Audio Version Of The Blog – 12.19.16

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Ynet: “Is There A Future For Capitalism?”

From my column in Ynet: “Is There a Future for Capitalism?” 

In Europe and in the United States, extreme right-wing movements are becoming stronger, in Asia fundamentalist Islam is growing, Nazism is permeating Russia. Besides that, millions of people are out of work, this trend continues to become stronger, and the world is heading toward war. How far will the world deteriorate? Rav Laitman answers in the spirit of the wisdom of Kabbalah

As a last convulsion before the death of the capitalism of today, it is flourishing and prospering, but underneath the surface, it is dying. The writing is already on the wall: purchasing power and sales capacity are fading, social mobility is frozen, technology is led by robotics, nanotechnology, and three-dimensional printers take over the job market, and the most distinct sign of all is rising unemployment. The UN’s International Labour Organization estimates that world unemployment will grow to at least another 11 million people in the next three years—and this is without considering the data on hidden unemployment and the unemployment of youth throughout the world, which is breaking new records and distort the measurement method.

It is clear that a lack of jobs accompanied by low wages will increase inequality, which is liable to force many of the young to postpone establishing a family unit, buying a home, and raising children and will encourage migration to developed nations. The economic downturn will necessarily cause the spread of the epidemic of depression and an increase in drug use and could lead to hundreds of thousands going out to the streets demanding social justice—a global trend that is growing before us.

In a world that is continuing to change and is in economic uncertainty, the question can be asked: Is it possible to prevent mass exodus to huge violent protests? Who will provide work for the millions of unemployed? And where is the world economy deteriorating to?

Capitalism’s Swan Song

The fundamental assumption of economics is that people aspire to maximal benefit with minimal investment (the assumption of rational expectations) with egoistic motives. Yet people who make a living off each other cannot exist separately from the other individuals in society. Throughout history, human development reflects the development of connections and interdependence between people. Which is to say, economics is just a copy of the system of connections and relationships between us.

According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, these relationships between people are a deeper expression of the egoistic nature of humanity—the desire to receive maximal pleasure and enjoyment even if they are at the expense of others. The egoistic nature began to grow even in the days of the ancient kingdom of Babylon around 3,500 years ago. So the foundations for the methods of trade and the use of money and taxation were laid down for the first time, modern agriculture began to take shape, and alongside them the methods for governance and control and classical processes of order and management were founded for the first time. Civilization, which had been conducted as a single family, was overthrown in an instant. The ego, which drove the Babylonians to develop, transformed them into being more self-centered and separated them. Social changes gave birth to class disparity among the populace and the phenomenon of exploitation of others began.

That created periods of slavery and feudalism one after the other, based on farming, and it split society into two classes in the Middle Ages, the prominent nobles and the serfs. The egoistic nature intensified the search for twisted ways of profiting more, and people began to develop new measures that brought far-reaching changes, known as the Industrial Revolution.

On the eve of the revolution, at the end of the 18th century in England, the steam engine was invented. For industry, this was a springboard into the modern world. Mechanization and industrialization continued to develop at a dizzying rate and caused the masses to leave their pastoral villages and move to the big cities in England, France, and later, the United States—cities that developed around modern industry.

Marx’s Mistake

The Industrial Revolution gradually changed the nature of society. It led to the development of two new urban classes: The bourgeoisie—the financiers, who were leaders of enterprises, banks, and commerce, and the working class (the proletariat)—simple peasants who came to the city without any education, worked hard for the wealthy and suffered alienating and exploitative employment conditions.

Karl Marx, the father of the doctrine of Socialism, who was exposed to this phenomenon firsthand, described it this way: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes” (The Communist Manifesto).

The process of the development of egoism did not stop, and in the middle of the 19th century it reached the peak of its prosperity and was wearing a new socioeconomic name of capitalism. The Capitalists demanded their own private property and free-market trade. They placed the individual at the center and formed a liberal position to justify their higher status. Their claim that when their income increased and their taxes were lowered, wealth would trickle down and provide benefit for the less established strata, has become a fiction. Marx believed that when the generation of working masses would understand that their situation was very bad, they would join together, make a violent revolution against the bourgeois regime, and bring a new egalitarian society. But he was mistaken about this turning point….

A hundred years ago, Baal HaSulam wrote that, “However, in this last point, where he promises us that after the ruin of the current bourgeois government, a proletariat government will immediately be instated, here is the flaw in his method: The new reality before us denies it. He thought that the proletariat governance would be the subsequent step to the bourgeois governance, and hence determined that by negating the bourgeois government, a proletariat one would be established instantly. Yet, reality proves that the step following the ruin of the present government is that of Nazis or Fascists. Evidently, we are still in the middle stages of human development. Humanity has not yet reached the highest level of the ladder of evolution. Who can assume how many rivers of blood are yet to be shed before humankind reaches the desired level?” (Baal HaSulam, the newspaper, The Nation).

