Entries in the 'Spiritual Work' Category

Watching The Lessons Or Uniting?

laitman_219_01Question: There is a good friend in the Japanese group, a loyal friend who studies willingly, participates in the group work, but doesn’t want to watch the lessons together with anyone claiming that he cannot absorb the material well when he is with others. Why is it important to watch the lessons together according to the wisdom of Kabbalah?

Answer: The point is not whether you watch the lessons together or by yourself, but whether you unite or not.

Perhaps the group is still very young, people have different mentalities, etc., gradually you will begin to hear and see more and more and then you will feel that there is no other way to fulfill the wisdom of Kabbalah but by overcoming the ego and it is possible to overcome it only by mutual actions.
[202103]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 10/30/16

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“Life For Life, Eye For Eye”

Laitman_514_02Torah, Deuteronomy 19:21: You shall not have pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.

A person must destroy the enemies, meaning his egoistic desires, that he has to correct with the help of the Upper Light, either to the desire to bestow or to the action of bestowal. There can be no concessions.

Each one must completely remake his egoism, while clearly, really feeling it in himself and applying a maximum amount of effort to it. A person shouldn’t take into account his egoistic weaknesses.

It is written, “life for life, eye for eye.” It means that you have to turn all the desires into the opposite ones and gain spiritual life instead of the egoistic one. However, it doesn’t mean that you separate from it, it just moves into a different phase, for the sake of a different ideal. Yet, you continue to exist in the material world.

Most people think that they are obliged to die and disappear from this life. It isn’t so! It is written, “You shall see your world during your lifetime in this world.” After all, we need to add to the sense of the material world, the sense of the upper world.

Question: Why it is written “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot”? Why exactly are these parts mentioned?

Answer: Because these are the most important parts of the spiritual Partzuf called soul. The soul is divided into three parts: head, body, and limbs. Each of them has its parts. The head portion is located in every organ of the body and vice versa, each organ of the body is connected to the head part.

The eye is an organ through which you see, investigate, exist, and attain. Teeth are like millstones that grind all the data that comes to you, all your desires. A hand is also an attainment, just on the different level than an eye. And a foot symbolizes movement forward. These are the most important parts of our soul that has the same structure as a physical body.
[202288]
From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 9/19/16

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What Does A Kabbalist Rely On?

laitman_234Question: What does a Kabbalist rely on if he cannot trust his mind and his feelings?

Answer: A Kabbalist relies only on the method through which he can invoke and summon the Upper Light.

There are billions of people around us who rely on their minds and their feelings, and what use is it to them? It is time to stop behaving like blind kittens and to begin thinking clearly.

A person should in no way count on and trust himself. After all, a person doesn’t know what is happening inside him now and, all the more so, what is good for him. We can see what has happened throughout human history. We don’t even know how to live.

We are all the outcome of the effect of the system of the upper forces on us. It is basically one force, but it is as if it operates and affects us through many forces. We must understand that our work is to draw the upper force to us and begin using it intensively in order to develop spiritually.
[201220]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 8/21/16

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What Should We Hope For?

laitman_938_04Question: You said that you are only an expert in teaching the wisdom of Kabbalah and that you have not attained the complete end of correction. So, what should we, who are merely beginners, hope for?

Answer: No one has actually reached the complete end of correction. It is a very high level, but everyone must attain it.

Rabi Shimon’s group and Baal HaSulam reached a relative complete end of correction. It is impossible to reach the complete end of correction unless all of the people, or more accurately, all of the souls, are corrected. It is because we are living in a system that is mutually connected.

I tell you frankly that I am on an intermediate level, but it is certainly enough in order to teach you. If I were on a higher level, I wouldn’t be able to do so.

Baal HaSulam says in his article “Baal HaSulam’s Prophecy” that he especially asked to be lowered from the high level he was on so that he would be able to express and convey the method of Kabbalah.

Sometimes, the levels of the teacher and the student in the wisdom of Kabbalah are disconnected, and it is not always possible to overcome that. Would a professor in an art academy teach a five-year-old to play the violin? No, since this is what teachers in music schools do. When the child grows, he will learn from more professional teachers until he reaches a master, an expert.

We will continue our motion forward together, and our common teacher will be the Creator.
[200971]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 8/7/16

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The Manifestation Of Unintentional Desires

laitman_571_03The Torah, Deuteronomy 19:06: Lest the avenger of the blood pursue the killer, while his heart is hot, and overtake him, because the way is long, and he strikes him to death, whereas he was not deserving of death, for he had not hated him in times past.

The cities of refuge should be within reach, with good roads and with a good understanding of where to run. A person must be granted such a place.

