Subconsciously, we want God to exist. It is a natural instinctive response to uncertainty. But outside of our desire for God to exist, how can we find out if God really exists or not?
The wisdom of Kabbalah is a methodology for discovering a perception and sensation of God, which is also called “the Creator,” “Nature,” and various other names.
When we embark on the journey to discover the Creator, we start understanding how the myriad ways of believing in God without attaining revelation are no more than psychology.
Therefore, does God exist if we do not clearly perceive or sense Him?
According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, the Creator is hidden from us and is attainable, but we cannot attain the Creator through our corporeal senses, intellect and emotion. Therefore, any beliefs in the Creator without attainment are no more than inferences and guesses.
The Kabbalistic approach to the Creator is written in the sources as follows: “A judge has only what his eyes see.” By developing our perception of reality according to the method of Kabbalah, we come to attain a new sense through which we can perceive a new reality, one in which we clearly see and feel the presence of the Creator. Until we reach such attainment, however, we cannot say that the Creator exists, because we have not attained that existence.
Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
There should be more of an emphasis on friendship, to build friendly connections among all the students.
We should focus mostly on how to positively connect the students in order to build a supportive society of happy and confident individuals. Ultimately, people should leave school with the feeling that their happiness and success in life depends on the extent to which they positively connect to one another.
The goal of schools toward the students should not be profession-oriented, but to build happy, confident and successful human beings out of the students.
If the students have to constantly sustain an array of egoistic relationships, where they each seek to maximize personal benefit at the expense of others, then they will never be truly happy, confident or successful in life.
Also, we need to understand that today’s generation is unlike any other, where as we head into more globally interconnected and interdependent times than ever before, likewise we should learn how to realize such interconnectedness and interdependence positively in order to secure our happiness, success and confidence in a way that suits our current times. The professions we currently treat with primacy need to be re-prioritized into second place, with the first place being given to positive human connections.
When students go to school, they should feel comfortable and even willing to connect with the other students, and there should be no fear or criticism circulating between the students. In order to establish such a positive and supportive atmosphere for the students to develop their connections, the teachers first and foremost need to undergo a connection-enriching process where they learn how to relate positively to each other and to the students in order that the students feel a life of happiness, confidence, safety, balance and prosperity through participation in the creation of a society led by values of unity and mutual consideration.
Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Dancing is very natural. It is the body’s language. Where there are no words left to express ourselves, we dance.
Dancing and singing stem from our desire to connect to the upper force, to our destiny, and to hope.
The individualized form of dancing that has developed over the generations is an outcome of our egoistic development, where the more egoistic we become, the more our human activities, including dancing, become individualized.
Dancing in groups and in circles gives us a feeling of connection to others, where by dancing together, we become stronger, and fuel ourselves with more intention and desire. Dancing together also gives us much greater strength than dancing as individuals because a spiritual force dwells in our togetherness, which helps us overcome our egos. Thus, in such a setup, negative egoistic forces become positive forces that increase our connection.
According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, dancing is the expression of connection and love that has to ride upon division and hatred, like two poles. It is our work to connect these opposites, and dance emerges as a balance of opposite motions, such as drawing closer together and then retreating, and jumping up and down. It points to our nature as individual and separate beings created as such by nature, how we overcome and rise above that state, and our desire to become as one.
Dancing with God is called “the dance of the bride and the groom.” God, or the upper force, is the groom and we are the bride who brings ourselves into connection with God. We are then willing to do whatever God wants of us, devotedly, and that becomes our dance.
Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Spirituality is when I want others and nature to enjoy from everything I do, and that the enjoyment that goes to others and nature will not belong to me in any way.
Opposite spirituality is corporeality, which is when I want to enjoy for self-benefit alone.
Based on the afternoon Daily Kabbalah Lesson with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman on March 13, 2021. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Challenges on YouTube and on social media platforms in general represent our primal animal nature and how we learn from others. It is natural for us to imitate others since we are social animals.
In the end, imitating one another brings us closer together. In some ways, we start to better understand each other.
Whether such challenges are good or bad depends on what we imitate.
For instance, if there are challenges that get people involved in doing good deeds to each other, and which increase positive social connection and helping others, then they are good for society and I’m all for them.
Based on the TV show, “Kabbalah Express,” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Israel Samsonnikov on February 16, 2021. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Pharaoh is a very powerful force. The wisdom of Kabbalah does not discuss Pharaoh as a personality, because in practice it is a nonexistent persona. According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, Pharaoh is the very big ego that the Creator created. It is a great desire to devour everything in the world for self-benefit.
The more humanity develops, the more this force of Pharaoh, the egoistic force, surfaces. One of its expressions is that we aspire to all kinds of accomplishments in our world, and the more we achieve, the emptier we feel. Likewise, the world appears to worsen the more we develop.
We become more and more dissatisfied with life. The more we connect technologically and economically, the more internally detached we feel from each other. Today, we witness such instances as people no longer feeling secure in the most distant villages. Our tightening global interdependence has led us to such paradoxes where farmers cannot even feed themselves from their own land.
Pharaoh represents the egoistic intention behind everything we do. On one hand, we make tremendous progress technologically, and we find ourselves in a situation where we are more dependent on others all around the world. On the other hand, we find ourselves feeling more and more detached from each other, and that we cannot tolerate being so tightly connected to others.
