The vanity of modern life, the myriad changes and trips, and abundant opportunities of communication, do not solve the problem of loneliness. It’s becoming more and more difficult to make new acquaintances, especially in order to create a family. About half of the people living in cities live alone, a tendency that’s only growing.

In the era of total freedom, it has become harder to make new acquaintances. Globalization and individualization are leading to a disintegration of social networks. Cell phones and the Internet are increasing the distance between people. People are increasingly communicating anonymously and virtually, instead of meeting face to face.

This is only the beginning of the expression of egoism – a cancerous tumor that is consuming us little by little. It is digging its own grave, as written, “Egoism is a help against you,” and “The Pharaoh will bring us closer to the Creator.”

Related Material:
Kabbalah Today Article: You Have a New Message 🙂
Kabbalah Today Article: Facebook – What’s All the Fuss?
Kabbalah Today Article: Second Life – Better than the Virtual World!?
Kabbalah Blog Post: The Internet Prison – the Influence of the Internet on Our Lives

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Article: Making Choices Impairs Subsequent Self-Control: A Limited-Resource Account of Decision Making, Self-Regulation, and Active Initiative

Making choices drains a person’s psyche. The freedom to choose is a fundamental value in modern society, where people find themselves having to make choices all the time. However, American physiologists concluded that the need to make constant choices drains the resources of the human psyche, damaging people’s ability to solve basic problems and overcome the difficulties of daily life. The results of the research, on how choice affects the human psyche, were published in the April issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

From the perspective of Kabbalah, when we ascend a level higher, we discover the control panel operating us, and that which seemed as the freedom to choose is actually the realization of the Light’s influence on the Reshimo – the gene of desires. This gene’s activation generates a person’s movement, physically, mentally, and in every which way.

When those studying Kabbalah receive desires from their environment, their group, to “ascend above themselves,” above their egoism, and demand the Light during the study of Kabbalah, then this Light elevates them, evoking a desire to bestow within them. We then “rise above ourselves,” above our desires to receive, and gain the “freedom” to act against our original nature. However, at the same time, we are obliged and compelled to act according to our new nature. This freedom to choose lies between the two natures, in choosing which nature to act in accordance with. Freedom lies in the choice that presents itself in Klipat Noga: “Who will rule over me?” and in response to this, choosing the Creator, similarity to Him. We receive the forces to make this choice to the extent that our environment provides us with the sense of the Creator’s greatness.

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A question I received: Who should you release your personal anger on? Sometimes it’s felt very strongly, and so I wanted to know how it can be used, whether at all.

My Answer: There is no one quality that was created in us without a purpose, and we need to use all of them, including anger. However, how we actually use anger needs to be clarified. When feeling angry, we first need to unite with the One who initiates our existence – the Creator (“There is none else beside Him”) – and our initial conditions for being able to do so are in having a Reshimo and a desire. We then need to determine what depends on us, to which we say “If I am not for me, then who is?” As a result, we should come to hate that which is within us, preventing us from uniting our entire sensation into one whole (“Israel, Torah and the Creator.” Read Baal HaSulam’s letter “Taking the True Path,”* in Pri Chacham, pages 63-64). We should then come to hate external disturbances, treating them as impurities, and neutralize them within ourselves. And because of “the necessity to practice caution with the laws of nature,” one should take after the collective (see Baal HaSulam’s article “The Freedom,” item “Take After the Collective”).

* Note: Baal HaSulam’s letter “Taking the True Path” is not yet available in English, however, below is an English translation of a lesson on this letter with M. Laitman.

Lesson on Pri Chacham Letter on p. 63 – “Taking the True Path”

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Freedom of Will

Does man have the freedom to act according to one’s own free will?

If we consider our actions, we will find they are compulsory, that we are forced to do them, and that we have no freedom of choice, since our actions are driven by either pleasure or pain. Thus, we haven’t the freedom to choose pain or to reject pleasure.

Man’s advantage over the beast is only that one can endure suffering for a remote, future goal. However, here, too, it is not a choice, but rather a calculation. It follows that Providence guides every person towards the goal, using pleasure or suffering, and without consulting us.

The social environment determines what people enjoy; every movement they make is subjugated to the fancies of society.

