Audio Version Of The Blog – 01.29.17

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My Thoughts On Twitter, 1/29/17

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I hope the world will stop electing “democratically”—choosing popular figures who are unable to manage and opt for professional managers.

Following the construction of the wall , the Mexicans might send a delegation to Gaza to learn how to dig tunnels… 😉

Eventually, Mexico and the US will build the border wall together. A responsible relationship cannot be built otherwise.

Political correctness and liberalism hindered social development. The world needs more openness and less conventionality, hence Trump appeared.

Trump didn’t pop out of nowhere. The global crisis and the need to transform the social and financial relations brought him forward.

Trump rejects political correctness and violates conventions that conceal flaws and corruptions. He is hated for tearing off the masks.

The world is like a stubborn child: it’s in a crisis, but has no desire to change, and doesn’t agree with anything Trump proposes.

As egoists, first we fence off our property to define its boundaries—then we can communicate with each other amicably. Trump is right.

Bernie Sanders is worried about climate change. But it is our selfish attitudes, our egoism, that throws nature out of balance.
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From Twitter, 1/29/17

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There Is No Other Method!

laitman_282_02Question: Can we say that today’s generation cannot attain spirituality without Rabash’s method?

Answer: That’s true, there is no other method today. Religion and any other method of spiritual studies no longer work and are confined to various rituals.

Comment: But there are those who may disagree with you and say that there are other methods like the method of Ramchal, the Baal Shem Tov, and others.

Answer: People can say that, but unfortunately there are no methods today for attaining spirituality. In the past Kabbalists created them through their internality and adapted them for themselves.

Baal Shem Tov taught Kabbalists, but did not actually leave anything behind. He had many students who wrote down his recommendations and developed them in different directions, and thus many streams of Hasidic Judaism emerged.

But the study method of the Baal Shem Tov is not an accurate Kabbalistic method and cannot be used today. I declare this taking full responsibility. This method is very close to Baal HaSulam because he was also among Hasidim in his days, but today it is not acceptable.

Baal Shem Tov and Ramchal were great Kabbalists, but they did not leave an accurate written method behind like Baal HaSulam and Rabash did; they collected, summed up, and prepared everything for our times and our generation.

Therefore, it is a pity to waste our time and our life in search for something else. There is no other method for us today.
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 8/7/16

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The Eternal Calendar

Laitman_045Kabbalistic books written hundreds of years ago and even thousands of years ago present tables of mutual positions of the sun, the moon, the Earth, Venus, Mars and the other planets. The Hebrew calendar, which has been used for many generations, is based on this information and does not need any corrections.

All the holidays, special astronomical dates, the beginning of the month, the eclipse of the moon, the eclipse of the sun, and the positions of the planets in relation to each other, etc. are determined and take place on the same day of the year. What is more, this was determined many years in advance.

I don’t know the exact date that the Hebrew calendar was created, but I believe that it is thousands of years old and is still working like clockwork today. It indicates precisely when, in which year, a certain holiday will be celebrated and a certain event, for example, will occur only on a Sunday or a Wednesday.

Can this calendar be changed? No, Kabbalists understand so well how the upper forces that manage our planet’s work that they created this calendar as the eternal calendar. Its uniqueness is that it is related both to the sun and the moon.

The Muslim calendar is focused only on the moon, and the Christian calendar is focused only on the sun. The Hebrew calendar is focused on both the sun and the moon because according to the wisdom of Kabbalah every motion, the whole philosophy of life, is arranged according to the middle line.
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 8/14/16

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How To Evaluate A Person?

laitman_627_2Question: Is a person responsible for his thoughts?

Answer: From the point of view of the wisdom of Kabbalah, a person is not responsible for anything because the Creator can substitute his deeds, thoughts, and intentions. So we don’t evaluate a person according to his state, but only according to his efforts and intentions. Moreover, these efforts are measured individually.

For example, you can lift 50 kilograms, while I can only lift 5 kilograms. Everything is measured relative to the person’s ability. It is also the same thing in the wisdom of Kabbalah. But we cannot evaluate our spiritual movement and passage through different states correctly, nor can we do this regarding those around us.

