Psalms Commentary – Psalm 84: To the choirmaster: according to The Gittith. A Psalm of the Sons of Korah

Commentary on Psalms 84: To the choirmaster: according to The Gittith.

Psalm 84
To the choirmaster: according to The Gittith.
A Psalm of the Sons of Korah.

How lovely is your dwelling place,
O Lord of hosts!
2 My soul longs, yes, faints
for the courts of the Creator;
my heart and flesh sing for joy
to the living Creator.
3 Even the sparrow finds a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself,
where she may lay her young,
at your altars, O Lord of hosts,
my King and my Creator.
4 Blessed are those who dwell in your house,
ever singing your praise! Selah
5 Blessed are those whose strength is in you,
in whose heart are the highways to Zion.
6 As they go through the Valley of Baca
they make it a place of springs;
the early rain also covers it with pools.
7 They go from strength to strength;
each one appears before the Creator in Zion.
8 O Creator, God of hosts, hear my prayer;
give ear, O God of Jacob! Selah
9 Behold our shield, O Creator;
look on the face of your anointed!
10 For a day in your courts is better
than a thousand elsewhere.
I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my Creator
than dwell in the tents of wickedness.
11 For the Creator is a sun and shield;
the Creator bestows favor and honor.
No good thing does he withhold
from those who walk uprightly.
12 O Lord of hosts,
blessed is the one who trusts in you!

There are all kinds of Psalms. This Psalm is King David’s gratitude toward everything he went through in order to reach the source of the whole path he underwent. It marks the closure of all questions, disconnections and misunderstandings, whereby then comes the outburst of praise.

Psalms are impossible to comment on. They are a vessel similar to the Light, where discernments disappear and everything is swallowed in wholeness.

Why do we say that Psalms are written in wholeness when sometimes they sound like they are written out of pain, sorrow, lacks and requests?

Sometimes they do sound very much like outbursts of sorrow, or outbursts of lacks of understanding, pain, and lacks of wholeness, for example, as David escaped Avshalom, and how he had problems with Uriah. He had a very difficult life arranged for him, because it is Malchut (Kingdom), i.e. the King of Israel, who is in constant battles.

However, everything he wrote, despite sometimes revealing very deep sorrow, so deep that we do not understand its meaning, in any case, it is written out of adhesion. Every single word in Psalms is written out of adhesion. Everything King David wrote about as prior to adhesion, i.e. what he underwent in order to discover adhesion, is him awakening the vessel, because one cannot exist without the other. Right without left is not right, and likewise, left without right is not left, and therefore, they can only complement each other in the middle line.

If you divide Psalms into all kinds of styles, you cast a flaw on them. This is because, despite them appearing different, with some appearing greater or smaller, or some relating to gratitude or to request, that is simply an incorrect view.

Each and every Psalm contains wholeness, as it is written out of perfection. In order to reach such attainment, King David needed to go through a lot of incompleteness, the same as it is for all of us.

What is adhesion? What is wholeness? Where are you in this whole picture of attaining wholeness and perfection out of a lack of that state? All these questions and more are dealt with in the Free Kabbalah Course, which provides the fundamental principles and tools by which to correctly approach the wisdom of Kabbalah. It is recommended to take the Free Kabbalah Course before approaching the Daily Kabbalah Lessons with Dr. Michael Laitman. Click the banner below to sign up…

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How Nature’s Example Is Perfect and Following It Will Resolve Every Crisis

How Nature's Example and Following It Will Resolve Every Crisis

Why Today Nature Is the Only Role Model for Humanity

Today humanity is gradually sinking deeper and deeper into a multi-faceted global crisis. It doesn’t seem there is antibody who has true solutions, or ideas how correct the multitude of mistakes.

The surest way to correct mistakes is to learn from those who have done things right. In this case, nature is our role model and a proven success, so she should be our teacher.

To see how we can let the desire to give into our lives, let’s look at how nature does it. We perceive the outside world by using our senses, and we believe that the picture of reality our senses provide is accurate and reliable. But is it?

How often do we walk with a friend, and the friend hears something that we miss? Well, just because we didn’t hear that sound doesn’t mean there was none. All it means is that our senses didn’t pick it up, or that we didn’t pay attention. Or maybe our friend was hallucinating!

