Question: I recently returned from a trip to Asia where I studied a state of being without thoughts. In this state I began to get to know people and realized that I was able to feel them, see what they want, and what I want to give them.

When I began to practice this further, I started to feel this wonderful internal state being generated between us, which was transmitted to everyone who was nearby. Is this what you are talking about when you speak about inner light?

Answer: No. It is not the same. You talk about psychological states, and I talk about spiritual ones.

First, when you study Kabbalah you will see that it is not the same.

Second, in order to feel what you are experiencing, you need not rise above egoism, above your nature. Such psychological training helps you somehow feel others on a deeper level and nothing more. It is not the way out of egoism, and is not what Kabbalah discusses.

There are many techniques in our world that attract people. I am not telling you to stop doing what interests you. At the same time, engage in Kabbalah and you will see what technique will really help you get out of your egoism, out of our nature.
[260121]
From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 1/26/20

Related Material:
Aspiring For Truth
Meditation And Mirages
In The Body And Above It

Filed under: Kabbalah Study, Science - No Comments →

Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Do we have predestined fates?“

According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, everything is predetermined.

Nature is a network of fixed laws that cascade serially from a source, extending to this lowest of worlds where we live.

Nothing happens by chance. Everything takes place according to nature’s laws.

Our problem is that we don’t know the laws of nature. We have no idea what will happen in the next moment, and we behave accordingly.

However, while we lack perception of nature’s laws, we need to reach a state where everything is perceived, understood, revealed and open, where we clearly see the complete picture of nature and how nothing happens by chance.

The method of attaining the complete picture of nature’s laws is described in Kabbalistic texts, many of which date back thousands of years.

In terms of fate, it is a driving force. There is fate, but there is no chance. Fate is usually in relation to a situation, i.e., whether or not a certain situation will happen.

If we know nature’s laws, the program that runs our lives, then we know what needs to emerge from that program, and that nothing happens by chance.

Through the study of the wisdom of Kabbalah, we gain the understanding and sensation of the fundamental laws acting in reality.

The more we progress in our awareness of the network of forces acting in reality, the more we recognize the interconnected and interdependent system that binds us at our foundations. In the wisdom of Kabbalah, this system is called “Adam HaRishon.” Through our increasing awareness of that system, we reach increasing identification with the causal force that created and sustains all life, which in Kabbalah has many names, including “upper force,” “Creator,” “upper light,” “nature” and others.

When the system of Adam HaRishon becomes revealed, according to the amount of its revelation toward us, we gain knowledge of the past, present and future, as it all merges into a single picture.

Filed under: Adam-The Common Soul, Q&A, Quora - No Comments →

Thrive Global published my new article: “Coronavirus — a Blessing in Disguise?”

We’ve needed these reflections and today that I see so many people asking them, or sympathizing with those who ask them, and it makes me optimistic.

Soccer Football – Campeonato Gaucho – Gremio v Sao Luiz – Arena do Gremio, Porto Alegre, Brazil – March 15, 2020 Gremio players wearing masks before the match is played behind closed doors as the number of coronavirus cases grow around the world REUTERS/Diego Vara

Life will return to normalcy after Coronavirus, but normalcy will not be what we know today. After the withdrawal symptoms from consumerism abuse subside, people will wake up to a new reality. The longer it takes for humanity to overcome COVID-19, the more different our post-Coronavirus lives will be.

The best case scenarios predict that a vaccine to the virus will be available to the public toward the end of 2020. How many businesses will survive a forced closure for that long? How many recreation and entertainment venues can stay out for that many months? And most important, what will our lives look like without them?

In my view, there will not be complete annihilation of recreation and entertainment, but there will be far less of it and in different ways. Can you picture it? Can you picture a life that does not consist of chasing assumed pleasures that almost always end up in dismay, which makes us look for the next promised bliss, only to find the next broken promise? What will satisfy us when the endless, futile pursuit of satisfaction is halted by force-majeure?

Right now, there are more questions than answers surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Beyond the obvious ones, such as when will a vaccine be found, there are very deep questions that this germ awakens. For example, it stops us from polluting the planet. By curbing flights, transportation, and production so radically, it drastically reduces our carbon imprint, improves the air quality, minimizes our depletion of natural resources, and generally makes humanity a dream come true for environment enthusiasts like Greta Thunberg and the millions who ache over the harm we are doing to our planet. So, is the virus all that bad? Or, maybe it’s bad for us and good for the rest of reality? But if that’s the case, then we’re at odds with reality, which is certainly not a good thing. How have we come to this?

As I said, it is still too early to answer these questions; we’re still in what the papers call “a developing story.” But when the dust sinks, there is no doubt that we will see a different picture from before it was kicked into the air.

