Entries in the 'consciousness' Category

Solution Of The Crisis: Recognition That We Are One

Dr. Michael LaitmanIn the News (from The Guardian): Scientists have learned that selection of a sexual partner depends not on the person, but on the preferences of the species in general. “People are usually attracted to partners with similar facial features to their own, but after a brief but stressful experience, men’s preferences changed to include a wider variety of women, the study found…Lass-Hennemann speculates that stress might increase men’s tendency to “outbreed,” or reproduce with more genetically dissimilar women, with the potential benefit that any children born from the relationship might be better equipped to cope with a stressful environment.”

My Comment: We see that our actions are controlled not by our individual consciousness, but by the consciousness of our biological species. This biological consciousness gives us commands directed towards benefiting the whole organism. In other words, the world is structured so that on the level of biology we obey the laws of Upper Governance as methodically as robots would. Yet we don’t have such programs on the level of social connections, thus we use primitive egoistic programs of our physical body in interactions with other people.

However, these programs are not directed toward survival of the species as a whole, or even us as people. They are directed only towards survival of our biological body and raising the level of its physiological comfort. When we take the same biological mechanism protecting our body, and apply it to interactions with other people, then that protection system prevents us from getting closer with the other person.

At the end of the 20th century, the use of this biological protection mechanism toward social interaction evolved into an egoistic problem for all of humanity. The reason is that we (the human species) are approaching a new level of self-organization that we must move toward in the 21st century. Therefore, if we will not mindfully overcome the forces of repulsion among us, the transition will arrive in a dramatic way.

Every Object Exists Relative To Us And Only If We Can Perceive It

matter A sensation is an impression of a desire, the matter of creation. We think that sensations are only feelings, like love or hate. But in fact, sensations are reality itself!

Vladimir Lenin once gave his own particular definition of matter: “Matter is objective reality, perceived by our senses and existing independent of our consciousness.” He couldn’t be farther from the truth with regard to matter’s objectivity and existence outside our consciousness.

Every object exists relative to us and only in our consciousness, to the extent that we perceive it with our consciousness. Matter is the desire to receive (be filled with Light) created by the Creator (Light, the quality of bestowal).

At different levels, matter aspires to different forms of fulfillment. For instance, the still level wishes to preserve its form, the vegetative level already wishes to attract the beneficial and repel the harmful, and so on.

The Light did not create anything besides the desire that perceives itself.

The Real Crisis Is Not In Finance, But In Our Attitudes

a-new-years-wish-to-the-worldAn editorial in the news (translated from blog.liga.net): Even supposing that the crisis will soon be over, there still won’t be enough work for everyone. People are buying fewer products because they have less money, and in addition, a person without work is a dangerous thing. The only solution is for people all over the world to change their value system and their notions of what they are willing to pay money for.

The crisis is making us realize what is of true value in the 21st century. It is preparing us to change our life values, and to understand the new values for which we are willing to pay money.

If the world’s richest people were to gather and form a world government based on these new values, then the world structure could change. But apparently, such an intent cannot appear without a crisis.

People’s consciousness doesn’t change in conditions of comfort. Stress, or a crisis, is necessary. Everyone needs it – whether they are workers, the middle class, retirees, or homeless – in order to ask themselves the main question: What are the new values that are important to me today?

I have yet to find one person who could give me a straight answer of what to do. Managing the crisis lies not in changing the situation in the external world – since all of this is just vanity of vanities, but the change needs to occur in the human consciousness. That is where all the roots and causes are found.

My Comment: People are already guessing that the crisis is not in finance, but in the need to change our general attitude toward life, ourselves, the world, and Nature. The problem is that we understand that we need to change, but we don’t know how and what to change, and we won’t find these things out by ourselves. We will keep receiving blows, but we won’t know how to evade them correctly.

Nature demands that we rise to the “human” level, which is a level we know nothing about because its qualities are opposite to our current level.

We will develop and eventually recognize the evil of our level, but on our own we will never be able to understand how to shift from evil to good, because this transition involves a new consciousness and new qualities on our part. That is why Kabbalah is being revealed today, as it is the science about revealing our next level.

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: The Main Lesson To Learn From The Crisis Is That We Are All Part Of Nature
Laitman.com Post: A True Diagnosis Is Half The Cure
Laitman.com Post: It Is Up To Us To Turn Poison Into Medicine
Laitman.com Post: The Crisis Is The Revelation Of Our Broken Connnections
Talk on Baal HaSulam Article: “Peace in the World”
Lesson on Baal HaSulam Article: “Finding the Creator Within”

Spiritual Attainment Engages A New Sense And A New Mind

Two questions I received on consciousness:

Question: Once we acquire the sixth sense, come out into the spiritual worlds, and cross the Machsom, will our physical brain start taking part in the attainment? If our five senses’ reaction to the Light is reflected in the brain, how will this happen with the sixth sense?

