Audio Version Of The Blog – 10/16/20
Posted on October 16th, 2020
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The main thing is to be aiming forward all the time. Then I fall and rise and again fall and rise, as it is said: “A thousand times the righteous will fall and rise again.”
This is actually true. It is not possible to advance without errors, without falls, without problems. It is through them that a person learns. It is impossible to achieve anything otherwise, as it is said: “One cannot carry out a Mitzvah (commandment) unless one breaks it first.”
A commandment is an action of bestowal. It is impossible to achieve bestowal without first revealing how opposite you are to it. Gradually, we will begin to integrate into this system. We do not just learn the material; we absorb it, and it builds us up. The internal systems: the brain and the heart, feelings and mind, take the form of those thoughts that we absorb from the articles and they build our soul.
It turns out that the broken will to receive begins to connect its atoms and molecules into all sorts of new forms. All its parts are getting connected together, building a system that operates not according to the laws of egoism, but according to the laws of bestowal. This means that we are beginning to enter a new, opposite world, a spiritual space.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 10/2/20, “Sukkot“\
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New Life 500 – The Bible As The Foundation Of Life
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Tal Mandelbaum ben Moshe
We can discover and actually experience the latent secret that is within the Bible through the study of the wisdom of Kabbalah. The Bible and all the sacred writings were written in the “language of the branches.” In order to understand these writings, it is necessary to ascend to the “roots.” Kabbalists are people for whom the text of the Bible streams within them since they have a unified embrace with it. A Kabbalist corrects his nature from a desire to receive to a desire to bestow and thereby discovers what is truly written in the Bible. The book is indeed ours but we are in exile from it. When bestowal and love are built between us, we will discover its truth.
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From KabTV’s “New Life 500 – The Bible As The Foundation Of Life,” 1/15/15
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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Suicide: Why do people kill themselves?“
People who commit suicide do not want to endure ongoing feelings of frustration and emptiness.
Like any person, they wanted to become fulfilled—and today there are myriad pleasures available to us at the tap of a button—but suicidal people find fulfillment to be completely elusive.
The inner distress they feel within exceeds any sensations that they can receive from anyone else.
What do these people ultimately need?
They need the answer to the meaning of life.
Do our lives have meaning, a goal and a purpose that make our lives worth living? What is our impetus to continue living on in life?
Such questions awaken in certain people, and they drive some people to seek their answers, and some to a pit of desperation, where they would like to invert such questions and sensations, but they cannot, and then they reach the end.
To get answers to the questions about life’s meaning, I recommend checking out the links in my Quora bio, where there is a plethora of courses and other materials available to help people find the answers to life’s deepest questions.
Photo by Lachlan Dempsey on Unsplash.
Medium published my new article “The Power of Thought — More Powerful than We Thought”
Did you think that your thoughts build or ruin the world around you? They do; they are our desire’s “brain” that designs the world we live in.
We’ve known for decades that humanity is destroying the planet, that our way of life is unsustainable, and that we are living on borrowed time at the expense of our children. We’ve known it, we’ve tried to stop ourselves, but we couldn’t. Only Covid stopped our reckless conduct. If it goes away, we will destroy whatever’s left of our planet and leave nothing for prosperity. We can’t help it since our actions are offshoots of our thoughts, and as long as our thoughts are negative, so will be our actions.
We are looking for a cure to Covid-19 but we’re forgetting that it comes from the same source that creates all our “sicknesses,” from viruses to hurricanes. Just as we don’t need to work on fixing our behavior toward the environment, but on fixing our thoughts, which make us mistreat the environment, we don’t need to focus on curing the virus but on curing its cause — our iniquitous thoughts.
Kabbalists don’t deal so much with restricting CO2 emissions, recycling waste, or saving endangered species, not because they don’t care about our world. On the contrary, they care about all of life and all of nature a great deal! This is why they focus on the core problem, the malfunction that generates all that is negative in our world: our thoughts. If we change our thoughts, we will change the world around us. If we change our thoughts from negative to positive, not a single problem will remain unsolved.
We could argue that we can’t control our thoughts, that they pop up in our brain without asking “permission.” It’s true that thoughts don’t “ask permission” before they emerge, but we can tweak the “factory” that creates them: the social environment we live in.
