Audio Version Of The Blog – 8/14/20

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“Higher Education Is At An All Time Low”

Dr. Michael LaitmanFrom My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 8/14/20

Higher education has never been so low. From the zenith of being the sole possession of reclusive monks who dedicated their lives to delving in secret ancient texts in isolated monasteries, science has become a tool in the hands of the rich and powerful to dominate, exploit, manipulate, and intimidate rivals and the general public. Humanities and social sciences, which once debated ideologies and discussed the merits and demerits of human nature and humankind, are now used as indoctrination tools to plant dogmas in young and malleable minds.

Universities were once a place where you came to grow as a person, broaden your horizons, learn about the world we live in, the ideas that permeate society, and formulate your views about the world. But since universities have become dependent on private funding, their facade as intellectual establishments has been nothing but a front. Today, when you enter college, you can tell from day one what will be your worldview and political affiliation when you graduate.

Even history, a field of research that was supposed to be a straightforward study of the past, is subject to so many interpretations and distortions that no one can agree even on the facts. Ask a thousand historians, and you will hear a thousand views, often completely contradictory, on the same event and based on the same evidence.

To have any merit, humanities and social sciences must be disconnected from hard sciences and acknowledged for what they are: personal interpretations of reality based on personal background and personal knowledge. As things currently stand, universities are both the source of the social fragmentation that is disintegrating society, and a hub where intolerance, division, and destructive views are nurtured in the name of “academic freedom.”

An academic degree still enjoys respect, especially higher degrees. However, if matters continue to develop as they have been for several decades now, universities will lose all merit in the eyes of the public. According to the institution from which one has graduated, you will know what political view to expect, and accordingly, people will decide whether or not to listen to that person.

Worse yet, higher education institutions are failing to provide students with required knowledge for today’s job market. Already, professional trainings are far more effective for employers than a university or a college degree. Since the knowledge, training, and professional experience of applicants who have been given professional training are far more relevant for what employers need, they will often prefer them over applicants who have expansive general background but little professional required knowledge, and who require more training to become productive workers.

There are, of course, benefits to academic learning. Being able to formulate one’s thoughts in a consistent, clear manner is very important for any person. Also, the rules of academic writing allow us to go over vast amounts of material very quickly without losing essential information. Learning how to meet deadlines, handle pressure, and collaborate with peers to produce a better outcome are all desirable results of academic learning. Yet, the price tag of warping young minds in order to acquire these skills does not seem to justify it, especially since there are other ways to get them.

And perhaps the biggest loss of all is the leakage of permission to interpret into hard sciences. You cannot call something “hard science” or “exact science” if it is based on interpretation rather than on measurements and results. If you can play with numbers the way you play with words, then the numbers are meaningless as is the science you profess to present. For this reason, hard sciences must be cut off from institutions that teach humanities and social sciences, and the two latter ones should not be regarded as sciences whatsoever, since they are not.

To merit its name, higher education needs to focus first and foremost on acquiring social skills, communication skills, ability to articulate feelings, embrace conflicting views, and making room for diverse perspectives in a vibrant society. Put differently, higher education should be about elevating the level of humanness in humans. Education must be pristine in terms of political bias (as hard as it truly is to do), and focus on creative and inclusive thinking to create broadminded individuals rather than the current opposite. Unless the academia reverses course soon, it will be too late to save it.

In Direct Contact With The Creator

laitman_572.01Question from Facebook: What kind of contact with the Creator do we speak about? After all, contact is unilateral, the Creator has been silent for over 5,000 years now, why?

Answer: The Creator is silent and will continue to be silent. Of course He will be silent if you don’t connect to Him and don’t establish the connection.

Comment: But people have been trying to do that throughout these 5,779 years.

My Response: You can try, but if you dial a wrong number, or you call the wrong line, there is no connection.

So you imagine that you are seemingly in direct contact with the Creator and that you speak to Him and feel that He answers you. Here everything depends on a person’s imagination. This is what all religions are based upon.

Comment: But the connection is unilateral.

My Response: No. The wisdom of Kabbalah calls us to re-establish complete and absolute two-way sensory connection with the Creator through all our senses and even above them.

Question: And then there will be a concrete feeling that He answers?

Answer: Not only answers. It is a kind of connection that does not exist in our world. It is telecommunication, teleportation, whatever you like, which means that the Creator is inside me and I am inside Him.

Comment: People are asking for proof.

My Response: Go ahead! Come and get acquainted with the method of the revelation of the Creator and reveal Him. All the evidence will be right in front of you.

