Question: It is said that laughter is a social emotion and we use it to establish and maintain social contact. Laughter has the ability to heal, to relieve stress. What do you, as a Kabbalist, think about this?

Answer: Kabbalists are very fond of jokes, laughter, and anecdotes. That is, everything that shines in the mind of a person when he or she can, as it were, turn himself or herself inside out and enjoy it.

Laughter raises a person above their present state, and therefore, has the ability to heal. When a person is sad, he can artificially use laughter and forcibly remove himself from states of falling or panic with all sorts of exercises.

Question: Do you think it would be a good idea to include a few anecdotes in every meeting at the integral training courses?

Answer: Yes. The Kabbalists welcomed this very much. Humor is the feeling of a developed person who can look at his or her egoistic nature from the outside, from the point of view of altruism, and combine two opposites.
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From KabTV’s “Communication Skills” 8/7/20

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Question: You can listen to another person in order to get information or for the purpose of empathy and understanding the other person. What does it mean to “hear” from the point of view of Kabbalah?

Answer: From the point of view of Kabbalah, this is the contact of hearts, when I want to feel what my friend is feeling. Listening and feeling are two different things. When I feel another, I don’t need his words, I just “drink” everything that is in him, and it enters into me and fills me. And listening is just like listening to a radio.

If I listen to a friend as a Kabbalist, I do it for a specific purpose: so that my attention would help me now connect with my friend and have common feelings, thoughts, desires, and aspirations appearing between us. Then we will work together on one common goal to which we strive, to reveal the Creator.

Question: In integral education courses, we usually sit in a circle and discuss a given topic. During that time, each expresses his opinion, and the rest listen. How can I hear another?

Answer: You have to enter this person and feel that you have some common spiritual and life goals with him. Then it will work.
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From KabTV’s “Communication Skills” 8/14/20

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Question: Joy is one of the main positive emotions in man, an inner feeling of satisfaction, fulfillment, pleasure, and happiness. Could this feeling be an indicator of advancement for a person who is engaged in self-development and at the same time feels joy?

Answer: For some yes and for some just the opposite. Joy is a feeling of achieving what you so desired in feelings, in attainment, in anything. And if a person sees that he is distancing from this goal, then he is sad.

Question: The sages say that there is no greater joy than the resolution of doubts. What does it mean?

Answer: If a person who is in doubt, in internal scrutinies, sees that he can rise above them, this causes a feeling of joy in him. After rising above them, he gets rid of doubts.

And if there are no problems, tasks, barriers, then there is nothing to build this fulfillment on.

Question: Must one first feel suffering in order to feel joy?

Answer: Joy is always a consequence of feeling a lower level and then reaching the higher one.

Question: In our world, we express a lot of states by the word “joy”: the joy of having watched a movie, the joy from a good job, from unity with friends. Why is our language so poor?

Answer: These are all reasons for the sensation that is called joy.
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From KabTV’s “Communication Skills” 8/7/20

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Preparation to the Lesson

Lesson on the Topic of “Work With Faith Above Reason”

Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Study of the Ten Sefirot, Vol. 1, Part 1, Chapter 1, Item 1″ 

Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Peace in the World”

Selected Highlights

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There is just one opportunity: to reveal the upper force, which will connect the two camps together. Revelation of the upper force and everyone’s unity—this is our work, as Kabbalists. This will soon be clear and we have to be ready for it. The world will want it, will come and ask for it.

The whole world will divide into the right and left. “Israel” will be responsible for billions on one side and billions on the other side not being able to connect with each other. We have to learn the middle line, which is established by the upper force: “He who makes peace in the heavens will make peace between us.”

There is no middle line—it will come from above. That is how the world and nature are built. Kabbalistic groups that work on coming closer to the upper force, to the goal of creation—Israel, those aimed “straight at the Creator,” will be in the center of the world and of everyone’s attention. They must provide a connection between the left and right lines.

Nature does not help people to unite, but on the contrary, it will divide them into two equal camps, as we are now seeing in the USA. Society has split down the middle, with millions of people on one side, and millions on the other.
A handful of people tip the scale to decide who becomes the American President.

