Question: I am reading reviews of some of the articles published by the “Mutual Guarantee” movement and many say that you simply want to expand your circle of adherents, as if “Kabbalah isn’t that interesting anymore, so now Laitman has started a new movement.”

Answer: I enjoy these intense questions and objections because I would like people to understand my opinion. Kabbalah is a technique of correcting the world, which works at every social level:

• There are people who are interested in progressing spiritually.
• There are people who are interested in moving forward spiritually because they feel it is important for them and for their children to live in a peaceful, secure, and serene world.
• There are people who have very little concern for any of this. They are only interested in living a good, normal life, “I feel comfortable right now, and this is my task—to maintain the comfort and if possible, to increase it.”

Depending on people’s desires, some are engaged only in their personal matters, whereas others are engaged in society. Some people are attracted to power, fame, knowledge, and wealth, which means they have higher demands compared to those of a common man. Every person has certain properties and desires as a given essence that are present in him from birth.

Therefore, being a person who studies human nature and society, I make no claims to anyone because I understand perfectly well that the people who are engaged or interested in Kabbalah will, in fact, come to Kabbalah. As for the people who don’t have these aspirations, then no matter how much time I would spend telling them about Kabbalah, they will not come to it. However, they will see that mutual guarantee is the instrument that we can use to fix the crisis today, but in the internal personal realm, within our families, and on the scale of the country and the world.

That’s what I want people to know. And accordance to every person’s inner question or need, each will take his proper place in this hierarchy of correcting himself and humanity. Therefore, there is no attempt here to draw people to what they will not respond to. This is impossible.

This is not the usual political movement where people can be enticed by some goals, by telling them, “Let us go and conquer, let’s take abundance from someone else and divide it among ourselves,” and so on. On the contrary, this is a movement that is based only on the joint agreement of all members of society, and therefore, it involves everyone. In other words, it is there in order for everyone to come under the mutual guarantee in the world, to the degree of one’s innate properties, predispositions, and inclinations to this.
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Only when trying to get closer to one’s neighbor and connect with him does a person reveal his 613 uncorrected desires. Only then does he start to open up his broken soul and understand what he has to correct.

When correcting my desires with the intention of “not doing what I hate to the other,” I correct myself to the level of Bina (Hafetz Hesed, delighting in mercy) and am filled with the Light of Hassadim (mercy). This means that I’m completely free from my ego. Then, I gradually turn this ego toward serving my neighbor, called “love thy neighbor as thyself,” by correcting the AHP, the 365 desires.

Both of these stages of correction are only relevant to those desires that are revealed in our connection with each other. If I don’t have a desire to connect with the others, this means that I haven’t yet revealed what I need to correct. Our usual desires toward food, sex, family, money, power, and knowledge don’t need to be corrected. Use them as you please.

If I seek knowledge or power, this is not the desire that is revealed in connection to others. The work begins when I try to advance in this connection by revealing the will to bestow instead of the will to receive. Then, I reveal how much I don’t want it. This lack of desire is called “evil,” and it’s revealed to me as the creation.

It is exactly this desire, felt as a rejection of connection with another person when trying to reveal the quality of bestowal, that is called the evil of egoism. It has to be corrected and transformed into good. This means that I act according to a strict order that is expressed by the phrase, “I created the evil inclination and I created the Torah as a spice” because the Light in the Torah reforms, and I realize this formula step by step.
[51364]
From the lesson on 8/15/11, Selected excerpts on the Day of Love

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Interview with Igor Beloborodov, Director of the Demographic Research Institute (Moscow): “The birthrate is going down at an alarming rate, and in the coming decades most countries will face a non-renewal of generations. This is a moral, ethical problem, associated with the loss of traditions and family foundations in society. The demographic crisis has already started. Forty-two percent of humanity do not reproduce. This has never happened before. This situation is unprecedented in world history.

“No government has proposed a set of solutions as to how to increase the birthrate in the conditions of reigning consumer values and moral degradation and how to ensure the priority and stability of the family. Out of half a billion of the European population, there is no country that reproduces itself demographically.

“According to the UN, by the 2030s, the birthrate may decline below replacement level. This means that this will be the starting point of the extinction of the entire human race. Will we be able to stop this process?

“I think so, if we set an appropriate goal. But international organizations have a different agenda: They want to reduce the population in developing countries. The entire world population has bleak prospects today.”

Comment: If there is no higher purpose, nothing higher than our life, then why should we bring up children and continue the human race? Sex is a pleasant activity, but raising children is a burden, especially when you do not see any prospects either for yourself or your children….

