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Archive for June, 2014
June 22, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
Here Is a Method that Is Helping People Receive Endless Enjoyment
Kabbalah in Hebrew means “reception.” As its name testifies, Kabbalah teaches how to receive. With the right attitude towards reality, it is possible to experience endless enjoyment. This endless enjoyment is not from sex, food, a new car, a big house, or other transient, mundane pleasures. Instead, it is from those delights that can fill us with such utter bliss that we would transcend any sensation of time to receive them.
We sense the passing of time by the fluctuations between good and bad feelings, or sensations of fulfillment and absence of fulfillment. However, when we are in a state of elation, we are unaware of time. The wisdom of Kabbalah tells us that we can eliminate time altogether, along with the sensation of distance and any other limits or boundaries. One who has reached such a state is clearly living in an infinite, unlimited world.
Our lives will always contain two opposing elements—pleasure and desire, plus and minus. A pleasure that pervades a desire satiates it and cancels it. We come across this phenomenon in every area of life. When the plus neutralizes the minus, we end up feeling nothing at all. As long as we short-circuit pleasure and desire, we will be locked in a zero-sum equation. However, put a resistor between these opposites and they will work perfectly, creating everlasting enjoyment.
How Giving Is Possible through Receiving
Kabbalists explain that pleasure stems from the Upper Force. This Force sends us pleasure because It loves us. When we try to receive the pleasure directly, the pleasure cancels our desire to enjoy it and the pleasure stops.
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June 21, 2014 at 10:00 pm · Filed under Torah Portion
Numbers 19:1-22:1
This Week’s Torah Portion | June 22 – June 28, 2014 – Sivan 24 – Sivan 30, 5774
In A Nutshell
The portion, Hukat (The Statute), deals with Israel’s continuing journey, with the Mitzva (commandment) of the red cow (heifer), the laws of the impurity of the dead, and the episode known as Mei Meriva (waters of Meribah [Heb: quarrelling]). In the episode, the children of Israel complain about the lack of water, and the Creator commands Moses to speak to the rock. However, instead of speaking, he strikes the rock. Moses and Aaron are punished for this act by being banned from entering the land of Israel. The people of Israel reach the land of Edom, and the king of Edom forbids them to pass through his territory.
Aaron dies, and Elazar, his son, succeeds him as the high priest. The people of Israel continue to complain about the difficulties along the way, and the Creator sends snakes to bite the people. Moses makes a copper snake and shows it to the people, and anyone who sees the copper snake is healed.
The people of Israel reach the boundary of the land of Moab and sing “the song of the well.” The people fight Sihon, King of the Amorites, and Og, King of the Bashan. Israel wins and inherits their land.
Commentary by Dr. Michael Laitman
This story details the primary correction in the corrections of the souls. Because our souls are initially the desire to receive, to enjoy, in order to correct it we must invert the intention of that desire toward bestowal. We must correct our souls to have the aim to bestow, to love others, by which will resemble the Creator. This will endow Dvekut (adhesion) with the Creator—which is the purpose of creation—to each and everyone in the nation. This is why we need to mingle and become integrated with the force of bestowal, called Bina, and with the force of reception, called Malchut.
Connecting the two forces—the two Sefirot just mentioned—results in four options: Malchut in Malchut, Malchut in Bina, Bina in Bina, and Bina in Malchut. When Bina is inside Malchut, it is the evil force because Malchut governs Bina, and when that happens, all the evil forces emerge.
While these forces may occasionally appear as good, they appear so only to lure and entice a person, leading toward the evil. It is a special Klipa (shell/peel), cunning and shrewd, which is in Malchut. This is how Malchut acquires Bina and uses it. This is also why it was said that evil can exist in the world only if it initially appears as good.
At first, the only forces that exist in man are the still, vegetative, and animate, meaning Malchut at the degree of still, vegetative, and animate. This is a straightforward will to receive. A person who possesses the power of Bina within the will to receive becomes very clever and very shrewd. Such a person knows how to appear as giving to others, as serving them, while in fact that person takes from others and uses them as much as possible. This is how the negative forces operate when the force of bestowal is “taken captive” by the force of reception.
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June 19, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books
Now You Can Understand What the Bible Is Really About
Kabbalists, as previously mentioned, research the Upper World, the world beyond the perception of an ordinary person. Hence, the depictions of Kabbalists’ attainments relate to the Upper World, but because we are not aware of the existence of a spiritual world besides our own, we ascribe their words to our world, a phenomenon called “materialization.”
When the Torah (Five Books of Moses) was written, the people of Israel were at a spiritual degree. But after two thousand years of detachment from spirituality since the ruin of the Second Temple, the Torah stories seem to refer to historic episodes or moral conduct.
Yet, this is not the case. Each element in the world is connected to the same element in all the other worlds by a “root and branch” connection. Based on that principle, Kabbalists developed a language that relies on the parallelism between the Upper Worlds and our own world. In it, processes unfolding in the spiritual world are described using names of branches taken from our world.
