Rabbi Yom Tov: Mastering Free Will Part 5

Shelvin welcome to impractical spirituality here in Asia tour in the old city of jerusalem overlooking the Temple Mount and today we are gonna finish our outline of mastering freewill we spoke in five ways of how to master freewill and I don't mind listing those ways once again although I'm nervous to do so because we seem to never finish this outline so I'm like reluctant to write it again but I will so we're talking about becoming masters of freewill in the end the sum total of your entire life in fact he was sitting in your chair right now is the end of an equal sign of every choice you've ever made it all equals who you are right now and therefore your choices are really really important because they're gonna equal your life and so if there are categories of chouet of choice of how to choose when you better know those categories you want to get good at them so the first is you know this is all the mindfulness work that we did which is constant choosing that every moment is a chance to choose the second one is reevaluation and that is having the courage to reevaluate your life just as you know raise your hand if you ever knew anyone who changed career later in life keep your hands up if they were happy they did okay everybody so you see reevaluation is just really really important to do and it can reinvigorate things like for example I had mentioned last week that I really admire Jin a major way and has and it just totally bumped up my marriage in a major way and I rehabilitate my Judaism and how I interact with Judaism constantly so you can constantly remember - number three was the battleground here we got in touch with the the voice in our head also a little mindfulness work but to recognize that we have a battle between the body and the soul and that the body wants immediate gratification it wants to have its physical desires myth while the soul has has much loftier goals and for example everyone in this room has chosen to come here and everyone knows they're not going to be more apt to neither survive nor be produced by being in here right now in fact this thirty million dollar building was built by someone who's all that money and all this building is not gonna make anyone more apt to survive except maybe the Jewish people or to reproduce you get that so even though the body voice is always busy with surviving reproduction like every plant and animal in a human but we have a godly voice that has no interest in that necessarily for example art art music philosophy meditation and and connecting to God and stuff like that that's you we all got a drive like that we don't have that drive inside of us but those two voices do battle and the both voice between the body and the soul and our job is to go for the soul just go go for the soul you want to go for the soul you want to negotiate with the body and be a good negotiator with your body anyone here promise themselves that they learn in Torah today they're gonna get something later you know did that yeah okay great and I know it's childish but to like give yourself you know ice cream because you learnt our all day or whatever but you see it doesn't trick does the trick in there there's all kinds of tricks I didn't I didn't go into any of the tricks I'm not gonna go into many now but I'll tell you one trick and don't let me talk about this trick for more than two minutes please I'm on the clock so the trick is that the body voice doesn't understand time at all it just doesn't understand time so so you you can trick it easily with time so for example you can tell your you let's say for example we have a whole list of classes in the morning hours you tell your potty voice that you're only gonna hear one of them and I promise you you'll be it probably two or three or four or five classes during that day it will say oh just one okay let's go so the body voice will just go in you tell your body voice that you're only going to Israel for three weeks mm-hmm and then you stay a year and you tell your body voice you're gonna you're gonna go down to the Western Wall you'll say you'll say one prayer and you might find yourself there an hour and a half later so it doesn't understand time so well that's a good thing to know it doesn't really get time and the body boys just can't tell time so you could trick it you can trick it all over the place you can really trick it a lot when it comes to time now there's a bunch of other tricks that we're not going to do because we're doing number five Bradley and and number five is God which is a little strange and I'll outline a free-will because constantly choosing revalidating being in that battleground in the soul are not necessarily God oriented they are a bit but not totally because you can think about just in in business you can have you know choosing to do what you do for a living reevaluating your business you're always in a battle because there's stuff you got to do that you just don't want to do and all your friends are waiting at a sports bar you choose to do those things and get to the sports bar a little late but this last part it's like totally transcendent so that's what we're getting into now why is this what does this have to do with free will so that what this has to do with free will is that is that the world looks the same whether or not you're into God meaning of our whole group if we took this one classroom and we all walk through the Jewish quarter and half of us were atheist and a half of us were believers the Jewish quarter would look exactly the same to all of us it would look exactly the same it's not gonna look different we're all gonna look at white walls of Jerusalem stone be walking on the Jerusalem stone streets there's gonna be a sky above and it's just gonna look the same but when you give that little snack of God awareness which we're gonna go into in a second but when you give that little snap of God awareness to be aware of God in this moment when