Question: How can we describe the Kabbalistic term “Lev ha Even” (the stony heart) in terms of integrality?

Answer: “Lev ha Even” is the primordial part of egoism, which we cannot correct in any way and on which our entire egoism is based. It is the point of creation of desire. And everything else that has been built over it is brought forth by the Light that acts on this point.

Question: Is it possible to give us an example of “Lev ha Even” so we could sense it?

Answer: “Lev ha Even” is such a rejection, such a hate toward the connection with others, which I cannot overcome. I simply have to put it aside, to camouflage it in some way, to conceal it, in order to work with the rest of the lighter egoistic desires in connection with others.

After I correct all of my egoistic desires that used to be against the connection with others, this part is corrected automatically because it is not supposed to be corrected by me. This part appeared within me as a drop of semen from which I was created; it is being corrected not by me, but rather by the combination of correct forces that I create.
[95837]
From KabTV’s “Talks with Michael Laitman” 3/11/12

Related Material:
Only A Miracle Will Melt The Stony Heart
The Stony Heart Instead Of Love
The Correction Of “The Stone Heart”

Filed under: Inner Work, Q&A - No Comments →

Question: In the course of history there were plenty of attempts to create communes. Why didn’t nature respond and help them?

Answer: This is because while doing this we didn’t educate people. Everything was built exclusively by enthusiasts. Maybe these attempts were successful for some time, but eventually they fell apart because we didn’t engage in integral education of people.

We should have developed a person by showing him where his freedom of will lies. This freedom is in attaining homeostasis with nature, balance with others and with nature, so that he would fit into nature’s most general law, the law of balance.

All of nature is directed toward fulfilling this law. We see what takes place in all of nature’s parts. All of nature’s actions pursue a single goal: to attain balance and peace. Even enormous cataclysms, explosions, and different activities taking place are still nature’s strive toward peace and balance. After all, peace and balance within a human society is a law of similarity to nature, integration with it.

Therefore, the most important thing is the correct education, and nothing can be done without it. People have to understand this.

Comment: But for a certain period there was enthusiasm.

Answer: This was bare enthusiasm, built on simple impulse of motivation toward this and nothing more. Meanwhile, people must be educated and taught to unite! This is a whole science.

For this reason a person receives qualities from nature that allow him to educate and to pull himself forward. Nature will respond to our desire to grow in the same way it develops a small child. It is the same exact system. We will gradually teach ourselves and mother-nature will encourage us.
[95930]
From KabTV’s “Integral World” 11/26/12

Related Material:
The Global Crisis Will Not End
Choosing Where We Want To Go
Why Give Pleasure To A Thought

Filed under: Education, Integral Upbringing, Q&A - No Comments →

The whole world is a force and not matter. So you give importance to the force of thoughts and your attitude to the friends. It is what operates in reality. By your attitude to others, you correct and change the world. No one can stand in the way of such power. If you think and worry about the connection with the friends from morning to night and that it should bring us, the world, and the Creator good, then you are actually performing a very powerful action, which cannot be compared with anything else.

The power of thought, the power of our desire, is the most important thing. If you activate it according to the goal of the creation, then you influence things much more strongly than an ordinary person.

Question: Can this be proven?

Answer: The point is that I don’t want to prove it to myself. The proof will give me egoistic confidence, while I want the opposite, I want to bestow upon the friends by using these forces so that I won’t be able to see the result. I want to help, to connect, to love, but not in order to receive a reward.

After all, I need something else: I am ready to pay with my attitude toward the friends, in order to discover one thing only—whose command am I fulfilling? I want to discover the Creator and to bring Him contentment by that.

Then, I have to conceal the result, so that the reward won’t bribe me. By that, I attain the point from which bestowal begins.

Question: Why am I not attracted to this?

Answer: Because this truth is opposite from us.

Question: So how can we advance?

Answer: By small lies every step of the way. You conceal the truth from yourself and play as if it is attractive and will bring you some reward.

Question: What will force me to think about the friends all day?

Answer: The recognition of the importance: “I will profit from this, I will attain spirituality; otherwise, my whole life will be wasted in vain. I have to attain something in life.” It says: “Taste and see that God is good.” “So, where is He? How can I taste Him? I have to manage until the evening, no matter what…”

You are told: “If you worry about the friends, if you lower your head before them, if you join them, then you will discover spirituality.” You are ready for that; you imagine the reward according to your taste, as it says: “Educate a child according to his way.” You imagine spirituality as tempting, as some great spaces, hovering in space, forces, and you are drawn to them.

