Entries in the 'Prayer and Intention' Category

The Most Important Intention

Laitman_051Question: Is “there is none else besides Him” the most important intention in everything that we do?

Answer: You should also add that the Creator does everything and therefore everything is correct and for a person’s good. And you see it incorrectly to the extent of your incompatibility with the Creator’s attributes.

Question: Should I think about why I do everything I do during the day if I want to reveal the Creator? What should the answer to this question be?

Answer: First we should always ask, “What should I do and for what?” Then I should decide whether to perform that action or not and implement my decision.
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The Creator Is Waiting For Your Call

laitman_239Question: Is the wisdom of Kabbalah intended for everyone or only for a special part of humanity? Why should an ordinary person want to engage in the Creator’s work?

Answer: The Creator specially pulls us, shakes us, and sends us all sorts of disturbances and crises. He does this so that we will want to correct our fate and turn to Him for help. To this end He sends us all the troubles.

If we don’t turn to Him but try to do something within the framework of our life, we feel even worse because when we don’t turn to Him we force Him to send us another portion of suffering so that eventually we will turn to Him.
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 3/20/16

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Exercises For The Revelation Of The Creator

laitman_281_01Question: What intention should a person have who lives in this world and studies Kabbalah when he sees material objects?

Answer: A person must live according to the simple principle: “There is none else besides Him,” a single force, i.e., the Creator.

I look at all external objects and occurrences and even at everything that is inside me that has no an external image, and imagine that all this comes from the Creator, that this is exactly what He wants to arouse in me, and this is exactly what He wants me to feel! And now everything depends on the way I treat this. Therefore, all material objects and this entire world are very important to me.

Question: Can I break through everything that confuses me by doing such purely psychological exercises?

Answer: Yes. When I attribute it all to one single force, I break through to the Creator. Through all my efforts to identify Him behind the various influences on me, behind the multitude of objects, forces, opinions, desires, and thoughts, I begin to see and feel Him. I desire something, so why does He want me to desire it? I think about something, why does He wants me to think this way? I am nobody. I am like a mechanism, just a metal box in which there are some thoughts and feelings, i.e., a heart and a mind, and only I can inspect myself: “Why did this appear in me? What does the single, uniform, and absolute force that controls me want from me? Why does this force want me to feel my state this way every moment?”

On this basis, I enter in complete contact with the Creator according to my small level. And if I continue to move forward this way through “there is none else besides Him,” then I will define more and more what the Creator wants from me, what He’s up to, and what reaction He expects from me.

And so I will begin to approach Him gradually, as it is said in Kabbalah, “There is nothing in nature that a person can’t achieve through a constant effort.” Therefore, I can reach a state where I will start to feel, see, and understand the Creator and communicate with Him as with a close friend. And all this is only thanks to the tip that there is no one else besides Him behind everything that surrounds me.

The various concealments of the Creator are exercises through which He gives me an opportunity to recognize Him behind all the disturbances. My task is to never part with this thought and not to forget that everything comes from Him under any circumstances.

This isn’t simple. And here I can get help only from the society of people who think the same way I do, and our joint effort is out in the open so we influence each other.

If we create such a group from millions of people who are tuned this way and are willing to reveal the Creator, we will “wash” the entire world by this and everything will become plain and clear.
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From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 3/9/16

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Touching Hearts

laitman_943Question: What do we lack in order to form the correct prayer?

Answer: Our hearts still do not feel that they can touch one another. They are enclosed in the egoistic layer called our body.

In this case, our body is not the physical flesh but rather egoism, which does not allow us to touch hearts. As a result we cannot form a prayer.
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From Convention In Moscow, Day One, Lesson 3, 5/2/16

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No Desire, No Prayer

laitman_600_04Question: Is it possible to raise a prayer and attract the Light if I do not feel any desperation or suffering?

Answer: How is it possible to pray if you do not feel any suffering? How can you ask if you do not have any need? A prayer is a revelation of desire. If I have no desire, then there is no prayer either.

Question: I can pray only from my own desire (Hissaron). How can I pray from my ten?

Answer: There is no way. Of course, you can mumble something, but it does not influence anything. If you do not exist in a ten, you cannot nullify yourself. You cannot make yourself similar to the Creator in any way.

You cannot pray from a ten without a common desire. Only together with friends when you unite into a one whole can you form a common intention, which is called a prayer.
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Moscow Congress, Lesson 3, 5/2/16

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How Do We Turn To The Creator?

