Question: For thousands of years, people have been wondering what human consciousness is. Philosophers, thinkers, and scientists constantly discuss this topic and posit various theories.

During the last quarter of a century, as science has begun to study the structure of the human brain in detail, philosophical questions have been, somewhat, pushed aside. Neurobiologists have begun to search the areas that are responsible for consciousness in the human brain. They call them neural correlators; they shape a person’s awareness of himself and the surrounding world, etc.

What is human consciousness from your point of view?

Answer: Consciousness is that cloud of forces made up of receiving and bestowing that is formed in the connection between a person and his surrounding space. How much а person grasps from his inclusion in the common cloud depends on his surroundings.

Everything is given to a person from the outside. A person has nothing of his own. Even what seems to him as arising from within himself is brought to him from the outside.

The development of one’s consciousness depends on what is called one’s point in the heart or one’s merging with the common cloud of bestowing and receiving in which we exist. There is a specific spiritual gene within each of us, a place or a force that binds us with this cloud.

Question: We say that a person builds his perception of reality, that is, literally creates the Creator in himself. Does this mean that he builds the cloud independently? Does he feel it that way?

Answer: Yes, but we feel this from our attainments. What is beyond the attainments, we cannot talk about. In the science of Kabbalah, we are not engaged in imaginary things but only in what Kabbalists have revealed before us and also in what we can add to their attainments.

Question: Is there anything outside of human consciousness?

Answer: We cannot know that.

Question: There is no way to check this?

Answer: How? If we succeed in checking something or in feeling it, this means that it is within our consciousness already.

Question: Does the universe have its own consciousness?

Answer: If something is outside of us, we are not able to determine what it is. We attain only what enters our consciousness.

Question: Can we determine, in our perception, that something outside of us has consciousness?

Answer: This is a question that does not have an answer. We cannot ask about what we do not clearly attain in the mind or within our desire. If there is no such thing, it means that it does not exist in relation to us!

Naturally, we can talk about anything. But do we attain this in our qualities?

Question: That is, a clear check always happens with respect to a person? Nothing else?

Answer: A judge has nothing beside what he has in his hands.
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From KabTV’s “Kabbalah Express” 12/7/20

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Question: Is it possible to trace in the events of the second century BC, when people were divided into Maccabees and Hellenized Jews, the current division in the State of Israel?

Answer: I don’t think so. I do not see that there are people in Israel who want to be corrected. No one believes that we are in a spiritual descent.

In the time of the Maccabees, there was a battle for ideology: how people should advance, how to serve the Creator, i.e., achieve the principle of “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Does anyone today have a method for achieving this spiritual rule? Do you see it in the program of any party or any part of society? And in those days, there was.

Rabbi Akiva and 24,000 of his disciples, and many others, believed that the principle of “Love your neighbor” must be fulfilled. But they could not resist their egoism because the rest of the people were heading in the opposite direction.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 12/16/19

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Question: During the pandemic, we have all become participants in the experiment of living in tactile isolation. How will eliminating physical communication as the main way of interacting with other people affect the further development of humankind?

Answer: We are entering a state in which we do not really communicate physically. So what if I am on the subway or bustling in a crowd? In practice, there is very little contact between us. All contacts happen through computers.

Therefore, I do not think the pandemic will do anything to bring people closer together. It is impossible to conduct an experiment that compares what was with what will be or with what is now because we are in different conditions.

How is an experiment usually set up? There are certain conditions as well as others  and by studying them, you freeze such and such conditions of one state and compare them with others.

Here, however, we cannot compare what is and what was and even more so with what will be. We have not yet finished this process. Therefore, all of our conclusions are very vague and uncertain.

If you ask me as a Kabbalist, I can tell you that people really feel that they are in more contact now than before. You may ask, “How can this be if they are quarantined in their homes?” They experience the same states and therefore become sensorially closer to each other and can understand each other more.

Question: Do you think that the computer screen, through which we communicate, could become a problem for us in the future?

Answer: We can meet now and in a few minutes you will see that we have nothing to talk about. What can we tell each other that you have not been through and I have not been through? We were all in the same conditions and therefore there can be nothing else to say.

Question: Does this mean that now we are entering a new stage of development in which the body no longer plays any role in communication?

Answer: Moving the body from place to place has long ceased to play any role. I get on a plane and fly somewhere but still stay in touch with my colleagues, family, and friends. Things have been working differently for a long time. The Internet has made everyone equal.
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From KabTV’s “Communication Skills” 10/30/20

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Question: They say that all the problems in life arise only because of self-love. Why?

Answer: Whatever we do, we initially do it only out of self-love. I love myself and, as it seems to me, I do everything that can help me, fill me, and please me. So, for my own sake, I am ready to destroy nature, to do anything. All the problems arise precisely because I think only of myself.

Question: Now a pandemic is spreading in the world. Is it because I think of myself?

Answer: Of course. Because of the fact that people think only of themselves such “vermins” appear.

Question: At the same time, they say that if a person does not love himself, he will not be able to love others. Does it mean that self-love is necessary in order to love others?

Answer: Yes. Otherwise, a person will not have an example of how he should love others. He must love himself. That is why it is said: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Comment: It means that narcissistic egoists …

My Response: Very nice people. It is just necessary to turn their idea of pleasure to the fact that by bestowing pleasure to others, they themselves will receive pleasure.