you give that that little snap what happens is the no everything looks the same but there's a there's a there's a certain divine indwelling that takes place in our own consciousness we have our own consciousness gets this divine experience that takes place but we're just walking down the street like anybody else everything looks the same now this is particularly important in Judaism because Judaism's anti icons we're not into icons in fact icons are almost tantamount to idolatry in our eyes now those who think the Jewish star cuz people weren't raised observant might think the Jewish star is an icon but they might think a menorah is an icon but they're not icons these are they're purely some symbols and they're not symbols for God the two triangles interposed are or have to do with Kabbalistic symmetry which you'll notice that anyone here has ever had a psychedelic experience on any kind of psychedelic plant medicine or chemically produced compound well things will come out in that that mystical symmetry of the of the Jewish star it's also if you've ever any kaleidoscope tripperz air anyone love pilatus knows so you'll notice it's all it's all that same sacred sacred symmetry that shows up there so it shows up there in in the in mysticism that's just a mystical reality about the creation and when it comes to and that's the mug and Davi the menorah is a lamp that was lit okay it has a lot of Kabbalistic stuff but it was lit in the temple okay so that's it's not an icon it's an it's a candelabra okay four four lights that are lit by the by the high priest in the temple and we also like them on Conoco with the apron ch menorah let's I mean it's the seven days of creation it's it's the seven Sphero since it's there all leading to the middle one meaning it's it's three with a middle so it's six in the middle one's Shabbat and they all all the wicks have to be pointing towards it there's a lot to it there's no that's that we'd be on that for a while we're not gonna go there now because we're not into icons at all it's much easier to find an atheist amongst the Jewish world because you you don't see God and there's no representation we don't have a guy in a cross to bow in front of yeah we don't have holy cows you know we're just not we're not into in that we're not worshipping elements directions things like that we have a ton of mysticism about the elements and ton of mysticism about directions and you know we even shake cosmic vegetation and make little leafy sounds you know in each of the directions you know as one week of the year we do that every single morning in all the directions and and so like we're definitely into these funky mystical things going on and then that that were involved in but but our allegiance is to a being that's not visible at all and and therefore requires a certain amount of maturity so this is really the ultimate act of free will you want to know why the reason it's the ultimate act of free will is to choose your God consciousness because it's because it's a choice you make between mundane and holy meaning it's the choice you make between this world being being just physical or this world being divine now when I were used that word divine I want to move to a much more specific word divine the word divine I know a lot of you think of the - God but the word divine doesn't necessarily mean God the word divine actually means an indwelling of divinity into physicality so it's far from God because if you have a physical thing that is an indwelling of spirituality so that's not God it's a physical thing with an indwelling of spirituality and that is called the divine so it's in you like you're the divine is in you and the divine is in certain Mitzvah objects for example and there's a divine indwelling in time when it comes to the Sabbath or a holiday and there's places where the divine is almost unnoticeable like for example a cup of water has the divine in it but you can't necessarily it's not so noticeable and it's delicious and the divine is and there's places where the Divine's totally covered up and that's called evil and darkness but it's still divine it's divine but it's covered up and it's not visible this usage of freewill when you're choosing to see the world as in divine world is it makes things quite magical so I'm gonna I'm gonna go out on a limb right now and go an appeal to one's intellect for the next 10 minutes ready okay can everyone just say the word nothing very good what is nothing make nothing great we're just gonna keep saying nothing okay nothing what is nothing make good before there was something what was there okay good okay so so now we're gonna do the four second proof of God okay just takes four seconds before there was something there was nothing and since nothing makes nothing and now that there's something it must be that nothing was God okay okay I'm gonna do that slower before there was something there was what does nothing make now that there's something it must be that nothing was God now what is God what is God the answer is we have no idea and nobody knows who God is we know nothing about God because well it's not a thing you know only thing you know about our things and here were time had a thing that you don't know anything about so therefore you know nothing about God and and by the way they might in my course called God hates religion or God is not religious but in my course God hates religion is one of the big issues religions keep telling everyone who God is but we have no idea who God is because if it precedes the world of something so therefore we know nothing about it because it's not something that clear now even an atheist can believe in this God because an atheist I always believed God was nothing anyway so atheists and cobblers have a lot in common because just like the Kabbalists realizes that God is not a thing and that has any definition or is all knowable so to the Atheist believes that now the Atheist doesn't necessarily believe that