Question: How does one achieve a state of “There is none else beside Him” (Deuteronomy 4:35) in order to make our work easier?

Answer: This is very simple. There must be a formal approach. Every time something happens with me, through systematic exercises I try to return to the thought that the Creator is doing all of this. This is done mechanically with the help of the friends in the group who remind each other about this.

Everyone tries to return to this by making notes on paper or on the cell phone. At one time, I wrote reminders on my hand because then there were no means of communication like there are today.

This is a long way that takes several years until you begin to feel how important the Creator is. That is why we are learning the concept of the “greatness of the Creator,” because if He is important to me, then I remember Him and I don’t forget. For example, my little child is important to me and so I think about him constantly, I remember him and want to do something for him. Importance determines everything.

So, it is necessary to think about this and talk with each other, even if just mechanically. Don’t worry about it seeming to be automatic. That doesn’t interest anyone, it doesn’t particularly concern anyone. In any case it works. Even when we are dealing with this automatically, without emotion, without desire, yet as it is said, “A penny and another penny combine to a great sum” (Baba Batra 9b).

The main thing is the importance. So, it is necessary to constantly bring up the Creator, talk about His being the first and the last, which is to say He both begins and locks in the entire chain of cause and effect where we are found.

On my part, I must constantly make efforts to determine that He is the only cause and try to discern Him behind everything that is happening. Suppose someone says something, I see something, I grasp something emotionally. It is all from Him.

I feel the Creator through some kind of intermediate system: people, events, nature, it doesn’t matter what it is. There is some kind of inhibition, a block in the connection that conveys the influence of the Creator to me. I must constantly aim toward Him. That is the most important thing!

When I tune in accordingly and try to feel that behind every phenomenon, every sensation, behind every thought of mine is the Creator (a thought is much more difficult to connect with the Creator and a sensation is much easier), and all this is correlated with Him, then in this measure I am already rebuilding the broken system, thereby bringing joy to the Creator, and beginning to work together with Him.

Here very serious, entirely new relationships begin to appear between me and the Creator.

So, the main thing about our connection is that He will suddenly become important to me. I remember how it began with me: The Creator suddenly began to be revealed behind everything, not just behind the group, not just in this world, not just with the friends, not just in positive or negative influences on me; rather, He was apparently found to be the origin of influence.

This is a very important point, and we must develop it. The moment you determine that the Creator is the origin of everything that is happening with you, you will begin to become stronger in it. So, every moment, in every event, thought and feeling, try to bring everything back to Him.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 2/13/19

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Question: Does the Creator know exactly what I will attain and when I will attain it? Does He simply watch the movie in which I am trying to attain it and suffer?

Answer: No, the Creator doesn’t just watch us. He has arranged, organized and created everything so that we will consciously participate in our movement forward together with Him and become partners. This means that He actively participates in our movement upward.

Question: What is the compass and what is “North” in spiritual space?

Answer: Only the group. The Creator is in the center of the group.

So moving toward the Creator means getting closer to each other in our desires for Him, which means to the center of the group, and then you will never go wrong. You will see that the Creator helps you and makes you His partner.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 8/18/19

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Preparation to the Lesson

Writings of Rabash, “Letter 16”

Selected Highlights

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How can one reach a prayer that will come from the very bottom of the heart and will reach the Creator? We need to imagine that we are inside the Creator, the only force, apart from which there is nothing.

And therefore everything we receive and feel, everything that happens in our thoughts and desires, comes to us from the upper force, the good who does good. And if I don’t perceive it as good and benevolent, then I feel suffering and have to ask the Creator to change my perception.

I have nowhere else to turn. I can’t change myself because I didn’t create myself. I can only ask the Creator to help me change. Moreover, I ask not to change my desire to receive, but to add to the desire given to me by the Creator an intention for the sake of bestowal. In all my qualities, desires, and aspirations I want to work for the sake of bestowal.

I’m not asking to change my desires, but rather my intentions. And to the extent that my intentions are similar to the Creator’s intentions, I will reveal Him and His desire to bestow to me. We will meet with Him within our intentions, and there I will reveal my merging with the Creator.