Question: Why do people so often hide love but openly express hatred?

Answer: Love obliges and perhaps shows me my weakness. And hatred, on the contrary, suggests that I am, as it were, above others, that I am not afraid of them, and that I am ready, as it appears to me, to show my correct attitude toward others.

Question: Sometimes a person thinks that he already loves everyone. How to pass such a test of love so that a person does not deceive himself?

Answer: Offer him to work one day for someone. Let him try and see how his pride obscures all his horizons.
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From KabTV’s “Communication Skills” 10/23/20

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Question: You often say that love and hate must exist at the same time, and that love must cover hate. What does this mean?

Answer: This means that when we ascend in Kabbalistic practice according to our properties, then love and hate replace each other and help each other, just as the left and right legs help each other when walking.

Therefore, the more I am in love, the more I fall into hatred, and, from it, I rise again into even greater love and fall into even greater hatred. And so it is constantly.

Question: But how can these two feelings exist at the same time?

Answer: At the same time in what? It is that we correct the so-called Aviut (hatred, the opposite) by contraction, by the screen, by lifting ourselves above it. So we balance these two feelings all the time but they are both in our power. We do not obey them, rather, they obey us.

Question: So it doesn’t happen at the same time? If I love, is love still dominant?

Answer: You, yourself, specifically, change one feeling for another in order to alternate and step forward: left-right, left-right.
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From KabTV’s “Communication Skills” 10/23/20

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Question: How can there be a connection between a teacher and a student without devotion? Weren’t you connected to your teacher?

Answer: Devotion doesn’t necessarily have to be physical. Being in the same group doesn’t mean that you have to sit in front of me.

Besides, a lot depends on you. Personally, I don’t get close to any individual student; I am close to everyone. However, a student may try to be connected to me by getting closer to me and this is how the contact is created.

This contact has nothing to do with visual images, neither mine nor his. The person can be a man or a woman, an elderly person or a young one. It makes no difference how and what. Everything depends only on the desire, on the extent to which our desires match in their yearning for the common goal.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 12/2/18

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Preparation to the Lesson

Lesson on the Topic of “Concealment”

Selected Highlights 

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New Life 1288 – Urban Expansion Vs. Nature Conservation
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Yael Leshed-Harel

Humanity and nature can live in peace side by side if we make sure not to harm nature in everything that we do. We need to let nature be the way it is without any intervention or any artificial forms that we may create. The basic principle should be that man needs to think about nature first and not about himself. For example, we must not take garbage out of our home and just throw it out.

The problem begins with the fact that man is an egoist and doesn’t look ahead or consider the impact of his actions. Just as animals don’t destroy nature, we too need to pay greater attention to the protection of nature.
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From KabTV’s “New Life 1288 – Urban Expansion Vs. Nature Conservation,” 20/11/20

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If I am unable to restrict my egoism and let the group into the free space in my heart, then the group must give me artificial resuscitation. It is as if I am lying breathless, unconscious, and the group is pressing down on my chest so I can exhale and then start breathing. Meaning, it helps me contract in order to begin expanding again.

Expansion occurs naturally, as part of nature, and I must produce compression through my own efforts. And if I cannot do it, then the group must help me and apply pressure on me to start breathing in spiritual life, breathing in spiritual air.

The group presses on everyone with love, this will be the pressure that forces me to exhale air. This is how resuscitators revive a lifeless person: it would seem that it was necessary to fill him with air, but no, they press on his chest to let the air out.

The group in the same manner puts pressure on everyone with love so that one feels that there are people around him who are bound by love and unity and who call him to do the same. This love obligates him: he gives up breathing himself and allows his friends to enter him and expand him by force. And when he expands due to their work, he will also be obligated to expand his love for them, that is, to show love for all.

There are two forms of advancement toward the goal of creation, toward correction. If we make the efforts on our own to advance through the group with the influence of the environment, reviving each other with artificial respiration, then this will be the path of light (Ahishena). And if we don’t, the global ventilator starts rolling over us like a roller of evolution, squeezing all the air out of us so that we are ready to inhale the spiritual air.

There is one point (Malchut) that belongs to man and the rest, the upper nine Sefirot, are the qualities of the friends or the group. I must restrict myself within these nine Sefirot without leaving any of my desires there. If I want to bestow in these nine Sefirot, then I inject the qualities of my friends into them, and they turn into bestowing qualities for me. Thus, I bestow to my friends and through them, I offer a place for the Creator to clothe in.

If we commit ourselves to influence everyone in the group, show our love and unity to awaken each friend, it will push him forward because he will also want to advance. This is practical Kabbalah.

Inhaling and exhaling should constantly alternate. After all, every time we breathe in the spiritual air we realize that it turned into the material one because our egoistic desire was added to it.

Therefore, we have to forcefully exhale it and inhale new spiritual air for the sake of bestowal, and this will be a step toward the next spiritual degree.

This is how we ascend up the spiritual ladder: each time we discover that the current step is somehow egoistic, we exhale it in order to breathe in fresh spiritual air instead, a new force of bestowal.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/18/20, “A Time of Contraction and A Time of Expansion”

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