Why Should We Unite?

Question: “Nature” and “Creator” in Gematria have the same numeric meaning. You can call it a “nature,” you can call it “Creator,” you can call it “laws of nature” or “laws or commandments of the Creator.” All of these are the same. What is the purpose of nature?

Answer: Nature has a single purpose: to bring creations, which it specially created as if having been repulsed from it, not in the same coordination, and integral system with nature, so that in this way they can gradually determine through their development that their union with each other and with nature is in the best state.

Question: It turns out, there are kind of two tendencies or two forces that develop us. The first force emanates and integrates, the second one receives and absorbs. And so forth on all levels.

On the inanimate level, atoms unite into molecules, and these molecules combine into more complex organisms. The same integration takes place on the human level where people from small tribal formations integrate into megacities.

On the other hand, we see that there is a constant growth of egoism. That is, matter constantly becomes increasingly complex, diverse, divided, and improved. Why is it important to understand these two trends? Why should we unite?

Answer: We should unite because we must become like the general nature. It is integral and global in all of its manifestations. We see that although galaxies fly apart, stars explode, planets form, all this happens in a general tendency.

First, it is all interconnected. Therefore, if somewhere in the universe something happens even with the smallest particle, then almost the entire universe feels it. After all, everything comes from one root and under the influence of one force called the “Big Bang.”

No matter what happens, everything has its root emanating from the Big Bang. Everything scatters from the Big Bang outwardly. Thus, all parts of matter that are known and unknown to us, at all levels, all events, all laws, are interconnected.

In cosmology, this process that occurred after the Big Bang is called the process of large unification when all the elements began to connect, integrate, and form all kinds of matter.
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From KabTV’s “Systematic Analysis of the Development of the People of Israel,” 3/24/19

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Question: Why is there only one truth and it lies in Kabbalah? Why aren’t there any other different paths to discover the spiritual world?

Answer: Egoism is created as opposed to the upper light. There is nothing besides the Creator (light, quality of love and bestowal) and the created being (quality of reception, self-concern, sensations in oneself).

Thus, all that is needed is to build the right connection between them for egoism (desire to enjoy) to acquire the form of the Creator. It is as simple as one plus one, nothing more. Thus there cannot be many methodologies.

By its nature, the method of Kabbalah is very rigid and categorical. It says: “Do this, and that’s it!” Therefore, we cannot offer it in this way to others. For now, we have to soften it, structure it, place it in some socially acceptable parameters so that it feels more palatable, like a bitter pill with a sweet coating.

Question: But all other methodologies come from the Creator too: “There is none else besides Him.” There are about 3,800 various spiritual practices. Is this a game on His part for the whole humanity to come closer to Him?

Answer: There is an enormous number of different souls that approach their final correction differently. However, their final correction will still happen with the help of the method of Kabbalah.

They must necessarily acquire a screen over their egoism and become similar to the Creator. But for now, they are not drawn to it. There are so many religions, faiths, philosophies, and mystical practices out there for them.

Question: So, in order to establish a connection with the Creator a person must “dress” his desire—acquire a screen on his egoism?

Answer: Yes. As in technology: there should be a plus, a minus, and a resistor between them. Otherwise, a short circuit will occur.
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From the TV Program “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 3/25/19

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Question: People are organized in such a way that everyone has a different immune system. There are people who are born with some kinds of genetic ailments, deviations, etc. Are there such deviations in spirituality? Does the science of Kabbalah teach how to get rid of them? After all, there are things that are invisible to the human eye.

Answer: Everything is determined by our starting point. Each of us is a cell of one single organism called “Adam.” This system was created by the upper light and together with it, it participates in everything that is happening and in what exists.

The upper light acts on this system, and it gradually changes, reveals its properties and, in turn, affects the light through its feedback. We are the particles of this system.

It went through a great path of development under the influence of the light that created, filled, and shattered it. And now all of its particles are in various states of half-life and decay. We must again assemble them into the same system in which they existed before the shattering, that is, restore it.

Imagine a toy that was assembled from cubes and then broken, and now you have to collect these cubes in the same system as before. This is our work, and it is very difficult.

We must change our nature in order to draw closer to each other, “cube to cube”; we must desire this connection—understanding what cubes to work with, how we need to interact, and why we are doing this—because otherwise unification will not take place.

But we ourselves do not have the strength for this. We only desire that this will happen. Therefore, all our work is to invoke the influence of the upper light, the unifying force that will gradually bring us together into one whole, as we used to be before the shattering.

