My new article on Linkedin “Different People, Different Worlds”

One sees white where another sees black. One thinks that something is good, and another is certain that it’s bad. Different people, different worlds. How can we collaborate when we are worlds apart, closed inside our shells, and with completely different viewpoints? And, why are we built like this to begin with?

Why is our view so important to us? Our view represents who we are; it is the expression of our self, our ego. If someone disagrees with me, it undermines the foundation of my being, makes me feel unworthy and insignificant, and therefore insecure.

Each person is born with a unique set of traits and qualities. Each person grows in a certain family, under certain conditions, receives a certain upbringing, and lives through different experiences. Each person is influenced through media outlets and social media networks, and all those factors make us who we are.

Because of all those factors, we see the world through different filters, unique glasses that each one wears. This is why it is so difficult, or actually impossible, for us to understand other people. As a result, we find ourselves in constant conflicts. As we try to prove that our view is correct, we forget that each of us is unique, and we end up engulfed in endless ego-wars that lead nowhere but to frustration, despair, and depression.

Why is our view so important to us? Our view represents who we are; it is the expression of our self, our ego. If someone disagrees with me, it undermines the foundation of my being, makes me feel unworthy and insignificant, and therefore insecure.

As long as we are taught that we must compete with each other, we will keep harming one another and regard each other’s uniqueness as a threat. In order to turn our individuality into a socially constructive factor, we must add another layer to our education.

That layer has to do with nature’s complementing contrasts. We have to remind ourselves that all of life consists of contrasts that complement one another and enable each other’s existence. Just as there would be no birth or growth without death and decay, there would be no growth in opinions and ideas without conflicting views. In nature, opposites do not destroy one another; they complement one another, embolden one another, and guarantee each other’s existence. This is nature’s integral formula, and unless we understand its importance and apply it to society, we will destroy each other instead of strengthening each other.

Walking a long journey to reach one’s goal does not happen by hopping on one leg. It happens when we use both legs, left and right, to get to our destination. Human society should be likewise. Our destination is unity, and the only way to get there is by fostering a bond between us. That said, we will have no impetus to bond unless we feel that we are separated and hateful of each other, and must bolster our unity in order to rise above our hatred.

Therefore, when we come across a person whose views we despise, we must keep in mind that that view is there not for us to patronize, but as a basis for building a stronger connection. This remoteness that I feel is my impetus for building closeness, and there will never be another impetus besides the opposite of what we need to build.

People who feel no conflicts with others have no reason to unite; they are content as they are, uninterested and largely indifferent. Only people who are different, who are worlds apart, can ever build true unity, a strong connection, and, ultimately, true love.
[281967]

Filed under: New Publications, Unity - No Comments →

The Mystery of Nature

From the only source, which is the Creator, two forces descend. One of them is the power that relates to Him: the property of bestowal, love, emanation.

The other is an artificial force created by the Creator that did not exist before the beginning of creation —the property of receiving, absorbing, which then became an egoistic property.

Both forces exist in the entire nature of the upper worlds and in our world as a plus and a minus. They are created opposite to each other so that we, who represent the property of receiving, the negative egoistic force, can use our properties to determine the opposite positive force, the Creator, and create certain interactions with it, unification, as in an atom.

One force does not exist separately from another. We always measure, see, feel, and find them in some sort of positioning relative to each other.

Therefore, the negative force in which the Creator created us is necessary precisely in order for us to find, define, and feel Him as a positive, emanating force, and thus be able to begin contact with Him, to detect, define, feel, approach or move away from Him.

In other words, to see what state we are in with respect to the Creator to determine the possibility of absorbing His properties into ourselves.

How can we make ourselves negative to Him as if we are both negative and positive? This is a very difficult question, and even more so its solution.

This is not just the disclosure of the mystery of the unity of minus and plus, the Creator and creation, but the disclosure of how creation develops, reaches its completely opposite state to the Creator, and begins to feel this state as absolutely harmful, unsuitable, and intolerable, and then does everything in order to ascend above it and start to create something positive from your negative self.

How is this possible? After all, creation cannot change its nature in any way. It turns out that it can only change the application of its nature. That is, although I am created completely negative, I can transform even my negative properties, motivations, and actions so that their final result is positive. And how to do it is really a mystery.