The ego, however, leads us to the need to correctly connect to each other, where we yearn for, build and ask for connection. What this means is that Pharaoh, by transforming our world so that it becomes increasingly interdependent and interconnected, brings us to a state where we hate the feeling of division, and we then transform our world into another one with positive connections. In other words, by abiding to our ego’s demands while connecting more and more, we find that we will simply be unable to achieve long-lasting happiness, success, or even survive. Pharaoh, however, constantly spurs our divisiveness. On one hand, Pharaoh awakens in us a desire for unity and acts so that we cannot live without making the right connections between us, since otherwise we cannot provide ourselves with essentials. On the other hand, Pharaoh will not let us unite. This contrast sums up Pharaoh’s merit.
We then start understanding that we have no other way out besides rising above and escaping from Pharaoh—the egoistic desire for self-benefit. Our escape from Pharaoh, from using others egoistically for the sake of self-benefit, is called the “exodus from Egypt.”
It is quite complicated because we still need to discover these concepts within ourselves. We live in a unique era. Today, we increasingly discover what has been prepared for us in the form of Pharaoh, i.e., in an egoistic form. We see a globally interdependent and interconnected world closing in on us more and more, and at the same time, we find ourselves feeling more internally remote from others. We thus need to respect Pharaoh, this overblown ego we find ourselves in today, because it leads us to realize how bad it makes our lives, and through such a revelation, we gain a desire to exit our ego and enter into a much more meaningful and joyous world where we are positively connected.
Based on “News with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman” from April 12, 2016. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Iran often discusses its aims to destroy Israel, while at the same time, it is paying a heavy price for its aspiration to build nuclear weapons. In fact, Israel does not disturb Iran, but helps Iran stand out. Iranians seem willing to sacrifice themselves in order to be seen as important and intimidating in this setup.
Regarding nuclear weapons, it is no more than a game. Leaders with nuclear weapons have no desire to use them. Historically, those who had nuclear weapons became more restrained, because the use of nuclear weapons draws the same threat onto themselves.
The Iranians are seemingly ready to die in order to gain respect, but what is it worth? When we die, we have no feeling or memory of any respect we received here. Therefore, the game is important for keeping them in the spotlight.
Israel should do nothing but hold a correct intention toward the situation, using it to come closer to the upper force, realizing the laws of nature among the relations of the people of Israel, with the most important one being, “Love your friend as yourself.”
On the physical level, Israel is correctly countering the looming threat from Iran for the time being. The problem is that Israelis are divided, which distances them from the upper force. At the end of the day, only the upper force can provide true protection.
This has nothing to do with religion. We have to understand that “Love your friend as yourself” is a law, a commandment, and it determines human relations. Moreover, implementing this law is the positive example that the people of Israel have to show the world.
If the people of Israel fulfill the commandment of “Love your friend as yourself,” then even the Iranians will start to love Israel, and this will become their source of respect: to connect to Israel, the nation that brings the method of correction to the world, i.e., the way to reach “Love your friend as yourself.” It was the revelation of this method that gave the people of Israel their name in Abraham’s times (“Israel” from “Yashar Kel” [“straight to the upper force”]).
The problem standing in Israel’s way to become a positive example for the world is simply hatred between Israelis. Therefore, a more unified and positive future or its opposite depends on whether or not the people of Israel come together, above their hatred, and show a positive unifying example to humanity.
Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Before the commandment of “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” described the key prohibition in holding a correct relationship with the Creator: that we should not use our relationship with the Creator for self-benefit. Receiving pleasure for self-benefit alone kills our desire.
“Thou shalt not commit adultery” is similar, but viewed from a different angle. It means to not use our connections with others for self-benefit.
The Creator’s quality is love and bestowal, and adultery is an act of receiving for self-benefit alone. If we receive pleasure at the expense of other people, then it is considered committing adultery.
Based on the TV show, “Spiritual States” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman on December 26, 2019. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
The eighth commandment, “Thou shalt not steal,” is the same as the previous commandment, “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” with the sole difference being that adultery and theft relate to two different levels of desires.
Nature is constructed of four levels of desire: inanimate, vegetative, animate and speaking (also, human). These four levels of desire exist in nature in general as well as within us.
Theft is then a similar action to adultery, but it is a prohibition at a different level of desire. Committing adultery is when we use people for the sake of self-benefit, whereas theft is when we use the inanimate, vegetative and animate levels of nature for the sake of self-benefit.
Therefore, where “Thou shalt not commit adultery” is an act of using others for self-benefit at the human level, “Thou shalt not steal” is an act of using the inanimate, vegetative and animate levels of nature for self-benefit.
Based on the TV show, “Spiritual States” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman on December 26, 2019. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
The sixth commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” means to cause no detriment whatsoever to others.
The previous five commandments explain a process that leads to us receiving the upper forces, and we need to become a receptacle that lets these forces act correctly in us, not interfering with the effect that they have on us.
Using these forces correctly means to use them for the sake of bestowal, and thus “Thou shalt not kill” means the contrary, that we use these forces for self-benefit.
In other words, if we use our connection with the spiritual forces, with the Creator, for self-benefit, then this act is called “killing.” By doing so, we kill our desire. Our desire gets killed because it becomes filled with pleasure; the pleasure aimed at self-benefit kills the desire, and the desire becomes extinguished.
Based on the TV show, “Spiritual States” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman on December 26, 2019. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Does God exist? Can you explain why God may or may not exist?“