But in fact, everything is measured precisely within a spiritual network of forces. So, a person cannot know either his state or his precise level, even more so, he cannot know that of others.

Question: Is it possible to say that bad thoughts cause harm to a person, while good thoughts help him?

Answer: It could also be the opposite. Bad thoughts can rapidly bring a person to the recognition of evil, personal insignificance, humility, and uncertainty and compel him to turn toward the Upper Light. The wisdom of Kabbalah doesn’t evaluate a person as we would generally evaluate him in our world: where one is a good person because he is diligent, speaks the truth, and so on. The wisdom of Kabbalah evaluates a person only according to his intention, according to his longing!

Comment: But his intention is hidden to those around him….

Answer: That is why Kabbalah is called the wisdom of the hidden.

Question: So how is it possible to assess whether a person is good or bad?

Answer: There is no way! Suppose one student sleeps during a lesson, while another arrives alert after resting, understands everything, and asks questions. We cannot evaluate a person according to these criteria especially since we don’t know the inner potential that exists within each of us. We only evaluate a person within a group to the extent that he actually invests more or less effort.

Question: In the wisdom of Kabbalah, is it necessary to justify a person from the start?

Answer: Yes. We do not know the path of a person in this world. Sometimes a student may stagnate for years, be confused, mumble something, and then suddenly make a breakthrough all at once. It is impossible to say anything from the start, because it could be that he was waiting all these years for the moment that a giant personal system of gears to arrange themselves and connect such that he became integrated in a collective common contact with them and begin to ascend.
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 8/21/16

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America Welcomes Its New President, Part 1

laitman_426Question: The day after the inauguration of US President Donald Trump, America and the entire world split in two, protesters against his rule and those who support it. Do you think this is a temporary phenomenon or a gap that will widen further?

Answer: Actually, such a split has never happened before. After World War II, liberalism became the fashion in the world. Humanity decided that the West, the “free world,” cannot afford many things without any restriction of religion and governmental system, and everyone can feel more or less free.

By itself, liberalism is a good thing, but if it is based on human egoism, it leads to distortions. It happens with everything that people do. There are many excellent qualities and aspirations for remarkable plans that people offer wholeheartedly

Humanity enthusiastically accepts them, without considering that human nature is inherently egoistic. The moment we begin to implement these excellent programs, egoism will begin to wedge into them and turn them so that only destruction will be left.

After all, if we want to correct something, we need to correct our egoism first, and then all aspects of our lives will be corrected. Without this, only harm will come from all the programs.

Therefore, neoliberalism and democracy initially looked very enticing, promising to provide everyone with good development. The problem is that all of this was based on egoism and therefore led to the destruction we observe now.

Democracy and liberalism have led to these distortions that affect everyone. Everyone does what he wants, and this is the most egoistic, abhorrent form possible, especially in our time when egoism has developed so much that it has come to quite unimaginable desires, inclinations, and properties.

It turns out that there are no restrictions on the manifestations of egoism, no power over them, not newspapers, governments, financial oligarchies, not the judiciary, police, nor universities. One cannot raise a child because he will complain about his parents to the police. In society, there are no constraints that would keep it in some kind of a framework so as not to lead to total anarchy.

This is like children who had been granted freedom to run riot as they want. In the end, what will happen with these children? That’s why we have come to such a crisis with the government, finance, media, law enforcement, and judicial systems.

The problem is that we don’t take into account that real democracy requires the prior correction of the egoistic nature of man. Democracy must be built on a corrected basis. Otherwise, it will crumble.

The split that has occurred today in the world is the difference between people who belong to the previous generation that still want some kind of order, and the younger generation, brought up in the last thirty years, who don’t recognize any order and are accustomed to doing
what they want.

So they have, after legal elections, gone out to demonstrate in protest. If they stand up for democracy, why don’t they agree with the President who received the most electoral college votes?

Apparently, they think that the opportunity to display their egoistic nature is democracy and an indicator of a modern, developed person. There is no correction, no understanding of creation, nor even an understanding of how society functions. In the meantime, society is functioning through other people who are preserving it, and the army and police are still working somehow.

However, a polyarchical system has already been built. Everyone wants to rule—the government apparatus, financiers, media, the military, and police. It is happening all over the world, but it must end.

