I have received many letters expressing concern about the future…

Our perception of the world depends on our understanding of what’s going on here. If we would understand the Creator’s plan, we will discover happiness, safety and perfection.

Prior to the 21st century, humanity didn’t have any free will! We had no free will in our development as it was automatically driven by our constantly growing egoistic motivation – until it had reached its peak.

Today, our free will is becoming apparent as we have the opportunity to rise above our egoistic nature and no longer depend on it. By realizing this opportunity properly, we will directly – with the least amount of suffering – exit our present nature. Then, we will enter another dimension of the universe, where we will experience a different sensation of life – one that is eternal and perfect.

Our egoistic nature imprisons us; it attempts to absorb everything into itself, and thus remains empty and ultimately dies. And even if we don’t choose the path of conscious transition to the altruistic dimension, nature’s plan will be carried out anyway – just as it has been up to this point – only by the harsh influence of its strict laws.

We are the only intelligent creatures in the universe. Everything was created for us, because only we have the ability to enter the higher dimension. This task is serious and its goal is marvelous. Currently, humanity is in a state that induces a search, which is good, and that is why I’m not afraid, but full of hope.

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An article in this month’s Current Biology magazine has Justin Marshall from the University of Queensland, Australia, describing how stomatopod crustaceans can see circularly polarized light. While the human eye has three types of “color” photoreceptors, they have twelve types of visual receptor cells. A human being perceives light as color (the length of the wave) and brightness. Then there are bees, which perceive linearly polarized light, and as such, see things that we cannot. Moreover, the stomatopod crustaceans perceive circularly polarized light, and see other things altogether.

This is a good example of how limited we are in our perception of the world around us. We cannot perceive a characteristic like polarization, and we don’t know what else is around us that we cannot see. Such an example is one of many that supports what The Book of Zohar says: that there is a World of Infinity around us, and we only perceive as much of it as our sensory organs allow us to.

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“And that is how I made another crucial discovery: our entire planet is only as big as a house!” (Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince)

From a Cnet Blog Post: Proof of Six Degrees of Separation
“In a research paper from June 2007, titled ‘Worldwide Buzz: Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network (PDF),’ Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research and Jure Leskovec of Carnegie Mellon University analyzed 30 billion conversations among 240 million people using Microsoft Instant Messenger in June 2006. It turned out that the average path length, or degree of separation, among the anonymized users probed was 6.6.

Six degrees of separation posits that a person is a step away from people they know and two steps distant from people known by the people they know – thus the magic number six.”

My Comment: This research simply shows how we’re externally connected to each other. Soon, however, we will start discovering how internally connected we are, where we will see each other as living not in the bodies we see today, but in each other’s hearts.

Today, we lack the understanding of how the world becomes disclosed to us. For instance, our senses perceive something to the extent that this “something” is disclosed to them, and beforehand, it is as if this “something” had never existed. In other words, something we perceive is born in the same moment we discover it. Just take a look at the laws of nature we know about today: until we discovered them, it was as if they had never existed. Obviously, they had always existed, but we simply couldn’t perceive them: they existed in potential, instead of in action, with regard to us.

Baal HaSulam explains that the world is divided into a revealed and a concealed (secret) part. Therefore, the time we will discover the true connection among people (souls), we will know (with Mocha – mind) and feel (with Liba – heart), simultaneously, that everyone in the world is solely dependent on everyone else’s goodwill: People’s attitudes of love or hate will determine whether or not they will bring life or death upon others.

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Question for ML: Do you really think that eventually people will regard Kabbalah as a science and seriously consider the possibility of moving from an egoistic society to social equality?

My Answer: Do you remember The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry, when the astronomer announced his wonderful discovery at the International Convention of Astronomers? No one believed him, and only because he was dressed in Turkish clothes. (If Kabbalah wasn’t being mistakenly associated with mysticism, religion, and especially Judaism, then perhaps people would hear what it has to say.) A year later, the astronomer announced the same discovery once again, only that this time he was dressed in the latest fashion, and everyone agreed with him!

Oh, these grownups are so weird!

Myths About Kabbalah

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Question for ML: You define God as laws of nature. In the times of Tanach, Moses spoke to God and God spoke back to him and to the nation. Why then, is your definition of God different? I find it very difficult to think of God as laws, as opposed to someone I can cry to or talk to in times of trouble. I understand that the Creator’s laws and orders must be followed, but I don’t understand why your definition of Him is different.

My Answer: We often project our qualities onto nature and then expect nature to react in the same way. For example, we get mad at the computer or at traffic lights. The Creator is absolute, and as such, He is perfect and invariable. He is kind and creates only goodness. His actions are wonderful, but I sense the opposite! So what should I ask Him? I should ask Him to change my perception, so that I can understand Him and see the perfection of His actions in everything. In other words, I’m asking for the correction of my qualities – from egoistic to altruistic. I will then understand His actions and justify Him, because I will be like Him. I will sense eternity and perfection just like Him. This is what I have to ask for!

Talking about the Creator and talking about Nature is the same.