My Answer: You will engage a new sense and a new mind, which will supplement and expand your corporeal senses and mind. It’s impossible to convey this, but every person is able to feel this.

Question: Albert Einstein – possibly the greatest genius of all time, said that matter is energy, that energy is fluctuating atoms, and atoms are composed of quarks (quantum physics), and then there’s consciousness. Does this mean that consciousness is also energy?

My Answer: Matter is an external manifestation of the desire, or its shell. Consciousness is the desire’s perception of itself, of its own existence. In Kabbalah matter designates the desire – the only thing created by the Light, by pleasure.

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: The Mind Is a Servant of the Desires
Laitman.com Post: In the Beginning G-d Created the Heavens and the Earth
Laitman.com Post: Some Quotes by Albert Einstein
Article: “Finding the Creator Within”
Lesson on Baal HaSulam Article: “Love for the Creator and Love for the Created Beings”

Will Obama’s New Stimulus Plan Work?

realisticIn the News (from The New York Times): “In Effort to Build Support, Obama Details Stimulus Plan” The White House envisions using loan guarantees and other financial support to leverage $100 billion in private sector investment in so-called clean energy projects over three years. The plan would help 8.5 million Americans keep health care coverage by providing workers who lose insurance with tax credits to pay for continuing coverage… The plan would modernize 10,000 schools, improve security at 90 ports and build 1,300 wastewater projects. It would bolster Pell Grants to help seven million students and offer a new tax credit for four million college students. And it would increase food stamp benefits for 30 million Americans and increase Social Security benefits $450 for 7.5 million disabled and elderly people…

In his speech, Mr. Obama said he knew that some worried about the size of his plan, “We won’t just throw money at our problems; we’ll invest in what works.”

My Comment: Investment alone will not work! What’s needed is a gradual change of the social consciousness, making it planetary, global, and integral. It must approach the rule, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” which is the condition of the global world’s existence.

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: Obama Will Have to Change Along With Life
Laitman.com Post: Obama’s New Energy Policy a Good Step
Laitman.com Post: In His Holiday Greeting, President-elect Obama Speaks of Unity

What The Global Education System Should Teach People

The Soul Is the Property of Bestowal, and Until We Develop It, We Remain AnimalsThe global education system should include the theory and practice of attaining the concealed world. It should teach humanity “the attainment or perception of reality.” Scientists already admit this, but are yet to fully comprehend the fact that we cognize the surrounding reality only in our consciousness, and we cannot perceive the “objective” reality, or what lies beyond the limits of our consciousness.

We must cast aside theories that view the universe as existing outside the limits of our consciousness. Reality is composed of our general experience, including scientific experiments, as well as our thoughts, feelings, and intuition. In addition, to the extent we correct our egoism, we reveal a new world inside our corrected consciousness. However, this new world does not exist until we reveal it within.

Actually, our consciousness is a fundamental concept, and modern science already acknowledges this. We never attain anything outside of our consciousness. This is what the principle of “perception’s self-sufficiency” (autopoiesis) says: everything we perceive as our surroundings, the whole universe as it is perceived by man, exists only in the form that we reveal it.

Self-sufficiency does not come from the nature of the universe, but rather from the nature of our attainment, perception. We cannot suffer from lacking a sixth finger, because the sensation of a desire is the preliminary state, preceding the revelation. The Upper Level is first expressed in us in the form of a desire for it, and then It’s revealed in this desire.

Astrophysicists create new models of a “self-sufficient” universe and describe its structure and functionality as being similar to a living system. They are finding more and more evidence for the fact that the universe is alive and connected into one whole on all its levels. Scientists who study evolution agree that the Earth is similar to a huge living cell because of its global, interconnected system on all its levels of life and development.

However, we are still left with the problem of correction: simply studying and accepting the facts does not mean that you are being corrected and becoming similar to Nature. For this, it is necessary to study the next level of our existence, which is explained only in Kabbalah. It turns out that we are left with the same problem of disseminating Kabbalah in the world. At first this should be done without specifying “Kabbalah,” and only gradually, as Rambam suggests, we should reveal the Source of true wisdom.

Charity, Nobility And Other Superficial Measures Won’t Help Us Cope With the Crisis

charityA question I received: The Vice–President of the Russian Union of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs said the following about the outcome of the financial crisis, “You can’t run away from the crisis. The world today is globalized, so it’s stupid to suppose that in the great ocean of instability, there are islands of prosperity that remain. First of all, people have to reduce ‘show-off spending.’ Over the last one hundred years, Americans have developed the notion of ‘noble behavior during a crisis,’ which includes charity.”