the nothing that precedes us something as a deity meaning is a is a conscious being and that was Bradley's question which was was how do we know his conscious meaning he'd be he knows intuitively and every one of us know intuitively worlds don't make themselves there was nothing and God is the term you give for someone who can make something from nothing for example let's say this gentleman here what's your name let's say Brandon couldn't demonstrate for us that he was able to make something from nothing you know we're gonna call Brandon God that sounds risky rabbi like you sure yes yes I'm sure because never in the history of the world has anyone ever made something from nothing it doesn't happen cuz nothing never makes something the only time nothing ever made something was when our world was created now if those do you think well who says the world was created minute was always here well you're gonna have a couple you're gonna have to speak to because this expanding universe was once not expanded and rather it had collapsed on - it would have been collapsed on to itself well how small an inch a foot size of a pea according to ROM Bond who lived a thousand years ago one of the great Kabbalists he said it was the size of a mustard seed well did that exist in time is there time when there's only one piece of matter is there time there isn't time I have to do with the relativity of bodies moving so is there time so maybe there's no time maybe it was always there okay when where'd it come from well maybe it wasn't always there did but did it get put there well let's say it was always there well who made it bang who said bang that made it bang and why would it ever bang and at what point did it bang if there's no time so you understand that this is why we call it God the reason we call it God is because because there was nothing and then there was something and that some things in expanding something which means that one point it wasn't an expanding something in it country it was a contracted something but but when did that something come along mean obviously that something is also it created something now another thing just so you know Kabbalistic lee we don't even believe any of this exists none of it not even the whole entire space-time continuum we don't believe any of it actually exists in any real way besides we can measure things I mean you can measure this table you can measure our our solar system but who says that all of this is real when we know on a quantum level it's not it's really made of vibrational energy it's just made of waves and particles all of this so okay so they so this this table is primarily made of of space because there's more space than mad in molecules and so then what's keeping all what's the glue keeping all this together and we're all made of the same stuff in you menu your clothing the tables the floor is all made of protons neutrons electrons and so whether you go from the Kabbalists perspective or you go from the physics perspective we're inside this giant holographic illusion and the cool thing is your consciousness now will get a little bit more in the free will the cool thing is your consciousness the actual conscious you right now thinking so you're are you aware right now are you aware that you're aware yeah are you aware that you're aware of yourself in this classroom and I'm speaking right now you're aware of that so that's three things going on there's you being aware of your awareness and then there's the object you're aware which is me standing up here speaking so how come how can you have two awarenesses you have one awareness that's me speaking then you have an awareness that you're aware of me speaking so that awareness is not physical it's not a physical awareness it's it somehow hovers or pings around you that's called the soul and everything you ever experience is always inside that conscious have you ever experienced anything outside your consciousness everything you ever experienced was inside your consciousness and this creation itself created out of the consciousness of God so what is there besides the consciousness of God and your awareness but let's let's go back let's go back before there was something what was there what what does nothing make nothing and in this particular case because there's a creation so we call the nothing God just one more thing is remember I said a theists and Kabbalists are friends I want you to remember that because we're not into religion at all in Judaism so if you've been like kind of religion friendly you're not gonna get very far as a Jew okay jesus never religion friend you can be a friendly person towards people who are religious that's fine I am I mean I'm very friendly to all kinds of people are into religion I'm super nice and friendly but since this room is filled with you know pretty serious astral travelers and you should know that that if you're if deep down you're friendly towards towards religion that your path will get blocked meaning your path up the ladder towards spirituality you'll get you know you will hit up you're gonna hit a brick wall because you have to be you have to be you have to be intense about about your journey and be truthful and where people are living in in religious illusion you can be super nice out externally but internally I'm not asking to be snobby either or arrogant internally you're totally locked on you got to stay locked on and and in the highest level people working Kabbalistic lee [ __ ] locked on we'd never even be interacting with those people because they're there just like for example tomorrow night he's got more neighbor free we're gonna be going to someone who only interacts spiritually I think that's all that's all he does he's 40 years in total meditation and we'll be in his presence as whichever men I'm gonna go be there the women are invited on Shabbos but during the week Thursday nights its immense experience you want to come tomorrow night yeah yeah you should