Question: I live in Saint Petersburg. What can I give to the Georgian group while physically present at this congress?

Answer: This is a very good question.

First of all you can give your warmth and physical participation. You can leave them with the impression that many people from all over the world are with them, that they are not alone in the mountains, they are our big family and together we are advancing toward the goal; we can’t do it without each other, otherwise we won’t this goal. If the Creator aroused all of us that means we have to work accordingly, we cannot separate any part of ourselves and say that “we’ll deal with them later.” This can’t be done.

It’s like children in the family: Can one be taken care of at the expense of the other? You have to do something with each child and the same thing applies here.

The most important thing for them to understand is that we see them, we feel them, we’re watching them, and we want to see them growing stronger.

On one hand, we have to offer our help and support and on the other, show them that we expect them to become big and successful. This is the kind of impression we must leave them with and afterward we must constantly keep in touch with them.

This is really a good, serious group and these are good states. Georgia is a very important region. As strange as it may seem, it influences everyone else. There are a few places in the world such as the Baltic states and Georgia where the population is only a few million, but they are very sensitive.

This is why we must help the Georgian group and show great concern.

We have to understand that Georgia in relation to great forces such as Russia, Europe, and America is a rather delicate point. Thus, it’s here in particular that our fine work can give results in many distant places.
[92561]
From the Georgia Convention 11/6/12, Lesson 2

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The next level after love of friends is love the other as you love yourself. We connect not only with the point in the heart but also with all the other values which complement one another like one harmonious chorus. And then I begin to love all the attributes of all the friends because they complement me and I complement them, forming one complete whole.

Through the point in the heart we are not able to connect in order to reach equivalence of form with the Creator. We reach equivalence of form with Him when all of our attributes become completely connected, complementary with each other. Therefore, love the other as yourself is the level on which unity, that is, the Creator is revealed in man.

From here it is clear how important my friends are to me. Their importance is that without them I am not able to reach anything. We are all parts of one creation and we broke and feel ourselves as divided. Everyone is an egoist, feels only himself, and others he feels only to the extent that according to his concepts, they can help him or bother him. This means that friends are only important in mutual work, and it is only when I constantly annul myself in front of them that I am able to connect to them. This is the importance of the group.

Attainment of the goal depends on our constant longing from the beginning egoistic point of each person, the point in the heart, via the group, via the connection to the revelation of the Creator within it. This means the quality of the One, the Unique, the Unified.

The “Creator” is specifically an attribute and not something that exists personally. We can’t feel anything in separation. We feel the manifestation only on matter. Thus, when we speak of a certain force, we mean where and how it is expressed.

Accordingly, when we speak of the Creator, we mean the attribute of unity, uniqueness, love, bestowal, the attribute of abundance, the completeness that is revealed in us. Otherwise, we can’t speak of Him since we don’t know how it can happen externally to us.

So the group must reach a state where it will demonstrate the attribute of the Creator.

From here appear many different conclusions: “How to make a friend”? How to relate to him: as to greater or smaller than myself? Like to a student or to a Rav?

It turns out that all of the answers are correct: Also as an equal, also as a student, and also as a Rav. At first sight, how can he be equal to me, if all of us have completely different natures!? He can be equal to me only in one thing: I am not able to attain the Creator without him and he can’t without me. It seems that from the beginning we are partners in adversity.

And afterward we begin to operate in the following way: Each one of us needs to be above the friend in order to help him, and to be under the friend in order to know how to receive inspiration from what he has, to receive from him the recognition of the importance of the goal, and to yearn for unity. This longing is lacking in each one of us and will always be lacking. It is possible to receive it only from others.

Thus I work with the friends: He is greater than me, he is smaller than me, he equals me. And then a connection really takes place. The main point of this work is called, “Make yourself a Rav and buy yourself a friend.”
[92451]
From the Georgia Convention 11/06/12, Lesson 2

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Question: Currently the entire Internet is buzzing with prognoses that some unpleasant events will take place in December of 2012. What does Kabbalah say about this? Please reassure the world!

Answer: How can I calm you down?

I think it all depends on us, including you. I am not going to calm you down, but completely the opposite because we indeed exist in a very sharp freedom of will and December and the entire next year depend on us. In addition, these states, which we will have to go through, are completely determined only by our world group and by no one else.

Thus, I will not be calming down anyone of you. On contrary, you have to feel very clearly that the entire world depends on you. You have to consciously realize this, meaning that you need to have a serious attitude toward our task, a constant mutual aspiration in your hearts.