There are no personal calculations on the part of the Creator, everything depends only on us. The Creator is absolute goodness toward everyone. He is always in absolute bestowal, without any delay. Therefore if we are ready, we will get His answer. And if we are not ready, then we have nowhere to receive and feel His attitude to us; every moment He tries to advance us to merge with Him.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 10/17/21, Writings of Baal HaSulam, Shamati #24 “He Will Save Them from the Hand of the Wicked”

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If I do not see success, it means I am not working in the group. It is impossible to reveal the Creator alone. You must be in the ten in order to do this.

The person is inside the group and the group is inside the Creator. I cannot bypass the group and break through to the Creator; I must connect with it, and only after that will I reach the Creator. After all, I myself have no vessels, no ten Sefirot for communication with the Creator.

I have only one Sefira Malchut, so I have to annul myself before the group, which are my first nine Sefirot. Then I will have the full ten Sefirot, and with them I can reach the Creator. It is a law of nature and it does not work in any other way. If I do not work in a group, I will not come to the revelation of the Creator.

Everything starts with my annulment to the group. This means that I exit my individual perception and become included in the group, and then together with my friends I already face the Creator. Therefore it is said: “From the love of the created beings to the love of the Creator.”

The group is not just a springboard for jumping to the Creator, but a vessel inside which I reveal the Creator. I have to prepare the Kli for feeling the Creator by becoming included in external desires and nullifying myself. To the extent that I nullify myself toward the group, I can feel how the Creator is also nullified toward all of creation.

This is a very strict principle by which the system of nature works, and we cannot change it. If we accept it we will reveal the Creator, and if we do not accept it, we will not reveal Him. The group is a vessel for revealing the Creator. After all I am just one point, one pixel, and I cannot do anything alone. I need friends, preferably ten of them.

I become included in the friends as Malchut in the nine upper Sefirot and accept their egoistic desires through my nullification. It turns out that I already have a Kli in which I am included above my ego, and therefore I can reveal the Creator. The rest of the friends will reveal the Creator according to the efforts each of them made. Maybe I feel the Creator at the 8^th degree, and someone has nullified himself more and feels Him at the 15^th degree, and another one even more, and so on until the 125^th degree.

I have nothing to look for within myself by delving into my egoism. There is nothing but egoism within me. The Creator can be revealed only above egoism. Therefore when I am included in the group, I get a springboard that allows me to jump above my egoism.

Despite the fact that perhaps my friends are egoists, if I nullify myself before them, then they turn into a Kli for me, a Kli in which I reveal my nullification toward an external desire and toward the Creator. Therefore I reveal the Creator within this Kli.

The Creator is revealed within the friends. It does not matter that the friends are not corrected because I reveal not their qualities, but the Creator, to the extent of my nullification toward them.

Therefore the group is not just a means to jump over to the degree of the Creator. I meet with the Creator within the group to the extent of my inclusion in it! And not only that. The entire common desire of creation that exists in the universe on the inanimate, vegetative, animate, and human levels turns into the matter within which I reveal the Creator.

Therefore it is worth annulling ourselves to the group as much as possible, but always with the intention to reach the Creator through this. In the group everyone builds their own view of the friends in such a way that the upper force can be revealed there.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 10/17/21, Writings of Baal HaSulam, Shamati #24 “He Will Save Them from the Hand of the Wicked”

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New Life 1320 – The Generation Gap
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Yael Leshed-Harel

Nature creates generation gaps so that humanity will advance. It is impossible to convey the wisdom of life to younger generations, so we need to establish an environment that reflects positive values. If an adult has a desire to give, he should try to learn what is good for the young person and give that. A parent should be close to his child, like a friend, so that he can speak to him freely about everything without moralizing or criticizing.

Only love can help us communicate and bridge the generation gap. We should show a child that if he does something wrong, he makes us change our attitude toward him. There is a wide pipeline between our child and us through which love constantly flows, but the key to the tap is in the hands of the child.
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From KabTV’s “New Life 1320 – The Generation Gap,” 10/10/21

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My new article on Linkedin “Extremist Islam, a Petrified Europe, and the Fate of the Jews”

On Friday, Sir David Amess, a long-serving British lawmaker from the Conservative Party and the Honorary Secretary of the Conservative Friends of Israel since 1998, was stabbed to death while meeting with constituents in a church building in his home district. A 25-year-old man of Somali descent was arrested and the counterterrorism division of London’s Metropolitan Police force formally declared the incident an act of terrorism. According to its statement, “The early investigation has revealed a potential motivation linked to Islamist extremism.”

