A question I received: What do you mean when you say that animals, plants, and matter (as a substance) don’t exist? Only the human being exists? The attainment of the Creator occurs only through the human souls? I understand that everything we feel here is an “imprint” of reality – the trees, the starlit sky, the tall mountains, and landscapes. So is all of this only present in our imagination?

My Answer: The only thing that was created is the desire. It contains a feeling that’s separated by egoism into “me” and “what surrounds me.” By correcting the egoism, the feeling merges into one whole “me” and the feeling of my source, the additional sensation of the Creator.

Everything you perceive on the outside is perceived inside your consciousness. This is, in fact, the “reality.” Everything is present only in one’s consciousness, like in a dream. Our inability to objectively compare feelings, due to having only a perception of “our world,” constrains us. But very soon, humanity will begin to “awaken” from its slumber and people will find other possible existences.

Related Material:
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In the News (from DailyMail): “The headset that will mimic all five senses and make the virtual world as convincing as real life” A virtual reality helmet called Virtual Cocoon that recreates the sights, smells, sounds and even tastes of far-flung destinations has been devised by British scientists. It stimulates the senses so convincingly they have called the experience “Real Virtuality.”

The virtual reality helmet titillates all five body senses while viewers sit at home on their sofas. The device will allow users a life-like experience of places such as Kenya’s Masai Mara while sitting on their sofa. They can also enjoy the smell of flowers in an Alpine meadow or feel the heat of the Caribbean sun on their face.

My Comment: According to Kabbalah, the only thing that exists outside of us is just the simple, direct Upper Light. This Light is what influences our five senses: it passes through our qualities and thus creates a picture that depicts the difference between us and the Light. We perceive this picture as “myself” and “the world.”

However, we are capable of developing the quality of bestowal and love which will be similar to the Surrounding Light. Then, instead of being opposite to the Light, we will start feeling our equivalence to it. That picture is called “the Upper World.” Kabbalah is the method that enables us to attain a quality similar to the Light. And to the degree one attains this quality, one becomes like the Light.

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Two questions I received about the Full Correction:

Question: In one of the morning lessons you said that at the end of correction (Gmar Tikkun), the religions will remain only as traditions. Will man exist in the material form at the end of correction in order to continue to observe the traditions? Or will man become a spirit, whereupon all the physical traditions matter will disappear?

My Answer: There are several states of complete correction: particular individual, collective individual, unified collective in Tzimtzum Bet, unified collective in Tzimtzum Aleph, and absolute adhesion to the Creator. As long as there’s even one uncorrected soul, our world will continue to exist in our perception. And only when the general correction is complete, our world and all the worlds will integrate in our perception into the World of Infinity.

In reality there’s only one state – the World of Infinity, and all the worlds are just filters for the Upper Light in our flawed perception of It. In other words, the worlds are degrees of concealment of the only existing state, the World of Infinity.

Question: What does it mean that we are approaching the state of the Full Correction?

My Answer: It is the state when all the souls merge into one and the Upper Force fulfills and manifests within them. Every person will then perceive everyone else as himself, and will therefore perceive himself as eternal and perfect, like the Creator.

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Lesson on Shamati #69: “First Will Be the Correction of the World”

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Everything in the world is just one material – the will to receive, to be filled with the Light of the Creator. This holds true for the Upper Worlds and our world. The difference between any object or phenomenon is only the degree of this desire. A small desire forms an object on the still level of matter, a greater desire – the vegetative level, a greater yet – the animate level, and the greatest desire forms a human being. All the desires are interconnected in one system. Through our senses, we don’t perceive the actual desires, but only their material shell. Kabbalah enables us to shift from the external level to the inner one, and thereby attain the forces that govern the entire universe.

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In the News (from Horizon Research Foundation): “What Is An Out of Body Experience?” A group of Swiss doctors carried out a procedure that is often performed on patients with intractable epilepsy. Electrodes were implanted in the brain and used to stimulate different portions of the brain… The patient reported seeing herself ‘lying in bed, from above’ and also ‘floating’ near the ceiling.