Do you feel how our hearts are gathering more and more into one ball? Only this will save our situation and will make it wonderful. It will be wonderful in the sense that we will remember that we have to be closer and more united until we get all of our one heart together. Then we will not be fearful of any calendar.
[92669]
From the Georgia Convention 11/6/12, Lesson 3

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In the News (from NewScientist): “Your attitude towards other people can have a big effect on your health. Being lonely increases the risk of everything from heart attacks to dementia, depression and death, whereas people who are satisfied with their social lives sleep better, age more slowly and respond better to vaccines. The effect is so strong that curing loneliness is as good for your health as giving up smoking, according to John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago, Illinois, who has spent his career studying the effects of social isolation.

“’It’s probably the single most powerful behavioural finding in the world, agrees Charles Raison of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who studies mind-body interactions. ‘People who have rich social lives and warm, open relationships don’t get sick and they live longer.’ …

“Cacioppo reported that in lonely people, genes involved in cortisol signalling and the inflammatory response were up-regulated, and that immune cells important in fighting bacteria were more active, too.”

My Comment: All the latest studies prove once again that a human being is a social creature and his corrected state is in unity with society.
[92713]

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Question: Under what conditions can we see that a group exists and that is headed towards the goal?

Answer: A group that is headed towards the goal is a collection of people for whom there is only one goal. They know what it is, they perceive it among them, and feel it. They study together from Kabbalistic sources; they check themselves according to these sources, and work on the connection of their points in the heart, which means that the main thing for them is the connection as they ignore all the other attributes. If a person yearns for unity in order to reveal the Creator, it is enough for him to be my friend even if he can be an unpleasant person in every other aspect; it makes no difference. Gradually we all understand how to adjust ourselves to one another and to get closer.

A group is a collection of people who understand that in order to attain the Creator they have to work on themselves, to study, and to lead a certain lifestyle. They have to meet on a regular basis and to be so strongly connected that it will constantly lead to connection and unity.

If they just rent a place and gather there, it doesn’t mean that they are a group yet, they meet physically, read together, and then go their own way, does that make them a group? According to the wisdom of Kabbalah everything is determined by the internal awakening and not by the physical bodies.

A group refers to the yearning of the points in the heart to become one whole. Only then it is called a “group.” So we still need to work a lot on this.

But when all the people yearn together for one goal, understanding that only by that will they connect above all the differences, they bring out the Creator’s attribute and by that, overcome the shattering—then they become a group.

So it turns out that all our contrasting attributes are in one egoistic desire. It is as if all the egoistic desires that are opposite from ours, that are in contrast to one another, are now in one sack. We restrict our desires, place a Masach (screen) above these attributes and focus our points at the Creator, at equivalence and bestowal.

It turns out that our connected egoistic desires are left below while our intentions to connect and the yearning for the Creator, to resemble Him and to become equal to Him are above them. This is how the soul, which means the one collective Partzuf is created.

The soul is one. There aren’t many souls. There is only one vessel for everyone. If we create it, we suddenly discover that is has already been created! We only try to discover it and by our attempts we suddenly discover that we already exist in it. This is because that one whole creation already exists while the shattering occurred only with regard to our consciousness. When we yearn to advance we ascend above our current feeling.
[92445]
From the Georgia Convention 11/06/12, Lesson 2

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Question: If we are ready to meet several times a week, to read and discuss things, what prevents us from connecting with the friends?

Answer: Your egoism. It will grow every day, and it will find increasingly greater flaws in your friends so that everyday you will look at them with greater aversion.

Question: Won’t I know the reason for this?

Answer: There can be many reasons. Don’t you believe me? In a year from now we will ask you and you will tell us how you are doing.

There are times when people are simply indifferent: You come, study, you seem to be needed, helpful, and then after getting used to this, you simply stop noticing the fiends for a while.

Then as you work with them, you feel criticism towards them; you find bad points in everyone, until it comes to actual repulsion and alienation.

But the real hatred appears when people are seriously working on connection. Then the true ego appears and is revealed very strongly. This is where the actual serious work begins.
[92398]
From the Georgia Convention 11/06/12, Lesson 2

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Question: It seems that along the process of the integral game, there will be people who will be easily impressed and who will suddenly say: “Oh, I have entered the general state of mind, and now I will teach all of you.”

Answer: In an integral group there cannot be leaders. Everything we discuss is according to the guidance of the moderator. This is one thing.

Second, a person who truly attains the upper world becomes softer and even more concealed. He never speaks about abstract matters; he can tell you jokes or joke about other subjects, but on the whole jokes are a distraction from the truly serious matters, since he is actually in them himself and he doesn’t reveal this.

