News Report (from BBC): The past year has been one of the most devastating ever in terms of natural disasters, one of the world’s biggest re-insurance companies has said. Munich Re said the impact of the disasters was greater than in 2007 in both human and economic terms. The company suggested climate change was boosting the destructive power of disasters like hurricanes and flooding. Munich Re quoted World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) figures showing that 2008 was the 10th warmest year since reliable records began, meaning that the 10 warmest years on record all occurred in the past 12 years.

My Comment: We are about to face all the consequences of the melting glaciers and other phenomena, since we have already passed “the point of no return.” However, if we correct our relationships on a higher level, this will also influence the lower level - the climate. This is because the whole natural balance was disrupted due to the human relationships. It is difficult to accept this position, but the revelation of the crisis in economics, industry, and security will force us to correct ourselves, to become a single organism - and along with our correction we will find that balance will be restored in all of nature.

News Report (from USA Today): Hit by extreme weather and operational glitches, U.S. airlines canceled nearly 9,000 flights, disrupting more than 1 million passengers’ plans in the first half of the holiday travel period, according to a report Monday. The number of cancellations from Friday, Dec. 19, through Sunday jumped 70% from last year, says FlightStats, a Portland, Ore., firm.

My Comment: This can happen anywhere in the world. Our spiritual opposition to nature will be revealed on all the lower levels. We can save ourselves from the threatening consequences of this only by reaching balance, harmony, and complete interconnection with Nature. The global interconnection will force us to become a harmonious part of this picture. We were obligated to pass the point of no return, and there’s no sense grieving over this. Precisely the impossibility of returning to the “sweet” world of the past will enable us to make the decision to change ourselves - the only parameter in this system that we can change.

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: A Spiritual Revolution Is Inevitable
Laitman.com Post: How to Make Nature Change
Kabbalah Today Article: “The Tip of the Iceberg”
Interview: “What Lies Ahead of Us”
From Chaos to Harmony: “Altruism is Life’s Law”

 

 The Law of Equivalence of Form [04:09m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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The ARI Online Learning Center
The ARI Online Learning Center reports that several thousand people from many different countries have already signed up for the new semester, “Fall 2008.” Presently the top ten participating countries are: America, Mexico, Columbia, Argentina, Romania, Canada, England, South America, Australia, and various countries in Europe.

International Book Fair in Frankfurt
The world’s largest international book fair was held in Frankfurt on October 15-19. This year marked the 60th anniversary of this famous book fair, and visitors had an opportunity to acquaint themselves with the book industries from one hundred countries.

A book stand with Kabbalah books was organized by our friends Daniel Lange, Martin Wieczorek, Urlik Hammer, Mark Daniels, Eddie Yusupov, and Uri Laitman. It elicited great interest from the visitors of the exhibit. Over thirty publishers from the most diverse countries have already started negotiations about translating and publishing Kabbalah books.

Among them are publishers from Brazil, Switzerland, Israel, Hungary, Italy, Germany, China, Croatia, Korea, Holland, Turkey, Sweden, and even Saudi Arabia.

New Publications in Mexico
The editorial staff of the Mexican magazine “Medicable,” with a circulation of 70,000, has decided to start printing our Kabbalah articles. The magazine comes out once every two months and is distributed in cities such as Mexico City, Guadalajara, and Monterrey.

Kabbalah in Finnish
Finland isn’t lagging behind either. The first issue of the newspaper Kabala Tanaan, (Kabbalah Today in Finnish) has been published. The newspaper’s publication was timed to coincide with two large annual exhibits held in in Helsinki in October of 2008. Our newspapers, brochures, and books in seven languages will be presented at the stands of both exhibits.

Online Education in Moscow
An international conference dedicated to online education was held in the “President Hotel.” Representatives of the Moscow branch of the Kabbalah Academy were in attendance. They gave a presentation on the online learning classes that the International Kabbalah Academy has been successfully teaching for several years. To date over 20,000 students have taken part in the classes.

This presentation was of great interest to the conference participants. During the discussion, the participants exchanged opinions on methods of increasing the efficiency of online learning, and the role of online education in the conditions of modern globalization.

Book Fair in Zaporozhye
A book fair was held in Zaporozhye, Ukraine, called Khortotzki Djerela – 2008. Visitors showed a lot of interest in the books, brochures, CDs, and newspapers about the wisdom of Kabbalah that were on display. The book Kabbalah - It’s Very Simple sold out on the first day of the fair. Many visitors became acquainted with Kabbalah during last year’s fair and came back to learn more this year.

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USA. The largest publishing company in the country, Penguin Publishing, reports that the first edition of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Kabbalah in English is completely sold out, and they are urgently printing the second edition.

The Spanish speaking world is interested in Kabbalah. In response to increasing demand, Random House - the second largest publisher in Latin America, bought the rights to The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Kabbalah in Spanish. The title of the book speaks for itself: it explains simply and accessibly what is Kabbalah and why it is necessary to the modern person.