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Philosophy has placed a lot of effort into proving that the corporeal is produced by the spiritual, that the soul begets the body. This is, of course, nothing more than philosophy’s invention. The spiritual has nothing to do with the corporeal; there’s no connection between them whatsoever.

Philosophy’s whole uselessness and confusion lies in that it takes pride in a theoretical understanding of the Creator. Kabbalah, on the other hand, is based on and speaks only about actual attainment.

The spiritual represents a force unclothed by a body, and therefore, it is without corporeal form, without any connection to the corporeal. As far as the soul goes, philosophy considers spiritual entities to be unattainable, attributing them to the category of pure reason.

How can the spiritual beget and sustain the corporeal? Such a question is only difficult for philosophers. This question presents no difficulty to a Kabbalist, because Kabbalists attain the total opposite of what philosophers imagine. Moreover, according to Kabbalists, any property of a spiritual object is similar to its corporeal property.

The time of philosophers has passed, and their reign has ended – thanks to materialistic psychologists. Materialistic psychology was built on the ruins of philosophy. Today, everyone understands philosophy’s uselessness, because it lacks a legitimate foundation. The opportunity to disclose Kabbalah to the world arose when materialistic psychology came about, and inflicted a victorious blow to philosophic theology.

Today, Kabbalah will be able to prove its validity by clarifying the uselessness and falsehood of philosophic theology, which inherited the throne of Kabbalah such a long time ago.

Based on: Y. Ashlag (Baal HaSulam) “The Wisdom of Kabbalah and Philosophy”

My Current Mood: confused

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Question for ML: People identify themselves with their body. Take a human body and an apple. The person eats the apple. The matter of the apple is transferred to the person, and he calls it his “I.” But we see that it’s no more than particles moving through space.

There are an invariable amount of particles in the world that continuously change location, thereby creating an illusion of time progression. Oxygen particles enter my lungs, my blood, my cells – does that make them part of my “I”? The same particles that just yesterday I called “air”?

Where do we start and where do we end?

My Answer: Everything you’re saying doesn’t exist. There is only my desire, a component that senses itself. Within my desire, I feel constant changes. They depict a picture for me, which I call “world.” Within this picture, I sense the existence of what is similar to me, and what is “other”: matter, vegetation, animals… That’s what my desires sense; that’s what I sense.

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News Story: Moses high on Mt Sinai: Israeli study

A professor of The Hebrew University in Jerusalem has come to a conclusion that Moses was under the influence of psychedelic substances at the time of receiving the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. “’Such mind-altering substances formed an integral part of the religious rites of Israelites in biblical times,’ Benny Shanon, a professor of cognitive psychology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem wrote in the Time and Mind journal of philosophy.

‘As far as Moses on Mount Sinai is concerned, it was either a supernatural cosmic event, which I don’t believe, or a legend, which I don’t believe either, or finally, and this is very probable, an event that joined Moses and the people of Israel under the effect of narcotics,’ Dr. Shanon told Israeli public radio. [Read more →]

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Question for ML: It is very difficult for me, as a musician and a composer, to perceive Kabbalistic music, which, because of my musical upbringing, “seems” primitive to me, and I have no choice but to separate myself from the higher harmony, from the higher level onto which the great musicians have elevated this music, and literally force myself to listen to it as if I’ve just started music school.
I don’t know how people, myself included, that are not on the level of Baal HaSulam, can perceive what he has put into it. More likely it raises people with its spiritual force and makes them tune into the spiritual like a tuning fork. I can’t do it yet, but I’ll keep trying!

My Answer: I felt the exact same thing when I first heard these melodies! And what can we say to people who come from completely different cultures, such as Eastern countries or Africa? This is how Baal HaSulam expressed his sensations. We need to abstract ourselves from the sounds themselves. It’s similar to the scenario of a student who desires to understand his Teacher: He may not even know the language that the material is written in, but he will discover the sensations that his Teacher is conveying through his desire alone. By the way, this is exactly what happened between Baal HaSulam and one of his students.

In Kabbalah, one needs to tune oneself into perceiving “Peh el Peh” – from the teacher’s screen into the student’s screen. By nullifying oneself before one’s Teacher (this is what the screen does) the person is able to receive higher sensuous information, comprehend it within, and start working with it. You understand the approach correctly – the sounds aren’t important; instead, through them one should try to listen for “the voice of the soul.”

Here’s a link to Baal HaSulam’s melodies

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In today’s morning lesson I talked a lot about perception of reality. I recommend watching it, especially the first part [the articles of Shamati].

Shamati article #89 (Feb 4, 2008): wmv video | mp3 audio

It’s hard for us to believe the Kabbalists, when they say that our world is an illusion, because we have never disconnected from it or seen it from outside. We have nothing left to do but either disagree with them, “because it can’t be true,” or to check it on ourselves. However, I see from my teaching experience that a person gradually starts understanding our illusion and the fact that the world can exist only within us.

We know from experience that only by equipping ourselves with certain senses can we perceive something new that we haven’t felt before.

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