Tag: balance

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How Balance in All Areas of Life Can be Achieved

How Balance in All Areas of Life Can be Achieved

Question: How can one describe balance on the human level, in relationships with the environment?

Answer by Dr. Michael Laitman: We don’t feel a division between us, we belong to a unified community, to one human body; we are connected into one system. And among us we want to arrange for balanced relationships of mutual cooperation.

Ultimately nothing separates us, we are a single whole. We depend upon one another and don’t even feel this dependence, for the answers to all of my requests come at that moment, immediately supplying me with what is missing, and I gladly give to others what they lack.

This is called balance in human society, this is a reciprocal interaction based upon two opposing forces that there are in everyone. One is for all and all are for one. We must reach this. Read More »

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How Kabbalah Enables You to Build the Form of Nature within You

How Kabbalah Enables You to Build the Form of Nature within You

Why It Is Impossible to Know Something’s True Essence

Kabbalah teaches us that reality could be divided into four layers: essence, abstract form, form clothed in matter and matter.

Our tools of perception can never perceive the Essence, regardless of our degree. Although what we perceive is indeed the Essence, we can only perceive it through Matter, and we cannot even imagine what the Essence itself is like. Moreover, we cannot even want to perceive the Essence.

For example, none of us feels that an additional sixth finger would be welcome. However, if we could imagine that we once had a sixth finger, and that we could do something with it that we cannot do today, then we could talk about a need for a sixth finger. But if we never had an additional finger, we could not even imagine how it would benefit us. This is why we will never want a sixth finger.

Similarly, since we never felt an Essence, we cannot want to perceive the Essence. Attainment of Matter, the manifestation of the actions of the Essence that is present within the Matter, is quite satisfactory.

The above discussion raises an important question: If we cannot perceive the Essence, how did Kabbalists know that it exists? For the time being, we will leave this question unanswered, but we promise to return to it later.

 

How Practical Experimentation Is Used In Kabbalah

The will to receive is the Matter. It is divided into five degrees. When the will to receive is integrated with the intention to bestow, it adopts different Forms, from the most opposite from the Creator to the Form of the Creator Himself. While spiritually evolving, we gradually study all the qualities that Matter might assume. This is called “Formative Learning.”

We have a genuine desire to acquire the Forms of bestowal that are dressed in Matter. A genuine desire means that it is a desire that stems from having had this Form before and not having it now.

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Warning: Are You Aware of Your Inability to Control Your Reality?

Warning: Are You Aware of Your Inability to Control Reality?

Why We all Strive for Balance in Our Lives

As children, many of us believed that the world was filled with all kinds of forces, like ghosts in fairytales. As we grew, we gradually relinquished this belief, but every now and again we still feel as though these forces actually exist.

The truth of the matter is that we are searching for them every single moment. We want to know about the world we live in because if we do not, we will never be freed of the sensation of uncertainty, to live in peace and confidence. We are curious to understand the world we live in and to improve our state of being. This curiosity evokes questions such as, “Who am I?” ”Where am I?” “What shall become of me?” Such questions prompt us to strive to know the reality in which we live.

Reality is divided into two parts: the human being and his or her surroundings. Some claim that we should only study and change ourselves, asserting that by so doing, we will feel tranquil and regard the world more positively. Others, however, say that we should stay as we are, make the most of what the world brings to our doorsteps, and change the world to fit our needs. Either way, it does not seem that our lives are working very well.

The best state in which we can get along with the world is that of equilibrium. If everyone understood me and wanted exactly what I want, that would be a state of equilibrium. There is no state more perfect than the sense of being in balance with the world. It can only be compared to being a fetus in my mother’s womb: everything exists only to care for me; there is no need to erect any defenses.

Science refers to that state as “homeostasis.” The Greek word, homo, means same or similar, and stasis is Greek for condition. This is the state of being that every object in reality strives to achieve.

 

Here’s a Quick Way to Understand the Limits of Your Perception

The laws of physics, chemistry, and biology explain that the only reason for any movement of matter, whether still, vegetative, animate, or speaking, is its longing to be in balance with its surroundings. For us, as human beings, to be in balance with our surroundings, we must know about the nature of the surrounding world and how we can equalize with it.

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The Surefire Way for You to Achieve Balance in Life

Returning to Balance With the Help of Others

Ever Wonder Why Other Species In Nature Are in Balance but Humans Aren’t?