Some Points of Reflection

Here are some of the things I reflect on these days:

#1 – If left alone, Nature is harmonious and balanced. When the balance is broken, such as when there is an overpopulation of one species, Nature finds a way to balance it either by increasing the number of predators of that species or by culling the excess number of animals in some other way. If Nature seems to attempt to cull us, I think we should ask why it is doing this. Have we become so deleterious to Nature that it is forced to discard of some of us?

#2 – If the virus is Nature’s way of culling humanity, would that imply that if we didn’t misbehave so badly, the virus wouldn’t happen?

There are even deeper questions we can ask:

#1 – So far, Coronavirus has been quite “gentle” with us. The number of casualties is relatively low and the symptoms are mostly mild. At the same time, we see that somehow, the virus has managed to disentangle all of our ties to one another; it is isolating us from each other, disassembling our previous way of life, yet does not threaten to altogether starve us. What does that mean for us? Could this be Nature’s way of telling us that the problem lies in our connections? If we were more empathetic to one another, more considerate, how would that impact the disease? Perhaps it wouldn’t since we should have been more empathetic and considerate to begin with and now it’s too late and we’re just going to have to ride out the storm and try to be different when it’s gone. But then, perhaps it would…

#2 – Also, Nature, as just said, is balanced. Humans are evidently not. We patronize Nature, patronize each other, and never stop playing “King of the [Dung] Hill.” We think what no creature thinks—that we are superior to Nature, that we can defeat it if we only try hard enough and long enough. Could this incongruence between the general nature and human nature be the cause behind the outbreak?

One way or the other, the virus, in its way, is a blessing in disguise. We’ve needed these reflections and today that I see so many people asking them, or sympathizing with those who ask them, and it makes me optimistic. We will find a vaccine to Coronavirus, but the question that bothers me the most is whether we will find a vaccine to the illness that has plagued us for centuries—our selfish human nature.

— Published on March 15, 2020

Filed under: Health, New Publications - No Comments →

Lesson Preparation

[media 1]

[media 2]

Lesson on the Topic “Pesach (Passover)” 

[media 3]

[media 4]

Selected Highlights

[media 5]

[media 6]

Filed under: Daily Kabbalah Lesson - No Comments →

Listen to an Audio Version of the Blog
Download:MP3 Audio

Filed under: Audio Version of the Blog - No Comments →

Recommendations for the #coronavirus period:
Maintain virtual contact in your permanent groups of up to 10 people. If it’s difficult to do in this amount, then in groups of 5 people. During lessons and at other times—up to 5 times a day.
I recommend going over the #Passover brochure materials.
From Twitter, 3/15/20

Related Material:
My Thoughts On Twitter 3/14/20
My Thoughts On Twitter 3/13/20
My Thoughts On Twitter 3/12/20

Filed under: Crisis, Thoughts on Twitter - No Comments →

In preparation for the congress, we sit in random tens at the lessons rather than in our regular tens where some of the people I know well and others I do not. But that doesn’t matter. Over these several days, we must come to realize that it does not matter who I am sitting with because we have to create a mutual guarantee. So now, sitting in a random ten, I must try to realize the mutual guarantee here and afterward do so in a different ten.

I must realize the mutual guarantee with respect to all of reality because the whole world is my spiritual vessel, a Kli. Each time a different part of that vessel becomes revealed to me in one way or another. When the ten Sefirot, the ten friends, are revealed to us, it always happens in the same ten and it only seems to me to be different, as if I am seeing different faces, names, states. But in fact, it is the same ten.

It seems to me that I see different people, but in fact, it is not so—this is only my perception. In reality, this is the same ten: “Always ten, not nine and not eleven.”

External details are unimportant to me because we have to come to the revelation of the spiritual Kli. We must be together only in spirituality, and we engage in corporeality only when necessary. Thus, it makes no difference to me where I sit because it is the same ten, it cannot be bigger or smaller throughout creation. Even if I found myself sitting with 8 billion people, it would still be one ten, only divided in order to allow me the opportunity to study the minute details of a single Kli. In essence, this is the same ten Sefirot.¹

Do we reveal or do we build the connection between us? We build our connection, and only then come to realize that it already exists. We do not know what to build or how, so we try every possible way. And as a result of our efforts to do something, this network establishes itself. But it does not get materialized until we exert the full measure of efforts at every level.

This system already exists, it is perfect. Nothing was broken, has disappeared, or was lost. The breakage only exists in our perception: we have to exert efforts and reveal it. After all, our awareness, understanding, and development depends on it. We create in ourselves the ability to perceive, with our mind and feelings, the kind of connections that should be between us, the responsibilities, participation, and reciprocity.

