Entries in the 'Q&A' Category

The Success Of A Congress Depends On The Preparation For It

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: What are you expecting from your trip to South America and the upcoming convention in Brazil?

Answer: I look forward to this trip with excitement since it gives me an opportunity to achieve some results in the mission to which I have dedicated my life. But on the other hand, this result doesn’t depend on me, which is why I’m simultaneously inspired by this opportunity and cautious in my expectations.

And naturally, the outcome of the convention depends not only on those who’ll come to Brazil, but on all of our friends from around the world—you all understand this very well. And this is why I think that we need to conduct a very serious preparation, which is extremely important to each of us individually and to all of us together.

Let’s really prepare ourselves in a way Rabash describes in his articles “The Need for the Gathering of Friends” and “Preparation for the Gathering of Friends.” Preparation for a gathering includes clarifying why I need these friends, what they give to me and I to them. Even before I come to the meeting, I must clarify the purpose of creation and how it can be attained so that this convention, that is, the unification in which everyone is equal, becomes a means of achieving the desired goal.

I am glad that people understand this better and better, and I believe that through these conventions we will be able to leap to the next degree. All of it depends on our preparation. This is what we lacked before the European convention in Lithuania, where we didn’t have such joint preparation.

There was only participation of the whole world in the convention, the kind that I feel now as well. But it’s only participation; for now I don’t yet sense a real preparation, even though we know that it determines everything. Right now, we need to conduct a massive preparation, which is even more important than whatever will happen later at the convention.

At the time of the convention, all kinds of obstacles could come up, such as interruptions in the Internet broadcast or whatever else. But at that point it’s no longer important because the action itself doesn’t depend on us, we are charged only with its preparation. We should never forget about this!

Your preparation doesn’t depend on anyone other than yourself since it happens as if in concealment. It has not revealed itself yet, hasn’t been realized in action. It is said that the thoughts of a person are not accessible to the impure force, it knows only of his actions. And this is why we can freely prepare together, correspond, and share our plans. And it is very important. The action itself could even appear as entirely unsuccessful, but the result won’t depend on the action itself at all but on the preparation for it.

We are concerned with the way the action itself turns out because we’re still small in spirituality, and we use the impressions we receive to determine the “success” or “failure” of a convention. But in reality, everything is determined by the preparation, and this is why the main emphasis right now should be made specifically on it.
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From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/9/2012, “Questions and Answers Regarding the Brazil Congress”

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It All Starts With A Woman

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: How important is women’s practical work? For example, how important is it for women to also take part in seminars on integration instead of doing their own thing?

Answer: Men will not be able to do anything on their own. Absolutely nothing!

They can get together, stand around, and sing as usual, these are good things, but it is just preparation. The real work cannot be without a strong women’s part generating its aspiration towards the same goal at the same time. It cannot be any other way! We see this everywhere, always. There are many examples in history. This comes from the structure of the upper Partzufim, the upper worlds; if we do not raise this desire to Malchut, it does not form, and without it, nothing happens. So women must take this very seriously.

First, I direct my attention towards the women’s part because everything starts with it. I really ask you to understand that here practically everything depends on the woman. Men can be “launched,” they can be manipulated, and women know this very well. The right way of manipulating men is based on seriously directing them towards the goal; a woman can literally do this with her desire alone, with just one word, with anything she does. It is very easy for her, and for men, it is very difficult, basically impossible, to advance on their own.

This is why there has always been a law in Kabbalah that unmarried men are not taken as students. This is because without the desire of a woman near you thinking about your succeeding, you will not be able to advance seriously.
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From the Vilnius Convention 3/23/12, Lesson 2

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Internal Preparation For The Convention

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: What is an internal preparation for the convention?

Answer: Internal preparation is a reverence for the property of bestowal as the force, property, value, that is above everything. On the basis of such preparation, you can then continue and work out various individual states, actions, and goals in order to reach the common goal and realize this property of bestowal within our matter, the desire to enjoy.

I am asking everyone to send their suggestions on how to conduct the convention in Brazil. We will discuss them during the lessons, and in this way we will learn from our common action and prepare our common desire. In other words, the convention will be a realization of what we will prepare together.

Everybody must prepare themselves, wherever in the world they may be. It cannot be that a person returns from work, does all the household chores, and when there is a little free time left, suddenly remembers that there is a convention going on, turns on the broadcast, and begins to watch.

Nothing will come out of it. A person should prepare in advance, anticipate, and plan what he will be doing together with us and how he will advance due to these actions. The action itself is worth nothing; everything depends on the preparation.
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From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/9/2012, “Questions and Answers Regarding the Brazil Congress”  

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The Beckoning Light Of Love

Dr. Michael Laitman

Question: As I see it, people left without a job sink into their problems and this gives them no incentive to find out where the problems are coming from.

