In the News (translated from Javno): This year’s traditional Vanity Fair will have no hint of glamour because of the global crisis. The traditional glamorous party Vanity Fair fashion magazine organizes every year after the Oscar awards will this year be far from the glamour attendees of the event are used to. As the global economic crisis is affecting all areas, the leaders of the renowned magazine decided to organize a rather humble party and reduce the list of invitees as much as possible. “We will curb expenses this year,” the magazine’s editor said, adding that the party would resemble the magazine’s first party 15 years ago which was pretty humble.

My Comment: Naturally, everything that was artificially created by humans will eventually come to an end. Only the natural existence will stay, along with spiritual development.

Glamour is often so tasteless, because people just want to “sparkle.” But this is already disappearing. Glamour has outlived itself.

The crisis does not mean that the world is falling apart, but that its false, shiny shell is. And just like a chick is born from an egg, this shell will break to reveal the birth of a new life – a new world that exists by the eternal laws of Nature, the laws of bestowal and love.

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Question: In one of the lessons you said that America is built egoistically to unite more than other nations because it is comprised of different nations (is ethnically and culturally diverse), and that it is going to be okay in this crisis if the people unite. My question is: doesn’t this speak to some space in me? Some space inside me that egoistically would like to get along with the other people in my life?

My Comment: Of course, this is how we start correcting our nature: by searching for a better egoistic life. However, while studying Kabbalah we begin to feel the value of having a direct altruistic attitude to others; its independence, greatness, and the infinite, eternal sensations that become revealed in it. And then we discover how to attain this, and consciously aspire to come out of egoism.

In the News (translated from SvobodaNews): The Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Science (IERAS) reports that Russians are faced with a decline in income. They will have to take any job, save money, raise their professional qualifications, and support each other. At this time it is important to stay connected with family and friends, because people will have to come out of this difficult situation together.

My Comment: Indeed, this prolonged suffering will force people to unite – and not just within each nation, but all the nations together. Kabbalah enables us to understand what is happening, and then people will also be able to quickly understand what to do in order to attain equivalence with Nature, with the quality of bestowal and love. This quality is the basis for survival in the unified system of humanity.

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News Report (translated from Scepsis.ru): The recent years, dubbed the “era of globalization,” will not go down in history as years of prosperity. They will be studied (if there will be someone left to study them) as a time of bloody regional wars, the growing poverty of the Third World, and the crisis of the Western middle class; a time when technological progress and financial speculation brought outrageous profit to tens of thousands, while casting hundreds of millions to the bottom of the social ladder.

The current crisis will be no exception: as we speak, some are already making plans to ensure that the losses suffered by the financial speculators will be reimbursed at the expense of regular citizens and debtors from poor countries.

My Comment: It all depends on how you view the crisis. Kabbalah views it as the beginning of goodness – as the revelation of the evil that is our egoism, the revelation that egoism is the one and only source of evil in our lives. It is the reason why we only perceive a tiny, negligible fraction of our eternal existence. This revelation, that egoism is evil, will be followed by a renunciation of it, and then by the correction of human egoism to bestowal and love.

We will then feel our existence as eternal harmony, called the Upper World or Paradise. And we will feel it both during the life of our physical body and after it dies. So let us accelerate this process by studying the method of our correction.

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News Report (from Physorg): “Reverse evolution in real-time” Evolutionary biology tells us that replaying life’s tape will not look at all like the original. Now, scientists provide the first quantitative genetic evidence of why this is so. In this study, to be published online this week in the journal Nature Genetics, scientists recreated natural selection in real-time, in the laboratory and provide the first quantitative evidence for natural selection on so-called standing genetic variation. The researchers used laboratory-grown populations of fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster)… some of the ‘reversed’ flies may be phenotypically identical to the ancestral flies, but they are genetically different.

My Comment: Creation descended from the highest level to the level of our world in order for man to consciously ascend – along with our entire world – back to the perfect level of bestowal, love, harmony, and balance. All movement is pre-programmed in advance, so as to advance only toward the final goal. This goal will necessarily be attained, and everything is moving along just one path.

However, man can either slow the process down or accelerate it. By doing the former, he evokes suffering and crises, and by the latter – abundance and comfort.

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News 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.

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News Report (from WebWire): “A Crowded World: Researchers use computer scenarios to study crowd behavior in time and space” The scientists at the School of Geographical Sciences at Arizona State University have created a model of crowd behavior. Their results were as follows:

1. There is rapid exchange of nonverbal information in crowds

2. The actions of a single individual can shape the dynamics of an entire crowd

3. Individuals who would never ordinarily engage in anti-social behavior such as looting might do so anyway when associated with a riotous crowd; and, conversely, anti-social individuals may see their bad behavior checked by other members of a well-behaved crowd.

My Comment: The science of Kabbalah has been explaining the same laws of individual and social behavior for thousands of years. It explains these and many other laws, how to use them to benefit the individual without infringing on his freedom and while enabling him to develop harmoniously, and how to use these laws for the benefit of society in a way that avoids conflicts between the individual and the society. It explains how the two can come to an ideal coexistence, where individual gain is equal to social gain. This is possible if the importance of the individual is equal to the importance of society as a whole, by observing the law, “The general and the particular are equal.” This observance is possible when everyone is equal and interdependent, and every person strives only to fulfill the desire of the single whole, seeing this as his mission and receiving absolute fulfillment from it.