A few years ago the mathematician Grigori Perelman proved the Poincaré Conjecture. If you haven’t read about this research, look it up. It is not a big book. The first 300 to 400 pages introduce the actual theorem, and then a bit more about his actual revelation.

Here we speak about the Creator, while the theorem of the Poincaré Conjecture is merely about the connection between a few parameters that are not that obvious, while here it is about much more.

Question: So you mean to say that it is a complicated matter.

Answer: No. I want to say that even in the connections in our world, because mathematics deals with the connection between different quantities, it is a problem to link these things with each other. They may be on different planes, different volumes, and perceived differently, after all, we are also complicated elements of creation.

So we need to reveal and to scrutinize all that. But I promise you that eventually you will be able to be in direct contact with the Creator.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 10/2/18

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The Laws We Are About To Reveal

laitman_448.1Question: Over the past several hundred years, we have discovered more than 200 physical laws. In addition, there are also social laws that we have invented ourselves: ethics, civil laws, and even religious laws and traditions.

Can we assume that the reason for all our crises and sufferings lies in the fact that we have artificially invented these laws?

Answer: Yes, I absolutely agree.

Question: What does it mean to follow the laws of nature?

Answer: Unfortunately, we do not follow the laws of nature but our egoism, which puts us against nature and does everything to ensure that we destroy it.

Question: So, we have yet to reveal the social laws?

Answer: Of course. These are laws of an integral society in which we are one single whole like all of nature.

We do not separate ourselves from nature, we do not divide it into inanimate, vegetative, animate, and human. We consider it a single global system that exists and develops within itself in absolute interconnection of all its parts. And most importantly, the basic law of this nature is love.

To love means to take into account everyone and everything, to have a kind attitude toward everyone, and realize how much everything that determines my next state will be good for others. I look at nature as an integral system and only care that it is in the best possible condition.
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From KabTV’s “The Post-Coronavirus Era” 5/7/20

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New Life 1263 – The Strengthening Of The Female Force In The World

New Life 1263 – The Strengthening Of The Female Force In The World
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Tal Mandelbaum ben Moshe

Women used to spend their time at home cooking and raising children and now they are prime ministers. The female force will continue to grow in global management in order to balance the role of the male force, which is diminishing. The female force in nature is the will to receive and the male force is the will to bestow. The will to receive or the pulling force of gravity is at the center of creation. It is the part that gives birth, cares for, controls, develops, and educates new life. The male and female forces must learn to complement and add to each other. They will learn to connect as human beings above their own natures and beyond gender so that true equality and balance can be achieved. We will learn to bestow upon each other and thereby attain a new, higher level of spiritual development as one essence. Connection, peace, fellowship, sharing, mutual responsibility, unity, and love will rule in this new world.
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From KabTV’s “New Life 1263 – The Strengthening Of The Female Force In The World” 7/8/20

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Contradiction To The Laws Of Nature

laitman_962.3Question: The external manifestations of our incorrect relations cause a crisis. In the economy, this can be shown by such examples as throwing out huge amounts of food to keep market prices higher.

In the field of healthcare, only medicine that is profitable to the pharmaceutical industry is produced. In the field of ecology, the chemical industry annually produces hundreds of tons of inorganic products that pollute the atmosphere. That is, everything is dictated by someone’s profit without taking other people into account.

Don’t people understand that the laws of society are the same laws of nature as the physical laws?

Answer: People cannot touch them, cannot take them into account and implement them. If I don’t feel the limitations from a force, it doesn’t exist for me.

Question: How does the ideology of a consumer society contradict the tendency and laws of nature?

Answer: The point is that nature is integral. It doesn’t do anything in vain. For it, the beginning, middle, and end are states that are equally necessary and exist only to bring it to its best state.

In order for a person to do something, he needs to know the beginning and the end, to feel his full relationship with nature, to understand where he exists. This we do not have, and therefore, we focus only on our egoism.

But in fact, we must necessarily connect to nature, feel the greatness of the goal, and try to go along with it with all our force.
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From KabTV’s “The Post-Coronavirus Era” 5/7/20

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Daily Kabbalah Lesson – 8/14/20

Lesson Preparation

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Lesson on the Topic “From the Prayer of the Ten to Its Prayer for the World” (Preparation for the Virtual Convention “A New World” 2020)

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Writings of Baal HaSulam,  “The Peace,” (Subtitle: “Clarification of the Excerpt from the Mishnah, start with:  “And now we come to clarify the excerpt: All is in deposit.”)

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Selected Highlights

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