Everyone depicts his own image. Ask the friends to explain the goal and its importance to you. We have to feel the taste of love: Ask for it.
[95859]
From the 4^th Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/18/12, “The Wisdom of Kabbalah and Philosophy”

Related Material:
The Common Desire Makes Us Friends
A Warm Attitude Toward The Friend Brings Us To The Creator
Bestowal Without Reward

Filed under: Daily Kabbalah Lesson, Group Work, Inner Work, Love, Prayer and Intention, Q&A - No Comments →

Question: So far, our ego twists and turns, trying to find different excuses. How can we change this on our level?

Answer: We can only do one thing: evoke the Light that Reforms. We don’t have any power but for that. So we have to know how to draw this Light.

The Light is evoked only if I want to attain the next closest level to me. How can I take such a step towards the Light so that the Light will influence me, and then make another step so that the Light will influence me again? I need a group for that. To the extent that I can influence the friends and evoke them by some corporeal actions to connection, to love, to corrections and to raise their spirit, I draw the Light upon me.

I don’t need to ask anything from the Light; it will operate and influence me without any request, without any words, only in response to my actions. To that extent, I will advance. Everything happens according to exact laws according to the powers one invests, as it says, “the reward is according to one’s sorrow.”
[95856]
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/18/12, “The Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot”

Related Material:
Rejecting Our Present Selves
How To Draw The Light
I Want The Light!

Filed under: Daily Kabbalah Lesson, Group Work, Inner Work, Love, Mutual Guarantee, Q&A, Unity - No Comments →

Question: For religious people the words “to please the Creator” or “ to give pleasure to Him” are understood. In terms of the integral mind, the Creator is nature. Thus, the words “give pleasure to nature” sound a little strange, as if you want to give pleasure to the law of gravity.

Answer: Imagine that nature is that same force that gives birth to and develops all organisms, all sensations, all intelligence, and all animate and inanimate things, absolutely everything.

Many people already understand that nature is universal and that it really has everything in it: also the concealed intellect and concealed feelings. We need to disclose them, invite them to a shared dialog. And you need to develop them up to the state where you feel all these attributes in nature.

Question: Does nature exist like a person and does it enjoy?

Answer: It is not only living, but the upper intellect exists in it as well. Talk to an astronomer, with astrophysicists, and they will tell you that the entire universe is intellect, it is thought. This is how they feel it.

Question: But why should I give pleasure to a thought?

Answer: You will feel yourself as part of it and will begin to understand that the development of the desires and your longings for that absolute bestowal, which is unconditional, and are what constitute the highest state.

When you bestow, then through you passes all the information, all the energy, all the pleasures, all the fulfillments to everything else. You are with God then, since you are at the highest level of nature. You enter into equivalence with it.

I understand that you still are missing some emotional expressions, but they will come gradually. After all, you previously did not feel many things in your life, you loathed them, you rejected them, and afterward you began to gradually feel them.

Remark: Theoretically, you can understand Indians; for example, generally it is easier to think that some kind of person enjoys, and not some law of nature which is hard to grasp.

Answer: Why not? Nature is a field; it is universal.

And an individual is something concrete, with volume, with specified borders. Nature is something that lacks borders, is limitless. It isn’t even our universe, but much higher and greater. We have no words to describe it.

And if a person invents for himself some upper force, then he really builds it in his image since, after all, he cannot describe it in another way.
[95833]
From KabTV’s “Talks with Michael Laitman” 11/3/12

Related Material:
Getting Acquainted With The Universal Mind
Learn To Live In Balance With Nature
One Variable In The Constant Reality

Filed under: My Similarity to the Creator, Q&A - No Comments →

Baal HaSulam, “The Wisdom of Kabbalah and Philosophy”: Likewise, all the fixed pictures that we know and use to define materials are inconsistent and do not exist in their own right. Rather, they only dress and undress forms under the influence of conditions such as heat or cold.

During the lesson we think about the force that “draws” the material that actually doesn’t exist. If, while we are reading, we are together, we constantly think about the united group and want to discover the general force among us, then we discover a whole world and live in it in a much clearer, more emotional, and more intensive way than our current life.

This is no fantasy. Evoke these forces. Now you are looking at the friends sleepily, and they look at you in the same way. So evoke these forces together and you will understand that there are worlds between you and that everything depends on your closeness and unity in your mind and your feelings, in your yearning and your inclination, in the desire to feel your inner essence together. Suddenly you will see how the abstract force turns into something real and concrete.

