Where Is Our Freedom?

Before you enter the group, you have the freedom of choice to enter it. After you enter it, you have just one choice: to strengthen your connection with the group. You must decide for yourself that this is your free choice, and you must always continue doing this. Therein lies your freedom!

Freedom is not when I do something I want, but when I continuously add my efforts to this connection. We don't have any freedom of will in any other regard; everything else will happen automatically.

This is a very important principle. I don't have any freedom in my entire life. I am a complete puppet. There is freedom of choice only in one regard: After the Creator brings me to the group and gives me a spark in my heart, I have one single freedom: to include myself in the group, to grab onto it with my hands and teeth as much as possible.

Once you "latch on" to the group correctly, you depend on it, on the influence of the environment, and you don't have freedom in this regard. So where are you free? You are free inasmuch as you add your own effort to strengthen your connection with the environment in spite of your egoism. You thereby increase your dependence on the environment and its influence on you. There is no other freedom but this!

This is the mutual guarantee and we must always add more and more principles to it including love for friends, love for the neighbor, and your justifying them by faith above reason. Everything is inside this freedom of will, this approach by which I attain the goal.

The rest of my life unfolds according to a specific "script." You can even go to a fortune teller who will be able to tell your future. You can predict everything in advance besides the one thing that belongs to your freedom of will. Everything else is driven by "blind" faith.

It is forbidden to predict the future because then a person might think that he has freedom of will in his regular life. However, if you know that there are no free actions, then the future becomes revealed to you. Yet, you can never reveal the future that relates to your freedom of choice because it depends on you.

From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 10/12/10, "The Love for the Creator and Love for the Created Beings"

Put All Your Eggs in One Basket

Question: Am I "drilling a hole in the boat" by acting in all directions, in all 359 degrees, except for the one that is aimed toward the mutual guarantee?

Dr. Laitman's Answer: But I signed an agreement with my friends that covers everything! My guarantee does not only apply to the tiny open gap through which I have to reach the mutual guarantee. You will not be able to concentrate one hundred percent on the mutual guarantee without taking the strengths from all the other directions and only leaving the vital necessities there.

Only when all the other directions become nothing but a necessity for you, which "is neither disapproved of nor praised" and all the strengths that remain after providing for your existence are directed toward reaching the mutual guarantee, only in this case, you are not drilling a hole in the boat.

From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 10/12/10, "The Love of the Creator and Love for the Created Beings"