In all three possibilities, the objective reality is the same, but our perception of it is not. In other words, we do not know what the actual reality is like, or if it even exists. All we know is what we perceive of it.

So how do we perceive? We use a process best described as “equivalence of form.” Each of our senses responds to a different type of stimulus, but all our senses work in a similar manner. When a ray of light, for instance, penetrates my pupil, the neurons in my retina create a model of the outside image. This model is then encoded and transferred to my brain, which decodes the pulses and reconstructs the image. A similar process occurs when a sound hits our eardrums or when something touches our skin.

In other words, my brain uses my senses to create a model or form equal to the outside object. But if my model is inaccurate, I will never know it and will believe that the actual object or sound is the same as the model I created in my mind.

 

Discover the Best Step to Take to Better Perceive Reality

The “equivalence of form” principle applies not only to our senses, but to our behavior, as well. Children, for example, learn by repeating behavior they see in their surroundings. We call this “imitation.” Eager to learn about the world they were born into, and having no language skills, children use imitation as a means to acquire skills such as sitting and standing, speech, and use of cutlery. When we speak, they watch how we move our lips. This is why parents are advised to speak clearly to children (but not loudly; they can hear better than we). By imitating us, children create the same forms (movements or sounds) as we do, and thus learn about the world they live in.

Continue reading “How Nature’s Example Is Perfect and Following It Will Resolve Every Crisis”

The Surefire Way for You to Achieve Balance in Life

Returning to Balance With the Help of Others

Ever Wonder Why Other Species In Nature Are in Balance but Humans Aren’t?

Our reality is built by the interaction of two forces, the desire to receive and the desire to give. When there is an imbalance in between those that forces problems arise.

Our imperiled world is indeed a sad result of man’s lack of recognition of the desire to give. In contrast, the rest of nature is a magnificent display of balance between the two desires. In the diverse ecosystem that is Planet Earth, each creature has its unique role. The system is incomplete if even a single element in it is missing or deficient, be it a mineral, a plant, or an animal.

An eye-opening report submitted to the U.S. Department of Education in October, 2003 by Irene Sanders and Judith McCabe, PhD, clearly demonstrates what happens when we breach nature’s balance. “In 1991, an orca—a killer whale—was seen eating a sea otter. Orcas and otters usually coexist peacefully. So, what happened? Ecologists found that ocean perch and herring were also declining. Orcas don’t eat those fish, but seals and sea lions do. And seals and sea lions are what orcas usually eat, and their population had also declined. So deprived of their seals and sea lions, orcas started turning to the playful sea otters for dinner.

So otters have vanished because the fish, which they never ate in the first place, have vanished. Now, the ripple spreads, otters are no longer there to eat sea urchins, so the sea urchin population has exploded. But sea urchins live off seafloor kelp forests, so they’re killing off the kelp. Kelp has been home to fish that feed seagulls and eagles. Like orcas, seagulls can find other food, but bald eagles can’t and they’re in trouble.

All this began with the decline of ocean perch and herring. Why? Well, Japanese whalers have been killing off the variety of whales that eat the same microscopic organisms that feed pollock [a type of carnivorous fish]. With more fish to eat, pollock flourish. They in turn attack the perch and herring that were food for the seals and sea lions. With the decline in the population of sea lions and seals, the orcas must turn to otters.”

Thus, true health and well being are achieved only when there is harmony and balance among all the parts that make up an organism or a system. Yet, we are so unaware of the other force in life, the giving force, that we cannot achieve this balance, or even positively define what being “healthy” means.

 

What Everybody Ought to Know About Depression & How to Overcome It

The definition of health in the Britannica Concise Encyclopedia truly captures our sense of bafflement: “Good health is harder to define than bad health (which can be equated with presence of disease) because it must convey a more positive concept than mere absence of disease.” But because we have no perception of the positive force in life, we cannot define a positive state of existence.

Continue reading “The Surefire Way for You to Achieve Balance in Life”

From The Big Bang To Now: What Humanity Needs Most Today

Without the Knowledge of Bestowal Humanity Lost Its Way

Why Everything Is Literally All About Giving & Receiving

As the Wisdom of Kabbalah explains, in the ancient Mesopotamia, after studying the world around himself, Abraham discovered that reality consists of two desires. One desire is to give and the other is to receive. He found that everything that has ever existed, that exists now, and that will exist is an outcome of the interaction between these two forces. When the desires work in harmony, life flows peacefully along its course. When they collide, however, we must deal with the fallout—calamities and crises of great magnitude.