Noticias, a Mexican newspaper, has printed the article “The Butterfly Effect and Kabbalah,” which explains the solution to the economic problems.

My blog in Spanish is now on the web. It is called “Kabbalah, Science and the Meaning of Life.” Previously my blog was translated into four languages; Spanish is the fifth.

The Spanish composer Nino Diaz (author of over fifty musical compositions, winner of the prize of the Canadian Academy of Arts and the competition of creative radio compositions Classic Radio 2008) has written a new composition called “El Muro” (“The Wall”) that includes a poem by the great 16th century Kabbalist, the Ari. The premier of this unique composition took place on September 9th at a festival in Alicante, Spain, and was very successful.

Norway. Visjon, a popular magazine, has requested an analytical article from the Kabbalah Academy, which will present Kabbalah’s views on the ecological problems. The article will be published in the next issue of the magazine, and it will be called “Ecology and Us.”

Israel. A holiday issue of the publication Kabbalah Today in Hebrew and Russian was issued on the eve of Rosh HaShana (the Israeli New Year). It is a compilation of materials about the holiday, as well as articles on current events. The number of copies printed is about one million.

Brazil. Imago, one of the most popular publishers in Brazil, has published the book Kabbalah Revealed in Portuguese. The book is on sale in all book stores in the country.

Internet. The BOBs (Best of the Blogs) is holding an international blog competition, and reports that tens of thousands of people have submitted my blog as the best and most original blog.

The Ari Online Learning Center has announced the beginning of a new virtual Kabbalah class in English. All the information about the opportunity to study Kabbalah in English on the internet is available at this website.

Over the past month, websites of the Kabbalah Academy have been visited by over 2,000,000 people.

The Arabic world. The first Kabbalah book in Arabic has been published, called From Chaos to Harmony. The book explains the fundamental principles of the wisdom of Kabbalah as well as its attitude toward modern scientific research.

Iran. It’s been less than a month since we have aired our website in Farsi, and it has already been visited by 1,300 people who reside in Iran. In addition, the Kabbalah Today publication is now being published in Persian. Presently 2,000 Iranians residing in the US receive this newspaper.

The Black Sea - 2008. Final Summary. The three month long dissemination event on the Black Sea coast of Russia and Ukraine, spanning from Sochi to Crimea, has come to en end. Over a million vacationers and local residents received the publications Kabbalah Segodnya (Kabbalah Today) and Moi Mir (My World).

Over time, other countries joined in on the dissemination event: newspapers were also disseminated in Lithuania on the Baltic Sea beaches, in Israel on the Red Sea, in Poland, the Czech Republic, France, and other European countries, as well as the Eastern and Western coasts of America.

In December a newspaper dissemination event is being planned in Mexico and Chile.

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When I speak to economists about the crisis, I find that they and I are interested in different things. They are not interested in the cause of the crisis, and are willing to accept my explanation of it. What interests them is the evolution of the crisis, and what needs to be done here and now – by a bank or a family.

For now, my propositions that what needs to be corrected are the relationships between everyone - both organizations and people around the world, sound naïve to them, because they do not yet see the cause of the crisis - the lack of kind connections between people. These connections must come from the understanding that we are all part of one organism, and we can cure this organism only by mutually caring for all of its parts. That is the only way to solve this global problem and all the crises that are gradually becoming revealed in humanity today. They are being revealed because our egoistic development has brought us to the point where we are all united within a single organism.

With regard to the global crisis, the process has begun, but this is just the beginning. There is a lot to say about it, and we will talk about it much more in the future - its causes, progress, purpose, and possibilities of softening it - “the path of Light” that Kabbalah offers instead of “the path of suffering.”

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: The Remedy for the Global Crisis
Laitman.com Post: My Article on YnetNews - A Kabbalistic Interpretation of the Economic Crisis
Kabbalah Today Article: What Is Happening to Our Economy?

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It is written, “The only people one does not envy are one’s children and one’s students.” I am proud of my students. Hence I am proud to publish texts and clips that my students send to me. The following was sent by my student Tasha Fridkin from New York:

An analysis of the crisis
It is known that the laws of nature work regardless of whether we know about them or not. No one will test the law of gravity by jumping out of the window, since we know the result from our life experience.

However, few people know that besides the laws affecting our physical bodies, there are also laws affecting our souls. We don’t see the souls in our world, and the interactions between them are also concealed from us. Nevertheless, this does not make the laws any less strict – they still inevitably affect us even if we don’t clearly perceive their influence.

According to these laws all of our souls are interconnected into one harmonious and balanced system that is based on the principle of bestowal. Every individual contributes the most he can to the system, taking only the necessary minimum from it.