This is the state we exist in from the very beginning. It is called the “World of Infinity.” We must desire to ascend (morally) from our present state, called “this world,” to the level of the “World of Infinity.” This desire will draw onto us the Light (feeling) of bestowal and love, which fills us in the “World of Infinity” – and this Light will then correct us, giving us the quality of “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” This isn’t inconceivable. Even scientists now prove that an individual’s qualities can change instantly under the society’s influence. Therefore, everything depends on our decision to create the right influence over each and every one of us. Therein lies our freedom of will.

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News Report (from The New York Times): “Project Created to Restore Ancient Babylon” A master plan is being developed for the restoration of the Mesopotamian site of the ancient city of Babylon, in present-day Iraq. The “Future of Babylon” project, financed by a $700,000 grant from the State Department, will map the city’s archeological sites, develop conservation plans and pursue possibilities for tourism and education.

My Comment: This is a landmark event because our global civilization is a replay of ancient Babylon. In the past, Babylon was a place with the same conditions as we have today – those of a “small village” and “the Butterfly Effect.” In other words, people’s egoism grew by leaps and bounds, and they stopped “understanding one another.” This is how we got the expression that “they began to speak different languages.” Yet, at the same time, people revealed that they were completely interdependent.

That’s when one of their priests, named Avram, began to examine the crisis and revealed its cause: it was happening because Nature (or the Creator) was pushing people towards unification. As a result of his research, he attained correction – the revelation of the quality of bestowal and love within him. He also realized what kind of connections are necessary in a closed system in order for it to survive and function correctly. He changed his name to Abraham, where the additional letter ה (Hey or “h”) designates the addition of the Upper Force (bestowal and love) to him. Thereafter, he wrote a book called The Book of Creation.

Abraham taught what he had learned, and thereby formed a group of students. He called them Israel (Isra – El = straight to the Creator), and together they went to what would become the land of Israel. As for the Babylonians who remained behind, they got rid of the crisis by breaking the connections between one another and dispersing all over the planet.

Today, just like Abraham’s science, Kabbalah,  predicted, from the end of the 20th century on, we have once again entered the state of “a small village” and “the Butterfly Effect.” However, this time we have done so on the global scale, so there’s no place to run in order to destroy our globalization. Hence, there are two paths before us:

1. Suffering, due to the discord in our civilization’s system, or
2. We can use Kabbalah as the method of correction.

Either way, we are obliged to correct ourselves so as to reach the level of observing the conditions of existence in a closed system, where every person will have to live by the rule of, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

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Dear readers of the blog,

Please don’t get offended if it appears that your questions are being “disregarded.” The thing is that the questions often repeat themselves, and I’m sorry, but I don’t answer the same questions over and over. However, whenever there are new questions, and they are substantial, I always answer them! That’s why I recommend that you read back through the blog – you’ll find all the answers there!

Thank you,
With love,
Michael

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News Report (from BBC News): “Is love just a chemical cocktail?” Writing in the respected scientific journal Nature, Professor Young argues that love can be explained by a series of neurochemical events in specific brain areas. … Researchers have found that oxytocin is involved in the bonding of male and the female prairie voles, which like humans, form an intense bond with each other that lasts for a very long time.

My Comment: Love, like any other feeling, brings about physio-chemical reactions in the organism. Otherwise, we wouldn’t feel it. However, these reactions are just an external manifestation, or the result, of our feelings.

Scientists are solving our problems backwards: they suggest influencing our feelings with drugs or chemicals. Science is approaching the situation from the only angle that it is able to.

On the other hand, Kabbalah explains that the foundation of all matter is the desire to enjoy. Furthermore, Kabbalah teaches us how to change our desires and control them. Then we will be able to control all other changes, which are just the results of the desires and the changes happening to them.

The division of nature into the still, vegetative, and animate levels is also nothing but a gradation of the desire to enjoy – “to preserve oneself and to develop,” or “to draw closer to what’s beneficial and move away from what’s harmful.”

Science cannot unlock the mystery of love – this cannot be solved with chemical means. Kabbalah, on the other hand, teaches us how to change our feelings, and even to ascend above them. In our transformed feelings, which will change from hatred to love for the neighbor, we will perceive “the world outside of us” – the Upper World, a state that’s eternal and independent of our bodies.

This is love, but not the corporeal type.

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News Report (from Health News): As many as one in eight teens in the United States takes a virginity pledge at some point, vowing to wait until they’re married before having sex. But do such pledges work? A new study suggests that the answer is no. According to a study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, pledge takers are as likely to have sex before marriage as other teens who are also religious, but don’t take the pledge. However, pledge takers are less likely than other religious or conservative teens to use condoms or birth control when they do start having sex.

My Comment: We always obey nature’s orders. We must discern where our free choice lies, and act only there, because everything else has absolutely no importance. Battling “windmills” won’t get us anywhere. We will only scold ourselves, and then fall further into drugs and depression.

Our free choice lies only in constructing the proper environment – one that facilitates the attainment of the goal of creation. When it comes to bringing up the young generation, the greatest priority is to educate them on how to distribute their efforts correctly, in order to attain the maximum, eternal bestowal in life.

News Report (from Time): “Are Romantic Movies Bad For You?” Researchers are beginning to ask whether the make-believe world projected in “rom-coms” might actually be preventing true love in real life. They found that problems typically reported by couples in relationship counseling at their counseling center reflect misconceptions about love and romance depicted in Hollywood films.

My Comment: We are all brought up, and later live, according to non-realistic standards that were invented by others. The only correct upbringing is to use Nature as the example, without believing in anything or fantasizing. This is what Kabbalah reveals to a person.

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