There Is None Else Besides Him

Hello to all our dear friends here and in the Arvut system. We've come to a special milestone. First of all, the special article we're learning from today, There Is None Else Besides Him is what we actually need to learn to implement. It's a very powerful article.

We have some interesting changes this week. As you can see lots of our young people are missing today - it's because they're helping form the youth group for ages 18-35. Next week we're absorbing a large group of new students. And next Wednesday's lesson on August 19th will take place in Haifa. So we hope everyone in the area will come join us. This is another exciting change - that we'll start travelling around the country.

Clip: One Simple Condition

And one must examine oneself clearly whether one has truly arrived by preparing for the lesson to receive the light that returns to the good. And now during the lesson he truly feels that it is acting on him and he moves from situation to situation, and perhaps even wants to be included in those actions, in those actions, about which it is written in the "Talmud of the Ten Libraries", in the "Zohar", everywhere, that it is really happening to him now. One must yearn for this.

This is called learning Torah. That he now has the influence of the light that returns to the good and immediately, immediately he is included in it. And it does not matter that he can read a page eleven times and each time the light that returns to the good acts on him in a different way and each time he processes that page from the book anew, anew in a new degree, in new ways of connection and so on.

We need to reach the revelation of God to really demand it. If I do not reach this, my preparation is still not correct, there is simply smarts here, this is one simple condition, to fulfill it and that is it. Michael Laitman

The Kabbalists describe what we feel during the lesson. And then we can compare what they say or what we're reading to how we feel - and the gap there is precisely the place for our prayer. This is why the preparation is so important. It doesn't matter how it's written or presented to us - it's all pure emotion. So if we really want to feel where the Kabbalist is taking us - it's from our great yearning that we attract the light that reforms.

This is the first article in Shamati: There Is None Else Besides Him

Where did Shamati (I Heard) come from? Rabash heard his father's lectures and wrote them down word for word - even from memory on Shabbat. He wrote down everything Baal Hasulam said in his little notebook and kept it near his heart always. He called it Shamati because it's what he heard from his father. At some point he gave it to Michael Laitman but he wasn't allowed to share it. He said that people who don't have a left line (capable of criticism, etc.) wouldn't be able to deal with it. But ultimately Rav printed it and disseminated it.

What's the whole point of our study? It's revelation of the Creator. Love of friends and everything else we do are only a means to the end. And this article focuses on what it means to love the Creator. Rav once recommended reading it 70 times. But it really doesn't matter - what matters is opening our heart.

Clip: The General Force of Nature

The article is the fundamental article, the first in importance of all the articles in the wisdom of Kabbalah that speak of the inner work of man.

We know that humanity, which develops, develops by slowly revealing itself, like a small child discovering himself in the world. Then comes the first contact between man and the Supreme Power, which is called "the first man", was such among all generations, that he was the first to attain the Creator and from whom we already have all this wisdom, its beginning, its root. And he conveyed all these things twenty generations until Abraham, and Abraham discovered the next stage in this Supreme Power, and he actually established the correct relationship of man to the Creator and also the method of revealing the Creator to the creature called "the wisdom of Kabbalah".

That is to say, the first man, was the first to attain the Supreme Power, but Abraham is also because he discovered the Creator in deeper depths, so he also discovered the roots and cause and effect, and for that reason alone he has a method. That's why we call him "Father of the Nation," "Abraham." And of course, if that's the case, it was very, very revolutionary back then, as we read it in Baal HaSulam, in Rambam, that Abraham broke all the statues, all those gods that were in Babylon at that time, that he actually discovered that "there is none else besides Him." There is only one force, which is nature, God, that this force is the one that operates in nature and that "there is none else besides Him," it includes everything within itself. And what seems to us to be many forces, many reasons in nature between inanimate, vegetative, animals, that is, stars and zodiac signs and the properties of nature and trees and stones and in general, and also human beings, that someone or something has some free choice, some power over the... except for the Creator, except for that general force of nature called "God," then it's all a mistake, really "there is none else besides Him." So that's how we should relate to everything. That's ultimately what we discover. Michael Laitman