On Wednesday, two days prior to the attack in the UK, a Danish convert to Islam killed five people in the Norwegian town of Kongsberg. The killer was a convert from Christianity to Islam and “Police had been concerned about signs of radicalisation in the suspect before the attacks,” a senior officer said.

There is very little Europe can do against the expansion of fundamentalist Islam. Both Muslim immigrants and native Europeans who have converted are becoming radicalized with dire ramifications for Europe and far reaching implications for Jews.

For centuries, Christianity had governed in Europe. It launched crusades to the land of Israel and was triumphant against invading belief systems, mainly Islam.

However, today’s Europeans are hardly religious, especially in Western Europe. In many ways, this leaves people feeling empty and in search of meaning. Into the void comes the currently most vibrant and aggressive religion on the planet: Islam.

However, in many cases, it offers its explanation in such a dogmatic manner that people are given the choice to become devout and fanatic Muslims and get financial support, education, and a fully organized life, or be subject to constant intimidation, threat, and indeed homicide. For its part, old Europe is too tired and too insecure to stand up to the threat. It is yielding to the new power.

For Jews, this can only mean trouble. Israel is already portrayed as the epitome of evil in many distinguished academic institutions, the Progressive Left and Extremist Islam are in complete agreement when it comes to maligning Israel, and the rest of the world seems content with offering polite disapproval of any sort of bigotry.

But hatred isn’t passive; it percolates and slithers into the hearts of more and more people. Today, the veil of anti-Zionism is easily removed and exposes the antisemitism underneath. If people were embarrassed to admit that they support anti-Jewish views until just recently, now they are embarrassed to admit that they do not support such views. When antisemitism becomes mainstream, it becomes institutionalized. When it becomes institutionalized, terrible things happen to Jews.

As always, when the world is in crisis, and today it is, it turns its anger at the Jews. We see it as looking for a scapegoat, and perhaps it is from the perspective of the rulers, but there is much more to it than that.

From the perspective of most people, Jews are indeed responsible for all that is bad in the world. They do not usually act on their feelings or express them, but they feel it nonetheless. When things get really bad, they begin to air their feelings. Therefore, what we perceive as an increase in antisemitism is actually venting of preexisting sentiments.

The only cure against the growing aggression against Jews is Jewish unity. We’ve always hated that cure because we hate one another more than we hate our haters, but it has always been our only rescue. When we did not use it, we were not rescued.

It is not as though we’ve never known about it. In my book Like a Bundle of Reeds, I dedicate an entire chapter to excerpts from Jewish spiritual leaders of every era reminding us that unity is our only salvation. Had we been united, our sages say, no misfortune would have come to us. “When there are love, unity, and friendship between each other in Israel,” states the book Maor VaShemesh (Light and Sun), “no calamity can come over them. … [If] there is bonding among them, and no separation of hearts, they have peace and quiet … and all the curses and suffering are removed by that [unity].” Similarly, the book Maor Eynaim (Light of the Eyes) stresses, “When one includes oneself with all of Israel and unity is made … no harm shall come to you.” Likewise, the book Shem MiShmuel (A Name Out of Samuel) adds, “When [Israel] are as one man with one heart, they are as a fortified wall against the forces of evil.”

The darker the clouds of Muslim fundamentalism grow in Europe, the more vigil Jews should become. Moreover, these clouds are now amassing not only in Europe, but in the United States, Latin America, and all over the world, and not only from Islam, but from all religions and all the nations. It is time for the entire Jewish people to unite and take the one pill that protects against Jew-hatred: Jewish unity.

For more on this topic, see my books Like a Bundle of Reeds: Why unity and mutual guarantee are today’s call of the hour, and The Jewish Choice: Unity or Anti-Semitism, Historical facts on anti-Semitism as a reflection of Jewish social discord.
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My new article on Linkedin “This Horror Show Shows Who We Are”

A student of mine told me about a new show called “Squid Game.” It is a South Korean “thriller series,” as they call it, which has become a pop culture phenomenon and is the no. 1 show in more than 90 countries. The show presents several hundred people who are all in great financial debt and in dire emotional states. The producers pit them against each other, even if they are very close, and make them hate each other. The winner takes millions of dollars, and the others are killed. This show wouldn’t be so horrifying if it didn’t portray our true nature. The very fact that we watch such a show enthusiastically is proof that underneath the “civilized” façade, our nature is as the show depicts.