Each person becomes a part of another and we begin acting together like cells of a single organism. We have to attain the actions of this body in all of its connections. We thus elevate ourselves to the level of the Creator. Through attaining how this mechanism operates, we elevate ourselves to attain the purpose of creation, we realize why the Creator has made everything in this form, and why He has created specifically these connections. This is a path to reveal the Creator, to attain the creative mind.²

Everything is a part of a single system, but the souls that are closest to me, with whom I must achieve the mutual guarantee, are the ten that I am with corporeally since I remain in this world with my mind and feelings. Thus, I accept the ten that I am currently in as an exercise I have been given to build the Arvut between us.

I can change tens every minute—it makes no difference. The main thing is that I annul my egoism and let the ten before me in, let them replace my heart. This is called mutual guarantee.

The nine people before me are the nine upper Sefirot and I am the Malchut. Therefore, I make a restriction on myself and serve them, attach myself to them, am willing to do anything for them. This means that I am building a spiritual Partzuf. The mutual guarantee is a condition for creating a spiritual Partzuf through which one can bestow to the Creator and receive back from Him.³

This is very real; it is right in front of us. This congress can become the revelation of the Creator to His creatures. But, obviously, our work is much harder than if we were studying Kabbalah in a small group of about ten people. That would be easy. But we are a Kabbalistic group of the new world that is opening the entrance to spirituality for the whole of humanity.

We are pulling the entire world upward and this, naturally, is a lot harder. But this is what is called the generation of the Messiah, the Last Generation.

There are various methods that let us effortlessly experience something spiritual. But that is not what the Creator requires of us. He expects us to do such work so that we pull the whole world upward with us.⁴

What can I do if I want to feel the desires of my friends, but feel nothing of the kind, absolutely nothing? Annul yourself. I want to sew their desires together, connect their hearts. If I take my friends’ hearts and sew them together, stitch by stitch, as if with a needle and a thread, I create an area where the Creator will be revealed. This is my Creator, my area, because I connected their hearts.

If I can envision these hearts and connect them in this way, I would have already built my soul.5
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 2/17/20, Arvut [Mutual Responsibility]” (Preparation for the Convention in The World Kabbalah Convention 2020)
¹ Minute 49:50
² Minute 55:20
³ Minute 1:05:11
⁴ Minute 1:40:20
⁵ Minute 1:42:11

Related Material:
Prepare For The Convention—Invest In Your Soul
World Kabbalah Convention 2020 Album—In Tel Aviv, Israel
Moments Of Connection: World Kabbalah Convention 2020

Filed under: Daily Kabbalah Lesson - No Comments →

The Times of Israel published my new article “Coronavirus and the New Humanity”

The outbreak of COVID-19 (Coronavirus Disease) caught us off guard. Initially, the majority of the world didn’t really care because it was in China, and the West sees China mainly as a big factory. Next, we thought it was little more than a new strain of flu. When it started to spread, we thought it wouldn’t come to our neighborhood/city/country. So when governments declared mandatory quarantine on people returning from abroad, or shut down all entertainment businesses, or canceled sports leagues, schools, and universities, we thought that they were panicking for no reason.

But we should already know better. If we don’t want our countries to look like Wuhan or Lombardi, we’d better be attentive to the instructions.

Almost a Positive Message

If it weren’t sad, the message the coronavirus is sending us could sound almost positive: It tells us “We are all in this together.” It is a universal message of mutual responsibility, where the measures taken by one government impact every person on the planet. Just think about how it started: Someone in Wuhan, China, got a strange flu in November, and three months later, thousands of people are dead, the world is going out of business, hundreds of millions are jailed inside their own homes or ghettoed in their city, Russia and OPEC have declared an oil-war, and the U.S. thinks they’re both out to get it, and all because of that one person with the strange flu.

Indeed, we are all in this together, universally connected.

In the wisdom of Kabbalah, there is a concept called “the last generation.” Basically, it means that when the generation is selfish to the core, a new paradigm will emerge, one of unity and mutual responsibility. Now, according to The Book of Zohar, the seminal book of Kabbalah, we are in the beginning of that last generation.

The Birth of a New Humanity

Admittedly, we are in the midst of a global crisis. But the word “crisis” doesn’t deserve its bad reputation. In English, a crisis is “the turning point for better or worse in an acute disease or fever,” or “an emotionally significant event or radical change of status in a person’s life,” according to Webster’s Dictionary. So it isn’t necessarily bad, but it is certainly a dramatic situation.

The Hebrew word for “crisis” is even more interesting. Mashber, which is Hebrew for crisis, is the word that ancient Hebrew texts used to denote birth. The mashber was the special chair on which the woman in labor sat until she delivered (Talmud, Arachin 1:4). Also, in the Bible (Isaiah 37:3), the word mashber denotes the opening of the birth-canal right before the newborn baby emerges to the world.

