On Sunday July 13, at 5:45 – 6:30 PM Israel time I gave an international lesson for children that was recorded. It was translated into English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, and Turkish and broadcast on Kabbalah TV.
On Sunday, July 6, at 5:45 - 6:46 PM Israel time I gave a children’s lesson. It was translated to English, Spanish, German, French, Russian and Turkish, and broadcast on Kabbalah TV.
On Sunday, June 29, between 5:45pm and 6:45pm Israel time, I held an international children’s lesson which was translated into English, German, Spanish, Russian, French and Turkish, broadcast on Kabbalah TV.
A question I received: Did you ever have an experience when young students would express a nice attitude to you in order to please you, but later they would begin perceiving everything that happens to them as your manipulation?
My Answer: You’re right. We are under the constant influence of external factors, but we have no awareness of it. Gradually, during the process of study (which I guide), a student begins to realize how he is being controlled from above (by the Creator), and how he can become freed from such control, have his own say, freely choosing and deciding how to act. Those who don’t study Kabbalah, however, remain controlled in every way.
We are like children in our spiritual development. The difference is that with a child, Nature (the Creator) evokes the aspiration to imitate adults. However, in one’s spiritual development, the person himself needs to develop the desire to become an adult, i.e. become similar to the Creator.
He can receive this aspiration only through upbringing and direction (call it “manipulation” if you will) from the teacher and the group. The student and the group are practically always directed by the teacher. Otherwise, how could they understand how and what they should develop to on their own?
The spiritual world, after all, is hidden from them until they acquire, under the teacher’s direction, the qualities similar to that world. Then, to the degree they are similar to the Upper World, they will feel it and be able to continue progressing on their own. As a result of being guided, the students become independent! This is the difference between spiritual (Kabbalistic) development and any other kind of development.
You have to read Baal HaSulam’s article “The Freedom” and then everything will become clear. [Read more →]
A question I received: I understand that the issue of education is one of the most important things to you, and it must be the first thing on your agenda. Today, society disregards teachers, and they suffer from ridiculous budgets and low salaries (compared to the social sector). Additionally, classes are overcrowded with twice the permitted number of students, and there are always several children in a class who require special attention.
Moreover, teachers often need to explain the basic values and norms of behavior, since parents have no choice but to spend very little time with their children. I would like to know your opinion: Is it possible to change the situation, and how? Where will the teachers draw the strength to come out of this current state?
My Answer: Only our dissemination of Kabbalah among parents, the realization of their hopelessness, and their fear for their children will force parents to change the current education system or create a different one, which will work on creating “people” out of children.
Related Material:
Kabbalah Today Article: Spiritual Education
Laitman.com Post: You Can’t Step into the Same River Twice
Article: Education
Article: Raising the Next Generation of Children
Article: Why Kabbalah? Why Now?
eBook: From Chaos to Harmony - The Solution to the Global Crisis According to the Wisdom of Kabbalah
This week, I held a talk with students of the Architecture Department of Tel Aviv University. The topic of their senior thesis (requested by the university) is “Designing the International Kabbalah Center,” which needs to include all of our numerous services, centers of communication, broadcast center, classrooms, auditoriums, television and radio studios, offices for the creation and editing of our materials, center of Kabbalah dissemination, conference halls, centers for women and children, utility rooms, etc.
A group of nearly thirty students will be working on this project together. For the first time in the university’s history, students are given not individual assignments, but are required to work together on creating a World Spiritual Center. Thus, it was decided that the students are to work on this project together, as a group, and each student will receive credit for his or her mutual work just as if s/he had done it individually.
A question I received: Kabbalah says that we are governed by the Upper Force. In this case, how should I relate to raising my children? How can I raise them when they and I are controlled from above? Children aren’t something inanimate, like a traffic light or a computer, so how should I raise them?
My Answer: In one way or another, children live in a society or environment from which they receive all “the good and the bad.” Nature has given you the responsibility to raise them, to determine what will fill them during their initial ten to fifteen years of their life. In other words, you are “molding” them, and you also determine what educational institutions they attend and who their teachers and friends are.
A question I received: How soon will a Kabbalistic elementary school be established? I am afraid of sending my children to a regular school or day care.
My Answer: We already have such schools, to some extent. And you can try creating them in other places as well.
A question I received: Is it possible to visit your center in Israel with children?
My Answer: Yes. You need to coordinate your visit with our reception by calling 1-700-509-209.