Answer: Our ego feels suffering within itself. The suffering is constantly increasing and taking different forms. Why do they push a person to ask about the meaning of life? It is because he is asking: “Why do I need to suffer?” Actually, they may bring him to the point of suicide.

What is the wisdom of Kabbalah doing? It says to a person: You have to replace this suffering with other suffering, the so-called “suffering of love.”

Indeed, when you love someone, yearn for him, but you still are not connected to him yet, or you are being rejected, turned down a little, or distance separates you and for now you can’t see him, then a big desire to come close, to connect, and to embrace appears, but it is impossible.

All of this is also suffering! But they are sweet for us; we do not want to get rid of them.

Personally, I cannot imagine such suffering anymore, but I remember them from when I was young, and they were sweet. So on one hand, you love, yearn, and anticipate that soon you will embrace your beloved one, but at the same time, you suffer because it still hasn’t happened, and this is pleasant suffering.

There is suffering that comes from the ego, and it is called the “shadow of the Sitra Achra,” meaning a bad shadow, darkness, which hides all the good in the world. And there is suffering that pushes you forward, and, on the contrary, you are excited, you are living in the expectation that it will happen soon: In front of you is the Light, the Light of love, the Light of the impending meeting. Light and darkness, this is the whole difference.

 

We need to quickly help the world replace their suffering, great hardships, and problems that will intensify more and more with a yearning for connection, for love, for the Light. Then, we will feel that the sufferings do not disappear. It’s because if you meet your loved one, and all the attraction you felt at the time of separation disappears, then nothing will be left for you except disappointment: You met, and after few minutes you don’t need anything else, and you can leave.

Therefore, it is necessary that this suffering, meaning this attraction, this appetite, this hunger, will stay, and at the same time, you will be able to enjoy it. Usually when you are very hungry and you start to eat, the appetite disappears and you do not enjoy the food. And what if the pleasure would not disappear?

That is, we need to keep our suffering and only transform it. Hence under no circumstances should we ask the Creator for anything except correction. We must not ask Him to take away our suffering, but only to change it so that we will feel the suffering of love instead, eagerness to go forward. Then we will live in excitement.
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From the Vilnius Convention 3/24/12, Lesson 4

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Understanding The Language Of The Creator

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Disturbances come in order to help us in our progress toward the goal. How is it possible to understand what the upper force is trying to tell me by sending this specific disturbance? What does it want from me by sending it in particular?

Answer: So that above this disturbance, you will not forget the Creator and yearn for Him.

Question: Is there a certain, specific recipe, or does one need to work separately with each disturbance?

Answer: Do not work with the disturbances! You need to rise immediately above it. There is no need to pay attention to the disturbance itself; the main thing is to rise above it.

Treat a disturbance that comes to you as a support, as a springboard that is bouncing you up. Try to look at it in this way and you will see that it was done in this way purposely. It seems to us as a disturbance only psychologically. Actually it is not a disturbance, but rather a means for ascending.

Question: But how to nevertheless hear what it is trying to tell me? What do I have to correct, above what do I have to rise?

Answer: You don’t know it now. But if you work above the disturbances, you will see what is being corrected in you. And from the new, already corrected qualities, you will start learning the language of the Creator.
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From the Vilnius Convention 3/24/12, Lesson 4

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Unripe Point In The Heart

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Most of us have relatives and friends who are dear to us who have not yet manifested an interest in spirituality. We care about them a lot and intend to rid them of suffering; is it worth waking up their points in the hearts?

Answer: That’s true, each of us has many relatives and friends to whom we would love to explain what we are preoccupied with. Possibly, it would help them too. At least, it could brighten up their lives interesting and think differently about their troubles and problems. However, we all know that it is a very difficult task, as a rule, to explain such things to those people who do not comprehend them. Why is this so?

Our methodology applies only to those who have awakened the aspiration to the goal of creation, those with the so-called “point in the heart.” Everybody has it. Modern day Kabbalists came from the first Kabbalist: Adam. Before Adam was born, for thousands of years, numerous generations possessed a latent point in the heart. Adam was the first man in this world whose point in the heart was awakened. It goes on from then. Before, each generation had very few people whose points in the heart were not dormant.

When a person’s soul (inner desire) matures (ripens), he starts to explore “Why do I need this life? What for? Maybe I should do away with all this? Or finally to find what makes life worth living?”

Such questions arise in everybody, but to different extents. Each person (especially in childhood) asks him or herself: “Why do people live?” Later in life, everyday routine suppresses this quest and people forget about it.