The negative force of the egoistic nature is operating as usual, and if we don’t rein it in, it will lead us into uniting in Neo-Nazi and Fascist movements, a trend that is taking place these days in Europe and the United States. While the economy helps us live, it is not life itself. We must see how we build a new society according to the process of development through which humanity is moving, and as society changes—the economy changes.

While economists and policymakers think about how to reverse the cycle and return capitalism to its golden age, we learn from the wisdom of Kabbalah that this is something that is impossible. Capitalism made its own laws, and the laws of nature are advancing us toward a new socioeconomic model, and it is good that this is so.

A New Human Industry

There is increasing interest in the model of universal income, through which a country pays every citizen a basic subsistence allowance without any connection to his employment status; the detachment of payment from labor, is not accidental. It reflects stuttering attempts to prepare for an era in which there will be no work, but provision will be in abundance thanks to advanced robotics. But the failure of a national referendum to assure an income in Switzerland in the beginning of the year and the opposition to the new model throughout the world reflects a lack of maturity or even a denial of the fact that the entire labor market is standing before dramatic changes that are liable to undercut the entire social-political-economic order, and it is incumbent upon us to prepare in advance to avoid shocks and much human suffering.

How do we do this? Just as today, we are all the product of a formal and informal educational system, that through lectures and the memorization of principles prepare us for life in a capitalistic system, so much so that it seems natural to us. So we just have to adjust the relationships between us, which are the basis for every economic system, to the new reality and the challenges of the 21st century. Such adjustment can be carried out only by means of mass education. The public-school system was established with the rise of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century in order to train workers to work in factory assembly lines. So it is precisely up to us to generate an unprecedented educational revolution in the 21st century, toward the formation of the new society.

Imagine that every morning we will go out to the workplace where we worked in the past or to a community center close to our homes, and throughout the entire day we sit around a roundtable learning about the global world and human nature and discuss how to strengthen positive relationships between us. The positive power of connection that is created and stabilized between us will balance the negative force of egoism and will provide every person with a life, emotionally and psychologically, in the form of happiness, joy, serenity, and peace. “social unity…can be the source of every joy and success” is what Baal HaSulam wrote in the article, “The Freedom.”

With the help of promoting an ideology calling for unity, we put an end to the problem of increasing unemployment: many workplaces will be created, as I have specified here at length, whose entire purpose will be to generate the power of positive connection. The citizens will not be concerned at all about food, clothing, health, education, housing, cars, entertainment, or any additional social services. The nation will become a big family community; the problems of nationalism and privacy will gradually be solved, and the power of connection will heal the dying human society to its complete recovery. The new social economy will finally release us from the constant concern about making a living, engaging in excessive materialism, and will free our time for personal, social, and spiritual development.
[198738]
Ynet: “Is There a Future for Capitalism?” 12/6/16

The Law Of Purification Of Egoism

laitman_558Torah, Deuteronomy 14:21: You shall not cook a kid in its mother’s milk.

It is impossible to begin the correction if there is not the proper separation of the right and left line. Milk represents the right line and meat or blood, the left line. Therefore, meat and dairy meals should be consumed separately with a certain time interval between them in order to allow distance between them: from meat to dairy and from dairy to meat. It is forbidden to consume them together or to consume animal blood in any form.

These laws of purification of human egoism are explained on the basis of external material since it is impossible to explain anything to anyone on the basis of internal sensations. They are clear only to those who understand the conformity of the external signs to his internal spiritual, moral, sensory structure, to the desires. And those who don’t understand, perceive fish, meat, milk, and the laws of kashrut only from the gastronomic point of view.

For anyone who understands what is being said, all this gastronomy is an internal one. He must carve himself internally to dairy, meat, fish, fowl, and other desires, in other words to still, vegetative, animate, and human levels. Salt, water and even some types of edible soil belong to the still level.

Dairy qualities in me are the qualities of bestowal, and kid is an animal, the left line, the quality of reception. Therefore, it is said, “You shall not cook a kid in its mother’s milk,” meaning don’t connect the right and left line together, otherwise you connect plus and minus and it causes a short circuit.

Question: How does the middle line appear?

Answer: When you want to direct both lines to the benefit of others outside of you they connect through bestowal from each line, yet not within you, but in the receiver, because you give this benefit to the third line.

The receiver doesn’t feel both lines together, but senses them only as bestowal. When you give from yourself, bestowal apparently loses its initial qualities. It doesn’t matter from which line it comes, from your right or left line, in the receiver it is felt exactly this way. Hence, you can give from both lines.