If we are born into an environment that says you’re only as good as your last conquest, then we will have no choice but to become ruthlessly competitive until we exhaust ourselves to death. In the process, we will destroy everything around us: people, animals, plants, and minerals. Currently, this is more or less the way we all behave, which is why the world is such a mess.
We can change our world. If we start nurturing a different culture — embracing diversity, encouraging originality, supporting cooperation, and rewarding displays of solidarity — our world will instantly change from bad to good. We won’t need to worry about what we should or shouldn’t do; we will need to worry only about what to think or not to think.
We can change our world. If we start nurturing a different culture — embracing diversity, encouraging originality, supporting cooperation, and rewarding displays of solidarity — our world will instantly change from bad to good. We won’t need to worry about what we should or shouldn’t do; we will need to worry only about what to think or not to think.
We cannot change our thoughts by ourselves. But together, there is nothing we can’t achieve. We can even transform our very nature from the negative attitude we are born with to a positive attitude that we will all have created together.
We are looking for a cure to Covid-19 but we’re forgetting that it comes from the same source that creates all our “sicknesses,” from viruses to hurricanes. Just as we don’t need to work on fixing our behavior toward the environment, but on fixing our thoughts, which make us mistreat the environment, we don’t need to focus on curing the virus but on curing its cause — our iniquitous thoughts. It would be great if we could find a vaccine for Covid-19, but unless we solve its root cause, more, and worse menaces will come in its wake, so we might as well work on a systemic solution right now and truly transform our lives to what they can be instead of staying stuck neck-deep in the quagmire that our lives have become.
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The Times of Israel published my new article “The Social Media Giants Campaign against Anti-Semitism Is Mere Pretense”
A Times of Israel story recently reported festively, “YouTube removes Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam channel.” According to the story, YouTube announced that it has “strict policies prohibiting hate speech on YouTube, and [will] terminate any channel that repeatedly or egregiously violates those policies.” Two lines later, however, you read that “Some individual accounts of Nation of Islam members are still up, with tens of thousands of followers.” It would be interesting to know YouTube’s definition of “strict policies.”
Another festive headline, this time on CNN Business, announced that “Facebook will ban Holocaust denial posts under hate speech policy.” According to the report, Facebook decided on the ban because of “the well-documented rise in anti-Semitism and the alarming level of ignorance about the Holocaust.” I wonder what set off this policy U-turn because as recently as two months ago, The Guardian reported that the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) had found that “Facebook’s algorithm ‘actively promotes’ Holocaust denial content.”
Clearly, this “concern about antisemitism” tune isn’t credible. Three weeks before the election, the only reason that would make social media platforms proclaim to take steps to curb antisemitism is their desire to play it safe. In my estimate, they feel that President Trump has a real chance of being reelected and are adjusting their policies to that scenario. In short, their campaign against antisemitism is nothing but lip-service.
For Jews, however, social media policies make no difference. They don’t abate antisemitism whatsoever. Antisemitism stems from the core of human nature, from a deep-seated feeling of non-Jews that Jews are unlike any other nation. Their accusations that Jews control the media, the banks, the government, and manipulate them to their advantage and against other faiths speaks volumes about the power that non-Jews attribute to Jews. Their accusation that Jews cause all the wars and all the troubles in the world is in fact an admission that they believe that the Jews have the power to end the wars and troubles in the world.
And while the Jews don’t know it, they do have the key to ending all the troubles. Jews don’t need social media bans to curb Jew-hatred. All they need is to stop hating one another and the world will stop hating them.
Jews are always at the center of attention. The world envies Israel for its military power and technological advancement, and it envies Diaspora Jews for being wealthier than other communities. Money, arms, and high-tech don’t earn the Jews any points in the eyes of the world. On the contrary, they only increase Jew-hatred since this is not what the world expects.
The world looks at the Jews so carefully because it needs a way to connect, to end conflicts, to rise above hatred, to save itself from self-destruction. And only the Jews, who coined the motto “Love your neighbor as yourself,” can show the way—by personal example.
There are three Jews among this year’s Nobel Prize laureates. No one will be grateful to Jews for this. But if Jews made peace among themselves, between Democrats and Republican Jews, between Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews, between Orthodox and secular Jews, now that would be something that the world would appreciate.