Only the revelation of the upper World and an eternal, perfect existence, which can be reached through correction by the Kabbalistic method, will awaken everyone’s desire to continue their correction through their children.
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A physiology experiment and its results:
Objective: “Does a belief in free will have a relationship with morals? Does the belief in free will make one more moral or less moral?”

Experiment: “A set of 30 people were taken and divided into two groups of 15 people each. One group was given passages and statements which seemed to state that free will does not exist. They were made to read the viewpoints of philosophers and scientists who were determinists and stated that free will is only an illusion. One of the passages they read was from Francis Crick’s book (Crick along with Watson discovered the structure of DNA), The Astonishing Hypothesis: ‘You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons.’

“So, one group was given ‘anti-free-will’ passages to read. The other group was given neutral passages to read that said nothing about free will or the lack of it.”

Test: “Then, the two groups were given a set of mathematical questions to solve on a computer. The computer program that asked the questions had a bug that the students could use to cheat in the test. After the test was over the experimenters checked the results of which group cheated more. The subjects of the experiment thought that the experiment was about math skills, but actually the experiment was about who cheats more.”

Result: “The experimenters found that the group that was given ‘anti-free-will’ passages to read cheated much more as compared to the group that read no passages related to free will.”

Conclusion: “So, the study suggested that a belief in free will makes one more moral. The person who believes in free will tends to take responsibility for his actions. A non-believer in free will tends to assign the moral responsibility to determinism – it had to happen that way!

“So scientists think that we may not have free will, but a belief in free will keeps society more moral. Our deterministic brain neurons fire based on its previous state, but one of the components of the state is our belief system. And having belief in free will in the system causes the neurons to fire more ‘morally’ than when the brain does not have this belief.”

My Comment: Kabbalah takes all of the opposite points of view and combines them, saying that a human being has no freedom in any regard; he is completely influenced by the environment. However, he can choose the environment on his own and thus change himself under its influence. This way, he can change his own destiny. (See Baal HaSulam’s article “The Freedom.”)
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The approach of Kabbalah is highly scientific. However, we do not impose it; we just want to point out the obvious facts of the interconnected world that are impossible to ignore.

We will move on from these facts to the changes in human nature because now, by getting an integral education, people are beginning to think in terms of an integral system. Earlier, they saw it and perceived it through the prism of their egoism, “me and others,” whereas now, a person is gradually beginning to feel the world through a prism that absorbs all visible light. He does not focus on personal gain, but on the good of all humankind. His view is becoming general and his mind is acquiring a different way of thinking. His perception passes through everyone else.

An example could be the mistress of the house, a mother who takes care of her children, her husband, and the home, arranging everything. She looks at life and tomorrow not in connection with her personally, but in connection with her household. She sees the reality of today and tomorrow not out of herself, but out of them.

If a person gradually begins to look at the world in this manner, he rises to a new degree. A new system of perception of reality develops in him. He does not feel a reality within himself personally, egoistically, and individually, but he sees the way everyone else feels it.

In essence, this is the rule, “Love the other as yourself.” A person gradually approaches this state where he is not only in confrontation with humanity and in closeness with some individual people, but he begins feeling himself inside this “pot,” within humanity, within the general system.

Then his perception, view, and way of thinking and feeling change; his entire reality changes. He comes out of himself and reveals a new reality that he did not feel before, a new dimension in his new perception.

If humanity advances toward this intention, it will reach what we call the upper spiritual world. This is not just a name, but it has everything to do with perception and bestowal instead of self-reception.

Moreover, the word “bestowal” is not used in the regular sense. It is when I feel the commonality of all of us, and if I do not care about everyone, I do not get anything myself. Today we are beginning to understand this, albeit slowly.

It will cost us a lot of pain and effort, but if we introduce global education, people will start paying attention to various examples from movies, plays, novels, television programs, and stories that demonstrate that good and evil are considered only with respect to society. We are in a global system where we are experiencing a global process that is accompanied by changes which we can implement ourselves only on condition that we start developing a new kind of education.

I spoke about this at the World Spirit Forum in Arosa back in 2005. However, we still see that people are not ready for this, despite being incapable of escaping it, and even though they are already on the verge of disaster.

For example, a few months ago the USA national debt exceeded the country’s total resources. In other words, even if they sold everything they have, they still would not be able to meet their obligations. If they recognize collapse and declare bankruptcy, the world will fall after them. Therefore, the world is demanding, “Keep on playing. Continue printing money as if you have something to cover it with.”

These are the games we are playing. This is not the economy in the former, classical sense. We just keep moving further with our eyes closed, relying on chance, rather than udnertaking correction. We have no other alternative than an integral education, and we are already aware of this.