The Torah doesn’t speak about people but about the inner world of a person, when he feels that he has unbiased, unintentional desires that drag him down to egoism and he can do nothing with them because he doesn’t control them; the Creator does.

This is exactly how the Creator manifests these desires in him. Although in principle, they are good and normal, suddenly they become deadly, kill the soul of a person, don’t allow him to connect with others, and don’t allow him to get closer and reveal the Creator within himself. This way the Creator reveals these desires to him, the involuntary, unintentional killers of his soul, and he needs to correct them.

Therefore, in the cities of refuge he corrects the desires that were revealed in him as deadly, while previously he couldn’t identify their egoistic intentions. He will be free from them in seven years, and after that it is forbidden to pursue him because he corrected his desires.

Thus, he should treat all his thoughts and motives very reasonably, in a weighted manner, understanding that everything comes only from the Creator. It is He who revealed in a person such depths of egoism that a person himself wouldn’t be able to reveal. Therefore, he sends them to the “occupation” zone where he examines and corrects them, and after a certain time of measured influence of the Upper Light on these desires, on the seventh year, he leaves the isolation zone.

There are the Light of bestowal and the Light of reception in this system, and they, by interacting with each other, play with a person and correct him more and more so that he becomes similar to the Creator. The Surrounding Light (Ohr Makif) descends upon all our desires and they begin to change gradually under its influence, especially in the cities of refuge because the concentration of the desire to be corrected in these places, meaning in these desires that the Creator reveals in a person, is very strong.
[201267]
From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 9/7/16

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Great Kabbalists Are Special Souls

laitman_740_02Question: How could great Kabbalists like the Ari, Baal HaSulam, Rabash, and others enter the perception of the upper world alone without a group, without a teacher? Today, there is a lot of material that wasn’t available before and good conditions that didn’t exist in the past. Yet in spite of it all, it is very difficult to cross the border between our world and the spiritual world.

Answer: First of all, we can’t compare ourselves with the Ari, Ramchal, and Baal HaSulam. There are special souls who come into this world because they occupy particular places in the collective soul, like the heart, lungs, or liver in the human body, for example. These are parts without which the body cannot sustain itself.

There are also organs of secondary importance whose function is not imperative for the operation of the entire body that basically carry out the instructions of the rest of the organs.

We learn that our body is constructed and organized like a soul. It has a brain, bones, sinew, flesh, and skin, in general, all the parts of the body from top to bottom and inside and out, precisely according to the structure of the soul.

So, there are souls that descend into our world and are developed in it according to special laws for them. If we consider how a fetus develops in the womb of its mother, first one part develops, then another, after that another part, then the first part again. Generally, it is a very interesting order.

The wisdom of Kabbalah scrutinizes this order and explains it. Medicine simply indicates the facts that it sees, but no more than this, while the wisdom of Kabbalah provides a precise explanation for why different parts of the body develop in a such a manner at different times and following a particular sequential order.

Thus, the Ari, Baal HaSulam, Rashbi, Rabash, and other great Kabbalists are special souls who came into our world to leave their continuity in it in the form of the foundations of the collective soul, while we cannot consider ourselves to be like these.

If we had the same preconditions that they had, we would behave and feel this world completely differently. We are simply parts of the collective soul, and all of our work can be summed up in being mutually connected as described by Moses.

It is written in the Torah that Moses developed in a special way. Batya, the daughter of Pharaoh, found him in a cradle floating in the water. Therefore, she called him “Moses” from a word that means “to draw out,” taking him out of the Nile. She took him to the royal palace, and he was brought up as a prince, the grandson of Pharaoh.

When Moses grew up, he became a huge Kabbalist and took his brothers out of Egypt. The moment he did this, his father-in-law Jethro, the king of Midian, the great leader and priest of the Midianites, came to him. He taught Moses how to reconstruct the entire system, and Moses listened to him and divided all of the people into tens, hundreds, thousands, and so forth. Each one had to know his place and work on a connection with others. Since then, it has been customary to do this.

Special individuals like Moses attained an exit to the upper world in a completely special way in which the discovery of the Creator existed, while we work as the Torah commands, gathering as tens, the tens gathering as hundreds, hundreds into thousands, and so forth. In this manner, we invite the Upper Light to influence us. It elevates and purifies us, and we achieve discovery of the upper world.
[202708]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 10/30/16

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How Can We Overcome Shame?

Laitman_632_1Question: How does a Kabbalist overcome shame? It is the strongest most hated feeling a person has?

Answer: What should a person be ashamed of? This is how the Creator manages him. If a person has a problem, he has to turn to the Creator and sort out the problem with Him.