A question I received: Within the course of ten years leading up to year 2002, the use of antidepressants in Great Britain increased by 234%. The U.S. independent report of 2005 announced that 11% of women and 5% of men who are not undergoing official treatment (in the year 2002) take antidepressants. What effect do antidepressants have on a person’s spiritual development? Can a student advance in Kabbalah if he’s on antidepressants?
My Answer: Antidepressants are definitely one of today’s leading drugs. Not only do we prescribe them to children, we prescribe them to animals as well. Egoism is incapable of being fulfilled in our world, and at the same time, it hasn’t yet realized its fulfillment in the Upper World. As a result, egoism remains in a sort of intermediate state between the two worlds. Egoism’s growth will lead one to the discovery of Kabbalah as a method of fulfillment, but in the meantime – suffering!
A question I received in response to an Israeli news post “8% of Teenagers in Israel Have Tried to Commit Suicide“: A recent study shows that approximately 8% of teenagers in Israel have at some point tried to commit suicide. This is a plea for help. We need to listen to our teenagers and be mindful of their concerns.
My Answer: It’s not the teenagers who have a plea for help. It’s their inner emptiness, the Reshimo that is crying out for fulfillment. Thus, we should give them the method capable of fulfilling this Reshimo: Kabbalah. My children never went through any such states. We raised them within Bnei Baruch’s framework, by teaching them Kabbalah’s basic concepts, and none of them (in all possible age groups, from 2 to 20 and up) have ever shown such problems.
Related Material:
* Article: Education
* Article: Raising the Next Generation of Children
* Blog Post & Video: How Do We Renew and Improve Education: The Hot Question in Bnei Baruch
1. Globalization has become a key factor in the world’s economic, political and cultural development. It incorporates the international market, all the social processes, and the lives of each and every one of us. However, it doesn’t solve any political, economical, social, cultural or religious problems.
2. A new kind of education is needed to reconcile us with this new reality. In the past, education was structured within the boundaries of an egoistic and disconnected world. New education should take place naturally, rather than through Nature’s painful influence. One way or another, Nature will force us to change - to change our way of thinking and to make our relationships truly global. But unlike previous transformations, we don’t have to undergo the current transformation by force. For the very first time, we can do it ourselves, consciously.
3. The common culture should not be replaced with a global culture forcefully, like how we usually do things. For instance, today we are forcing our children to study by old methods, even though they are ready for “the new humanity.” We instinctively strive to suppress everything new, while they naturally strive toward it.
4. For the first time in history, mass media must assume an educational role. Instead of being a dubious source of information, mass media needs to earn our trust by contributing to the education of the new generation. Mass media should initiate the change, and later, educational institutions will follow. This is because all social changes need to begin from “below,” in other words, they should touch people’s lives, morals and cultural-religious traditions. The new should not replace the old by force, but naturally, by revealing the globality of nature and society. Then the new will replace the old painlessly.
5. Kabbalistic education is not coercive, because it does not strive to bring everyone to the same educational and cultural level. On the contrary, people can keep all possible levels and cultures, because Kabbalistic education raises people above their various cultures. Instead of making them collide, it unites them even more strongly due to such differences.
Therefore, Kabbalistic education prevents the clash of cultures, ideologies, and nations. As Baal HaSulam writes, everyone can remain in their religions.
6. Even though Kabbalah brings everyone to a single consciousness, bringing people together as cogwheels in a single mechanism, it doesn’t lessen anyone’s individual role. This is because it helps a person find his or her place in the mechanism, in the mutual connection of all people. Each one of us discovers the best possible state that Nature has prepared for us.
Kabbalistic education enables people to accept the same principles of existence in the world, so that one’s individual consciousness turns into collective consciousness, and later into the consciousness of one civilization. After that, as Baal HaSulam writes, the boundaries start disappearing and a single civilization emerges, in which the citizens are single-minded in their aspiration to unite with the Creator.
Parting with independence, the disappearance of boundaries and cultures, and the creation of a single spiritual authority should not happen coercively, but by realizing the need to unite with the Creator.
Mass education can happen through TV shows and internet games, and by prohibiting the glorification of egoistic fulfillment and forceful influence over the world.
7. Globalization evokes the sensation that the world is small. Yet the growing awareness of the single system of souls makes it a warm world, where we can all rely on one another.
Related Material:
* ARTICLE: A Kabbalistic Interpretation of the Economic Crisis
* ARTICLE: The Consumer Effect
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