitable death of the body and the uncertainty about what lies ahead scare us. What will happen to my soul? Where will it end up? Can we avoid hell and guarantee ourselves heaven? People are very worried about these questions and others can make good money here.

Question: Does this mean that there is no magic?

Answer: No. But the problem is that anything that we attribute to a person’s internal world is related to his psychology. Consequently, a person can be influenced in a way that may seem like magic to him. This also happens with many religious people.

There is nothing we can do about it, since these are the properties of our psychology. Eventually it all stems from ignorance.
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From KabTV’s “New Life 502 – Magic For Sale,“ 1/18/15

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PARDESS Begins With Secrets

Question: If the Torah can’t be taken literally because it talks about the spiritual world, how can we understand what is written there?

Answer: Baal HaSulam explains in the Introduction to The Study of Ten Sefirot that the entire Torah is divided into PARDESS : Pshat (simple explanation), Remez (hint), Drush (allegory), and Sod (secret).

And as the Vilna Gaon explains study of the Torah begins from the secret, and not from the simple explanation. It means that it is attained in this order: Sod (secret), Drush (allegory), Remez (hint), and only at the very end Pshat (simple explanation).

When we begin to read the Torah we understand nothing in it and think that this is some kind of fairy tale or historical novel and nothing more. And therefore it is a secret to us.

And only later, through the study of Kabbalah, do we penetrate deeper into the Torah text and begin to understand what it says about the internal world, the forces of our soul, and the forces that control us. And then the Torah is transformed first into an allegory, then into a hint, and in the end, it becomes simple and easy to understand for us.
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Israeli Radio Program 103FM, 2/28/16

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Question: It seems impossible to get close to the Creator even by one millimeter during one lifetime. It is such hard work that sometimes you feel that you are too weak. What can we do about it?

Answer: You can overcome such states only by the help of the right environment. There is no other way! A person who sits by himself and has no one to study with is waiting in vain to succeed.

If a person studies the wisdom of Kabbalah, the study is fruitful of course. If one wishes to advance as fast as possible and in the right way, then he has to do so with the right group and by combining the group and the study correctly. One must find at least one partner, even virtually.
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 3/13/16

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In the News (Psychologies): “Each of us at least once had a sudden epiphany: all the known facts, like puzzle pieces, add up to one big picture, we did not notice before. The world is not so, as we thought. A person close – impostor. Why we do not notice the obvious facts and believe only to what we want to believe?

“Insights associated with unpleasant discoveries: betrayal by a loved one, betrayal by a friend, a loved one cheating. We repeatedly scroll pictures from the past and wonder – all the facts were before our eyes, why didn’t we noticed anything? We accuse ourselves of naivete and lack of attention, but they are not to blame. The cause is the mechanisms of our mind and psyche.

“The reason lies in the blindness of information on the neurobiological level. The brain is faced with a huge amount of sensory information that needs to be processed efficiently. To optimize the process, one constantly designs models of the world on the basis of previous experience. Thus, the limited resources of the brain concentrate on processing new information that does not fit into his model. …

“We ‘remember’ what is beneficial for us to remember at the moment, and just as easy to ‘forget’ the wrong information. …

“Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Daniel Gilbert (Daniel Gilbert) warned – people tend to manipulate the facts in order to maintain the desired picture of the world. This is how the defense mechanism of our psyche works. Faced with conflicting information, we unconsciously give preference to the facts that fit our picture of the world, and reject data that contradict it. …

“Our eyes only notice in the literal sense what it wants to find the brain.

My Comment: These facts are not new and have even been studied extensively, but the problem remains. Because our whole nature is a desire to receive and to enjoy—there is nothing more to us—everything is aimed only at our filling ourselves, despite the research results, we will still serve our desire blindly.

Only the wisdom of Kabbalah allows us to ascend above our nature, and then we will not see the distorted picture that our egoistic brain depicts for us, but the true picture of the world. It is upper world, the world above our narrow self-interest.
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Kabbalah Never Made Anyone Crazy

Question: Many people are afraid of Kabbalah because there are rumors that it can make a person crazy. Is this true? And if not, where did this opinion come from?

Answer: Baal HaSulam in Introduction to The Study of the Ten Sefirot and also the ARI and other great Kabbalists explained where such rumors came from. There is no danger at all in studying Kabbalah. In my life I have never seen that it made anyone crazy.