The process of our restoration is this very sequence of the states that we must go through. This is our spiritual life.

And our corporeal life is much more broken and dispersed. During this life, we carry out only a small amount of spiritual actions, although we do not understand this. But if we reveal the science of Kabbalah for ourselves, then we can draw the influence of the upper light that will intensively bring us together, unite, condense, and connect us into those states in which we previously existed.

The upper light understands how to do this. It develops spiritual genes in us that connect us together. We can see in movies how a combination of various chemical, protein structures forms some kind of a system, and in the same way we unite in our internal structures.

Externally we do not feel it. But if we ourselves strive for internal unity, we will begin to feel how we are attracted to or disconnected from each other. And here we already have free will: we move on to this by ourselves or invoke the influence of the upper light. This is the way we act. This is our fate.

We need not wait for nature to teach us, through all kinds of blows and punishments, that it is worth being closer to each other. If we begin to direct ourselves correctly toward the upper light, so that it performs these actions on us, then they will pass quickly and we will be able to feel unity.

In this unity, we will reveal the whole system, the upper force, and our correct present and future states. In principle, even in small associations, we will be able to feel some resemblance to the correct final state. This is something that we can already now reveal and strive toward.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 2/2/20

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What does nature teach human beings?“

Nature is leading us to the understanding that we are parts of a single interconnected and interdependent system, and that we need to reach a higher level of connection among each other in order to discover nature’s perfection and eternity.

We are all egoists by nature. What this means is that all of our thoughts and actions are ultimately motivated by a desire to enjoy at the expense of anything and anyone around us.

As egoists, we each perceive a narrow reality. We feel ourselves as separate from other people and things, primarily concerned with our personal problems, each in a constant race after ephemeral pleasures.

Also, as egoists, the way we conduct ourselves increasingly clashes with the opposite way that nature conducts itself.

In contrast to the human egoistic quality, nature aims to connect everyone and everything into a single harmonious whole. A harmonious whole acts such that each part receives what it needs for its sustenance, and gives according to its ability for the benefit of the whole, similar to how cells and organs of a healthy human body function.

While our egoistic quality increasingly clashes with nature’s altruistic quality, we experience more and more blows. Blows from nature can appear as global pandemics, as we’re now experiencing with the coronavirus, as well as myriad other forms, from major ecological disasters through to each of our personal feelings, where depression, anxiety, stress, loneliness, emptiness, meaninglessness, and other such negative sensations have been increasingly tearing away at us for many years.

What is the purpose of the blows nature sends us? What is nature trying to teach us through all the pains and problems it sends us?

It is all for us to pause for a moment and start contemplating our life, its purpose, why we are suffering, and rethink the direction in which we are headed.

We can then use such introspection to elevate ourselves from our current egoistic mode of existence, where the causes of our pains are hidden, to a more connected and altruistic mode of existence, where the reasons for our pains are revealed.

The wisdom of Kabbalah grants us this ability: to discover the hidden, connected and altruistic laws of nature, and to balance ourselves with these laws. By sending us blows, nature ultimately teaches us that we need to revise the way we live our lives, to recognize the bankruptcy of trying to continue living egoistically as we have until today, and that by changing our attitudes to each other from egoistic to altruistic, where instead of trying to self-benefit all the time, we try to benefit others, we enter into balance with nature, thereby experiencing a harmonious, whole and eternal existence.

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Question: Is suffering a manifestation of egoism?

Answer: Naturally. What does suffering mean? I want something I do not have. It turns out that unfulfilled egoism causes suffering.

There is another kind of suffering: suffering from love, when I want something good for another and suffer if I cannot realize it. It is not so that the other would love me and respond to me, but because I want to give it to him unconditionally.

Thus, there is selfish and altruistic suffering. They need to be sorted out.

We shift from one suffering to another: from suffering for ourselves to suffering for others.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 1/26/20

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Lesson Preparation

Lesson on the Topic “Pesach (Passover),” Part 1

Lesson on the Topic “Pesach (Passover),” Part 2

Writings of Baal HaSulam, “The Arvut (Mutual Guarantee)” 

Selected Highlights

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The Times of Israel published my new article “A Cure to the Economic Anxiety of the Coronavirus Pandemic”

As the coronavirus pandemic advances globally, it is fair to think that no one in the world will be exempt from its economic impact.

Just as the development of the global capability to contain the coronavirus pandemic is uncertain, so is the economic forecast, but it is estimated that COVID-19’s effect on the world’s economy will surpass a $1 trillion loss in 2020.

