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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Lesson on Article: “Attaining the Unity of the Universe”

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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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Baal HaSulam Article: “The Acting Mind”

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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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News Report (translated from an article at chtochto.ru, based on the book Brain Rules): Experiments with human senses in neurobiology now demonstrate that not only can people “hear” with the eyes, they can also “smell” with them.

My Comment: This confirms what is written in the “Preface to the Book of Zohar,” that the things we perceive do not exist outside of us. Our five senses are nothing but the five levels (Aviut) of our common desire, in which Reshimot (informational data, Hitlabshut) emerge. The levels of desire differ by the desire’s strength (Aviut) and quality (Hitlabshut), similar to the difference between the development of the levels still, vegetative, animate, speaking, and the Creator.

We study all of this in Kabbalah, the science of perception (revelation) of reality (the Creator). By definition, Kabbalah is the method of revealing the Creator to man in this world. It explains that each of these five parts consists of all the other parts. This is why each part can partially perceive all the other parts, and vice versa. Hence, when a person loses one of the five senses, it becomes partially replaced by the remaining senses. In other words, you can “see, hear, smell, taste, and touch” with any one of your senses. And this ability is more developed in some people: for example, Rosa Kuleshova, who could read printed words with her fingers. Actually, in the past we all had these abilities.

Nothing changes outside of us. We perceive the constant influence of the Simple Light (the Creator – the desire to give us pleasure that’s constantly directed at us) in our continuously changing desires (Reshimot – inner informational data). The Reshimo are what depict – inside us – the changing picture of the “external” world, like frames of a motion picture strip. The senses that create the picture are inside us, and the resulting picture of world is absolutely subjective.

Therefore, if I place myself under the influence of the right environment (group), I can create the inner conditions for the Reshimot that emerge within me to develop spiritually. I will then feel a desire to realize the Reshimot through bestowal and love for others, and then my perception of the world that emerges within me becomes spiritual. I will thereby reveal its cause and its purpose, or in other words, I will start perceiving the general force of Nature (the Creator).

Related Material:
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Shamati #82: “All Worlds”

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News Report (translated from inauka.ru): Dr. Y. Danilov from the Tactile Communication & Neurorehabilitation Lab at the University of Wisconsin, reports that a device called TVS (Tactile-Vision Substitution System) has been developed. It works like this:

A video camera relays an image into a computer, which converts it to a black and white image. This image is then transferred to a flat matrix that is placed on a blind person’s tongue, which then receives the image in the form of electric impulses. The tongue relays the signal into the brain, enabling the blind person to see the objects around him and to find his way around space. As a result, a person who is absolutely blind can see his surroundings. He can walk around, read, play Tic-Tac-Toe, and recognize faces. This scientifically proves the words of the famous researcher, Paul Bach-y-Rita, who used to say, “We see with the brain, not with the eyes.”

My Comment: If you read what the science of Kabbalah has been saying about the perception of reality ever since Adam revealed the Upper Reality, nearly 6000 years ago, you will discover that Kabbalists knew about this for a very long time. They use the “external vision” to perceive and research the Upper World, which is perceived in “our brain” just like this world is.

The next scientific discovery in the field of perception will be that our brain is but a detector, whereas perception (sensation) isn’t happening in the brain, but outside of it, in the “desire.” The desire bears no relation to our body and is found beyond the earthly matter. We perceive everything in our soul.

Related Material:
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Two questions I received on spiritual perceptions:

Question: On one hand you say that there is no connection between the soul and the corporeal body, that these are two parallel worlds. On the other hand you says that there’s no such thing as this world and that world, that everything is united, and our current reality is the lowest part of the spiritual world which is revealed in our sensations for the time being. Does this mean that the corporeal body is also the soul or spirit?

My Answer: Of course, this world is what we perceive in our smallest desire. The rest of our desires are concealed from us, and become revealed to the degree that we progress toward spirituality. What becomes revealed in them is called “the Upper World.”

At the same time, all of one’s desires remain. This is why a Kabbalist retains the sensation of our world, but this sensation is also complemented by the sensation of another world – the Upper World. And at the end of all the corrections, all the worlds “fold up” into one – the World of Infinity.

Question: While listening to your lessons I have this thought that the Upper World is concerned only with our reaction to everything that happens to us, and what it (the Upper World) sends us. Is this correct?

My Answer: That’s absolutely correct, and how to correctly react to the Creator’s influence is exactly what we study. It is a process of attaining Him and achieving equivalence with Him.

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Two questions I received about physical and spiritual birth:

Question: I am very curious about whether there are any secrets during birth, marriage, and death according to the wisdom of Kabbalah.

My Answer: The birth of one’s animate body does not involve any secrets, and it never will because the body is simply an animal! However, when the soul (the screen, the quality of bestowal) is born in a person, he reveals the Upper World – the secret of all secrets!

Question: In the future, will people be born with a developed sixth sense within, that will give them absolute control over their lives?

My Answer: Man will always have to make an effort against egoism in order to be corrected and fulfilled by the Upper Light.

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