Although there are many people that start to study and stop and then get angry that Kabbalah allegedly didn’t meet their expectations. I receive indignant letters claiming that I didn’t want to open a door to the Creator for them. But I only teach on the basis of the original sources; everything else depends on the person.

This is the case with any study. When I graduated from the university I enrolled in graduate school and continued to study to get a PhD. And there were others who finished school somehow and didn’t want to study any further.

Everything depends on the person and on his desire. Anyone can study; the wisdom of Kabbalah doesn’t require any special abilities other than the desire.

Kabbalists themselves spread the rumors that Kabbalah can make a person crazy. After the destruction of the Temple people fell from their spiritual degree to unfounded hatred; therefore, Kabbalah went into hiding for 1,500 years until the time of ARI. And that is why the Kabbalists spread rumors that it is forbidden to approach Kabbalah.

And they succeeded so much that these myths are still alive even in our time, 500 years after the lifting of the ban. Chaim Vital, the disciple of the ARI, wrote in the sixteenth century that there is no prohibition on the study of Kabbalah.

Baal Shem Tov and other great Kabbalists, the founders of Hassidism, made every effort to disseminate the wisdom of Kabbalah. And nevertheless there are still a lot of myths about Kabbalah and many people, especially among Orthodox religious people, protest against its dissemination. There is no prohibition against it anymore; on the contrary, there is a duty to study it.
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Israeli Radio Program 103FM, 2/28/16

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Mysticism Or Science?

Question: It doesn’t matter how much you try to convince me that Kabbalah is a science, it still seems like mysticism to me. I don’t understand what makes it a science?

Answer: We explore our world through the five physical senses given to us from birth. This is the basis of science and all our knowledge about this world.

But there is another reality that we are beginning to reveal only recently with the help of modern physics. We discover that some kind of reality exists beyond our abilities to comprehend that is apparently an upper world or an upper dimension.

It implies an existence above time, motion, and space above all earthly limitations and beyond our universe. We can’t sense this reality because we are not set up for it; we don’t have suitable sensory organs.

The wisdom of Kabbalah is called so because it teaches how to receive (“Kabbalah” means “reception”). First of all, it builds new organs of perception in us. They differ from the common sensory organs because they sense matter outside themselves and not inside.

The five ways to perceive our world in physical sensory organs are called vision, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. And perception of the upper world that is higher than the usual physical one happens in five qualities called Keter, Hochma, Bina, Zeir Anpin, and Malchut.

Once we form these new qualities within ourselves through studying the wisdom of Kabbalah, we begin to feel a new world that we call an upper world. We begin to live in it to the extent that we feel it. So much so that even if our body dies in this world and we stop seeing and feeling our world through it, we are left to live in the upper world that we learned to feel during the life in our body.

And if we didn’t manage to reach the upper world, then we are born again in this world in an animal body and we receive an opportunity to reveal the upper world during our life in order to stay in it for the eternal life.
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Israeli Radio Program 103FM, 2/28/16

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In the News (lenta.ru): “In science, to enlighten humanity, there are only three questions: How did the universe come to existence, how did life begin, and how to animals learn to think? …

“Many processes can be explained with the help of such a thing as ‘self-organizing active media.’ …

“In other words, the mechanisms of self-organization in the physical and chemical, biological, ecological and social systems can be treated with common positions. Having an idea of the self-organization of active media, you can create models that describe such seemingly disparate processes as working laser coagulation, chemical reactions, the heartbeat, or the appearance of annual rings of a tree. …

“The active medium of self-organization follows the same principles, regardless of size. …

“Self-organization – is the basis of all life on earth. It is important to bear in mind that this is determined by the self-organization of primarily physical laws – even in biology, but people are used to interpret biology through chemical compounds. …

“You can often hear the expression ‘the organism is in balance with the environment.’ Physicist interpret this phrase clearly: ‘the organism is dead.’ We are essentially in non-equilibrium and far from thermodynamic equilibrium, and even if we talk about our relationship with the environment, then we are in thermodynamic, energetic and material balance. It can be a stationary or non-stationary relationship, but not equilibrium. Equilibrium can only be in the grave.

“The very essence of life – is a difference of chemical interaction and electrical potentials, concentrations and so forth. Only in the case of inequality and imbalance can there be a chemical process. From the viewpoint of biophysics, the energy of life – is a parabola. At the lowest point, life dies, in a sense; it’s not there. Self-organizing processes begin in an active environment when balance ends and the system is removed from it.