Laitman_931-01Question: I value what is written in the sources and in the prayer book because you said they were written by Kabbalists, members of the Great Knesset, but I imagine what is said there in the most corporeal way. How should I turn to the Creator? Should I pray to Him if I don’t feel Him?

Answer: We don’t feel the Creator, so having no choice, we imagine Him in different corporeal images. If we want to attain Him or at least to imagine who we turn to correctly so that we can really turn to Him, we have to understand who He is, which means to gradually attain His attributes.

A man’s need to reveal the Creator stems from this world, from which we gradually begin to depict Him correctly to the extent that we acquire the attribute of bestowal, which means to the extent that we begin to resemble the Creator according to the rule “from the love of the created begins to the love of the Creator.”

If we do it any other way, we will not turn to the Creator but to His oppositeness, to our ego, to Pharaoh. When we turn to him we ask for corporeal fillings, not to acquire the attribute of love and bestowal. This is the reason that Baal HaSulam says that first we have to imagine the Creator and then pray to Him.

Only if our efforts are aimed to the connection with friends, which spur and summon the influence of the Surrounding Light (Ohr Makif), the Light of the Torah that reforms, to the source, to the attribute of love and bestowal, is the image of the Creator revealed in a person. It is revealed as the only upper force similar to the way the image of the parents is formed in a small child as something that is whole, safe, protecting, the source of himself and of the whole world.

A person who begins to study the wisdom of Kabbalah draws away from the religious perspective of the Creator if this is how he was brought up, and seems to leave the religious path. After the correction of the first level of the ego, by correcting himself in a group of friends who try to get closer to each other, by fulfilling the Kabbalists’ instructions in the connection between the friends in the group, by drawing the Light that Reforms, the Surrounding Light(Ohr Makif), by the attempts to get closer to the friends; he gets closer to fulfilling the main rule in the Torah, “love thy friend as thyself.” It is only under the influence of the Surrounding Light (Ohr Makif)  that saves and corrects a person that a student begins to feel the presence of the Creator in the world. Thus our forefathers advanced in their attainment of the Creator to the extent that they resembled Him.

Then came the period of the sons when the feeling of the Creator through uniting in the group became more real. An urge to turn to Him appears and is felt as the source of life and all of a person’s attributes and actions. A person becomes totally focused on the connection with the Creator because he feels that the Creator manages all his thoughts, desires and actions.

So the only thing left for a person to do is to ask the Creator for the ability to make the right choice in his thoughts desires and actions because it is as if he wants to overtake the Creator in his yearning to resemble Him. The period of the correction of a person’s nature is called the period of the sons and it is said “my sons have overtaken me,” which means that the sons overtake the Creator in their yearning to resemble Him.
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Intention And Its Influence On Reality

laitman_928Question: Many people know that if they want to realize themselves, their lives, then before every action it is very important to stop for a minute and think: “What do I really want to achieve from my actions?” and then proceed to implement it.

Is it true that tuning into something I want to achieve, an intention before the action has a power to influence the reality and help me to achieve the desired?

Does setting what I wish to achieve, the intention before the action, have the power to influence reality and help me achieve the desired?

Answer: The intention is called what I want to achieve in the end. And then all my actions along the way are directed to the same state I want to achieve.

I am not talking about earthly intentions. Kabbalist works with the upper force that rules all of reality, and he is constantly in connection with it. He sees all of reality as emanating from this force that draws reality, both internally, the way he feels, and externally, which he perceives in his five senses.

Therefore, I take into account only this force because this is the only force that forms the reality. And my intention is directed only to this force—how I lock myself on it all the time, how I get closer to it, in every situation in my life associated with good or bad people, or with my internal states, or with animals, or plants, and inanimate objects—everything I feel I relate to the same upper force that creates this reality for me.

I seemingly exist in some movie that this force creates for me. Part of this movie I feel as if it scrolls around me and part is inside me in the form of my reaction to the actual movie. The upper force does all this both inside and outside of me.

The extent I need, in every minute of my life, to recognize and be adhered with the upper force that forms my reality around me and inside me, that is my intention.

Then I begin to learn what the upper force does to me by carrying me through all kinds of states, both external and internal, that is, my reactions to them.