We cannot imagine it, that is why we say that this is a secret. We are absolutely not yet in it, but we are in our egoistic negative properties.
[247101]
From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 3/3/19

Related Material:
A Struggle Between Opposites Or Harmony Between Them?
Man And Woman — A Magnet Between Them, Part 1
Harmonious Complement

Filed under: Kabbalah Study, Man and Woman, Unity - No Comments →

My new article on Linkedin “No Calamity Comes to the World but for Israel”

“No calamity comes to the world but for Israel.” These poignant words of our sages (Yevamot, 63a) capture the reason for all the tragedies that afflict us. Not only the Talmud warns about the reason for Israel’s blows. The Book of Zohar also states that when the people of Israel veer off from the right way, “with these actions they bring about the existence of poverty, ruin, and robbery, looting, killing, and destructions in the world” (Tikkuney Zohar, No. 30).

Our nation was formed through a vow to unite “as one man with one heart,” and unity has always been our strength. “The prime defense against calamity is love and unity. When there are love, unity, and friendship between each other in Israel, no calamity can come over them” writes the book Maor VaShemesh.

In the days following the Meron disaster, where 45 people, many of whom children, died in a stampede, the people of Israel proved once more that in crisis, the nation unites. For a short while, we’ve put aside the vociferous, spite-filled arguments, and united in mourning over the pointless loss of life. But tomorrow, when the headlines change and the heart-wrenching pictures give way to new fiascos, the malice will return more intense and venomous than ever. While the circumstances that allowed for this disaster to happen must be examined, we must also not miss out on the opportunity that this tragedy has given us to reconstruct our social relations in this country because this, in the end, is our real source of strength.

In his essay “The Nation,” Baal HaSulam laments our lack of internal unity and ephemeral coalitions. “We are like a pile of nuts,” he writes, “united into a single body from the outside by a sack that envelops and unites them. Their measure of unity does not make them a united body, and each movement applied to the sack produces in them tumult and separation. Thus, they consistently arrive at new unions and partial aggregations. The fault is that they lack the inner unity, and their whole force of unity comes through outside incidents. To us,” concludes Baal HaSulam, “this is very painful to the heart.”

Our nation was formed through a vow to unite “as one man with one heart,” and unity has always been our strength. “The prime defense against calamity is love and unity. When there are love, unity, and friendship between each other in Israel, no calamity can come over them” writes the book Maor VaShemesh.

Moreover, when Israel unite, they are “a light unto nations,” setting an example of love and unity to the world. The Book of Zohar writes that when the people of Israel unite above their hatred, they bring peace to the world. In the portion Aharei Mot, The Zohar writes, “‘Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to also sit together.’ These are the friends as they sit together and are not separated from each other. At first, they seem like people at war, wishing to kill one another … then they return to being in brotherly love. …And you, the friends who are here, as you were in fondness and love before, henceforth you will also not part from one another … and by your merit, there will be peace in the world.”

The onus of unity does not lie on one faction, but on all parts of the Israeli society. It is time we began a national reflection on our conduct as a nation. We can blame each other all we want for the disasters that land on us, but they will not stop until we realize that they reflect not our incompetence, but our division. Naturally, incompetence and recklessness are accomplices in every disaster, but these vices, too, are the results of our callousness and indifference toward each other. If we are content with finger pointing, we’d better get ready for the next blow.

Some of us openly admit their feeling that “we are not one nation.” However, if we use it to justify our alienation from each other, we will suffer more blows until we realize that we are meant to rise above our hatred, not embrace it and brag about our candor. Only when we rise above divisions are we regarded as a nation, and only then does the world welcome us. The book Sifrey Devarim details how in antiquity, people from other nations would come to Jerusalem during the pilgrimages to witness the brotherhood among Jews. They would “go up to Jerusalem and see Israel … and say, ‘It is becoming to cling only to this nation.’”

Indeed, as we embrace the grieving families, we should also embrace the message of unity. As our sages wrote, this is “our prime defense against calamity,” and the only way we can realize the vocation of our nation in this world.
[281874]

Filed under: Israel Today, New Publications, Unity - No Comments →

Question: Is there any reason that the word “Evel” means sometimes bestowal and sometimes vanity?

Answer: Of course! This is how our egoism breaks it. This concept has been translated incorrectly—egoistically. Any word has two meanings: one on the spiritual and one on the corporeal level.

Being at our level, we treat everything for our own sake, and therefore, all words have only corporeal meaning because we look at everything with our earthly eyes. If you look from the level of the upper light, from the level of the Creator, then all this takes on a completely different meaning.

Therefore, any word can be rotated as desired. And the Torah, the Prophets, and the Holy Scriptures, all three books are written in such a way that their understanding depends on the level of the person who reads them. For one person these are just stories describing all kinds of corporeal actions of ancient people. And for another individual, these are spiritual actions that take place in souls and not among people on earth, in the property of bestowal and love and not in struggle and wars.