definitely be there yeah and that's an all-nighter but I usually don't have strength to be there all night but when I was young and dumb I used to stay there all night till they finally threw me out now the okay here we go before there was something there was nothing that nothing is what we call God there's two things we know about it one is that it's one why because if you have absolutely nothing how many is they none right and can you just can you differentiate none does nothing have distinction no there's nothing have parts when you mo can you have two of them no when you multiply it by 30 and what do you get you still get nothing yes well it does later that's gonna be a step 5 we're on step 3 now so we had before there's something there's nothing that nothing we call God now we're on the fact that it's one because you can only have one nothing and this is also a distinction cuz on to all those religions that believe in one God there's nowhere in the entire Torah says there's one God it just says it is one no by fault by default there's only gonna be one of it but we don't focus on the fact that there's one we focus on the fact that it is one and that turns this world into extremely cosmic place which will be Step five and that's why we're talking free will here on step number five is God that's why so so there you are able to use you're able to use things in the spiritual realm to produce results but you'll always have to start with something you always have to have something you can mess with something once you got something but until you got something you can't miss it just like the when Elisha the prophet who was even higher than Ileana the Prophet it was his student but a student rose to great heights and when he found that poor lady the Isha tsunamis who was like starving or had to feed her family and whatever there was problems he said you have anything in your house he just needed something and so she said well I have a have a jar with some oil in it like a little oil and so I said go to all your neighbors and borrow all their jars just bring all the jars to your house and then with names of God cuz it's not black but you prophets never using black magic using names of God he got that little bit of oil and filled every single jar up with oil until she just was that she became an oil saleswoman could she just had more oil than she knew what to do with afterwards but you always gonna have something now it was a great question unless something from nothing love that question I I wish more people were to ask it unfortunately rarely does anyone ever ask that yes is right we don't know we don't know mean why are we calling you God yeah and the answer is that is that the is that we there's a couple answers so one of the answers is is that those are theories about what could be besides nothing so you have nothing for sure theories maybe you get that that's a kind of a deep thought but but for sure we have nothing and nothing bothers people by the way why is it bother peeling because if it really was nothing then you're a god and therefore theories of what maybe there was a multiverse or maybe there was who knows what but some Theory maybe that would take the surveillance light at it use a surveillance camera out of your bathroom but nothing puts the surveillance camera in your bathroom darling your bathroom burning your thoughts meaning you're being watched no one likes that so so but you're right it's an excellent question and then the other the other point is that is that I thought you're gonna say well why'd you call it God if it's nice meeting if you really don't know what it is why calling a gun Vince the answers where's God mean it doesn't mean it it's just a term we are using for something we could never think of yeah I said that yes yeah I think cuz you just said a tradition like like lopping off the ends of a halwa one is when is truth and the other is that your family doesn't eat the ends of a challah if your family didn't eat the end of the challah on Chavez they would cut off the two ends of the comet you should not eat the end of the hollow now if that's a total Bubba miser which it probably is it may be a tub of listen there's no truth to it but don't break thousands of years or hundreds of years or 50 years of people nodding then Mahalo in your tradition now you may well ask why but I don't you ask why you wanna know why because the because it's it's a slip well I'll give you I went into it the reason I'm a liberal Tim is cuz I went into this yesterday for a couple like about five minutes but it's a slippery slope you stop doing this then you stop doing that and stop doing this and after a while you know you're just your Judaism returns what's the right word for it I'm a dogmatic but you're just no it's not even selective because I said you'd be still following absolute truth which means the mitzvahs but you got rid of all the traditions for example does anyone have to do cavil at shabanam Fridays there's no commandment like that there's nothing like that do you do cover lunch about fun Fridays so doesn't say that anywhere yeah we only do it since the auras all like Kabbalistic ly realized like all the stuff he realized and then started doing cavil at Shabbat and ever since then we've been doing Kabul at Shabbat I didn't say that Judaism is not a religion chooses not a religion let me let me tell you something what's the difference between a religion and a cult the answer is the number of people if you Wednesday ones if you take ten people believing in something it's a cult if you multiply it by hundreds of thousands of people or a million people now it's a religion what is it if it's if it's something that's based in real truth so that's not called a religion or cult it's based on facts understand like it's not believing that trumps present United States started bring them up is not it's not a belief okay it's a fact so our history is a factual history for I mean like look outside this