In the News (International Business Times): “British physicist Stephen Hawking has said that there is no God and that computers will overtake humans within the next century. The 73 year old dismissed any notion that there is a God in an interview by stating that science is able to explain the origination of everything.

“When asked by Spanish newspaper El Pais if scientists should believe in God, Hawking responded: ‘I use the word, God, in an impersonal sense, like Einstein did, for the laws of nature.’ This question was followed by: ‘Do you think humans would one day abandon religion and God?’ to which he retorted: ‘The laws of science are sufficient to explain the origin of the universe. It is not necessary to invoke God.’

“…[He] went on to say that the future of the human race could be bleak. He said that if aliens come to Earth, they could take over our planet. Hawking: ‘Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach. To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational. The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.’

“On the subject of artificial intelligence (AI), he added: ‘Computers will overtake humans with AI at some point within the next 100 years. When that happens, we need to make sure the computers have goals aligned with ours.

“‘I think the survival of the human race will depend on its ability to find new homes elsewhere in the universe, because there’s an increasing risk that a disaster will destroy Earth. I therefore want to raise public awareness about the importance of space flight. I have learnt not to look too far ahead, but to concentrate on the present. I have so much more I want to do.’”

My Comment: The wisdom of Kabbalah could be very useful for all scientists; they wouldn’t need to suffer for generations asserting hypotheses and then refuting them. Instead they could just discover the nature of God.
[170921]

Related Material:
Scientists Believe In God
Is There A God?
Science Is Becoming Convinced Of The Existence Of God

Filed under: Kabbalah Study, Science, The Creator - No Comments →

In the News (Tel Aviv University ): “Most of us think that friendship is a two-way street — but that’s true only half the time, according to research from Tel Aviv University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Their new joint study says only half of your buddies would consider you their own friend. People have a very poor perception of friendship ties, and this limits their ability to influence their “friends,” according to the research, published in PLoS One on March 22, 2016. …

“‘It turns out that we’re very bad at judging who our friends are,’ says Dr. Erez Shmueli, who conducted the study with Dr. Laura Radaelli, both of TAU’s Department of Industrial Engineering, in collaboration with Prof. Alex Pentland and Abdullah Almatouq of MIT. ‘And our difficulty determining the reciprocity of friendship significantly limits our ability to engage in cooperative arrangements. We learned that we can’t rely on our instincts or intuition. There must be an objective way to measure these relationships and quantify their impact.’

“The researchers conducted extensive social experiments and analyzed the data from other studies to determine the percentage of reciprocal friendships and their impact on human behavior. The team also examined six friendship surveys from some 600 students in Israel, Europe and the United States to assess friendship levels and expectations of reciprocity.

“They then developed an algorithm that examines several objective features of a perceived friendship (that is, the number of common friends or the total number of friends) and is able to distinguish between the two different kinds of friendship: unidirectional or reciprocal.

‘” Dr. Shmueli says. ‘If you think someone is your friend, you expect him to feel the same way. But in fact that’s not the case — only 50 percent of those polled matched up in the bidirectional friendship category.’

“Why is this important? According to Dr. Shmueli, influence is the name of the game.

“’Reciprocal relationships are important because of social influence,’ says Dr. Shmueli, who utilized the ‘FunFit’ social experiment in the course of the research. ‘In this experiment that analyzes different incentives for exercising, we found that friendship pressure far outweighed money in terms of motivation. We found, not surprisingly, that those pressured by reciprocal friends exercised more and enjoyed greater progress than those with unilateral friendship ties.’”

My Comment: Indeed, we only see ourselves reflected in our environment. Therefore, we need to fix this some how.. On the one hand, we see an incorrect and absolutely false world. On the other hand, we don’t want to correct the incorrect mutual relationships between us, even though it is possible to correct them.

Question: At what point would there be correct assessment of reciprocal friendship?

Answer: This would be when all of us begin to work for closeness between us, without any connection to what is happening between us. This would be when our goal becomes connection between us in the center of the circle in order to attain the next level of development, to rise to the next level of nature, of creation, of formation. Then, we would no longer have any problems.

Question: This is very difficult for people.

Answer: No, we can do this as a “guided tour” on a spiritual roller coaster, and this will be a joy. This is wild spiritual fun. I recommend this to you!

Question: Even the researchers concluded that friendship is a stronger motivation than money. So, the most useful method for attaining results in every area is to perform work together with friends.

Answer: This is what the wisdom of Kabbalah speaks about. It is up to us to work together for the sake of unity. Then, we would have everything, including money, undoubtedly! This is because the upper force that manages everything in our world, including the regulation of all of our commercial problems, only comes down to a place where unity exists.