On the basis of each state, the external and internal together, I need to declare that there is no one else besides this force and that it is good and does good, because it does everything, even the most frightening and unpleasant, only in order for me to turn to it as creating every state, because it is the first and the last. Only the upper force does everything occurring in the past, in the present, or in the future, all of this.

I start reaching such a state that I live inside this intention and my goal is to live in it all the time, together with the fact that I have to carry out various actions that the same force forms in me in both the spiritual and corporeal world.

In essence, this is my life. I gain by recognizing inside the same force what it wants from me, how it forms me, how it creates the upper world, how I attain it, etc. I advance in two planes: I need to treat this world as coming from above, and to the upper world, as rising to it from below.

I always live this way. Then my attitude toward my reality is called intention. There are many intentions described in the books of Kabbalists: how I need to relate to every step on my way, in my life.

Through the intention I form my reality. If I connect everything with the upper force that creates my whole life, both corporeal and spiritual, then I already live in one world and not in two because everything comes from this upper force and there is no one else besides it.

Then I influence my reality favorably; I build it because, in fact, the reality does not exist and everything depends on the way I construct it.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” 2/18/16

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The Intent Of The Creator

laitman_602_01Question: How must a person direct himself toward the correct perception of what is happening with him?

Answer: This is spoken about in the most important article about man’s spiritual work, “There is None Else Beside Him.” Beginning in the morning, you must constantly direct yourself to feel that you are in a world in which the one and only power and will that builds and manages it is the Creator.

And along with everything that you absorb and in spite of anything that may happen to you, you must only strengthen your inclination and yearning within the consciousness that everything that is happening to people and what is around them, including what is happening with you, all is the intent of the Creator. He is the first, and after Him are all the characteristics and features of our world that influence and act upon you.

You must examine yourself constantly, do not begin to lose and divert your attention from your inner intention that everything happening within you and around you is derived only from the single upper force. And despite the internal and external changes, the reason for everything that will happen is that I will not change my attitude toward the Creator as the only reason for everything.
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New Life 531 – The Prayer Of Many

New Life 531 – The Prayer Of Many
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Tal Mandelbaum ben Moshe

Even when masses of people pray together for everything to be fine, there is no guarantee that their prayer will be answered.

Nature demands that we should be in a state of “love thy friend as thyself.” We have to educate ourselves to love.

To pray means to check yourself as to whether you really aim at love of others. It is hard for us to feel love for others, so this process takes place in a group, in a Minyan (a group of ten), in the prayer of many.

The good and benevolent force is everywhere, but it is hidden from us. Our nature is opposite from it and so we don’t feel it. All the evil in our life stems from the fact that we are opposite to this good force.

If we don’t want to be deluded into thinking that we already love everyone, we have to work with people, in the group, in relation to everyone. All the people in the world are part of my soul. We acquire our soul through love.
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From KabTV’s “New Life 531 – The Prayer Of Many,” 3/1/15

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New Life 530 – Which Prayers Are Answered?

New Life 530 – Which Prayers Are Answered?
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Tal Mandelbaum ben Moshe

Even though we constantly try to improve our situation, life today is nothing. It is somewhat pointless and meaningless.

We have to live under pressure; otherwise, we would not have developed throughout history. Today we have reached a general state of crisis, including in the perception of life. Everything is available, yet nobody is satisfied. This situation leads people to ask about the meaning of life, as well as to be carried away by fundamentalism like Daesh and so forth.

In the natural environment, everything operates according to absolute laws, and we must also live that way. It is up to us to recognize the final state nature is leading us toward. Then we will know if there is a place for prayer.

The sages of Kabbalah discovered that there is a component of freedom of choice within the absolute laws of nature.

The possibility of choice doesn’t change the final outcome but the way in which we advance toward it. There is a path of suffering and stress, and there is a path of self-awareness. The transition between them is with the help of “prayer.”

In fact, all people pray. What the heart wants is the prayer of the person. Yet only the prayer of many is answered. The prayer of many is a prayer for the many, that things will be good for everyone. When we pray together for someone to be healed, the connection between us influences the higher system. In addition, the patient gets strength and encouragement from this; his spirit is fortified and this gives his body and spirit the power to heal.

In conclusion, the higher power is good and benevolent, and all the problems in our lives derive from the evil inclination in us, the ego, the desire to receive for ourselves. If we connect to correct the evil inclination in us to aim toward love for others, we will be cured of all troubles.
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From KabTV “New Life 530 – Which Prayers Are Answered?” 2/26/15

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