Now is the opportunity to eliminate this conflict in a peaceful, quiet way. It is still possible to fix the destruction done by the liberal rulers in Europe and the previous American leadership in the United States.

Today, there is a struggle between the two parts of America, and it won’t be very simple. Yet, the process doesn’t depend on one or another, and in any case, it will move in the direction of correction. The only question is, which way it will go, good or bad? Hopefully, Trump will be able to implement at least something from his program of change, and the realization of evil will happen through the mind, and not through suffering.
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From the 2nd part of Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/22/17, Lesson on the Topic: “Mismah Arosa” (Arosa Document), “Altruists and Egoists in Society”

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Ynet: “The Day Robots Take Over The Labor Market”

From my column in Ynet: “The Day Robots Take Over The Labor Market”

Autonomous cars that are driven by themselves, three-dimensional printers, and computerized supermarkets without cashiers, what will taxi drivers, salespeople, and all the other people do who have professions that are going to disappear? How will we fill our day after we discover that our workplace has been shut down? Rav Laitman presents the expected scenario of changes in the future society that we should prepare for.

In 2025, the world will be totally different. Sophisticated machines and computers will take over the labor force. Robotic cars that drive by themselves will replace truck drivers, taxi drivers, and bus drivers. We will not need banks either, and professions such as cashiers and other service providers will likely perish from the world. We will still need personnel to operate computerized systems, but will require very few people. The conclusion is simple: most of today’s workers will find themselves without a livelihood.

If such scenarios sound like a science fiction movie trailer, here is some data. The research institute Gartner predicts that by the end of 2020, about 50 billion tools, objects, and people are expected to be connected to the Internet. The world will be connected by formats similar to smart cities; we will all live in smart houses, and machines that know how to transmit information between them and give orders to each other without any human contact will be part of our daily lives. This technological revolution is called the Internet of Things (IoT).

Along with the work place, which is like a second home for us today, wages in their familiar form will disappear, money, which gives us an incentive to get up in the morning, glues us together, and compels us to make a living through the connections between us. What will our future source of income be? What will happen to our wages?

It’s All About Relationships

The Americans have great hopes for a better future with the election of Trump. They expect him to create tens of thousands of new jobs and to make America great again. Other people are hoping that salvation will come from science and that scientists will offer a new socio-economic approach. In both cases, it is about covering up the problem, about providing patches that will not last long. Eventually, we must face the growing problem of global unemployment.

You might try to bury your head in the sand like many do or to ignore the enormous changes that are coming, but you should take one thing into account: man’s egoistic nature. It will continue to grow and develop, will become increasingly more ferocious, and might eventually lead puzzled humanity to choose between two familiar options: a Marxist-style socialist revolution or a nationalistic regime with Nazi/Hitler-style characteristics.

According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, the solution is in building the right relationships between people. It is the different social connections throughout history that have formatted different new regimes. Even back in the Middle Ages, different social eras like slavery and feudalism based on agriculture divided society into two major classes: the nobility and the vassals. The egoistic nature in humanity grew stronger at that time and led to the search of crooked ways to profit more, and people began to develop new means that led to great changes.

At the end of the 18th century, the gradual transition to the modern world began. The industrial revolution developed very rapidly and led to urbanization, a process in which the masses in Europe and the US left pastoral villages and moved to big cities that developed around the new factories that were being built. Society gradually changed, and two new classes emerged: the working class and the bourgeois class.

In the middle of the 19th century, the egoistic nature of relations in society became more extreme and took on a new socio-economic format called capitalism. The method was good at first, but the 2008 economic crisis illustrated briefly how far things can go, and generally speaking, few know how to play by the rules of capitalism, and they are the ones who determine the game, and the others, who are the silent majority, lose big time.

Economy or Corruption

Although the economy helps us live, it isn’t life itself. The increasing activity in the model of universal basic income (UBI), according to which the state pays every citizen a daily allowance regardless of his employment status, disconnecting work from pay, is no coincidence. It reflects the awkward attempts to prepare for an era in which there will be no work, but there will be plenty to live on thanks to advanced robotics. This is the reason that, in a digital era that threatens to change jobs as we know them today, we must engage in building a new social structure. As soon as society changes, the economy will change.