My Comment: This is not enough. What we need is a complete overhaul of human consciousness and attitude toward self, the world, and the Creator. Nobility and charity cannot correct anything.

Gradually the world is gaining a recognition of the “non-earthly” tasks it must now resolve, and people will then discover the method of solving them, Kabbalah. But for the time being the world is still comforted by thinking that it’s possible to go back to the past by making superficial changes.

Here is what Martin Wolf wrote in The Financial Times: Choices made in 2009 will shape the globe’s destiny” Welcome to 2009. This is a year in which the fate of the world economy will be determined, maybe for generations. Some entertain hopes that we can restore the globally unbalanced economic growth of the middle years of this decade. They are wrong. Our choice is only over what will replace it.

It is between a better balanced world economy and disintegration. That choice cannot be postponed. It must be made this year. We are in the grip of the most significant global financial crisis for seven decades. As a result, the world has run out of creditworthy, large-scale, willing private borrowers. The alternative of relying on vast US fiscal deficits and expansion of central bank credit is a temporary – albeit necessary – expedient. But it will not deliver a durable return to growth.

Fundamental changes are needed.

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: The Global Crisis Brings the End of Glamour
Laitman.com Post: Wishes for the New Year – 2009
Kabbalah Today Article: What Happened?
Babel – a Tale of Two Trails
Baal HaSulam Article: “Peace in the World”

Some Even Make A Profit Off Of Expired Food

expireNews Report (translated from InoPressa): An Internet store is selling stale products for a third of the price. This is legal in Great Britain, and the number of people willing to consume expired goods just to save money is growing at an enormous rate.

My Comment: Why eat food that has expired!? We have to produce the exact amount of goods necessary, so we won’t have to destroy them. The crisis will teach us the best way to treat nature, life, and the integral system of nature and society. It will teach us to produce and consume only what is necessary for the body, and to direct all the “extra” energy toward bringing all of humanity to one level of bestowal and love, both physically and spiritually.

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: The Classical Wisdom of Kabbalah and the Evolution of the Urgently Needed Planetary Consciousness
Laitman.com Post: There’s a Grand World Outside Our Bitter Radish
Kabbalah Today Article: The Consumer Effect
Lesson on Fundamentals of Human Nature
Shamati #30: “The Most Important Is to Want Only to Bestow”

Why Our “Sacred Values” Aren’t Up For Sale

Is Pride a Form of Egoism?News Report (from National Science Foundation): A team of researchers funded by the National Science Foundation is investigating the role of ethical and religious beliefs, or “sacred values,” in motivating human behavior. The team’s most significant finding is that individuals who hold sacred values are rarely willing to barter them for economic gain. “Our research tells us when there is a confrontation involving sacred values, then offers to give up or exchange sacred values for material incentives is taken as a deep insult…”

My Comment: Here’s the scale of human values, from the lowest to the highest:

  • bodily desires (food, sex, and family); these arise from the bodily needs,
  • social desires (wealth, power, fame, and knowledge); these arise from society’s influence,
  • spiritual desires (revelation of the Creator); these arise from the awakening of a “Reshimo” or a spiritual gene.

Hence, it’s no surprise that we value even the “sacred values” of our world above all others. However, this does not apply to extreme situations, when the instinct of self-preservation compels one to choose the “bare minimum for one’s survival” over all else.

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: Society’s Disdain Helps Us Along the Path
Laitman.com Post: The Classical Wisdom of Kabbalah and the Evolution of the Urgently Needed Planetary Consciousness

The Unconscious Is Smarter Than The Conscious

reasonNews Report (from Science Daily):Our Unconscious Brain Makes The Best Decisions Possible” Neuroscientists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky received a 2002 Nobel Prize for their 1979 research that argued humans rarely make rational decisions. Contrary to Kahnneman and Tversky’s research, Alex Pouget, associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, has shown that people do indeed make optimal decisions – but only when their unconscious brain makes the choice.

My Comment: No doubt, our earthly mind does not feel the goal which the Creator sets for us at every instant, whereas the unconscious is closer to the truth because it is led by the by the instinct rather than the corporeal circumstances. When one’s consciousness isn’t bound by egoism, which desires and calculates everything to make a profit, then one sees the truth!

Hence, we must first rise above egoism and see the world truly objectively, outside of ourselves, of our “I.” Only then can we use our egoism to attain “outside.” This attainment will indeed be called the “Upper World” – a world that’s above egoism, above our nature.

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: There’s a Grand World Outside Our Bitter Radish
Laitman.com Post: Kabbalah Is a Science About the Upper World
Kabbalah Today Article: Rising Above the Ego to a New Level of Consciousness
Article: “Kabbalah – The Key to Perceiving Reality”
Kabbalah for Beginners: “Stage One”