The Swiss doctors had been able to induce an out of body-like experience in someone. This seemed to suggest that the reported sensation of leaving the body during a brush with death might simply be an illusion created by abnormal stimulation of a specific area of the right side of the brain called the angular gyrus. The Swiss researchers had concluded that out of body and near death experiences might be influenced by a portion of the brain misfiring under stress.

My Comment: Now anyone can sign up for stimulation of the brain and go on a journey to the “world on the other side”; maybe people can even choose what adventures they’ll go on!

It’s time to say goodbye to Raymond Moody’s theory about the “afterlife,” along with all the other theories by different researchers, as much as we’d like to hold on to our sweet hopes for the future. It’s time to see the truth: when your body dies, you’re left only with whatever part of the “world on the other side” you have revealed during your life in the physical body.

One Kabbalistic text states, “You will see your world while you are still alive!” And if you don’t reveal the Upper World (which can only be done using Kabbalah), then you will die just like an animal. Afterward you’ll receive a new (protein-based) life – another opportunity to reveal the Upper World during your lifetime. Therefore, “If a person did not engage in studying Kabbalah, he will have to return to this world again” (Baal HaSulam, “Introduction to the book Fruits of Wisdom”).

A person is like an animal in every respect, and just like with animals, one’s death is final! There is only one other alternative: to acquire the quality of the Creator, which is love for one’s neighbor. Through this quality, one is able to feel the Upper Life because one comes out of the self and enters others.

None of the religious promises about “life after death” (interpreted differently by every religion) will come true. There is no reward waiting for you “there” for anything you do here. We can attain all of creation and the Creator only “here,” in this lifetime.

Therefore, “Every person has to study Kabbalah. And even if a person has learned all the intricacies of the Torah and exceeds all the righteous people in the world, still, if he did not study Kabbalah, he will have to return to this world again in order to study Kabbalah” (Baal HaSulam, “Introduction to the Book Fruits of Wisdom”).

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In the News (from Life in Israel BlogSpot): “A charlatan or the real thing?” Oren Zarif [an Israeli psychic] sent a letter to the Ministry of Infrastructure offering his services to help fill the Kineret with rain water. His only condition is that they stop all weather broadcasts for the period of the month in which he will be doing his work [because when millions of people watch these forecasts daily, they influence nature with the power of their thoughts].

My Comment: We influence Nature (the Creator) with the power of our thoughts. This is how we intervene in the Plan of our development, and in return we receive the same influence we caused and altered.

If all of us together direct our thoughts toward goodness, we will change our fate. Right now every person thinks in his own favor, against others; therefore, our thoughts don’t converge into one, good thought, but evoke mutually destructive consequences.

In other words, Nature’s (the Creator’s) Plan for our development is neutral in and of itself. It’s us who improve and accelerate, or, on the contrary, delay and worsen Its influence on us with our desires, thoughts, and intentions. Our entire choice lies in choosing which path to take: the short and good path, or the lengthy and evil one.

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The global education system should include the theory and practice of attaining the concealed world. It should teach humanity “the attainment or perception of reality.” Scientists already admit this, but are yet to fully comprehend the fact that we cognize the surrounding reality only in our consciousness, and we cannot perceive the “objective” reality, or what lies beyond the limits of our consciousness.

We must cast aside theories that view the universe as existing outside the limits of our consciousness. Reality is composed of our general experience, including scientific experiments, as well as our thoughts, feelings, and intuition. In addition, to the extent we correct our egoism, we reveal a new world inside our corrected consciousness. However, this new world does not exist until we reveal it within.

Actually, our consciousness is a fundamental concept, and modern science already acknowledges this. We never attain anything outside of our consciousness. This is what the principle of “perception’s self-sufficiency” (autopoiesis) says: everything we perceive as our surroundings, the whole universe as it is perceived by man, exists only in the form that we reveal it.