Nowadays, we see that due to crises and various problems, the question of the meaning of life spreads to millions of people around the world. However, people still restrict their search by questioning: “How can I get rid of the pain?” How do I get away from pain, not how do I move ahead.

Nevertheless, at this time we see millions of people who have a point in the heart. Look how many fellow students you have around the world and how many people we don’t even know but who study together with us. They don’t have an obvious desire to contact us as of yet, that’s why our task is to treat them with a lot of thoughtfulness, to never push them too much, and to find suitable reading materials for them.

I think that spreading of our methodology together with the materials we create for the 99% of the world population will gradually lead people ahead and will help many of them (millions!) to reveal their points in the heart. Others will simply follow; they will advance mainly because they tend to escape from pain somehow.

I am sure that you should search for interesting materials and give them to your friends. If you see that words do not work, then don’t talk. Printed materials are more persuasive. Try them. Be patient! Personally, I don’t know how to address those people who do not look for answers to these questions. Why do we need to force them? You have to tell people something that they are willing to hear.
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From the Vilnius Convention 3/23/12, Lesson 1

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Multilevel Education

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: A source of information in a group can either be its moderator or exercises that help clarify certain theses. What is the relationship between these elements in a group of integral education? Should everything be conducted in form of a game or can the instructor be a source of information as well?

Answer: Absolutely! There should be an instructor both in the main, educational lessons and during the practical exercises since everyone, without exception, needs to receive an education.

It doesn’t matter that some people couldn’t bear themselves to listen to a single lesson in school, graduated simply because they were “pushed out,” and went to work in some factory or at the street market. That’s not important!

All people should receive an integral education in its minimum form, in form of laws and memorized rules that they constantly repeat, if that’s their level. They need to repeat all the rules and literally know them by heart until, under the influence of various life’s problems, excesses, and incidents, these rules begin to come to life within them and prove that it is indeed so, that is, until the rules come into action and show them their real applicability.

Indeed, certain segments of the population understand everything on their own level: They wake up, take care of their needs, eat, go to their vegetable garden, and go back to bed again. We should definitely work with them. Accordingly, we need to prepare various kinds of educational materials, starting with simple pictures, like for small children. These people learn more from video clips, motion pictures, and theater or cinema productions that are as simple as TV series. The most important thing is that they learn the integral laws, the main provisions of nature.

There are also those who go further, to whom we can present the theoretical elements of attainment. And they will agree with them on the basis of their logical conclusions.

But overall, this is a multilevel education that needs to adapt to all segments and layers of the population, both on the social and intellectual level, or maybe not even based on their level of development but on the natural predisposition that a person has for comprehension of a given topic (physics, poetry, and so on). Even among domestic workers, there are poets and physicists.

People who are working on group selection have to really take this into consideration. Accordingly, we need to prepare various types of materials, different kinds of lessons, examples, activities, and games. Everything should be very differentiated and customized.
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From KabTV’s “Foundations of the Integral Soceity” 2/26/12   

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Integral Education In Every Style

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: There are people who are used to receiving an assignment, working on it at home, and then discussing the completed task in a group, and there are also those who are incapable of doing anything at home but are ready to take up anything in a group. Is it possible to practice both of these approaches in the method of integral education?

Answer: You should adapt to people instead of trying to break them down—this is the problem with today’s education. Of course we need to act in accordance with the individuality of a person.

You won’t be able to change people, and it is not necessary. We need to present the integral method to each type people in their own key, in their form and style.

Question: If in the experimental group for preparing future instructors one person will study at home and another will work only in a group, will that be sufficient?

Answer: No, absolutely not! A person won’t be able to study at home. We can give more theoretical and descriptive homework assignments to a group of such people, but they are required to go through practical exercises together with the entire group.

We need to assign them homework that allows them to prepare themselves for practical exercises. And then they will be coming with an understanding of what they need. They will be in agreement with it in advance, and it will be easier for us to work with them, even with those who initially didn’t seem prepared for that.
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From KabTV’s “Foundations of the Integral Soceity” 2/26/12  

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A Day In A Healthy Integral Family

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Could you describe a day of a healthy integral family?

Answer: The alarm clock rings; everyone gets up. The children are going to school as usual. Mother stays home, or together with dad goes to study, to work.

People are working part time jobs in fields that are necessary, although it is not important where they work; it does not matter to them. Each one works as much as he can in a place where society decides it is the most useful and needed for society so as to supply food, clothing, a standard apartment, heating, health, retirement, vacation, medical help, and so on.

The husband and wife are working as needed, but regardless of whether they are working or not, they must study 5-6 hours a day in the group. This is considered as work that completes the job they have. People are studying the method of integral upbringing and education and the system that we all exist in: the worldwide, universal system of the upper mind, force. By learning, they are trying to discover it more and more and realize it through the connection between them.