Jewish leaders throughout the ages have avowed that Jewish unity is our only way to escape persecution. So far, their words have found no listeners, and hate increases both among Jews and toward Jews. If we, the Jewish people, want to avoid another Holocaust, we should start paying attention to our sages throughout the ages, and to the world’s call for peace, first among ourselves, and then throughout the world.
*For a more elaborate explanation on the root and solution to antisemitism, refer to my book, The Jewish Choice: Unity or Anti-Semitism
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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “How will the coronavirus be defeated if we can’t get rid of the seasonal flu?“
We will see an end to the coronavirus when we overcome our negative thoughts, divisiveness and hatred of each other.
Today’s world is fundamentally different to the past because our present era increasingly reveals how dependent we are on each other, all around the world. And the more we depend on each other, the more we rely on each member of human society upholding values of consideration and responsibility toward their fellow human beings.
We need mutual consideration and responsibility today more than ever to spare ourselves from a lot of unnecessary suffering, and more so, to create a safer and happier future for all people.
In terms of the coronavirus, we are still in stages where we think that it will soon end and everything will return to “normal” again.
But it won’t.
The new era of interdependence that we have entered demands that we bridge our rivalries in order to experience our tightening connection harmoniously. Likewise, the coronavirus will subside to the extent that we rise above our negative attitudes to each other and positively connect.
We simply fail to see how much the health or illness of our bodies and surrounding society depends on the positivity or negativity of our thoughts in relation to other people. Until we start actively surrounding ourselves with socio-cultural influences that inspire us to compromise, cooperate, care for one another, and positively connect, then we will continue seeing a rise in negative phenomena—from more and more people falling ill with the virus, to more and more people losing their jobs, their businesses, and their sanity the more they have to maintain social distance.
Today’s tightening interdependent conditions embody a new stage in human evolution, and so we will have to get used to the fact that we will not return to our pre-coronavirus lives. As evolutionary biologists have shown, nature constantly evolves through crisis to greater cooperation and unity, and today is precisely a time of global crisis preparing us to make a global-scale unifying shift.
If we fail to actualize our shift to greater unification above our differences willingly, then we will experience tightening interdependence in an undesirable fashion. It would be akin to sharing a small room with our biggest adversaries. However, if we make moves to positively connect above our divisive inclinations—prioritizing values of mutual consideration and responsibility throughout human society—then we will experience a whole new harmonious world open up to us, ensuring good health, safety and happiness for all.
Image: Ani_Ka, Getty Images.
Question: What is true love?
Answer: True love is absolute trust, impeccable support, self-sacrifice, and confidence that you are treated the same way.
Question: Throughout the development of mankind, the concept of family has changed greatly. What is an ideal family today?
Answer: An ideal family is the same as ideal love. It is built on top of all the problems, with them, and in spite of them. Therefore, if people knew how to create bridges over problems and keep them safe, then true love is created. Love is a consequence of a very hard work over one’s own and other people’s shortcomings.
Question: What does it mean to live above problems?
Answer: Knowing all the problems, we try, without closing our eyes to them, to respect the other, value him or her, and be connected with each other without forgetting about our problems.
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From KabTV’s “Kabbalah Express” 9/1/20
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Question: Now all of humanity believes that marriages entered into at mature age are stronger and more stable. Is this really the case? When does a person need to get married?
Answer: Of course, over time we become wiser. Life educates us by quite harsh methods. However, you do not have to experience them. It all depends on the education received, what kind of example the child had in the family. We see that children literally are repeating what they see with their parents.
In general, I would start educating a person for family life from kindergarten and continue at school, at university, and at work. Home circles, television, everything should be dedicated to the creation of the correct family as the unit of society.
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From KabTV’s “Kabbalah Express” 9/1/20
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Question: How does the wisdom of Kabbalah determine the degree of sufferings and pleasures that were set for a person who is on the spiritual path?
Answer: The degree of suffering depends on a person’s recognition of the greatness of the goal. If I want to attain a certain goal and am at a certain distance from it, to the extent that the goal is great in my eyes, the discrepancy between me and the goal is felt as suffering.
But it is actually the magnitude of the suffering that drives me forward. I already see the goal and I understand that I have a method of how to attain it. So, I am happy with what is happening, and for me, it is no longer a path of suffering but a path of light. I feel these suffering illuminate the path for me.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 11/18/18
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