The economy is the language of our egoism. Our relationships are built on the principle of “you give to me, and I give to you,” on the system of maximum gain at the expense of others. It’s precisely in the language of economy that we communicate in our egoistic interactions because the economy is the essence of our egoistic unity.

We built it according to certain rules and because of it, we can exist. We are experiencing the crisis in this system first because the egoistic connections between us have reached the ultimate state, and it is no longer possible to live this way.

Therefore, under the circumstances, I appeal to people not even as a Kabbalist, but as an ordinary person who worries about the future of humanity. I do not need anything myself. I just urge people to look at what is in front of every one of us in equal measure.

I do not give home-grown advice. I do not suggest self-made theories, nor do I propose any new, special science. First of all, I say: Let us be guided only by science because it is equally recognized by everyone.
[51136]
From a conversation about a new book on 7/11/11

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Editorial in the news: “For the Western peoples, who have failed to heed our civilization’s greatest warning that ‘those who fail to heed history and its lessons are doomed to repeat it,’ lie the greatest dangers as the only way capitalistic systems are able to survive is through war, and according to the experts now it is coming much sooner than later.

“The first stirrings of Total Global War to protect the American and Western economies were first sounded this past spring by top Obama advisor, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman who said: ‘From an economic point of view World War II was, above all, a burst of deficit-financed government spending, on a scale that would never have been approved otherwise. Over the course of the war the federal government borrowed an amount equal to roughly twice the value of G.D.P. in 1940, the equivalent of roughly $30 trillion today.…this slump can be cured. All it will take is a little bit of intellectual clarity, and a lot of political will.’

“Krugman was joined in his ‘war thinking’ by his fellow economic ‘intellectual’ and CNBC analyst Marc Faber, who warned to ‘Brace for a Global “Reboot” and a War.’

“And to how close this war is we can ascertain from Russia’s envoy to NATO Dmitry Rogozin who warned that the United States and its Western allies are planning a military campaign against Syria to help overthrow the regime of President Bashar al-Assad with the long-reaching goal of preparing a beachhead for an attack on Iran, and which, of course, would start World War III as neither Moscow or Beijing will allow this to happen.”

Comment: Kabbalah also states that the world will reach war out of despair. But if we show people the possibility of another way out, which nature has to offer us—namely, the unity between ourselves and nature, then humanity will be able to achieve its final, perfect form and will do without war.

Kabbalah points out that the second path is realistic and we can realize it. Everything depends only on the explanation of how we should act to accomplish this ascent onto the next stage of our evolution where we reach similarity to the integral, global nature.
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Editorial in the news (by Michael Hazin, economist): “The European Central Bank began to buy Italian and Spanish debt to halt the collapse of the market of their government bonds. They understood that they cannot hold the situation without the emission. Indeed, it is impossible to hold it with the emission, but it is possible to delay.

“We do not know what caused such a panic among the ECB leadership, that they abandoned their core principles. Since the rejection of the core principles has begun, it will soon be followed by the abolition of proverbial European democracy.

“It should be noted that at the end of the 1930s, most of the EU countries were openly fascist regimes, and apparently, they met the proverbial ‘European values,’ as democracy in the 20th century was imposed by the narrow elite stratum as an ideological response to the USSR.

“Today, we have an amazing opportunity to see which real values correspond to the ‘European choice.’ So far, it is clear that ‘financial stability’ has ceased to correspond to this choice!”

Comment: Michael, you have heard me say on numerous occasions that if the Kabbalistic method and correction fails in the world, Nazism will reign over the world, which will bring the world to the third world war. The preconditions for this already exist in all European countries.
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When we are talking about spiritual concepts, if there is no hatred in the beginning, there will be no love later on. It is written, “I created the evil inclination and I created the Torah as a spice because the Light in it returns one to the source.”

The good source is love. But it cannot be revealed unless evil, hatred, and rejection are disclosed first. We should get used to the fact that love and hatred are always revealed and work together.

This is why we discover both hatred and love in our society, and we should understand that one is impossible without the other. We are not perfect angels, preserved at the inanimate level, but people with all of our cruel egoism.

To the extent that you yearn to feel love, you will discover only greater hatred. That is the only way you will become worthy of “the exit from Egypt” and will come to “Mount Sinai.” The mountain of hatred, “Mount Sinai” is the result of our previous work.

The Tower of Babel is only the beginning; nothing was revealed there. Therefore, 20 generations from Adam HaRishon until Abraham, being the first generations of Kabbalists, are called the forefathers. This is only the initial preparation because a strong desire was not revealed there yet.