Previously you only paid attention to “coarse” corporeal forces: heat, cold, pressure, etc. But there are much finer and stronger forces in a person than the ones that operate even in the micro-world, on a subatomic level. These fine forces reveal the real material to you. When you enter this field, you discover that it is the beginning and the end of everything, that all of creation is there with its plan. Here, however, there is nothing but the false, artificial, external drawing that is meant to confuse you and to focus you on the correction by false incentives without taking your freewill from you and so as not to turn you into a robot.

This realization should focus us on the main thing, on developing the forces that are between us. They are the strongest “weapon” against evil, against all our problems. Even in our imaginary world subatomic forces are much stronger than the ordinary forces of the macro world. A lot of energy is required in order to cause a collision between the particles in the collider. We, however, enter the field of our personal forces that operate between the friends. This is such great intensity that cannot be measured by using the means we have in this world.

It is a real force. We only have to reach it and to learn how to manage it, since it will not be revealed without an intention to bestow, for the good of others.

Question: Does this mean that there are forces in me that enable me to discover a new reality? How can I find them?

Answer: Start acting, exert yourself, fix the connection with the friends, annul yourself, and by that allow them to connect to you. Start evoking them so that they will impress you with the greatness of the goal. We should make such efforts every day, every moment, because the desire to receive is constantly renewed and constantly demands us to renew our relationships, the whole Ha-Va-Ya-H. This is all our work.

If you evoke and arrange the forces that connect you with the friends as correctly as possible, the force of bestowal and the force of receiving, you will discover that the relationships between you are much more important than the corporeal world.

It will come, since you study and you are expecting the Light that Reforms, and it will influence you. Suddenly you will discover that the relationships between you are the most important thing, and then you will begin to discover a new spiritual material, which is much more real and concrete than what surrounds you today. It will be so powerful, heavy, and real that the temporary, imaginary picture of this world will dissolve on its background.
[95768]
From the 4^th Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/18/12, “The Wisdom of Kabbalah and Philosophy”

Related Material:
You And Me And The Whole World Too
The Internal Network: The Access Is Through The Desire
Not By Quantity But By Quality

Filed under: Daily Kabbalah Lesson, Group Work, Inner Work, Kabbalah Study, Mutual Guarantee, Perception, Prayer and Intention, Q&A, Unity - No Comments →

Question: What is most typical state that a person experiences right before the revelation?

Answer: Darkness… He feels that he needs new fuel, new motivations, as the old ones have already been depleted. He is revealing it now.

He sees spirituality in the Reflected Light of the upper Partzuf, in AHP of the upper one who is showing this to him as though he is in the hands of the upper one. Now the person feels that he has to grow to the same rung and adopt all of this himself. He has to come down from the hands of the upper one and achieve the same.

This happens every time on each new rung: First comes the small state (Katnut), and then the big state (Gadlut).
[95751]
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/17/12, “Introduction to Talmud of Ten Sefirot” 

Related Material:
Several Details About The Picture Of The Spiritual World
Superimposed Worlds
The Spiritual World – The World Of Qualities

Filed under: Daily Kabbalah Lesson, Inner Work, Q&A - No Comments →

In the News (from Spiegel International): ““The list of accomplishments this latest European Union summit was supposed to deliver was long: The euro zone was to receive a substantial push forward with a decisive redesign of the currency union’s architecture. There was even to be a new convention to rapidly adjust EU treaties to the realities of the changes occurring in the euro zone. …

“Yet by the time the 27 heads of state and government arrived in Brussels on Thursday evening, such ambition had been forgotten. It could be pre-Christmas exhaustion that got the better of the EU leaders, but enthusiasm for reform was nowhere to be found. One after another, they insisted that they would merely hold nonbinding talks about the deepening of the currency union. After nine hours of talks, the summit agreed on a five-page paper that, while called a ‘roadmap,’ is little more than a vague outline for the next six months. Indeed, the most concrete date mentioned is June 2013 – by then, European Council President Herman Van Rompuy is to have worked out a solid timeline for the establishment of closer fiscal policy coordination among eurozone member states. He is also to examine how bilateral reform treaties between the European Commission and individual common currency members could look in order to make reforms recommended by Brussels more binding. The creation of a fund – referred to vaguely as ‘solidarity mechanisms’ at the insistence of Germany – that could be used to reward those countries serious about reform is also to be examined.”