A Kabbalist doesn’t feel shame about anything. If he feels shame, he experiences terrible pangs of conscience because the egoism that has grown convinces him that he is the one who has actually done something, that he has programmed his life, that he has reacted wrongly, or that he has wronged people. But it is all the Creator, not him! These states are given to us on purpose so that eventually we will be able to appreciate ourselves correctly.

This approach is described in Kabbalah books and it is only according to this approach that we can relate to everything correctly. We don’t do it in order to avoid taking responsibility. In fact when we relate to life this way, we put ourselves in a situation where we the created beings invoke and summon the Surrounding Light unto ourselves in order to really manage our future state, but only through the upper world.

Question: It sounds as if a Kabbalist is not afraid of shame or of anything else?

Answer: If a person is in contact with the Creator, the Creator continuously builds him, and so he can ask the Creator to accelerate his development, then it will be totally different, and this world seems very simple. There is only one simple Light that fills it. I advise everyone to see that that’s the way it is.
[201699]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 8/21/16

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Everything Is Vanity Of Vanities

laitman_608_02Question from Facebook: What does the expression “vanity of vanities,” from Ecclesiastes by King Solomon, mean?

Answer: “Vanity of vanities” is a mistranslation from the Hebrew expression “Hevel Hevelim,” proving once again that it is impossible to read the Torah in translation.

In fact, Hevel a-peh is actually a breath, an exhalation of air, which passing through the five parts of the mouth—namely, the vocal cords, palate, lips, cheeks, and tongue—is processed and expressed as five kinds of sounds: dental, palatal, guttural, lingual, and labial. That is why it is said: “the word of God created everything.”

In the wisdom of Kabbalah, Hevel means Ohr Hozer (Returning Light). This is great rule of the emission of Light when a person does not want to receive Light within his egoism, but wants only to resemble the Creator, he rejects it and sends it away. Only this measure still exists in the world and is manifested. Therefore, it is said that everything that happens in the world comes from what is called Hevel, the Ohr Hozer.

This is not vanity but very serious inner work, quite the opposite of what we mean in our world when reading the Torah in translation.

Question: If a person says about worldly pleasures, “all of this is vanity,” does it not have in mind some semblance of Reflected Light (Ohr Hozer)?

Answer: No, this is enormous work a person performs on himself when he must make a Tzimtzum (Restriction) and then a Masach (Screen) to achieve a state of discovering the upper world, rejecting it, and sending it away from himself. Then, he sees that everything is perceived only in the Ohr Hozer.

Thus, it is possible to receive pleasure only through the Ohr Hozer. This is the Hevel. Therefore, “There is none else besides Him.” Everything else is only talking about our world that is not considered to exist at all.
[202023]
From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 1/25/16

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“You Shall Appoint For Yourself Judges And Officers”

laitman_571_06The Torah, Deuteronomy, 16:18: You shall appoint for yourself judges and officers in all your towns which the Lord your God is giving you….

The Creator purposefully erected gates through which one can penetrate into the spiritual world. And we have to put judges and officers so they will direct us and control our animalistic (corporeal) state.

They form the animalistic essence of a person and gradually elevate him; otherwise, we would not be able to pass through the gates of elevation.

A person himself has to appoint judges for himself because it is thanks to this that he begins to understand what steps he has to ascend.
[201497]
From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 9/12/16

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Influencing The Development Of The Soul

laitman_289Question: The Torah talks about a prohibition against fortune telling…does the wisdom of Kabbalah predict the future?

Answer: Fortunetellers only ruin life for us. A person doesn’t need to think about the future and ask questions about maintaining his perishable body. We need to attain a soul. Where is our soul? It is necessary to discover and develop it, connect with it, and live within it, not within the body.

Question: In the Torah it is said that it is necessary to kill, burn, execute, or hang fortunetellers. What is your explanation of this? What are these four types of death according to the Torah?

Answer: What the Torah is talking about is completely irrelevant to our world. When it talks about four types of death, it is not referring to the physical body but to the soul and how it is destroyed by a person. He is the only one who can harm it.

Nobody else has the ability to reach and influence the human soul. A positive influence on it is expressed in elevation to the level of the Creator. A negative influence is a descent through four phases that are symbolized by strangulation, stoning, decapitation, and immolation. But these four types of punishment of the soul are in a case where a person neglects its development.

Question: What does the use of these deaths mean in regard to predictions of my future?

Answer: A prediction of my death symbolizes that I must fix a characteristic within me, which I get rid of from within me. It is an internal correction and no more than that.

Question: A person must correct his own soul. Is he “burning” his uncorrected desires this way?

Answer: Nobody is capable of touching a person’s soul other than himself. If he goes deeply into his spiritual development, he can influence his soul in any direction, either in a bad direction or a good direction.
[200862]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 1/1/16

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