“If we take the two systems with the same electrical potential – no matter how big it is – then there is no movement of charges can not be. Asymmetry is needed. This – the main condition for the beginning of the process. Chemical processes are driven by physics.This built the modern systems of biology and biophysics. And now, one of the most promising areas – the science, which, on the one hand, includes biophysics, and on the other – Synergetics.

“Synergetics, or the theory of complex systems, is an interdisciplinary field of science that studies the general laws of phenomena and processes in complex nonequilibrium systems (physical, chemical, biological, environmental, social and others) based on the inherent principles of self-organization. Synergetics is an interdisciplinary approach, as the principles that govern the processes of self-organization, are represented by the same, regardless of the nature of the systems, and their descriptions must be suitable general mathematical formalism.

“The famous French physicist, Nobel laureate Pierre Curie said that nature is driven by symmetry breaking, movement itself is essentially a distortion of symmetry, because symmetry – is a static state.

“Keep in mind that nature is often not subject to the fact that physics is traditionally called ‘the law.’ For example, Hooke’s law – the claim that the deformation that occurs in an elastic body is directly proportional to the force applied to it, this law does not apply to large deformations… . So, not every law of physics is a law of nature. It is necessary to understand the proportional linear dependencies. Here it becomes clear that far from equilibrium can undergo smooth sections and can enter the so-called bifurcation point – that is, split.”

“Very often, (especially politicians) say that development should follow the path of evolution, not revolution. But evolution, including biological, after a smooth development is the bifurcation, and predicting what will be, after passing the point of bifurcation, is very difficult.”

My Comment: Kabbalah speaks about a single source, a single nature and development of everything that exists on the basis of four phases of HaVaYaH. Development happens under the influence of the Ohr Yashar (Direct Light). The basis and foundation of creation is desire. Its developmental law is the attainment of resemblance and equivalence to its origin, the Creator.
[188169]

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New Life 494 – The Secret Of The Zodiac According To Kabbalah
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Nitzah Mazoz

What will happen to me tomorrow? How will I take care of myself and my loved ones? What does the future hold? For such serious and disturbing questions…the answer exists.

From the need to know the future and control our lives, we have developed many ways to interpret the signs around us. Curious eyes have turned upward to the stars whose trajectories can be anticipated thousands of years in advance, and from them, human beings have learned about possible times and events in life.

It is not surprising that there are such ways for predicting the future, because our world and the entire universe is one closed system in which all the levels of existence—still, vegetative, animate, and human—are connected according to permanent and complete laws, yet we still don’t know what we can expect the next minute, because astrology and similar methods make it possible, at best, to read some of the signs, but do not grant a person the ability to influence his fate and change it.

The Method of Connection

One method does make it possible to influence fate: the wisdom of Kabbalah. Most of us think that life is a matter of luck—I am lucky or I am unlucky. According to Kabbalah, “luck” (Mazel) is derived from the word, “Nozel” (fluid). The Zodiac consists of forces that descend and “drip” on us, activating all the phenomena and events, present and future together, that we call life. These forces reach us in drops, there are breaks or intervals between them and they arrange each and every moment for us.

The signs of the Zodiac are not accidental, as it may seem to us; rather, they are orderly and move in a single predetermined direction. It is possible to imagine this as a car we are traveling together in that has a single predetermined final destination, a preset destiny. The forces that work on us to bring us there are called luck. If we prepare ourselves for that goal from the start, every time a “sign” reaches us, we have already adapted ourselves to it and the direction it is advancing us, so we accept it as “good luck.” And vice versa, if we have not accommodated ourselves to it, without a choice we are pushed forward through difficulties and problems, and we accept this as “bad luck” and suffering.

Separately and together we can equip ourselves with the knowledge of which way to turn ourselves, what every detail in our lives wants to teach us, and how to relate correctly to society and the environment. At each and every moment something pushes us, either as a hindrance or help, and we can gather all these forces together and build a map of our lives from them.

Kabbalah speaks about the goal of life that all of us are advancing toward either through desire and understanding or through suffering and confusion. It teaches us how to direct ourselves so that every sign that reaches us will be felt as good and a blessing. Moreover, it teaches us how to summon these signs and attract them even more forcefully, embracing the force that comes and enhancing its action. This is how we shorten our path and reach the predetermined goal more rapidly, in a nice, good, and pleasant way.
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From KabTV’s “New Life 494 – The Secret Of The Zodiac According To Kabbalah,” 1/8/15

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