When you read the Torah, it seems to you that there is a continuous struggle between the chosen people and the Creator, endless wars and disappointments, because you perceive this story in your earthly egoistic properties.

And if you change these properties, you will understand everything completely differently. And it will happen automatically! You will suddenly begin to understand what is being said about how we should unite with each other and, having been united, be filled with the knowledge of the Creator, the feeling of eternal, perfect life.
[281473]
From KabTV’s “The Power of The Book of Zohar” #12

Related Material:
Everything Is Vanity Of Vanities
The Plague Of The Century
The Secret Of Happiness

Filed under: Spiritual Work, Torah, Unity, Zohar - No Comments →

If I am not included in the ten, I cannot effectively impact the world and lead it to correction, because without the ten it is impossible to attract the light that reforms. Alone, I can only transmit theoretical knowledge to the world.

But in any case, it is worth starting to disseminate. If a person has a spiritual spark and is connected to the Bnei Baruch world group, then through it, he will receive the light and will be able to influence the outside world through himself.

Dissemination is when I turn into a channel through which the upper light can reach the uncorrected desires and influence them. If we speak in the ten about our desire to unite, then we connect with each other and through this unity, on one hand, we connect to the Creator, and on the other hand, we connect with the outside world, by wanting to connect one with the other.

This connection is not carried out by explaining the method of correction to people. We simply speak about connection, unity, the future of the world, the purpose of creation, and how it helps us in life and gives answers about the purpose of our existence.

The main thing is to understand that our goal is to correct the Kli of Adam HaRishon, to return it to its perfect state. And that is why the dissemination of Kabbalah is so important today. After all, we have come to what is  called the last generation, that is, the last, general correction. We are right at the transition point from the wisdom of Kabbalah being implemented within a small group, a ten, to the widespread distribution of Kabbalah in the masses, covering the whole world.

This is facilitated by the general state of the world due to the global coronavirus pandemic and other cataclysms in which the world will be drawn more and more. The world will have to go through a very difficult process and experience many unpleasant states. When the upper light approaches us according to the natural course of time and a predetermined program of development, and we are not ready for it, then its approach brings us troubles and problems.

If we are ready for it, then the light will advance us in a good and pleasant way. Therefore, the next decade can be good or bad depending on how much we unite together and connect with the upper light in order to spread the wisdom of Kabbalah through us, that is, to become a channel through which the upper light will affect the entire population of the earth.
[281509]
From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/25/21, “The Importance of Disseminating Kabbalah”

Related Material:
The Path To Correction Depends On Us, But It Is Not Short
How Does A Ten Impact The World?
Holding The Steering Wheel Of The Management Of Creation

Filed under: Crisis, Daily Kabbalah Lesson, Dissemination, Spiritual Work, The Tens, Unity - No Comments →

My new article on Linkedin “Dozens of Reasons to Unite”

“The prime defense against calamity is love and unity,” writes Rabbi Kalman Halevi Epstein in the book Maor VaShemesh. “When there are love, unity, and friendship between each other in Israel, no calamity can come over them. …Even if they worship idols, but there is bonding among them, and no separation of hearts, they have peace and quiet, and no Satan or evildoer, as by this [unity], all the curses and suffering are removed.”

The Book of Zohar, the seminal book in the wisdom of Kabbalah, was written in that spirit, the spirit of love and unity. In the portion Ki Tissa, the book writes, “All those friends who do not love each other depart the world before their time. All the friends in Rashbi’s time had love of soul and love of spirit among them. …Rabbi Shimon would say, ‘All the friends who do not love each other cause themselves to stray from the right path.’ …Abraham loved Isaac; Isaac loved Abraham; and they were embraced. And they were both gripped in Jacob with love and brotherhood… The friends should be like them and not blemish them, for if love is lacking in them they will blemish their value above.”

“The prime defense against calamity is love and unity,” writes Rabbi Kalman Halevi Epstein in the book Maor VaShemesh. “When there are love, unity, and friendship between each other in Israel, no calamity can come over them. …Even if they worship idols, but there is bonding among them, and no separation of hearts, they have peace and quiet, and no Satan or evildoer, as by this [unity], all the curses and suffering are removed.”

Last night, a tragedy of historic proportions struck the people of Israel, as dozens of people were crushed to death on the tomb site of Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai (Rashbi), author of The Book of Zohar. They came there because last night, some nineteen centuries ago, Rashbi and his disciples completed the writing of this book of love and unity. But there, instead of love and unity, thousands were crushed in the stampede, and dozens lost their lives.