Question: I am talking about later stages of the game, if we imagine humanity playing the game for 10-20 years …

Answer: First, we don’t play for such a long time since on the way, the recognition of the connection and unity in the group takes place within a couple of days up to a week, it is a very fast movement.

So if humanity begins to deal with it, then within several days the world will totally change. You cannot even imagine that!

People will gladly go where they are told to: to arrange something, to work somewhere. They won’t need anything that is redundant. They will become rational in their attitude to themselves and to the world, to a reasonable, normal way of life.

The main thing is the feeling of connection and unity that gives a person an upper spirit, a mind.
[91893]
From KabTV’s “Talks with Michael Laitman,” 03/10/12 

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Opinion (from Nature): “The principle that ‘popularity is attractive’ underlies preferential attachment, which is a common explanation for the emergence of scaling in growing networks. If new connections are made preferentially to more popular nodes, then the resulting distribution of the number of connections possessed by nodes follows power laws, as observed in many real networks. Preferential attachment has been directly validated for some real networks (including the Internet) and can be a consequence of different underlying processes based on node fitness, ranking, optimization, random walks or duplication. Here we show that popularity is just one dimension of attractiveness; another dimension is similarity. We develop a framework in which new connections optimize certain trade-offs between popularity and similarity, instead of simply preferring popular nodes. The framework has a geometric interpretation in which popularity preference emerges from local optimization. As opposed to preferential attachment, our optimization framework accurately describes the large-scale evolution of technological (the Internet), social (trust relationships between people) and biological (Escherichia coli metabolic) networks, predicting the probability of new links with high precision. The framework that we have developed can thus be used for predicting new links in evolving networks, and provides a different perspective on preferential attachment as an emergent phenomenon.”

My Comment: A human being was created on the principle of an integral cell of a single network, and anything he creates, he creates based on the same principle because he cannot imagine a different connection.
[91983]

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During these days, I am constantly asked questions about the hurricane Sandy that hit the east coast of America. Everyone wants to hear the answer as to why it happened and how we should look at it.

Baal HaSulam writes about this clearly and openly: We are in a single system of Nature and have come to the state in our development when it can no longer tolerate us. As soon as this system begins to show itself as integral, “round,” as soon as overall interdependence is manifested, we must behave accordingly. Otherwise disasters become much more qualitative because they originate not from the animate, but from the human degree.

In the course of history, we were evolving on the still, vegetative, and animate levels. Our egoism was growing, sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker, but more recently at an exponential rate until it has become satiated and “round.” So far, everything went as usual: The more egoistic a person was, the more he could earn and succeed. We thought that this trend would last forever. We were so obsessed with this idea that it obscured the limits of natural resources from us.

However today, when Nature shows itself as “round,” requiring us to become “round” as well, we have found ourselves in a completely different situation. Now it’s not enough to simply reduce our ego and be polite with each other. Today, we have to unite.

We are talking about a very different quality of relationships. If in the past, humanity could bend its ego slightly during wars and disasters, today it won’t help. We need an entirely new unity, and it can come only with the help of the Returning Light because this unity is against our egoistic nature and thus does not arise by itself. So, if our actions don’t help at least indirectly to bring the Reforming Light, then they bring only harm and misery.

Here we see the task of the people of Israel. It possesses the method of Kabbalah—the only means of attracting the Light that allows all of humanity to unite. This is a truly fateful, decisive situation. Today, humanity needs only the Reforming Light. If it doesn’t begin to integrate, it will cause disasters much worse than Sandy.

And the people of Israel are responsible for this. It determines the way forward. If it doesn’t have time to form itself into a connecting link between humanity and the Reforming Light, if it doesn’t carry out the task of Galgalta ve Eynaim, if it doesn’t become a “mediator,” then all evil can turn against it.

Therefore, from a selfish point of view and from the standpoint of the purpose of creation, we must please the Creator. From His side, this means to do good to His creatures, and from our side, to do good to Him. Let’s hope that our studies will help bring the Reforming Light that will correct us and flow through us to all of humanity.
[92046]
From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson, The Zohar

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“Uniting: Building the Future Together”: Dozens of organizations and youth movements have rallied and organized a joint event during which in one day, October 24, 2012, “Roundtables” were held in the central squares of the 12 major cities in Israel. These discussions gathered representatives of Israeli society.

[Show slideshow]

The central event took place at Rabin Square in Tel Aviv, at the Congresses Center in Haifa from 4:30 to 10:00 pm. The event was attended by more than 35 organizations, including 8 of the leading organizers of the event; the Arvut (Mutual Guarantee) movement was among them.
[91518]

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