This is the day and the life of people because they know that through this, they achieve a better mutual connection between them, and in it, they discover an eternal and perfect existence and an enormous, unlimited fulfillment that for them substitutes for absolutely everything.

This world they will feel as a means, as a place of work, until they reach the complete attainment of the system of nature. By this, they will achieve the whole system and they will fit in it by becoming equal with it, equal to the Creator, which is called adhesion with the Creator. They will reach a state where the feeling of this world will disappear, and instead of their biological bodies, they will feel spiritual bodies, meaning the forces that painted this world and themselves on the uncorrected ego.

Essentially, people will do only this. But as long as they are still in the egoistical desires, they will feel their bodies and will need to take care of them. However, it will be clear to them that this is the picture they have to “nourish”now with egoistical fulfillment such as food and other necessities of the body.
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From KabTV’s “Foundations of the Integral Society” 2/19/12 

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According To The Laws Of The Bubble

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Don’t we tend to put greater emphasis on actions than on intentions during the day?

Answer: All our work is based on intentions. Can we bring about real changes in the world only through actions? By disseminating our message we want to change people’s intention. We have to approach them in different ways so that they will absorb it and be inspired, and then their attitude will begin to change.

If there were a wave on which we could convey to them by mind power the knowledge about the integral world, we would do that. But on the other hand, a method that resembles hypnosis or an injection wouldn’t be effective here. People have to understand, to perceive, and to internally analyze what we bring them.

It is impossible to simply “inject” another perspective of the world into a person. He needs to consciously acquire this knowledge, without lies, confusion, or fraud. We have to create the right conditions for him, thanks to which he will reach the desired result by himself and will share our point of view. So even if there were a wave for conveying information mentally, it would only lower a person to the “inanimate” level, while we, on the contrary, have to assist his development. This is the whole problem.

So we should offer a person “food for thought” with which he will agree or argue internally until the right tools will be created in him, the “tools” that enable him to understand the situation. Today by “flowing with the stream of life” a person cannot understand and assess this flow by looking at it from the outside. He doesn’t penetrate the depth of nature in order to understand its laws; he doesn’t know himself and his environment.

We are not talking about the artificial environment people have created for themselves. In that area they are “experts,”  and many feel like a big fish in the sea. But the natural systems that move a person, society, and nature are unknown to them. We have to make that accessible for them so that they will begin to feel the essence of things, so that they will get to know the basic laws of the external nature and the essence of humanity. This is the Creator, even though it is still in an adapted corporeal form.

In the meantime, people have no idea about that. They are living their ordinary lives in an artificial net that they have woven for themselves. This is what the global processes of modernization and urbanization have brought us to. The whole world is living according to these laws today, and so we are facing very hard work: We have to spur the need for ascending in people, to lead them to the level of clarification and of a new feeling, and to guide them to the root so that under the guidance of the artificial mechanisms of civilization, they will see our natural mutual connection that penetrates all levels of nature.

By bringing a person to this thought, we bring him inside, into a totally different system about which he doesn’t know and which he hasn’t taken into account at all. He encounters a problem: He detaches himself from the artificial net and has to solve basic questions by himself: “Who am I and what am I? What is the environment, what is nature?” Here another environment is revealed to him, the system of the upper nature.

This is the reason scientists today are much closer to our message. Soon we will be so close to them that we will actually begin to speak in the same language. On the other hand, in the meantime we cannot have a real conversation with businessmen, industrialists, merchants, politicians, etc.; in their environment the laws of the market exist.

We are really facing a difficult dissemination problem. We have to understand the way a person feels the world, the picture he sees before him, the social services that he uses, his interests, etc. He is living in an artificial blown-up “bubble” and he doesn’t understand what we are talking about.

We, on the other hand, speak about the fact that man is part of nature in which there are clear and definite laws. They resent this idea, “What laws are you talking about, all the laws are written in the constitution.” And so all the problems are “solved” by legislation and adding a few more items to certain laws. This is how the artificial system by which people are hoping to change something grows.

Eventually we have reached a global crisis: Two systems, an artificial one and a natural one, are now one opposite the other. The problem is that the artificial system is beginning to break down as a whole, whereas we want to bring people to the natural system, and this is a big problem. We too are gradually going through this process, so what can we say about humanity?

So don’t hope that intentions will be enough. First, we have to enter the bubble and establish a connection with a person. We descend to his level, to his state, become part of him, and from there we begin to gradually explain that we all depend on the second natural system, on balance and on the right mutual relations with it. In addition, we have to act gently; otherwise, people will not accept our message because they only feel their bubble.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/8/12, Writings of Rabash

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