The ego grows in the course of its development—the discrepancy between the right and left does not get smoothed out. They grow further apart from each other, the conflict and arguments between them increase. This is clearly expressed in America the left and right parties cannot come to a common denominator. This breakage exists even within families.
From Twitter, 11/8/20

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We read Kabbalistic texts and do not know how to understand what is written because we do not belong to the system of the common soul, which consists of ten Sefirot or to a group in which we must find a connection with our friends.

I read “faith above reason” and I don’t know what to do with it. And the action is very simple: unite so that there is no difference between me and the others, and we all become like the ten Sefirot of one spiritual Partzuf.

If we connect in this way, we will begin to feel what is spiritual, what a Partzuf is, and how the Creator works within it. We will already be in another world. Instead of people, I will feel the ten Sefirot within which the upper force operates. This will already be the upper world, not our world.

In this way, I will cross from world to world, and in this form, I will continue to exist. I will take care of the material because I have not yet completely detached myself from it and completely moved into the spiritual, but I perceive it as a secondary thing.

I will take care of my body like a horse or donkey that exists around me and supports my life. But all my spiritual work concerning the Creator takes place within this Kli where we all connect together.

Inside this vessel, the Creator gives me filling as a Host, and I accept it as a guest. All this is only inside the ten. We meet the Creator as a guest and a Host within the ten: “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.”

This is all our work. And so, reading about faith above reason, you need to think about how to implement what is written in the ten. And if a person does not have a ten, he should try to find one as soon as possible. Otherwise, all his advancement will remain only written on paper and will never be implemented.

After all, Kabbalah is a practical, applicable science that teaches us from lesson to lesson how to realize our unity more and more until we begin to reveal the Creator in it more and more.

And so we bond with each other until we return to one soul as it existed before the sin of Adam HaRishon with the Tree of Knowledge, and we feel within our connection the Creator and the entire upper world, our eternal state. In other words, we already reach eternity by having risen to the level of bestowal, faith above reason.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/2/20, “Work with Faith Above Reason”

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Question: Once you said that time kills everything. How do we resist the influence of time?

Answer: We need to rise above it, because, in fact, we exist outside of time.

Time is a kind of illusory idea in which all the actions I find myself in consist of a beginning, a middle, and an end. But I must perceive reality as existing in which I am in eternal, perfect, endless motion. And how much I influence this eternity and perfection depends on me. And I must do it to the best of my ability.

Understand that the correct connection to the eternal, perfect movement of the entire system of the universe is the highest. When I connect to something higher, I swim with it.
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From KabTV’s “Kabbalah Express” 9/27/20

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My article in Newsmax: “Any President of Half the Nation Is Illegitimate”

America is split between two halves that hate each other to death. Whatever one says, the other instinctively counters, regardless of the content. When one candidate represents half the nation and the other represents the other half, then neither represents the country. It’s a stalemate that will either lead to a civil war or to union on a completely new level. Currently, the former is far more plausible.

Both sides have great arguments. They present them clearly and convincingly, but no one is persuaded. No one is even listening. In fact, both arguments are valid, yet both are wrong. Why are they wrong? Because if you think your way will make the country better, but all it really does is increase division and enmity, then whatever your argument may be, it’s wrong.

Moreover, when a society reaches such levels of intolerance, it is no longer a democracy. Even if you win the election, still, almost half the country opposes everything you do and feels that you, the winner, are imposing your view on the other half against its will. The basis of democracy lies in accepting that the majority leads while considering the views and needs of the minority. When you have no trust, no feeling of mutual consideration, you have no democracy.

What you have instead is tyranny of one half over the other. This is an explosive situation and it is currently the situation in America. Unless Americans overcome the impasse in the near future, a civil war is bound to erupt.

To change the situation in America, Americans first need to understand that they will never convince the other side. No one will agree with anyone—not now, not ever. We have come to such a level of self-absorption that we cannot listen to each other, so persuasion is off the table. Next, Americans must accept that disagreements are not a problem, but a given situation that they must deal with or kill each other until only one is left.