This is a very interesting quality. We study what happens in the third line as a dressing of one on another through the example of mutual influence of the spiritual systems Aba ve Ima (father and mother). Although father gives the quality of Hochma and mother the quality of Bina and they are opposite to each other like meat and dairy, together they connect in the bottom part (Zeir Anpin) and dress on one another in it.

Is it possible to add milk to the meat and meat to the milk? They connect in the third where they simultaneously are fully realized in their entire oppositeness.
[198671]
From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 7/27/16

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Hebrew, The Key To The Spiritual World

Laitman_137Question: The horizontal and vertical lines of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet show the direction of the spreading of the Light and they have a spiritual meaning. Do the letters in other languages symbolize spiritual attributes?

Answer: Every language, not only human languages, but also the language of animals, has its own spiritual source, its own spiritual root, but we don’t have the code key for them.

We discover the Hebrew language when we enter the spiritual world. Therefore, scientists like Newton studied Hebrew, realizing that this was the way to gain insight into the “spiritual computer” of the universe.
[197181]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 7/17/16

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Bringing Others Pleasure

laitman_942Question: Do I only fill the spiritual desires of another when I bring him pleasure or do I also fill his corporeal desires?

Answer: To bring others pleasure does not mean running to hospitals and helping people or helping animals. It means I connect with my group of friends in the system in which we become the conductors of the Upper Light to each other and connect into one whole, eternal network where the Creator is revealed.

Bringing others pleasure means helping others discover the Creator. Therefore it is written: “from the love of others to the love of the Creator.” A friend is called close because he has the same aspirations and intentions I do.

All the other people who don’t have the same yearnings and intentions do not belong to the category of “another.” They live an ordinary life until the point in the heart awakens and then they join us. The wisdom of Kabbalah is not a religion and it doesn’t force anything on anyone. It is a wisdom by which every individual can reveal the upper nature by himself.
[197455]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 8/28/16

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This World Is Not An Illusion!

laitman_752_1Question: For a person who is immersed in the material world, the spiritual world seems like an illusion. Does the material world become an illusion for a Kabbalist who attains the spiritual worlds?

Answer: This world is not an illusion. It absolutely and clearly exists and must be treated as a reality. When it gradually begins to disappear from your sensation you can say that it is illusory. The wisdom of Kabbalah relates to everything materialistically.

Question: Does this world become an illusion for a Kabbalist? What does existence in two worlds mean?

Answer: For a Kabbalist, this world is not an illusion. I exist in this world. I have a wife, children, grandchildren, friends, students, and my egoism that I am working on. Existence in two worlds becomes possible when a Kabbalist, in addition to his egoism with which he was born and which has developed in this state, acquires additional possibilities for investigating the extent of creation found outside of the ego.
[197518]

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The Pursuit Of Happiness

laitman_527_03In the News (Psychology Today): “Getting what we want brings us happiness, right? Wrong! We believe this and go in search of happiness as if it were something that could be ‘found’ or ‘obtained’ but it is actually something that we can and do; manufacture internally. 

“Dan Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist has run a series of workshops which explore the idea that whatever happens to us, we have the ability to synthesize (i.e. manufacture) happiness; it is not something we ‘find.’ …

“We are all able to manufacture our own happiness, to some extent and if we obsess too much about whether or not we are happy we may miss out on the experiences of living and relating to others that are likely to bring us pleasure and contentment. Happiness is not an end-goal, rather it is a by-product of a well-lived life where we love and connect to others.  So, instead of looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, start enjoying the rainbow instead.” 

My Comment: This is incorrect; this is purely Harvard University psychology. The fact is that happiness is in the effort, when people are already starting to feel the following excellent state.

For example, a person is going to get married in a month: He has a lovely fiancé; everything is wonderful; they are not only dreaming about getting married, but are implementing their plans and preparing for the festive day. Is the month before the wedding any less pleasant than the month after the wedding? No. The expectation of happiness is even greater because it is unlimited. After all, when a person expects happiness, it gives the person a huge frame, and when I receive it, the frame is sharply narrowed.

The expectation of happiness depends only on us, and only we dictate the scope of future happiness! It can inflate, expand, and be enjoyed all the time, and thus a person’s state can be limitless. So it is possible to create endless happiness and live within it.

But when I get it, it enters into a box and I begin to feel it within me. What was outside (Makif – surrounding) me, becomes internal (Pnimi). I limit it by myself within my emotions and in this way I distort it.

In my senses it is discovered a bit more here and a bit less there; there is separation, detachment, and so forth and this leads to its end. Happiness exists in movement toward what is desired.
[196781]
From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 10/31/16

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Daily Kabbalah Lesson – 12.19.16

Preparation for the Lesson

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Lesson on the Topic: “Gathering of Friends”

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Lesson on the Topic: “Chanukah,” Part 1

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Lesson on the Topic: “Chanukah,” Part 2

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