My Comment: European leaders are lost in the new world; they do not understand what is happening, and in this state, the best decision is to decide nothing. They act reasonably and sensibly, looking at what is happening. However, the development in the direction of integration continues, and the social systems that were created in the past become less and less suitable for working with them; that is, they increase the crisis, but that the answer is not in changing the world, but in changing man; this still needs to be understood and then only to agree with the need for integral education.
[95784]

Related Material:
“The Worst Is Now Behind Us”
European Revolution Is Not Far Away
Integration At The EU Summit

Filed under: Crisis, Education, Integral Upbringing, Q&A, World - No Comments →

Question: Yesterday a friend who had left the group some time ago suddenly called me and said that he wanted to return. How does such a warm deficiency suddenly awaken in a person? How can we evoke those who have left?

Answer: Can anyone avoid the correction of his soul? Anyone who was with us at some point and left will eventually return. You can see that I am not keeping anyone, not even for a moment. If someone wants to go, then let him go; I wish him all the best. I can say that about anyone, without any regrets, since this is his destiny.

We have to advance according to the laws that we see in nature and which Kabbalists explain to us. These are nature’s laws and there is nothing artificial about them, Kabbalists tell us about man’s psychology and how to use it correctly in order to advance and to reach the top, to rise to our inner psychology, to an inner connection, to enter the world that is behind elementary particles, photons, atoms, all matter.

We have to penetrate this field where the force that sustains all of reality is concealed. All this happens according to exact laws, and there is nothing accidental here.

We have to advance towards this, and as a result of our advancement, a more powerful force field will appear around us. Then it will begin to influence the people who were with us and have left, and also people who have not reached us yet. Their charge, their spark, their “point in the heart,” their spiritual potential is still weak, and so they studied a little and left or haven’t reached us at all yet, but are still on hold.

They are close to us, but our field isn’t strong enough in order to draw them. Our force field is still weak and they are weak in their charge. But when our field grows and becomes stronger, it will draw them inward. Then we will suddenly see how the door opens, and they walk in.

It will undoubtedly happen. It all depends only on our advancement; we don’t have to perform any external actions with regard to them. It all depends solely on us, and we have to perform the correction that is our duty.

So our work is mainly the inner spiritual work. We have to disseminate our materials all over the world in our free time, and for this work we have our Kabalistic factory. This is the external work, but 90% of all our work should be dedicated to our inner work. All our forces and our attention should be aimed at our inner advancement.

We do the external dissemination outside the global group for our advancement, since we depend on the extended society.
[95748]
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/17/12, “The Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot”

Related Material:
The Way Of The World Group
Plead For The Resurrection Of The Dead
From Summit To Summit

Filed under: Daily Kabbalah Lesson, Group Work, Inner Work, Kabbalah Dissemination, Kabbalah Study, Q&A - No Comments →

There cannot be love without hate. After all, love comes precisely as the correction for hate. It isn’t an innate part of us, but we have to build it by ourselves. This is where the command of “love thy friend as thyself” comes from: From the love of the created beings we move on to the love of the Creator. The Creator is the general, sum of all the forms of love.

But first I discover the matter of my egoistic desire, my “Mt. Sinai“, my mountain of “hatred,” the shattered vessel to its dark depth. This is called the “illumination of Malchut,” and it is really frightening.

Then I have to correct this hatred, and only by that do I reach love.

There is no independent love; there are no independent vessels of bestowal. There is the Light that Reforms that I draw in order to correct myself. I don’t leave the hate, I still feel and acknowledge it, it is kept, and above it instead of the “mountain of hate,” I build a “mountain of love.”

This is how the vessel is built; below there is thickness and above a Masach and the Returning Light (RL), which means adhesion. In the upper part I form my attitude to the Creator, all my intentions, and then I cover my hate with the Light of Hassadim below. Then comes the Light of Hochma and fills the vessel.

This happens time after time until the end of correction. Hate which is opposite from the Light remains, since otherwise I will not be able to be independent.

Question: Does that mean that I have to come to the lesson charged with rejection, and aversion in order to overcome it? What deficiency, what feeling of a flaw, should I bring with me?

Answer: Don’t look for hate. You should not come with a flaw, but with love. There is only one goal and what comes along the way is not our business. If hatred is revealed—let it be revealed, and if not—then it isn’t. I have to be attracted to one thing only, and if in the process I discover in me an inability, lack of understanding, lack of knowledge, etc., it means that that’s the way it should be.

I want to be clever, and on the way I discover that I am still stupid. But I am yearning for something that is totally different. So despite everything, I need to focus on the final goal.
[95754]
From the 4^th Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/17/12, “The Wisdom of Kabbalah and Philosophy”

Related Material:
Penetrating Love Through Barricades Of Hate
Love That Defeats A Mount Of Hatred
About Love And Hate

Filed under: Daily Kabbalah Lesson, Inner Work, Kabbalah Study, Love, Q&A - 1 Comment →