It follows that if there is no freedom of will, one is not one’s own master. And if we are not our own masters, that is, if we do not do what we want to do, but what society dictates, then there are no reward and punishment. [Read more →]

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A question I received: These days, many women are taking national leading positions. Some examples are Angela Merkel (Germany), Tarja Halonen (Finland), Vaira Vike-Freiberg (Latvia), Cristina Kirshner (Argentina), Pratibha Patil (India), Gloria Macapagal (The Philippines), Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf (Liberia), and Yulia Tymoshenko (Ukraine). It also looks like France and the USA are next. What does Kabbalah have to say about this situation of women taking national leadership?

My Answer: It doesn’t correspond to the spiritual system. In our era, equal rights seems correct and just, while the demands of spirituality (where the woman helps, directs, strengthens and approves, while the man attains the Upper Light of correction and fulfillment) seem sexist.

Nevertheless, if we don’t correspond (as much as humanity’s desire for spirituality develops) to Nature (the Creator, the property of absolute love), we’ll disfigure our existence. Our dissimilarity and imbalance evoke the negative forces of correction, which we feel as suffering, and Nature (the Creator) will nevertheless make us follow its laws by force.

So we can follow Nature laws either by being forced, i.e. through the path of suffering, or we can consciously will ourselves to follow them. The place of our freedom is not in inventing our own paths, because there’s only one truth and only one path to it (the same path through which we descended from the World of Infinity). The place of our freedom is in our aspiration (our request for correction), above our egoistic aspirations (to receive), and our striving toward the goal of Nature (to bestow).

Why is it that women are being allowed to take leadership positions in our times? It’s because they use their egoism more carefully than men. When it comes to today’s enormous egoism, a woman’s egoism is better and calmer than a man’s.

(In the photo: my daughter and I.)

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There’s nothing more criminal in the modern world than the falsehood and irresponsibility permeating mass media. Anybody can write, anything can be written, and it also costs next to nothing, reaching and spoiling everyone. A person’s destiny completely depends on the environment (see Baal HaSulam’s article, “The Freedom“). Crimes, crises and suffering are all results of the involuntary absorption of incorrect and harmful information. Mass media feeds us this information and gets us hooked on it, changing the way we think and ruining us. Thus, by changing mass media, we’ll change the world!

Mass media needs to change to the degree we change. However, it needs to lead the way, as a group helping us reach a higher goal.

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A question I received: Why are people afraid to fall under the influence of a certain environment, such as a sect? One way or another, they’re influenced by their surroundings, and even though their surroundings are broad, they still aren’t free. Maybe it’s because the influence of a broad environment – the whole world – isn’t felt so much, creating an illusion of freedom?

I think that this is the main obstacle in disseminating Kabbalah, i.e. the demand for a person to create a proper environment for himself. People today don’t even want to start a family because they’re afraid of being dependent on their spouses and children. They feel a basic fear towards it. But maybe this will change as they experience more and more suffering?

My Answer: You’re right. Besides the society that Kabbalah urges one to create (whether a civilization or just a group of Kabbalists for now), all other societies (civilizations, religions, communities) are sects, because they impose their views on people and manipulate them. We know that that’s how the mass media and the government operate.

Take religious people as an example: Instead of providing their children with knowledge and the opportunity to choose their own path, religious people deliberately don’t educate them and impose upon them a special dress style, in order to keep them dependent on their environment.

Even though the environment rules over the person, he doesn’t feel subjugated because others encourage conformity to society, and this fulfills his ego. But today we see that egoism is outgrowing the social framework, because it’s getting ready to turn to the Creator. Therefore, people are acting against their environment (their families, clans, or religions). It takes time, but people will soon discover that a person isn’t free in any society or even within himself, and that freedom can only be found within a group that seeks to attain similarity with the Creator.

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A question I received: The article “Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them” states that, according to a research that was performed, “researchers using brain scanners could predict people’s decisions seven seconds before the test subjects were even aware of making them.” So my question regarding this is simply, do we have freedom of choice?

My Answer: A person doesn’t realize that his inner system of desires has already made all the calculations and put out the result. Such studies prove what Kabbalah has been saying all along: everything depends on our desire, and not on our external, philosophical reasoning. Thus, only the Upper Light can correct us; we cannot correct ourselves on our own.

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