The Solidarity Of Terrorism

laitman_222Opinion (Warwick Mark Harrison): “Now when we look at suicide terrorism, it is clearly not a cry for help. It is a determined attempt to destroy oneself and others. So it has to be understood in those terms. But the thing that I think it has in common is the need first will to understand the self. This is something that economists are probably not always very good at. Economists talk very freely about self-interest. It is commonplace in economic textbooks to find the idea that human behavior is driven by the desire to maximize one’s self-interest or one’s personal utility. What’s not commonly asked is who is the self whose interest is being maximized. …

“So one way that social psychologists understand suicide is that the person who commits suicide has a determined attempt, has reached the point where they can no longer protect the identity they have by staying alive and protecting the identity they have requires an active self-destruction. …

“When we look at people who commit acts of suicide terrorism, what we see is people who have gone on a journey that’s invested them with the self that requires self-destruction, because the identity that is required is that of the martyr, the witness to religious truth that can only be validated through death. And in the one of the things that we see when we look at the organization of suicide terrorism is that it’s not committed, acts of suicide terrorism are not committed by people who are desperate; it is not committed by people who are in any way particularly unusual psychologically. It is committed by young people who’ve been trained to see themselves as martyrs to a faith. …

“In the process of being recruited they don’t actually learn a lot about global politics, they don’t learn a lot about the demands of the organization, they don’t learn a lot about political strategy. In fact, these things are not very important to them.

“What they are looking for is some form of social solidarity.

“And you can get social solidarity in many ways: you can get it from working together in a firm, you can get it from joining a choir or a cycling club or a sports club, but you can also get it – we know this from a lot of examples – you can get it by joining together to commit acts of violence. Sometimes that’s football hooliganism, sometimes it’s terrorism. …

“So Abraham’s point is that to understand what people are looking for when they join the organizations it’s important to understand the lure of powerful social ties.

My Comment: Solidarity, a sense of unity, can be realized only through egoistic self-sacrifice or by rising above the ego; it is leading humanity forward.
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Related Material:
Why Do Kids Become Terrorists?
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Do We Need A Second Half?

Laitman_049_03Question: Must we get married for spiritual advancement?

Answer: No. Today this is no longer necessary.

In our day people have lost the desire to get married, raise a family, invest in a family, and the education of children is a big hassle for them.

Our generation was educated in a completely different way. Everyone had to get married, bring children into the world, educate them and give them a direction in life. These questions were always in front of us. But today, as a rule, parents aren’t very concerned about these things.

Comment: But in principle nature obligates us to live in a family.

Answer: That is how it once was, but for the new generation there is no need for this. In our day marriages are no longer necessary conditions even for those who want to develop spiritually.

My teacher Rav Baruch Shalom Ashlag obligated his students to marry and only someone who married was considered to be his student.

Unfortunately, I cannot demand this from my students because the wisdom of Kabbalah must extend and be disseminated all over the world. If I placed any conditions, we would not succeed in disseminating the wisdom of Kabbalah. The main thing is that people should hear and know at least a little about what the wisdom of Kabbalah is, and that is how the circle of those who are interested will gradually expand.

But someone who truly wants to be seriously involved with the wisdom of Kabbalah on one of the stages of spiritual development will need to think about solving the problem of the family. A person who learns about the nature of the spiritual world feels that he must himself be like nature, and so he is obligated to have a second half.
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 12/6/15

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Spiritual World – One For All

laitman_938_02Question: Is the spiritual world we attain the same for all or does each one have his own spiritual world?

Answer: The spiritual world we attain is the same for everyone, but each one attains it from some different perspective, in his own properties, just like our world.

In our world we are also supposed to exist in the same volume, but we still attain it in a different way. This happens because each of us has a different set of basic properties, the criteria through which we attain the world.
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From Lesson in Russian 12/27/15

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The Group – A Magic Mirror

laitman_934Question: If a person is born with a certain spiritual potential, can he increase it above what is given?

Answer: Every person is born with a certain spiritual potential that can be increased through the study in a Kabbalistic group where together with other people he will develop his potential with the help of others. And everyone develops in such a way.

After all, we are small pieces of one single system called Adam that broke into many particles. We have to put this puzzle together. If my interaction with others is correct, then together with them I assemble some part of this puzzle, a small fragment. As a result, within this fragment I can begin receiving some sensation of the upper world.

When ten people get together and interact with one another in the correct way, they create a mini-image of the upper world where, just like in a magic mirror, they can reveal that world.
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From Lesson in Russian, 12/20/15

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New Life #511 – Internet Addiction

New Life #511 – Internet Addiction
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Yael Leshed-Harel

Summary

We are in the midst of a virtual era in which everyone has a toy—the Internet. In the future it will liberate us from work and we will engage only in our relationships and the connections between us, but until then what will happen if they take away our toy?

Since the end of the 20th century we have entered the new phase of human development: We are the “screen” generation and have no reason to even leave our home since I connect with the whole world and get whatever I want through this screen.

We are educators who work to build relationships between people and therefore have to call for a public war against negative phenomena, the garbage that is on the Internet—just like the war that was declared on smoking.
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From KabTV’s “New Life #511 – Internet Addiction,” 1/27/15

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Daily Kabbalah Lesson – 02.18.16

Preparation for the Lesson

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Lesson on the Topic: “Questions from the World Kli”

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The Book of Zohar – Selected Excerpts, “Good and Evil” 

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Shamati #8, “What Is the Difference Between a Shade of Kedusha and a Shade of Sitra Achra” 

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