Humanity, however, has developed differently. It has reached the state where every individual desires to give the minimum and to use everyone else to the maximum to get personal gratification. Moreover, we have even stopped noticing this. Every person wants to win the lotto – to spend a dollar and win a million. But where does this million come from? It comes from a million people who spent one dollar. In other words, every individual wants to snatch from everyone else, for his own self benefit. And this is considered absolutely normal.

But there is an imbalance between our spiritual and corporeal existence. The violation of the spiritual law evokes the apparent and tangible manifestations in our physical world, such as the current financial crisis. This crisis is but a particular manifestation of the general crisis of all the social connections. The financial system is the most vulnerable one, similar to the blood in an organism, connecting and permeating the entire worldwide community. Nothing has changed in any part of the financial system; the crisis is purely psychological. We have revealed our incorrect usage of the connections between us, and as a result we have lost our trust of the system and the entire system has collapsed.

That is to say, we have reached a state where the externality - the structure and principles of our integrated systems, is losing importance compared to the internality – our thoughts and intentions when using these systems.

If every one of us will not change our attitude toward the people around us, adopting attitudes that match the connections between the souls, then we will continue to oppose the laws of nature. Then these laws will affect us more and more negatively. No one can run away from this; there won’t be any place on earth where one can hide, waiting for things to improve.

The world is crumbling. If you want to be saved, then start with yourself - with your attitude to the people around you. No one else is going to save you.

The world is built by every one of us. The world is our common home, and it is built according to the laws of nature. It can either bring us enormous, inconceivable abundance, or – if it is founded on egoism – it will bring us inconceivable suffering, which will nevertheless force us to change.

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: The Remedy for the Global Crisis
Kabbalah Today Article: What Is Happening to Our Economy?

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News Report (from Project Syndicate): The Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon stated, “We all recognize today’s perils: a global financial crisis, a global energy crisis, a global food crisis. … Climate change ever more clearly threatens our planet. …today, we also face a crisis of a different sort - the challenge of global leadership. Nations can no longer protect their interests, or advance the well-being of their people, without the partnership of the rest. Yet I see a danger of nations looking inward rather than toward a shared future. I see a danger of retreating from the progress we have made, particularly in the realm of economic development and fairness in sharing the fruits of global growth.

My Comment: Even if everyone will understand that the source of all the world’s crises, including the climate crisis, is human egoism and its negative influence on Nature, they still won’t find the remedy for the progressing General Crisis. They will not understand how to change man’s nature, and that’s because this is impossible to do in our world, whose entire nature is egoism.

There is a law that states “The general and the particular are equal” (Klal U Prat Shavim). Just like a regular person is brought to Kabbalah by suffering and the question, “What is the meaning of my life?”, so humanity as a whole will be compelled by suffering and crises to come to the question about the meaning of its own existence, which is not wealth, power, fame or knowledge. Then it will find the answer to this question – that the meaning of life is to reveal the Creator.

That is when humanity will reveal the science of Kabbalah, the means to attain this. By definition the science of Kabbalah is “The method of revealing the Creator to the people in this world,” as Baal HaSulam writes in the article “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah.”

Related Material:
Laitman.com Post: How Does a Kabbalist Feel About the Current Events?
Laitman.com Post: Disasters and Diseases Come to an End When Humanity Unites Above Selfishness
Laitman.com Post: Ervin Laszlo and Michael Laitman - From Chaos to Harmony
Kabbalah Today Article: What Is Happening to Our Economy?
Kabbalah Today Article: The Hurricane Within
Article - “Lecture in Arosa”

 

 Changing the World [3:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Two questions I received on the Olympics:

Question: Do the Chinese participants of the Olympics have an advantage because millions of people are thinking about them and hoping that they will win?

My Answer: Yes. People’s thoughts influence each other because we are a single system of souls. We are only disconnected from each other in our imagination! Hence there is more than just psychological influence when you have millions of fans present as well as the feeling of being at home – in addition you are also influenced by any number of people who are merely thinking about you.

Question: How does the wisdom of Kabbalah relate to sports and body culture, with regard to how it’s expressed in the Olympics?

My Answer: Sports should exist for the sake of interaction between people, rather than competition between them. Since people do the latter, sports has become political, economical, and physically harmful. The intentions of the players should be similar to a game of “giveaway checkers” (where the objective is to give in) – every person should feel like he’s the host who welcomes the guests and wants to please them. One way to express this on the outside is through athletic games. Right now we find it difficult even to imagine such a scenario - a contest for the sake of bestowal, friendship, and union with the “opponent.”

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Laitman.com Post: What Makes Kabbalah Different from the Football Madness?
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Laitman.com Post: What Do a Healthy Mind and Body Have to Do With Kabbalah?

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The World Kli News, 08-24-08

The World Kli News, 08-31-08

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Laitman.com Post: The World Kli News, 08-10-08

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