window outside this window is the Temple Mount we have all the ruins of the temple you know the base of it and we also have periods of the David's temple built by Solon we have them we have coins with David's name on it from when he ruled Jerusalem no how long was David after Mount Sinai so I'll answer that was little more than 400 years that's not a very long span it was a full-on total Jewish civilization living here in Hebrew with the temple and doing all the stuff the Torah says to do okay and and no one thinks David wrote it but we know David existed and we know we only have a four hundred and twenty something year span from Sinai till David we also know who David's father wasn't we know who his father was and his father wasn't his father we have a family chain all the way down the line going all the way back to Judah was the son of Jacob and you tell me when religion kicks in here cuz there's no religion in that story zero religion in there it's called there's no religion there that's all in some world direct descendants literally of these people were direct descendants we're all straight down that line all the way down I mean could be some of us converted in I mean you see we're all like different colors and stuff we got Ashkenazi man as far the Yemenites like we all look kind of different so there's clearly where commerce coming in to Judaism at some point in another I highly doubt the Jews looked as white as I do you know in biblical times I just don't believe that was the case but the but we do have an we have an unbroken chain and not only that are scholarships all written out all the way down meaning you can go from today obviously today you'd be recording thousands of names of scholars just because there's a huge amount of scholarship right now but they're rebels were fewer and then their release were fewer and fewer but but you can literally go rebby to student Rebbe to student the word Rebbe means teacher Rebbe to student remedy student revenue certain revenue student you're not far from getting a thousand years ago to like the Rambam i mentioned earlier the rom bond who spoke about the big bang he's big big bang button and and then you go back another thousand years following names the whole it's all names student Rebbe to student revenues dinner every student all the way to the roman times well that was the time of the talmud it's all there it's all recorded revenue certain revenue student revenue student Rebbe student all the way down till the till second temple period and that's all revenue certain revenue student memory student memory student all the way through now you have nine Tanakh well Tanaka's got everything listed of exactly were the revenues and who are the students and who was the king of Israel who was the per main prophet of Israel that for me every King had a profit that was the spiritual leader and it just keeps going registered in revenue certain revenue student every student we have all that it's all recorded every single bit of it and we know exactly what was going on in that temple cuz we got all that recorded and we know all the details we even know the geometry which is also a lot of sacred geometry in there we know all that stuff and interestingly today if you go into a shop a mystical shop you've seen these mystical jobs like in Manhattan with the incense and the sage sticks and the you know and the in the crystals and the music and the you know and the dude behind the counter with the giant big old earlobe holes and you know I'm covered in pagan tattoos and stuff and like then this stuff's been going on all the way back all this stuff and we had we had the high priests with twelve crystal twelve precious stones in his breastplate we had an in so serious about incense that who was the death penalty for even creating the combination by creating the company in those measures because everyone has a measure even creating that was the let's say you didn't create it but you burned it outside the temple also the death penalty meaning you know we make remake we make like modern day pagans look like strip mall jokers compared in the way we treated incense and then a gigantic band of Levites playing meditation music in life that was so loud by so many musicians such a big choir that you could hear the music all the way down in Jericho in the Jordan Valley and we have this chain all the way down now it gave birth to things like Christianity which is the externality of temple Judaism it gave birth to things like Islam which is the externality of synagogue Judaism notice Christianity took off right after the temples destruction and it's got all the external trappings of Temple Judaism it's got the funky outfits it's got the incense offerings it's got a priesthood instead of a practically a general practitioner of GP the it has centralized as I mentioned centralized prayer location Church and then later came Islam hundred years later right at the time of synagogue Judaism and their total take off on that no priesthood everyone's a practitioner you pray anywhere it's a it's just take it's the external level of that but these are religions that are takeoffs on what they saw at the time was the only literate population we have always been the only literate population there's only such a thing as as international literacy and there is an international but at least national literacy in some nations that's a brand new thing whereas Jews have been literate every single Jew literate all the way back time immemorial and when you're literate that puts you very high up the hierarchy in every single Society one sec rabbi we have a tunnel tour now I don't know what time it is so you know I'll wrap it I'm gonna I'm innocent oh no it's it's after 4:00 okay and then just one more thing is Nikolai there was some people who Nick Maris forgot and told them to come meet him at ER anywho people those people whatever he's gonna come if he told someone who's gonna meet him okay okay what tomorrow night