Through these discoveries, Abraham understood how the universe and life had started, and how they evolve. Our universe was born approximately fourteen billion years ago, when a massive, never-again-repeated burst of energy exploded out of a minuscule point. Astronomers call it “the Big Bang.” Just as a seed and an egg join to form an embryo at the moment of conception, the universe was “conceived” when the desire to give and the desire to receive were first joined together in the Big Bang. For this reason, all that exists in our universe is a manifestation of the joining of the two forces.

Just as a cell in an embryo begins to divide and create the flesh of the newborn immediately after conception, the desire to give and the desire to receive began to form the matter of our universe immediately after the Big Bang. Then, through a process that spanned billions of years, and that to an extent continues today, gases alternately expanded and contracted, galaxies were created, and stars were formed within them. Every expansion of gas was a consequence of the desire to give, which expands and creates, and every contraction was the result of the desire to receive, which absorbs and contracts.

Expansion and contraction form the endless ebb and flow of life, propelled at one moment by the desire to give, and at the next moment by the desire to receive. Whether it is galaxies, suns, and planets merging to form our universe, or cells, tissue, and organs combining to form a human being, this interplay of desires is at the heart of creation.

As with the stars, Planet Earth evolved by expansion and contraction through the interaction of desires. When Earth was first formed, its surface reflected the flow of expansion and the ebb of contraction. Every time the desire to give prevailed, Earth’s sweltering interior would burst into rivers of melted lava. And every time the receiving force prevailed, the lava would cool and form new swaths of land. Eventually, a strong enough crust was formed over the Earth to allow for the emergence of life as we know it.

If we search deep enough, we will find the same two forces—giving and receiving—within every being ever created, weaving their magnificent garment of life. In the weaving process, the desire to give first creates matter, as with the Big Bang or a newborn baby, and the desire to receive gives the matter shape, as with the stars and the differentiating cells in organisms.

 

Did You Know Humanity Is the Result of Billions of Years of Cooperation?

The story does not end with the creation of the universe. When a baby is born, it cannot control its hands or legs, which seem to move about erratically. However, there is tremendous importance in these seemingly erratic movements: after many repetitions, the baby gradually learns which movements get results and which do not. Unless the baby tries, it will not learn how to turn over, crawl, and eventually walk. In a baby, the life force (the desire to give) creates movement. But it is the desire to receive that gives that force direction and determines which expressions of the desire to give (movements) should stay and which should not.

The same principle can be applied to Earth’s early childhood. As the earth was cooling, particles driven by the desire to give moved randomly about. The desire to receive caused these particles to contract and form clusters, and only the most stable of these groups survived, forming atoms.

Continue reading “From The Big Bang To Now: What Humanity Needs Most Today”

Why the Bible’s Abraham Holds the Key to Solving Today’s Global Crisis

Why the Bible’s Abraham Holds the Key to Solving Today’s Global Crisis

Why Blaming the Financial System for Today’s Global Crisis Is ‘Not Seeing the Forest for the Trees’

Today humanity find itself in a global crisis. Most of the attention is focused on the economy and the financial system. But the global crisis we are all facing did not begin with the collapse of our financial system. It was actually in existence long before—rooted deep in human nature. To understand how we can bail ourselves out of this crisis, we need to understand why our own nature puts us on a collision course with nature and with each other.

When we look at the present state of humanity, it may seem quite grim, with a doubtful prognosis for success. But just as many times when people get into trouble and then work out the solution together, helping each other, we can be positive about the future of humanity. To guarantee our success, all we need is to unite and collaborate.

In fact, unity and collaboration have always been nature’s, as well as humanity’s tools for success. When we use these tools we thrive, and when we avoid them, we break apart.

 

The Root of Today’s Global Crisis Is 1,000s of Years Old

Thousands of years ago, between the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, in a vast and fertile stretch of land called “Mesopotamia,” there lived a flourishing society in a city-state called “Babel.” The city was bustling with life and action. It was the trade center of what we now call, “the cradle of civilization.”

Continue reading “Why the Bible’s Abraham Holds the Key to Solving Today’s Global Crisis”