Question: Does this mean that everything I have will be enough for me?

Answer: Even more than that.
[183552]
From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 5/11/16

Related Material:
Guarantee Of Happiness
A Remedy For Depression
Rising Above The Gaping Emptiness

Filed under: Children, Education, Kabbalah Study, News, Science - No Comments →

Is Kabbalah connected to religion?

Question: Is Kabbalah connected to religion?

Answer: In his article, “The Essence of Religion and Its Purpose,” Baal HaSulam writes that “religion” is the attainment of the Creator, the upper force, which acts in the entire universe. This definition fits only the wisdom of Kabbalah because it is the only method engaged in the revelation of the Creator to the creations.

Kabbalah is the only true religion. All other faiths and “religions,” as it is customary to call them, are really not a religion.

Question: How is the wisdom of Kabbalah connected to these religions?

Answer: There is no connection between religions and Kabbalah. They all originated after Kabbalah was concealed, that is, after the destruction of the Second Temple. Before the destruction of the Temple, the entire nation of Israel existed in spiritual attainment, with a sensation of the upper force. However, later on, they fell from their spiritual level, from the love for others to unfounded hatred. This is called the exit into exile from the attainment of the Creator, the upper force.

Because they were in brotherly love, they attained the upper force, while unfounded hatred concealed the upper force from them. This is why this state is called exile or destruction. In order to continue living in the conditions of concealment, the Kabbalists created a substitute. They replaced the wisdom of Kabbalah with Judaism, which later gave origin to Christianity and after that, to Islam.
[178772]
From Israeli Radio Program 103 FM, 2/28/16

Related Material:
Dispelling Myths About Kabbalah, Part 6
Dispelling Myths About Kabbalah, Part 5
Dispelling Myths About Kabbalah, Part 4

Filed under: Kabbalah Study, Religion - No Comments →

In the News (from lenta.ru): “Pottery shards found in a small Israeli fortress reveal an answer to one of the most important issues of Biblical studies—whether basic texts of the Old Testament were written before the Babylonian exile or after it. Inscriptions on potshards attesting to the literacy of the Jews speak in favor of the first version. This was reported in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. …

“However, Israeli archaeologists have studied the inscription (in Hebrew) on the clayshards from the fortress of Arad (southern Judah), dating from about 600 BC – and found a high level of literacy among the Jews of that era.

“It turned out that the text on 16 potsherds belong to a minimum of six authors, who did not need the help of scribes. Among the records were instructions to the deputy quartermaster of the fortress about the issue of provisions for a detachment of Greek mercenaries. The literacy of junior officers far from Jewish centers of culture indicates that Jews could read the sacred texts long before the Babylonian exile.”

My Comment: From the days of Abraham, comprehensive learning and education were practiced in his group, as well as reading of books written by him. The books from more ancient Kabbalists, from Adam to Abraham, as Rambam wrote, just didn’t reach us. But it indicates that in the period of the First Temple there was no uneducated child who did not know how to read and write and did not know all the sacred texts by heart.
[181553]

Related Material:
Myths And Realities Of The Bible
The Future Society Amidst The Ancient World
In the Beginning G-d Created the Heavens and the Earth

Filed under: Ancient Babylon, Israel, Israel Today, Kabbalah Study, Nations of the World, News, Religion - No Comments →

Zionist, anti-Zionist, Jewish: they are not the same thing! The Jews were divided into Zionists and anti-Zionists with the appearance of their aspiration for Zion in the 19^th century. There was always a desire to be reborn on our land, but the non-religious movement to establish the revival of the Jewish people in its historic homeland was something new.

There are Zionists who criticize Israel because they don’t agree with its policy of “occupation.” Among the ultra-Orthodox community, Neturei Karta has come out against Zionism and the Jewish State because they believe that Israel can be established only with the coming of the Messiah.

I believe that the ultra-Orthodox are absolutely right. It is indeed only with the coming of the Messiah (a force of attraction that draws the people out of exile through attitudes of connection and love, out of the egoistic state) will the true Israel be established. They don’t take into account that the coming of the Messiah (redemption from the ego, from mutual hatred) depends on our efforts to unite through a comprehensive method of public education and consolidation into a complete whole. That is how we leave the exile via the short way, through Achishena – will hasten it (Isaiah 60:22).

But if we wait for the Messiah passively, it will happen by way of Beito – in its time (Isaiah 60:22). This means through terrible suffering (wars, Holocausts), labor pains, so to speak, until the Jews become unified as a people and then into a proper nation. This is similar to what Abraham did 3,500 years ago when he united part of the Babylonians into a group that called itself Israel, “aimed directly toward what is higher,” toward union and love.

