Ask Anything

Dreams are simply how all that we’ve gone through during the day – what we went through or could not realize or process – is organized for us into compartments so that we can start fresh the next day. Here is what Rav Laitman says in a blog post:

Question from Facebook: What is a dream, and what happens to the soul during sleep?

Answer: A dream is a purely physiological state of the beastly body, which has no relation to spirituality.

Rest is typical not only for humans but also for animals and plants. This suggest the need to alternate between two states, on and off, like the alternation of day and night.

Question: What happens to the soul during sleep?

Answer: A person has no soul! He is simply an animal that has only a bud (point) that can be developed with the help of studying the wisdom of Kabbalah, and then within him he will begin “to cultivate,” to grow, a spiritual organ called a soul. But this is only to the degree that a person carries out serious work on himself.

Moreover, he cannot carry this out alone but only in a society in which all the points are connected together, and that is how they create one single point that is composed of ten, which is called a spiritual Minyan (group of ten).

So, within the group of ten, by nullifying themselves and connecting together, they will begin to feel a spiritual force, a spiritual state. A connection like this is called a “soul,” within which the state of the next level is already felt, called the upper world.

But when a person just goes to sleep, this is a natural, beastly state that arises as a result of an internal overload of all the thoughts, emotions, memories, and so forth.

So during sleep, as a rule, we connect with what happened during the daytime because our thoughts are reloaded and sink internally to a deeper level of memory, and we feel this as dreams, which can take on different forms because they are cut off from egoistic desires. They are no longer found within the desires, but in thoughts above the desires.

There are states when dreaming that we can sense the future, but this has no connection to the wisdom of Kabbalah. There are some people who feel this more, others feel it less, and there are people like Wolf Messing, who feel the future in general, not necessarily during sleep. But this is absolutely irrelevant to the spiritual world, to the soul. Everyone has a bud for the beginning of the soul, but it is necessary to develop it. The wisdom of Kabbalah is waiting for you.

Did you read that in our sources? I’ve never heard of such a thing in the wisdom of Kabbalah.

More is not always more. You have to do what makes sense for your ten. One of my ten’s meetings is the morning lesson. Then, we have a morning call and an afternoon call. Sometimes I talk to friends at other times too. I have figured out how to make time for this over years. What’s important is that you commit to a framework daily and stick to whatever that is.

Our calls are 20 minutes and we’re strict on time and structure. Occasionally there’s a special spirit among us and we have a 30 minute call, but everyone knows we’re overtime. It’s important to be punctual because that makes it easier for friends to commit and make the daily decision to attend.

The morning meeting content is ten-specific. And in our ten, it’s also team-specific. Each day, a team of two (“Gabai/Shatz”) leads. We have a pair that runs the call more like a Gathering of Friends (Yeshivat Chaverim). Another has friends read excepts from the morning lesson in rotation, and discuss them. Another likes to start with a Psalm, then move to the article for the upcoming lesson. And so on.

The afternoon meeting tends to center around the study materials for the upcoming lesson. Think of it as starting the preparation for the lesson hours in advance. Then we set our intention for the intervening hours and what we want to achieve in the lesson.

We also have a chart pairing friends who are “call buddies” for the week, calling each other even for one minute during the day to read something, share a few words of uplifment. Not everyone is as capable of this one, depending on the nature of their work, and we’re understanding of that.

I’m telling you just to give you ideas. Main thing is to punctuate your day with spiritual flashpoints that remind you there is friends, an Upper World, a Creator of reality. If your heart moves a bit toward friends, that’s the best way to remember.

Toward everyone besides the friends, yes, I need to relate to them in a normal way. Someone comes to slap me, I don’t turn the other cheek, so he can also slap me on the other side, but I slap him first so he doesn’t even think about hitting me twice. But INSIDE, I connect him into a total system, governed my None Else Besides Him, who is Good Doing Good. This very likely doesn’t detectably alter my external behavior.