Self-sufficiency does not come from the nature of the universe, but rather from the nature of our attainment, perception. We cannot suffer from lacking a sixth finger, because the sensation of a desire is the preliminary state, preceding the revelation. The Upper Level is first expressed in us in the form of a desire for it, and then It’s revealed in this desire.

Astrophysicists create new models of a “self-sufficient” universe and describe its structure and functionality as being similar to a living system. They are finding more and more evidence for the fact that the universe is alive and connected into one whole on all its levels. Scientists who study evolution agree that the Earth is similar to a huge living cell because of its global, interconnected system on all its levels of life and development.

However, we are still left with the problem of correction: simply studying and accepting the facts does not mean that you are being corrected and becoming similar to Nature. For this, it is necessary to study the next level of our existence, which is explained only in Kabbalah. It turns out that we are left with the same problem of disseminating Kabbalah in the world. At first this should be done without specifying “Kabbalah,” and only gradually, as Rambam suggests, we should reveal the Source of true wisdom.

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News Report (from BBC News): A look of horror will grab the attention of those around you faster than a smile, US research shows. Individuals react more quickly to a fearful expression than to faces showing other emotions such as joy, a study in the journal Emotion found. … It is thought the brain has evolved to react more quickly to potentially threatening situations.

My Comment: This is because we perceive everything within our egoistic desire “to receive.” But if we switch to the desire “to bestow,” then our perception of the world will change: we’ll notice smiles instead of looks of horror, because the phenomenon of “danger” or “threat” will cease to exist for us. And that’s because we will reveal that Nature is absolute goodness. Baal HaSulam describes this wonderfully in the article “The Creator’s Concealment and Revelation” – whether we perceive the world as horrible or wonderful depends only on the qualities of the observer.

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News Report (from The New York Times): “Blind, Yet Seeing: The Brain’s Subconscious Visual Sense” A patient whose visual lobes in the brain were destroyed was able to navigate an obstacle course and recognize fearful faces subconsciously.

“You just had to see it to believe it,” said Beatrice de Gelder, a neuroscientist at Harvard and Tilburg University in the Netherlands, who with an international team of brain researchers reported on the patient on Monday in the journal Current Biology. (A video is online.) The study, which included extensive brain imaging, is the most dramatic demonstration to date of so-called blind sight, the native ability to sense things using the brain’s primitive, subcortical — and entirely subconscious — visual system.

My Comment: As I’ve already said, we actually see and feel everything within ourselves, and there’s nothing on the outside. Hence, a person may have no eyes, but still be able to see. So why do we need eyes? In order to have the illusion that there is something in front of us!

Baal HaSulam writes in item 34 of the “Preface to the Book of Zohar”:

Take our sense of sight for example: we see a great world before us. But in fact, we do not see all that except in our own interior. In other words, there is a sort of a photographic machine in our hindbrain that portrays everything that appears to us, and nothing outside of us. Moreover, the Creator has made for us there, in our brain, a sort of a polished mirror that inverts everything that we see, so that we see it outside of us, outside of our brain, in front of our face.

Despite the fact that what we see outside us is not a real thing, we should still thank His providence for having made that polished mirror in our brain, enabling us to see and perceive every thing outside us. This is because by that, He had given us the power to research every thing with clear perception and knowledge, and to measure every object from within and from without. Without it, we would not have most of our knowledge and perception.

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From item 40 of the “Introduction to the Book of Zohar,” by Baal HaSulam:

“And I know that it is completely unaccepted in the eyes of some philosophers. They cannot agree that man, whom they think of as low and worthless, is the center of the magnificent creation. But they are like a worm that is born inside a radish and thinks that the world of the Creator is as bitter and as dark as the radish it was born in. But as soon as the shell of the radish [of one’s egoism] breaks and it peeps out [comes out of the egoism, of the intention, “for his own sake,” and enters bestowal and love for others], it wonders [in awe of the Upper World that it revealed] and says: “I thought the whole world was the size of my radish, but now I see before me a grand, beautiful and wondrous world!”

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