Suddenly, the fear of appalling economic damage becomes stronger than the anxiety over harm to health. Job losses are paralyzing many people, and the threat takes new forms on a daily basis.

Undoubtedly, common citizens who depend on an average monthly income, who need to put food on the table for a number of family members, and whose partners are also obliged to stay home to care for children, are faced with a frightening new reality. The long lines to purchase such items as toilet paper under directives that caution them to stay away from crowds causes them to fear for their lives, ponder their destiny and the paralyzing uncertainty of the unknown.

Business owners, large and small, are in grave danger. Suddenly, their accounts plummet toward deficits and their routines are shattered. Customers, suppliers and orders have come to a halt, and nobody knows if, when and to what extent they will return. No one owes these business owners anything. Who will take care of them? Who can ensure that the virus will be stricken from the earth tomorrow and that life will return to normalcy?

Human society is disintegrating and falling from our sanitized hands. For years we have made a living off of one another and suddenly in one swish everything has become frozen and neutralized. The threat brought about by the coronavirus covers all economic spheres, but the strongest hit was to the tourism sector. There are no flights, no hotels, no open restaurants—a tourism industry death sentence.

Therefore, the cries of misfortune and despair surfacing with each new limitation and subsequent new level of severity stemming from the pandemic are understandable. However, we can also find solace in the fact that humanity is looking at itself in the mirror, discovering that it created a dysfunctional society awash with exaggerated self-importance. Now, with a paralyzed economy, we have the sharp taste of the spoiled fruits of our long-standing egotistic behavior, and we must decide on how we view our situation.

Thus, this is a blessed moment for national and global soul searching. It is a time to ask about what nature wants of us. Why were we given life? Was it merely to somehow find a way to survive on this planet? What have we achieved? In the first thirty years of our lives, we went through our primary, secondary and tertiary levels of education. We traveled the world and spent another decade building a family, took on the Sisyphean toil of purchasing a home, a car and raising children.

What is next? We were thrown into a whirlpool from which it is difficult to extricate ourselves. We are in a modern form of slavery, locked in golden cages, and enclosed in social networks. Now, suddenly, isolated from everything by the coronavirus, we have an opportunity to make a change. We just need to figure out how we fell into this global inconvenience in order to know how to make the best of it.

This is the positive aspect of the coronavirus. It helps to elucidate the comprehensive system in which we live, the system of nature, which is all about interdependence, where every part supports another. The exception is the human being, who we know is ready to destroy everything to overrun and conquer just as long as he feels good. He does not want to integrate with the interconnected and interdependent laws of nature.

So along comes the coronavirus and breaks down the anti-integrative edifice we have created in human society. It will force a fresh examination of the order of life and the understanding that if we continue to act savagely, as narrow-minded egoists, and not behave according to our bodies’ needs—just like any other animal or plant in nature—we will only harm ourselves and our environment. This human “exception” is the one that we need to balance today, in order to connect with the integrative system of nature so that we can be happy and satisfied with our lives.

Nature programmed bringing us to this critical adjustment. Let us then anticipate an antidote to the virus, open our ears to the messages of the Kabbalists and what is written in the books of Kabbalah: that we live in a world that is all good, and that it is us, human beings, in our egoistic, selfish relations that knock it off balance.

By treating the other well, in mutual responsibility and consideration, we begin to uncover the complete and eternal nature in which we live; a fearless life, free of pressure, a long, healthy and beautiful life on earth.
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KabNet published my new article: “Coronavirus: Nature’s Vaccine To Cure Egoism”

With all the home quarantines and health department orders to stay at home except for essential needs amounting around the world at this time, while these moves are meant to protect our physical health, they can also serve as a new environment for us to heal ourselves as individuals and as a society.

The fact that many of us have been confined to our homes should serve to reveal our true state: that we are internally remote from each other. Such a revelation can thus serve to show us how physical remoteness and corporeal isolation requires inner closeness and spiritual connection.

Physical Remoteness and Corporeal Isolation Requires Inner Closeness and Spiritual Connection

Thanks to the coronavirus closing us into our homes around the world, we gain access to a new space where we can all participate in the same thought. In this space, we have an opportunity to seek more internal contact with each other and with the force of connection, which was previously hidden from us. Due to our busy competitive and materialistic lifestyles coming to a sudden halt, we have been slotted into a new environment around the world where we have the chance to become closer to nature.