The first time that the desire was disclosed was in Babylon, which is where the science of Kabbalah originated. There was already a small mountain of hatred there: “The Tower of Babel” above which it was possible to rise. The science of Kabbalah, the science of connection, was born there, and people who were capable of connecting emerged there as well. Thus, is always revealed above hatred.

Therefore, there is no need to be afraid of the fact that the world today is revealing hatred. We just have to let it be revealed naturally and precede the blow with a remedy so that hatred will be revealed with understanding consciously. And we have to be confident in the fact that we have the precise instructions on how to use it correctly.
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From the lesson on 8/15/11, Selected excerpts on The Day of Love

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First of all, I have to commit myself to bonding with others in order to reveal the property of bestowal. But it takes a long time to reach this need, which is called “the time of preparation.” At this stage, I reveal the extent to which I am unable to connect with others, do not desire, and hate it,

This is where I find the hatred. In truth, it’s not hate for another person, but for the property of bestowal itself. Rejecting another person is rejecting the Creator, His property of bestowal. That’s why I have to arrange the support of my environment, of that very friend with whom I want to connect by asking for his help: “I hate you, and I need your help!” After all, there is a very special force called the “mutual guarantee“, as it is said: “So help a man his neighbor.”

That is how I get the support that is deposited in my account since I drew it from another source. And to the extent I achieve this mutual guarantee, where I support him and he supports me, we try to get closer to one other and cannot! Then we discover that the mutual guarantee does not help either because the One who maintains it is absent. We need the Creator to be a witness, a guarantor who signs our contract.

It’s as if we are lacking the “head of the bank” and therefore our guarantee is invalid. It has to be supported by capital and power. That force which can unite us is the Light! And the Light is revealed through our reciprocity. This is what sets us apart from all other cases of guarantee, such as between criminals who have united in order to steal. After all, they did not bond to implement mutual bestowal.

This is a profound discernment which shows why we are able to realize ourselves in this way, although bonding did not help everyone else who pursued material goals and did not draw the Light that reforms to them. There must be a mutual guarantee which contains the force of the Creator, the force of the Light inside of it.

This is described as: “Israel (aiming straight to the Creator), the Torah (the Light of correction), and the Creator are one.” This is the only way to connect: When we (the Creator, the group, and me) are together. Otherwise, it won’t work. There won’t be a force that can engage the engine, and then we will simply get off track. We will not be able to examine ourselves, as if we are in a dead circuit with no electricity in it.

But if we work in a way where one supports another, with the Creator’s power unfolding between us, this is the only way we will arrive at the correct system where the Creator is revealed. That is how the quality of bestowal is revealed among the creatures. We create spiritual vessels out of ourselves, and within them the Light, the Creator is revealed.
[51360]
From the lesson on 8/15/11, Selected passages on the Day of Love

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Interview with Mário Soares, former President of Portugal: “The EU is in crisis today. The markets are disoriented, as are those that govern them. I call them monsters and it’s true, they are monsters. Nobody knows where they came from or what they want. Well, we know they want money so they launch attacks on the euro and consequently countries such as Greece, Ireland and Portugal and others….

“This is extremely serious. We lack a united response, which was necessary for Europe. For rich countries like Germany and Mrs. Merkel, who may be thinking that she can give orders to Europe, to Germanise Europe. If she thinks that, she is mistaken…

“If things carry on the way they are, it will be the end of the European project, there is no doubt. But I think there will be a big reaction. The reaction will come from the people. It is not just in the Arab world that people revolt. The danger is revolution in Europe. Individuals can reject this Europe and say this is not Europe, we want another. We want dialogue, social welfare and respect for each other.”

Comment: The only thing that can save us is the realization that we are living in the new, integral world in which we are fully interrelated and must therefore consider everyone as a whole, as one family. Back in the 1920s, Baal HaSulam wrote that the whole world is one family and if we do not view it that way, then we will bring ourselves to a world war in 10-15 years. And that’s what happened.

Today, the situation is repeating itself with the difference being that time is moving faster, and therefore, a world war could break out within a few months. And it can only be prevented by shifting the world’s tendency toward mutual connection, by realizing the need to rise above protectionism and individual egoism, and by thinking the way people think within a family about everybody while addressing issues from the most pressing to the simplest. Like in a family, first we think about the children and the sick, and then about those who can wait with the solution to their problems.

As soon as we change our approach, we will immediately feel a different attitude from nature towards us because we will reach similarity (homeostasis, balance, harmony) with it, and all our actions in this direction will bring us goodness! Let’s learn from nature!
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