Subconsciously, the nations of the world are expecting this unity specifically from us. Until the realization of this state, they will blame us for all of their troubles and suffering because the origin of all suffering can be summed up as a lack of the unifying power and love in our world that can only appear through the unification of the Jewish people.
[183138]

Related Material:
The Call Of The Soul For The Promised Land
Come Quickly To The Promised Land
A Guide Through The Desert To The Promised Land

Filed under: Israel, Israel Today, Kabbalah Study, Nations of the World, Religion - No Comments →

Question: There are people who read a text by moving their eyes over the page and moving on to the next page. They do not grasp the details of the text, but can talk precisely about the essence and the main idea of the text. Is reading like this similar to the method of penetrating into the essence of the Kabbalistic sources?

Answer: No, in the wisdom of Kabbalah we don’t use this. You are talking about a special method that can be found on the Internet in which one can learn how to read across the page. But in the wisdom of Kabbalah, the idea is not about knowing how to talk about the text. On the contrary, one must read it slowly, returning again and again to the beginning and the middle of the sentence, going “back and forth,” trying to connect with the person who wrote the text, feel what he wrote, enter into his feelings, and flow through the text with him. Speed doesn’t give anything here. So if I don’t read every sentence again and again, at least twice, and don’t return afterward to the beginning of the section, I don’t feel it.

Question: You have already read these texts personally at least 150-200 times, if not more. Does a constant renewal occur in you with this? Do you feel that you are new each time?

Answer: Certainly! Before the lesson I am engaged with reading the text, after the lesson I will need to go over it to advance further, and I will even see it in a completely different way.

Question: Do you enjoy working with the texts?

Answer: There is nothing more enjoyable in life than the feeling that enters you; the logic that is absorbed through the inner meaning of every sentence reveals a feeling of closeness to the Creator, a picture of the world and its structure!
[181322]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 2/7/16

Related Material:
Reading A Kabbalistic Text
The Effect Of Kabbalistic Books
Books With A Spiritual Subtext

Filed under: Kabbalah Study - No Comments →

Opinion (The American Conservative): “A people’s religion, their faith, creates their culture, and their culture creates their civilization. And when faith dies, the culture dies, the civilization dies, and the people begin to die. Is this not the recent history of the West?

“Today, no great Western nation has a birthrate that will prevent the extinction of its native-born. By century’s end, other peoples and other cultures will have largely repopulated the Old Continent.

“European Man seems destined to end like the 10 lost tribes of Israel—overrun, assimilated, and disappeared. And while the European peoples—Russians, Germans, Brits, Balts—shrink in number, the U.N. estimates that the population of Africa will double in 34 years to well over 2 billion people.What happened to the West? As G. K. Chesterton wrote, when men cease to believe in God, they do not then believe in nothing, they believe in anything.

“As European elites ceased to believe in Christianity, they began to convert to ideologies, to what Dr. Russell Kirk called ‘secular religions.’ For a time, these secular religions—Marxism-Leninism, fascism, Nazism—captured the hearts and minds of millions. But almost all were among the gods that failed in the 20th century.

“Now Western Man embraces the newer religions: egalitarianism, democratism, capitalism, feminism, One Worldism, environmentalism. These, too, give meaning to the lives of millions, but these, too, are inadequate substitutes for the faith that created the West.

“For they lack what Christianity gave man—a cause not only to live for, and die for, but a moral code to live by, with the promise that, at the end a life so lived, would come eternal life. Islam, too, holds out that promise. Secularism, however, has nothing on offer to match that hope.”

My Comment: But beyond the promise of eternal life is the ability to attain in this world something that is not promised, but which the wisdom of Kabbalah offers as a method for the revelation of the Creator to His creatures in this world.
[182614]

Related Material:
Religion In The Mirror Of Kabbalah
Is Religion Important To You?
“Religion May Become Extinct In Nine Nations”

Filed under: Crisis, Globalization, Kabbalah Study, News, Science - No Comments →

Opinion (brainpickings.org): “Questions like why our world exists and what nothing is have occupied minds great and ordinary since the dawn of humanity, and yet for all our scientific progress, they continue to do so, yielding only hypotheses rather than concrete answers. …

“Alan Lightman points to fine-tuning — the notion that the basic forces propelling our universe appear to be fine-tuned in such a way as to make the existence of life possible — as a centerpiece of how modern scientists have attempted to answer these age-old questions. …