“The ego virus did not give us fevers and dry coughs; it attacked our thoughts and desires. It made us think about ourselves all the time, making us act solely for personal benefit, using anything and anyone around us in order to satisfy itself.”

What is nature? Nature is fundamentally a thought that has a quality of connection, love and bestowal. The more our attitudes to each other resemble nature’s quality, the more we discover a new field seemingly rising between us, a space existing in our connections that is alive, breathing and pulsating.

In this field that starts forming between us, we start living on a new level of connection. This new level of connection necessitates us developing a sense of mutual dependence and responsibility, with ties of support, encouragement and friendship between us. Everything else we created then turns out to appear all the more artificial and transient.

How Nature Teaches Us to Grow Up and Become Considerate of Each Other

The integral force of nature that becomes revealed in our connections both brings us internally closer together, and it also pushes us away from each other, in intervals. It can be likened to parents teaching their babies to walk by holding both the babies’ hands and guiding them through a few steps, and then letting the babies’ hands go, allowing the babies to fall, all under careful guidance, in order to let the babies learn how to start walking by themselves.

Likewise, there are times when we feel more together, and times when we become more remote, and this alternation is in order for us to seek how we can connect positively above the increased distance between us, to build more mature relationships to each other. “Mature” means that we feel a sense of rejection separating us, and above that negative sensation, build positive connections of mutual consideration and assistance.

Nature Injected Us with the Coronavirus as a Vaccine to Cure a More Severe Virus

Before the coronavirus struck us, we were hit with another virus: our egoistic human nature. The ego virus did not give us fevers and dry coughs; it attacked our thoughts and desires. It made us think about ourselves all the time, making us act solely for personal benefit, using anything and anyone around us in order to satisfy itself.

The problem was that the ego could never become genuinely satisfied. In an endless race to fulfill itself, it increasingly mutated, wanting more and more, making us forget about the need to be considerate to others, and urging us to seek more wealth, social status and power using anyone and anything it could make us get its hands on.

Nature then injected us with the coronavirus—nature’s vaccine for the ego virus that had recently mutated to extremes. Since we let the ego exploit the physical closeness that we used to have, nature physically distanced us from each other in order to give us time to heal internally, to realize that our egoistic quality was increasingly knocking us out of balance with each other and with nature, and to think about how we could fix this flaw—to develop a common sense of support, encouragement and responsibility for each other upon the ego.

Of utmost importance right now is to be in this together, to help each other relate constructively to this period of physical isolation that nature has forced us into—that we need nothing other than to develop feelings of consideration, concern and responsibility for each other in order to make a historical shift from the old competitive-egoistic world and into a new world of harmonious global connection.
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“Disperse the wicked; better for them and better for the world.”

Comment: The measures taken by many governments against coronavirus have literally paralyzed people’s lives.

My Response: Governments are very afraid for their fellow citizens. We must understand that they are responsible for the health of the population and for the economy. And the economy is completely dependent on our relations and international trade. This is a huge headache for governments. If they already decided to cut all ties, it means that they have no other choice.

For example, just the other day, US President Trump announced that he is canceling all flights from the United States to Europe. Do you understand what this means for the US aviation industry? Certainly, he takes this into account, especially since he has an election coming up.

He probably has data that confirms that I am not exaggerating. He would have liked to make a more lenient decision, but obviously he has such information that he has to stop flights.

Comment: The same is happening in the country where I live. Israel is completely isolated. You cannot leave the country. I have heard that this fact alone causes a loss of four billion shekels, not to mention all the rest.

My Response: Some people think this is an exaggeration. I think that it is underestimated.

Question: It turns out that the only way to fight the virus is by isolation. However, this is against the tendency of the laws of nature, which constantly pushes us to unite, to integrate. How can you explain this?

Answer: Very simply. It is written in an ancient Kabbalistic source, “Disperse the wicked; better for them and better for the world.” And vice versa, “Assemble the righteous; better for them and better for the world.”

Question: What is our sin?

Answer: It is in the fact that we do not connect correctly. In our connection, we do not wish each other well; therefore, this cannot be called unity. This can only be called a desire to profit at the expense of others.

Therefore, in our development, nature cannot accept such attempts to unite, to trade, and so on as positive, correct, and leading to a more unified state that it set for us. It believes that such a connection is harmful to us and to the entire universe. Therefore, it gives us a hard time in the form of viruses and all sorts of unpleasant excesses. These blows will continue until we change our attitude to each other.
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From KabTV’s “Coronavirus Is Changing Reality, Part 2,” 3/12/20

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