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how is it that ALL of my choices are predetermined, all known by the creator before I am presented with them. Except my choice of environment. because my environment is literally everything. if I choose to live in the Bronx rather then queens is that me, or the creator? what about the color i paint the apartment? If im driving down the road and choose to swerve to miss a squirrel thats the creator right? but if I choose to exit to get coffee thats me? Makes no sense, there is non else besides him thereby ……who am I?
Hi Terry,
Freedom means rising above our egoistic nature. As we learned in this week’s lesson, we do this by building for ourselves a strong spiritual environment.
Baal HaSulam talks about this in the article, the Freedom. He writes: “Harut (carved) on the tables”; do not pronounce it Harut (carved), but rather Herut (freedom), to show that they are liberated from the angel of death.
Throughout the article he explains how our current egoistic nature is that angel of death. Meaning although we are technically alive and surviving, relative to spirituality, our life is considered death. True life is within a completely different nature, that of bestowal. In order to reach freedom from our current nature, we need to choose and build a spiritual environment for ourselves which will influence us with the importance of acquiring the quality of bestowal.
For this reason, the Kabbalists equate our main freedom in life in choosing to be influenced by a spiritual environment. Not just any environment, but specifically a spiritual environment, since only through the spiritual environment can we get the importance of coming out of our egoistic nature and only through that environment can we draw the light that can help us to actualize this.
Check out this blog post from Rav Laitman for more details: https://laitman.com/2012/10/bestowal-should-become-fashionable/
You can ask: but if there is none else besides Him, then even my choices in the spiritual environment are predetermined? That is correct, our initial choice of the spiritual environment is not up to us. This follows the saying that: the Creator puts man’s hand on the good fate and says “choose this for yourself”. Meaning He awakened your point in the heart and brought it to a good spiritual environment in which you can nourish it. Only after that, the rest is up to you.
So what needs to happen for me to start actualizing my free will here? After all, the point in the heart is seemingly forcing me to be here. If so, then this desire needs to be taken away from me little by little, and there I begin to reveal more and more the place of my freedom.
This is similar to how we teach a child to ride a bike. First the parent holds the child completely. Then as the child learns to pedal and balance himself, the parent lets go a little, then a little more and a little more, until the child continue to pedal without the parent holding him at all.
So we too need to learn to continue to do this work even when that initial desire for spirituality begins to disappear or when the ego grows and begins to pull us into many different directions. When that happens, we’ll feel a need for mutual work in the group, the spiritual environment. On one hand when I fall into my ego, they need to pull me out, and on the other hand I need to help pull others out when they fall. This is why Kabbalists have always studied in groups (physical or virtual).
We will learn more about this in the more advanced semesters on KabU, where you’ll receive your own Kabbalah group with whom you can practice these things.
Lastly, we need to be careful with how we work with this concept called there is “none else besides Him”. Every single moment indeed comes to us directly from the Creator, but it does not mean that we can just take this as a maxim and sit around doing nothing all day. The correct way to work with this concept is to split our work to internal and external.
Externally I continue to exist on the level of this world so I must function in a normal way in society, follow the normal rules and laws of society, to work, take care of my family, health, etc. Meaning to do everything normally.
And internally, I try to attribute everything that is happening to the Creator, to “none else besides Him”. But this is our internal work and it does not cancel out any of the normal external actions that we need to take.
We’ll learn more about this concept in the more advanced lessons. In the meantime check out this blog post from Rav Laitman for more details: https://laitman.com/2014/10/if-i-am-not-for-myself-then-no-one-will-help-me/
Albert @ KabU
Love your neighbor as you love yourself. Why is it so hard to show love, compassion to someone that is hurtful, disrespectful to others ?Will it ever be possible to love unconditionally?
Hi Mira,
Loving others is like exercising. We cannot go straight into lifting 1000 pounds. We first need to train and prepare ourselves with lower weights, and then, when we’re ready, we can increase the resistance to higher and higher weights.
So although one day, we will indeed reach love for the whole world, but for now, that is the equivalent of lifting 1000 pounds without training. Instead, we need to start with a lower resistance and build up to it.
That lower resistance is the Kabbalistic group. We first get into small groups of ten, and practice reaching these spiritual qualities of love and bestowal in that small group. After we master that in the group of ten, we can add another circle, another group of ten to that connection. And after we master that, we can add more and more circles, until we come to include the whole world in that connection.
In the advanced semesters of KabU, everyone will be placed into groups of ten and we’ll learn how to do this work practically in the ten.
Albert @ KabU
How is that there is 600000 souls that make up the collective, but 8 billion-ish people on earth, not to mention billions of other planets many likely populated…ect, really a better question for last lesson here it is all the same.
Hi Terry,
600,000 is less of a quantitative number and more of a qualitative number. It represents the strength of the spiritual desire after it has been fully corrected. So essentially all of humanity is included in this number.
Check out this blog post to see how this number is derived: https://laitman.com/2010/09/love-and-hatred-of-600000-souls/
Albert @ KabU
Hi Michael,
It means that all of humanity are part of a single system, like cells within a single body.
Check out this blog post from Rav Laitman for more details: https://laitman.com/2021/11/adam-is-a-collective-soul/
Albert @ KabU
Hi Marguerite Marie,
I’m not sure I understand the question. In what context are you asking it?
By the way, we offer Kabbalah courses in other languages as well. Check out Kab.info for details.
Albert @ KabU
I posted this in week 1 but it was meant for here:
Can regular everyday people connect with the upper worlds without the Torah?
For example: a caveman fulfills his lower desires, for food, shelter, family…he then picks up a stick and carves a flute. he creates songs on it. Later he picks up some plants and creates dies, and draws what he sees in nature, animals, plants, everything in his visual field. There’s a kind of satisfaction of a higher desire, a feeling of connections with the creator. There is no social expectation for him to do these, things, so it seems that this is an exercise of free will.
The second example has to do with intuition. A flight is fully booked but only a quarter of the people who bought tickets arrive. The plane crashes and everyone who took it dies. Through some inexplicable force, the people who didn’t take the flights describe a gut feeling guiding them not to take it. Some are sure the creator was communicating with them, so they acted on their desire to be closer to the creator by abandoning their plans. Are they exercising free will?
Hi Dana,
When we talk about freedom in Kabbalah, we’re talking about freedom from our egoistic nature. Whatever we do within our egoistic nature, there is no freedom there whatsoever. We’re simply like machines carrying out their inner programming.
See my reply below to Giuseppina for more details.
As for the Torah, Torah comes from the Hebrew word Ohr, meaning light. So when Kabbalists refer to the need for the Torah, they are not referring to the book but rather to the light. We need the force of the light to correct our egoistic nature. Then, according to the law of equivalence of form, we will become similar to spirituality and attain it in practice.
Check out these blog posts from Rav Laitman for more details:
https://laitman.com/2010/12/know-what-you-want-precisely/
https://laitman.com/2013/04/everything-is-attained-by-the-equivalence-of-form/
Albert @ KabU
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