“‘On one thing most physicists agree. If the amount of dark energy in our universe were only a little bit different than what it actually is, then life could never have emerged. A little larger, and the universe would have accelerated so rapidly that matter in the young universe could never have pulled itself together to form stars and hence complex atoms made in stars. And, going into negative values of dark energy, a little smaller and the universe would have decelerated so rapidly that it would have recollapsed before there was time to form even the simplest atoms.’ …

“‘Out of all the possible amounts of dark energy that our universe might have, the actual amount lies in the tiny sliver of the range that allows life. There is little argument on this point. It does not depend on assumptions about whether we need liquid water for life or oxygen or particular biochemistries. It depends only on the requirement of atoms. As before, one is compelled to ask the question: Why does such fine-tuning occur? And the answer many physicists now believe: the multiverse. A vast number of universes may exist, with many different values of the amount of dark energy. Our particular universe is one of the universes with a small value, permitting the emergence of life. We are here, so our universe must be such a universe. We are an accident. From the cosmic lottery hat containing zillions of universes, we happened to draw a universe that allowed life. But then again, if we had not drawn such a ticket, we would not be here to ponder the odds.’”

My Comment: The wisdom of Kabbalah reveals a different cause for the universe and life within it—the existence of a higher intelligence. It reveals the reason and doesn’t put forth a new theory.

In addition, the question still remains in the theory proposed about the cause of matter, energy, and information. So Mr. Lightman, in my opinion, is wrong.
[179697]

Related Material:
The Balanced Universe
Science Is Becoming Convinced Of The Existence Of God
The Multiverse

Filed under: Kabbalah Study, News, Science - No Comments →

Blessing and Mistake

Question: What is the meaning of various amulets, charms, or blessings?

Answer: A belief in charms and blessings is a big mistake. These objects do not have any connection with Kabbalah. How can one bless a person with words if the only possible blessing is getting closer to the Creator?

If a person performs acts of bestowal and aspires to love his neighbor, he receives from above additional Light, the Light that Reforms. It is called a “blessing.” However, it is impossible to hand out blessings to others.

Some time ago the Baal Shem Tov had to write a blessing for some person. He did not allow this person to open the note and read what was written. When Baal Shem Tov died this person decided to open this note and he saw that Baal Shem Tov simply wrote his name, Israel.

Among the real Kabbalists it is not customary to hand out blessings. The authentic Kabbalistic books like The Book of Creation, The Book of Zohar, Tanakh do not mention amulets or blessings. A person receives a blessing from the Creator.
[178481]
From Israeli Radio Program 103 FM, 103FM, 2/28/16

Related Material:
Dispelling Myths About Kabbalah, Part 5
Dispelling Myths About Kabbalah, Part 4
Dispelling Myths About Kabbalah, Part 3

Filed under: Kabbalah Study, Q&A, Religion - 1 Comment →

Commandments And Traditions

Question: Does Kabbalah obligate one to follow the Jewish rituals?

Answer: When one studies the wisdom of Kabbalah, even being the most secular person who has never followed any traditions, he begins to feel that all of these rituals are given with the purpose of reminding about the connection with the upper force. Therefore, some people begin to follow these traditions, although there is no obligation.

Question: For example, what is the meaning of blessings for bread and for wine in the beginning of the first Shabbat meal?

Answer: It is impossible to explain these actions without the wisdom of Kabbalah. Only Kabbalah explains what the seventh day of the week, Shabbat, means. It corresponds to the seventh millennium, that is, the end of correction.

We hope that we will come to a state when the entire world will be corrected and will continue its existence in the absolute general love for the other in greater degree than for himself. Then, the upper force will be revealed between us in the corrected connection and will dwell between everyone.

Without the wisdom of Kabbalah, it is impossible to understand what the Torah is talking about.

Question: Why do we add salt to the bread during the blessing at the beginning of the Shabbat meal?

Answer: It is very simple to understand for someone who studies Kabbalah. However, it is impossible to explain it without using the Kabbalistic terms. Bread symbolizes the Light of Mercy, Hassadim, Bina, whereas salt is Malchut. This way, a connection appears between Bina and Malchut, as it is written, “You shall offer salt on all your sacrifices,” as a sign of the union.

One must study this. It is impossible to explain it in a few words. If you want to understand the inner meaning of any tradition, it is possible only through the wisdom of Kabbalah. All traditions, laws, and commandments in Judaism come from Kabbalah and exist only because of this wisdom. It explains their true meaning and fills them with the inner sense.
[178475]
From the Radio Program on 103FM, 2/28/16

Related Material:
Dispelling Myths About Kabbalah, Part 4
Dispelling Myths About Kabbalah, Part 3
Dispelling Myths About Kabbalah, Part 2

Filed under: Commandments, Kabbalah Study, Q&A - No Comments →