Introducing the 4 Languages of Kabbalah
Kabbalists use four different languages to explain how we can reach the degree of the Creator and how we can draw to ourselves the Correcting Force that will invert our nature from egoism to altruism. These languages are the language of the Bible, the language of laws, the language of legends, and the language of Kabbalah.
In his essay, The Wisdom of Kabbalah and its Essence, Baal HaSulam wrote that there are four languages in the wisdom of truth, and the essence of the wisdom of Kabbalah is no different than the essence of the Bible. However, the laws, the legends, and the language of Kabbalah are the most convenient and appropriate to use.
The difference among the languages is in their accuracy. The language of Kabbalah is more precise in depicting the connection between the root in the Upper World and the branch in the lower world. The more accurately one connects oneself to one’s Upper Root, the greater Correcting Force one receives.
What Is the Best Kabbalah Book for People Living Today?
The language of Kabbalah applies to terms that do not exist in our world, such as “worlds” and “Sefirot,” charts and formulae. This language makes it easier to avoid confusion and materialization, and facilitates a clear and ordered approach to the study. The language of Kabbalah is essentially different from other languages because of the clear, unequivocal way it describes the purpose of Creation—the similarity of the creature to the Creator, i.e. inversion of egoism into altruism.
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June 18, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Books, Evolution
Why the Spiritual Reality Is Hidden
Throughout Its Existence, humanity has been utilizing its five senses to research the reality in which it lives, and gather the findings to formulate sciences. The purpose of science and the accumulated human knowledge is to improve our lives and help us more effectively use the world we live in.
The wisdom of Kabbalah, unlike all other sciences, researches a realm whose existence eludes an ordinary person. To research this realm, one must be equipped with another sense, a sense that perceives the “Upper World.” With this additional sensory ability, one can gather information about the Upper World and experiment with it. Like any ordinary scientist, a Kabbalist can record reactions to actions. Kabbalists are researchers of the Upper World, and as such, they have recorded their findings over thousands of years of research. The collection of their records constitutes the wisdom of Kabbalah.
What Kinds of Tools Does Kabbalah Give a Person?
The wisdom of Kabbalah describes the actions that originate in the Creator and hang down to our world through all the Upper Worlds. It also describes how they expand through the corporeal reality that we can all perceive with our five ordinary senses.
Our world is a consequence of the Upper Worlds. Thus, the wisdom of Kabbalah contains knowledge about the Upper Worlds and our world. The Upper Worlds pertain to a higher level of existence than our world, where time, space, and motion do not exist, but only abstract forces. It follows that Kabbalah contains the existence of all times as they are expressed in our world.
Kabbalah is a means to help us research all the states of existence. This sequence of states includes our state before our souls dress in physical bodies, all our phases while we exist in this world, and our situation once the soul departs from the body and returns to its root in the Upper World.
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June 17, 2014 at 7:30 pm · Filed under Articles, Love
Everybody wants to live in a world founded on love, but no one believes that it can be a reality. We speak about love when telling fairytales to our children because everyone understands that love is good to speak about to a child, that it makes life safer than animosity.
However, what if it were possible to make a world out of love? Our world today is hostile, competitive, dog-eat-dog and life is becoming increasingly worse.
As Baal HaSulam wrote, “A person is a small world.” A person’s anger and cruelty toward the world boomerangs back against him, when implementing his egoistic desires and hating himself. This split personality is becoming increasingly prominent.
Now picture to yourself that you could transform your outlook and your relationships to a course of love and care. What would happen if we could suddenly influence, educate and correct the world so that there would be no theft, damage or exploitation?
We would then perceive an opposite world and no one would fear that their life would become wiped out tomorrow. People would not be afraid that tomorrow we would eradicate the planet and bury ourselves under the waste from our own production.
Love would oblige us to act in the best and most correct way. We wouldn’t have to search for billions of occupations just to keep the population busy, producing things no one needs. Even if everyone would be unemployed, every person would receive what is necessary because then people also wouldn’t need any excesses since they would live in a kind, amiable world.
Then we wouldn’t pollute the earth with unnecessary products, which is 90% of all the things being produced. If we look at nature, there is nothing wasted. Look at how life is organized in the animal kingdom, from the beginning of creation to its end, in all the forms that are included in nature’s cycle where everything is repeatedly used to 100% capacity.
All the cycles are absolutely closed, with the exception of the things the person does. When people produce anything, it does not return to nature in the natural form, but in the form of toxins that poison nature.
However, if we treated each other with love, we would make the world clean as well. Love would ensure that we will not demand any excess for ourselves and then everything would normalize. How different would things be from today where all the oceans are full of garbage and radioactive waste?
All we lack in our world is attention toward one another and mutual participation in the integral system, and we will get there out of our desperate state.
Based on the post “Love Is the Most Powerful Weapon” on Laitman.com – Michael Laitman’s Personal Blog.
What is love? How do we come to realize love in all kinds of different relationships, whether it be among couples, family, or society at large? What is the source of love and how can we draw this force into our lives? Love is one of the many topics tackled in the Free Kabbalah Course. Registration for the Summer 2014 semester closes soon, don’t miss out!…
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