How will we bring about the change? Just as we are all products of the public education system that was founded with the acceleration of the industrial revolution in the 19th century in order to train skilled workers for the professional work on the assembly lines of the factories, we also must bring about an unprecedented educational revolution in the 21st century. This means that we must adapt the relationships between us through educating the masses to live in a new society.

What is the first step? It is to attend school once again, to study about the global world and about human nature, and to discuss how we can tighten the positive relationships between us at a roundtable. The positive force of connection we will create and establish between us will balance the negative force of our egoistic nature, restrain it from disintegrating relationships, and will provide every individual with an income in the emotionally and psychologically in the form of happiness, joy, peace, and tranquility.

Homemade

Such an educational initiative is based on the laws of global nature, which is taught by the wisdom of Kabbalah. Unity is the most basic, natural structure. Nature aspires for balance, equality, and wholeness, and since people are part of the circle of nature, we, too, are obliged to operate in equality and mutual consideration. The only difference is that in our case, we must do it consciously through an educational process. We will put an end to the problem of growing unemployment by promoting an ideology that calls for unity. New jobs will be created for many and their only goal will be generating the positive energy of connection. This will be our production, an income of nobel human value, a pay we will work for.

What will be our work? We will be busy developing a society that encourages closeness between people. We will focus on the improvement of skills such as patience, concession, and restraint in our relationships with others and will increase awareness of social relations hidden from view. We will not be required to change any of the natural attributes we were born with or those we have acquired during our lifetime, but we must learn how to establish nice mutual relationships between us that will guarantee a good and happy life.

What about the basic necessities such as food, clothing, housing, transportation, and other social services like healthcare and education? We will leave that to robots and smart machines. The enormous surplus in manpower will operate the advanced equipment, and wherever manpower is needed, we all will work together in rotation and with great will to serve all of society.

Robots gradually will replace our technical contribution to humanity, but not the human part, which we have not developed yet. When we connect a bit more, the social atmosphere will bring us together and create a new socio-economic structure that we have never known before. The state will become a big communal family, national and personal problems will be solved from a new perspective, and the force of connection will heal society and bring it to its full recovery. The new social economy will finally free us from the continuous worry about making a living and an exaggerated engagement in materialism, and will leave us spare time in order to develop individually, socially, and spiritually.
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From Ynet article 1/5/17

New Life #338 – The Ideology Of The Israeli Nation And The Next Revolution

New Life #338 – The Ideology Of The Israeli Nation And The Next Revolution
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Nitzah Mazoz

Summary

What makes the ideology of the nation of Israel so special? What can we learn from leaders of revolutions throughout history and how can the Israeli society affect the future revolution?

Since the days of Abraham, the ideology of the nation of Israel has been the fulfillment of “love thy friend as thyself.” Two thousand years ago we broke away from that and since then we have been going downhill.

According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, our ideology is “love thy friend as thyself.” This is our constitution. This ideology is the internality of the nation, and it is time we return to it. Then we will be a light unto the nations of the world. Baal Shem Tov began spreading the love of others among the nation of Israel, and then Marx continued this ideal.

We don’t understand how this connection works, but it exists. The seed of Israel is found in every revolution.

Abraham was the first revolutionary. He brought a new force into the world, a force of giving, mercy above the force of receiving. The Jews have the hidden tendency to develop into something new.

Today only the nation of Israel can lead a social educational revolution in the world. The correction of the world is the transition from egoistic relations to relations of love and connection. This is the ideology.

The next revolution will not involve a dominant part and a part that is dominated. The connection between us will prevail, the upper force.

God is the upper force that dwells in nature, that connects everything, that develops everything. The next revolution will be according to the ideology of the nation of Israel.
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From the KabTV’s “New Life #338 –The Ideology Of The Israeli Nation And The Next Revolution,” 3/4/14

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Daily Kabbalah Lesson – 01.29.17

Preparation for the Lesson

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Lesson on the Topic: “Ein Od Milvado (There Is None Else Besides Him),” 

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Lesson on the Topic: “Mismah Arosa (Arosa Document),” “Plan for Getting Out of Crisis,” 

[media 5] [media 6]