In the case of the current crisis, and in fact the current process that we have been undergoing for some decades now, the newborn baby is a new humanity. The difference between now and, say, ten years ago, is that significant portions of humanity are beginning to acknowledge that mutual responsibility and interdependence are not merely fancy words that they can use to decorate their social media posts; they are the painful truth that we must take into account in our daily lives. Previously, it didn’t matter to anyone if I wanted to go to a discotheque or to the movies to take my mind off life’s burdens. Nowadays, other people’s lives could depend on my decision, literally! It doesn’t get more mutually responsible than that.

Willing vs. Unwilling Collaborators with Reality

Reality has made its choice for us: We are all dependent on each other. But we can choose how to relate to it. Like a crisis, interdependence is not a bad thing in and of itself. Imagine what our lives would be like if we had no one to make our food so we could buy it in the supermarket, no one to make our cars so we could go anywhere we want, and no one to make our clothes, homes, appliances and gadgets that we so enjoy. What would our lives look like?

The problem is not with mutual dependence in itself, it’s in the fact that we are trying to use it to our personal benefit instead of everyone using it for everyone’s benefit. When we use our interdependence selfishly, the results are the financial crisis from twelve years ago, the depression that we feel due to our dissatisfaction with life, which then causes substance abuse that claims tens of thousands of lives every year in the U.S. alone, and the current pandemic that who knows when or how it will end.

But if we use our interdependence for the common good, then we will be happy to contribute our very best skills and efforts to society because everybody else will be doing likewise. Can you imagine a society whose members all work for the common good? Can you imagine sadness there? Can you see sickness there? Will you find loneliness there? Will there be crime, illiteracy, or drugs in such a community? A community that implements mutual responsibility will never allow any of that to happen in its midst.

COVID-19 is a stern teacher. But however painful are its lessons, we had better learn them now—the lessons of our interconnectedness and mutual responsibility, our new paradigm of life. Reality has already decided that now is the time for the birth of a new humanity; it is our choice to make it smooth and happy, or resist it and endure nature’s methods of assisted delivery…
[261612]

Filed under: Health, New Publications - No Comments →

Comment: King Solomon inserted tremendous wisdom in his sayings, and behind its external simplicity lies a great depth.

Ecclesiastes, 7:20: For there is no righteous man on earth who does good and sins not.

My Response: I would say it differently: that there is no righteous person on earth who would do anything righteous without sinning before it. And each time, to the extent of one’s sin, one can act righteously. One against the other.

Question: What do you think sin is?

Answer: Sin is any condition where I can harm others. It does not have to be in action; it can be in intention. When I realize this, then I immediately proceed to the next state where I correct myself by the correct kind attitude toward others, and this completes my correction.

Therefore, the fact is that you see good actions, but maybe you just do not realize that before a person did some good, it was evil, conscious evil, and there was the decision to switch to good and the state of good that you already see.

That is, four steps occur from the evil state to the good state, and then it is implemented.

Question: So before I did any kind deed, did I sin before it?

Answer: If you did a good deed, then yes, you sinned beforehand. And if you do not feel that you have sinned beforehand, then your deed is not good.

It is truly the case. There are such stories and parables, where every cheerful and truly wise person has an opposite and depressive opposite inside.

Raikin [a Soviet stand-up comedian] was such a character. It was thanks to these states which he experienced, that when he felt completely repulsive states toward the world from himself and toward himself from the world, he went on stage and could depict the opposite. Otherwise, he would not have these emotions, this understanding, how to say, the opposite. It is always like this.
[260327]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Micahel Laitman,” 12/30/19

Related Material:
The Wisdom Of King Solomon: “The Wise Wife And The Simple Wife”
The Wisdom Of King Solomon: “He Who Guards His Mouth”
The Wisdom Of King Solomon: “Two Are Better Than One”

Filed under: Kabbalistic Sources, Spiritual Work - No Comments →

Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Prof. Stephen Bronner, co-director of the International Council for Diplomacy and Dialogue and the author of A Rumor About the Jews: Anti-Semitism, Conspiracy, and the Protocols of Zion seek the optimal way to balance society.

Two forces operate reality: positive and negative. The negative force is the continuously evolving human ego—a desire to enjoy at the expense of others. It develops naturally, and while erupting, causes crises and disintegration. The positive force is one of love and bestowal, an altruistic force. It becomes revealed in positive human connections. We subconsciously yearn for altruism, but we face manifestations of the ego around us.

How can we get rid of our ego?

We shouldn’t get rid of anything. Both altruism and egoism, love and hatred, are necessary for our development. Humanity has to find a conscious balance between these two forces, and the wisdom of Kabbalah tells us how.

We exist under the laws of nature, and thus are subject to them. Therefore, if people create such an attitude to hatred and love where one covers the other (“love covers all transgressions”), they will build a structure that will fit the integral system of nature, and according to equivalence of form with nature, reach perfect and complete balance.

Filed under: Anti-Semitism, Egoism, Videos - No Comments →