Our reality is built by the interaction of two forces, the desire to receive and the desire to give. When there is an imbalance in between those that forces problems arise.

Our imperiled world is indeed a sad result of man’s lack of recognition of the desire to give. In contrast, the rest of nature is a magnificent display of balance between the two desires. In the diverse ecosystem that is Planet Earth, each creature has its unique role. The system is incomplete if even a single element in it is missing or deficient, be it a mineral, a plant, or an animal.

An eye-opening report submitted to the U.S. Department of Education in October, 2003 by Irene Sanders and Judith McCabe, PhD, clearly demonstrates what happens when we breach nature’s balance. “In 1991, an orca—a killer whale—was seen eating a sea otter. Orcas and otters usually coexist peacefully. So, what happened? Ecologists found that ocean perch and herring were also declining. Orcas don’t eat those fish, but seals and sea lions do. And seals and sea lions are what orcas usually eat, and their population had also declined. So deprived of their seals and sea lions, orcas started turning to the playful sea otters for dinner.

So otters have vanished because the fish, which they never ate in the first place, have vanished. Now, the ripple spreads, otters are no longer there to eat sea urchins, so the sea urchin population has exploded. But sea urchins live off seafloor kelp forests, so they’re killing off the kelp. Kelp has been home to fish that feed seagulls and eagles. Like orcas, seagulls can find other food, but bald eagles can’t and they’re in trouble.

All this began with the decline of ocean perch and herring. Why? Well, Japanese whalers have been killing off the variety of whales that eat the same microscopic organisms that feed pollock [a type of carnivorous fish]. With more fish to eat, pollock flourish. They in turn attack the perch and herring that were food for the seals and sea lions. With the decline in the population of sea lions and seals, the orcas must turn to otters.”

Thus, true health and well being are achieved only when there is harmony and balance among all the parts that make up an organism or a system. Yet, we are so unaware of the other force in life, the giving force, that we cannot achieve this balance, or even positively define what being “healthy” means.

 

What Everybody Ought to Know About Depression & How to Overcome It

The definition of health in the Britannica Concise Encyclopedia truly captures our sense of bafflement: “Good health is harder to define than bad health (which can be equated with presence of disease) because it must convey a more positive concept than mere absence of disease.” But because we have no perception of the positive force in life, we cannot define a positive state of existence.

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How You, Me and Everyone Can Practically Become Altruists

How You, Me and Everyone Can Practically Become Altruists

As the wisdom of Kabbalah explains, and as contemporary science and the global crisis also suggest, we need to shift to an altruistic, bestowing way of life in order to rise above our problems.

 

Why all Systems, Humanity Included, Need Bestowal to Achieve Balance

We need not look very far to find ways to implement the principles of bestowal to life. Many contemporary scientific studies confirmed the benefits, advantages of bestowal in today’s interdependent human network. The reason why the researchers of those studies did not discover the implications of the integral human network—that we “infect” each other psychologically almost as we do physically—is very simple: they were not looking for such implications.

Similarly, there are many ways to observe the effects of the law of bestowal, if we only look for them as we analyze existing data. The Social Interdependence Theory, displayed here by Johnson and Johnson, is one way of observing its effect on systems, but there are many other ways to observe it. In my discussions with Professor Ervin Laszlo, philosopher of science and system theorist, we were in complete agreement because every system theorist knows that no system can persist without its parts yielding to the interests of the system.

Similar agreement transpired in my conversations with evolutionary biologist, Elisabet Sahtouris, with primatologist, Jane Goodall, and with many others. In fact, any physician, network scientist, or biologist knows that to keep a system in balance, or “homeostasis,” the interests of the system must override those of its parts. Each field of science refers to this principle by a different name, and Kabbalah calls it “the law of bestowal.” Essentially, however, these are different names pointing to different manifestations of the same law.

The Lazy Man’s Guide to Why Humanity Needs Mutual Responsibility

On the negative side, the effects of not following the law of bestowal are evident. The growing alienation in society and the escalating isolationism on the international level, as demonstrated by publications such as Christopher Lasch’s, The Culture of Narcissism, Twenge and Campbell’s The Narcissism Epidemic, and Joseph Valadez and Remi Clignet’s essay, “on the Ambiguities of a Sociological Analysis of the Culture of Narcissism,” clearly demonstrate our poor social health.

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