Assuming the American people do not opt for mutual extermination, they must find a way to live together. Indeed, there is such a way. All of reality is built on complementing opposites that live side by side and only their mutual existence creates harmony, balance and life!

Opposites never agree. If they did, the agreement would cancel them and they would cease to exist. In fact, the existence of one enables the existence of the other. Would there be day without night, birth without death, spring without fall or heads without tails? There wouldn’t be anything; the universe would not exist.

Only once you realize that you need both sides you can begin to resolve anything. In fact, when you unite above the dispute, you discover that the dispute no longer exists, that its only purpose was to impel you to unite against your will. This is true of personal relationships as it is true of international relationships. It may be hard to fathom right now, but if America unites its ranks, none of the foreign policy issues it is dealing with right now would remain.

When you go hand in hand with reality, reality goes hand in hand with you. When you go against reality and try to impose your view on half the nation that does not agree with you or accepts your leadership, you will fail in home affairs as well as in international affairs. The only thing that’s required in today’s divided world is unity. Those who miss it will stay behind and fall, either through war or through social disassembly. Those who grasp it will lead the world into the future.
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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What is your opinion about the 2020 USA election?“

Today, we bear witness to increasing social division and polarization all around the world, in all of the developed nations of the so-called free world, and the more developed the nation, the greater the polarization.

Why are we becoming increasingly polarized the more that we develop?

It is because behind our evolution are growing human desires. Human development began with us fulfilling our base individual desires for food, sex, family and shelter, and over time, new desires appeared in us—social desires for money, honor, control and knowledge—and we lived and worked in order to fulfill them.

Our current era is characterized by the emergence of a new desire that we have yet to fully grasp, one urging our increasing interdependence and interconnectedness, and it requires us to realize our growing connection harmoniously. However, in this transitional process, we feel increasing connection and our constantly-inflating desires as burdens that pit us up against each other more and more.

We have never experienced such a strong opposition in opinions and relations, where one opinion is convinced that things should go one way, and the other opinion is convinced that things should go the other way.

The more we have developed our intellects and gained experience from our time on this planet, then you would think that by now we should know how to bridge our divides. Instead, however, we see that the more sophisticated we become, the more divided we also become.

How, then, can it ever be possible to get along?

Today’s intensely polarizing society will not be able to be connected at the same level of understanding and emotion that currently resides in people. On the contrary, the more we develop, the more division, hatred, rejection, and lack of readiness to reach any kind of common understanding will ensue.

Nature awakens this division among us precisely in order for us to reach a state of helplessness, where we all raise our hands with a sincere desire for help, because otherwise we will see that we are all doomed.

However, nature has no intention to divide us. Rather, it is urging us to realize balance and a perfect connection with each other. Also, it does so in a way where we could realize that connection on our own, as adults, and not that we would unconsciously and involuntarily “click” into place without any awareness on our behalf.

What is happening right now with the US elections is a clear example of how nature is encouraging us to wake up to the helplessness of our current situation, as well as to the need for help from a higher force—that it reveal itself and organize our connections positively—otherwise we remain stuck.

In America, we see an example of how a roughly equal amount of people are split between two opposite sides. How can a successful leadership emerge in such a situation, where two halves of the population are respectively for and against an elected leader? Simply put, there can be no successful leadership in such a situation, and everybody will increasingly feel dissatisfied with whatever leader arises.

This division is happening because a higher force of connection needs to become revealed throughout humanity. This force—call it nature, the laws of nature, God or the Creator—holds the key to organize our connections harmoniously, and any positive progress from this point onward requires this force to surface among us. The positive aspect of our current polarization is that it becomes clear that we cannot solve our division on our own accord, and that if we fail to realize the need to invite a higher force to organize us, then we will end up battling each other uncompromisingly, and can find ourselves in states of great conflict and suffering, which have already started unraveling.

I discussed this topic and answered questions about it yesterday in a meeting with a team of writers. Watch the video here: Q&A with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman on the US Elections. [1:09:40]

Image: Tony Hisgett from Birmingham, UK, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

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