It works like a magnet. We love to watch the struggle between good and evil, as long as we are safe from the consequences of the battle. The thing is that in this show, there is no good; there is only evil.

Indeed, humans are the worst being in reality. What makes us so uniquely evil is the fact that we explicitly want to harm others. We do not want to eat others because we will starve unless we do so; we want to see them suffer! We derive pleasure from others’ pain, and derive the most pleasure when we are the ones inflicting it.

We often say that reality is like a jungle, where the strong eat the weak. However, in the jungle, the strong do not want to destroy the weak; they want to eat. Once they are full, they want to sleep and play, and not kill or hurt for fun. In the human jungle, we do not want to eat other people; we want to see them hurting! This is why the natural jungle thrives without any laws while the human jungle, which we mistakenly refer to as “civilization,” is disintegrating despite the laws that strive to limit our barbarity.

If we had any hopes of finding goodness in human nature, “Squid Game,” and mainly its popularity, proves that we have nothing to hope for when it comes to human nature. If we can create such shows, and if they can be so popular, then we can do such horrors in real life.

The only possible good that can come out of such a show is the realization that it is not fantasy, but an authentic depiction of who we are. Maybe if we realize this, we will be willing to do something about changing ourselves.

The current trend is to dull our awareness of the human horror show we live in by making cannabis available and legal. Indeed, the more we learn about human nature, the more we realize that perhaps it is better to numb ourselves through life until it’s over.

For now, we’re cheering at the sight of other people suffering, much like people used to cheer at the sight of poor men fighting against lions in ancient Rome. Only if we realize that it is not okay to be like that, our minds might open to other options. If such a diabolical program can be the no. 1 show in more than 90 countries, it means that the entire world is immersed in unhinged viciousness.

There is a solution, but it is demanding and must encompass the entire world if it is to succeed. To change who we are, we must initiate a worldwide educational process where such programs are forbidden and pro-human-connection programs are produced and aired. Even if they are not popular, at first, we cannot allow ourselves to be exposed to the violent poison and culture of narcissism that we consume today. They may be sweet, but they are lethal.

If people don’t want to watch shows about human connection, they can put aside their media devices and simply talk to one another. This will already be a major improvement to the current situation.

It may not sound like fun, but what is the option? To live out the “Squid Game.” Besides, after some practice, we will discover that connection and care are far more rewarding and pleasant than destruction and cruelty, and do not carry the negative side effect that is our current culture.
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My new article on Linkedin “Equality, Equity, and Identity Politics”

Identity politics is everywhere in both the US and Israel. Identity politics values people according to their ethnic or religious groups. Worse yet, a person who sympathizes with identity politics dedicates all of one’s attention to righting the wrongs purportedly inflicted on one’s own identity group: black, white, LGBTQ, Muslim, Jewish, Asian, male, female, and countless other groups that one can belong to. Identity politics professes to demand justice when in fact, it breeds hatred that can lead to civil war.

Any identity politics, whether presented as such or as part of Critical Race Theory or Intersectionality, induces fragmentation of society and weakens it because it focuses on what separates people rather than on what connects them. Unity is the only way a country can survive. Therefore, even when we cannot find anything that connects us, we should strive to create that connection above our separation. We should know that anyone who portrays identity, race, or any faction as more important than unity is striving for division and will not contribute anything positive to the country or even to the faction he or she purports to represent.

Many American Jews, for example, passionately support Critical Race Theory. If they haven’t already, they will soon discover that their ideology has turned against them. It will not help them to claim that they support oppressed minorities. The fact that they are considered white and privileged, and even more so, the fact that they are Jews, will haunt them and they will not be able to escape retribution.

If Jews want to avoid another episode of persecution, they must shift their focus from defining one’s social status by race, to defining it by care. The more one cares about people, whoever they are, the more one should be valued. We need a care-based society rather than a race-based society, and not just in the US or in Israel, but around the world.

Equity has become a buzzword among many advocates of identity politics. But equity is a poor surrogate for the real thing: genuine care and mutual responsibility. When you have these, you don’t need equity because you naturally treat everyone kindly. The fact that we are trying to promote equity shows our absolute failure in nurturing a caring society.

We needn’t settle for it. If we try to enforce equity, we will only increase division and hate, but there will be no equity or justice. However, if we nurture care and concern, we will have equity, equality, and no concern at all for one’s identity.
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