The pain and shock are indescribable. It is a time of deep sadness for the whole nation. But when we rise from the grieving, we must take the one and only action that can prevent such tragedies from reoccurring. We must do what our sages throughout the ages have advised us: unite above all our different colors, cultures, beliefs, and opinions.

Masechet Derech Eretz Zuta (Chapter 9), written at approximately the same time as the Talmud, is one of numerous statements in that spirit: “Even when Israel worship idols and there is peace among them, the Lord says, ‘I have no wish to harm them.’ …But if they are disputed, what is it that is said about them? ‘Their heart is divided; now they will bear their guilt.’” Similarly, Rabbi Shmuel Bornstein writes in the book Shem MiShmuel (VaYakhel): “When they [Israel] are as one man with one heart, they are as a fortified wall against the forces of evil.” But perhaps the most fitting on this mournful day are the words of the Talmud (Taanit 23a): “This is what people say: ‘either friendship or death.’”

Filed under: Israel Today, New Publications, Unity - No Comments →

New Life 1304 – Group Discussion
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and NitzahMazoz

First and foremost, we all need to agree on our ultimate goal and that it should be important for us, even if we don’t like discussions. We need to ask ourselves what we are willing to concede and sacrifice in order to achieve the most important, common goal. Each one should integrate in the expectations and heart of the others, the warmth, security, and hope.

We come with an attitude of “each man shall help his friend” and mutual inspiration. The more we develop, the more the ego grows, and the more unbearable our discussions will become. We need to determine that connection with others opens up a perfect future for everyone and it is therefore our sublime, ultimate goal.
[281307]
From KabTV’s “New Life 1304 – Group Discussion,” 4/18/21

Video: Play Now | Download

Audio: Play Now | Download

Filed under: New Life, Unity - No Comments →

The spheres pressuring #Israel are closing in. However, knowing that otherwise this nation will not aim for the upper goal—to be an example of #unity, one recognizes the upper plan in what is happening. This is from above. And from below, influence on the #masses should come from us, by revealing to everyone the #meaning of what is happening in the world: unity.
From Twitter, 2/6/21

Related Material:
My Thoughts On Twitter 2/4/21
My Thoughts On Twitter 1/31/21
My Thoughts On Twitter 1/26/21

Filed under: Israel, Thoughts on Twitter, Unity - No Comments →

Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Will humanity ever be united?“

Humanity will unite in the distant future, but at the moment unity is far from being any kind of priority. In other words, a common desire for humanity’s unity to surface in the global public is still unripe, even though we are developing in that direction.

In order to unite, we need to want unity above and beyond the many egoistic, divisive and materialistic forms that we naturally desire, and we still lack such a desire. We might get hints of it at times, and we can indeed involve ourselves in educational and support systems to more optimally develop a desire to unite, but nonetheless, we still have to undergo various stages of growth until our desire ripens to want unity above all else.

Humanity’s final state is a single unified organism. In that final state, humanity consists of different people, groups and interests, as each has his or her own unique root and development from that root. However, we all share a common understanding of a common unifying goal, and we construct ourselves such that we reach spiritual and worldly balance.

In other words, we will reach a state where we—all of humanity—consciously share the same goal, and create a tremendous atmosphere of support and encouragement to achieve that goal. Mutual support is of utmost importance in this new unified humanity that needs to arise after these tough times we are currently enduring.

We are thus headed toward the creation of a single system of humanity where people will uphold the idea that uniting is more important than giving into naturally-conflicting views and drives, and we will seek to mutually support one another in order to build this unification. When people with opposing viewpoints connect to reach a common goal outside of themselves, they will exist in total harmony and balance.

We are still unripe for the unity of humanity though. We require further development until we develop a sincere desire for humanity’s unity, as well as the realization that it is impossible to achieve that goal on our own. When we reach that stage, though, we will start bearing witness to immensely positive changes in our lives: We will gain the support of a positive unifying tendency dwelling in nature, and experience a newfound balance among each other and with nature beginning to take flight.

Filed under: Q&A, Quora, Unity - No Comments →

As a result of unity, new light comes from above and fills me. I feel that I have made a breakthrough into a new state, onto a new degree and have advanced forward. “And there was evening, and there was morning—one day.” The day begins with darkness. First there will be evening and only then will the morning come, as one day.

If there is no light in the present and no light for the future—this is a sign of transitioning to the next degree, when I am facing a new state, which always starts with a complete zero. One must close one’s eyes and become more invested in the group, think only about unity, and nothing else.
From Twitter, 11/9/20

Related Material:
My Thoughts On Twitter 11/8/20
My Thoughts On Twitter 11/7/20
My Thoughts On Twitter 11/4/20

Filed under: Thoughts on Twitter, Unity - No Comments →