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My Thoughts On Twitter 1/26/21

Dr Michael Laitman Twitter

The further humanity advances toward correction, the stronger certain circles rise up against #masks and etc. Humanity’s development compels them to do this, toward correction of egoism. Because they are representatives of the general egoism.

Despite boasting the world’s top coronavirus #vaccination numbers (#1 in the world), #Israel is also the world leader in the number of sick patients. We talked about this a year ago! The reason is that it’s the people of Israel who, by their union, can eliminate the virus from the whole world.
From Twitter, 1/26/21

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“The Strongest Force Of All” (Linkedin)

My new article on Linkedin “The Strongest Force of All

In relationships, at work, in society, in the country, in the world, in relationships of all kinds and at any level, one can see power, exploitation, and control. Where does this come from and how can we better cope with these destructive impulses?

The material from which we are made is a desire to enjoy. This is why we constantly set norms that define an excessive activation of our desire to receive at the expense of others as forceful and invalid. Unlike animals that act by instinct, nature gave human beings the freedom of choice to determine how they treat others within society.

The education we receive, the environment that surrounds us, our individual attributes, and the circumstances in which we live form a comprehensive account that determines when we exercise power toward others, in what form, and how much we allow our egoism to act to control others in order to achieve our goals.

There are struggles in nature also, but only in humans is there egoism, an evil instinct. No animal wants to harm another animal or enjoys controlling and abusing another. Humans, on the other hand, have no boundaries, no limits. As egoism develops, we want to swallow up the whole world and to subdue everyone under us. It is not enough for us to have everything we want at our disposal; we differ from animals in our desire for control.

If we could recognize the material we are made of, we would discover that we never see the person in front of us as such, but only as an object for our dominance who could be used for our benefit. There is always a subconscious communication between us about how much I can overpower you and vice versa and how much can I enjoy what I get from you. Our lives revolve around such measurements and calculations with each and every one in every way possible.

But eventually, we will discover that no matter how hard we try to bend each other, we do not achieve lasting satisfaction. Perhaps we seemingly gain something for a moment as a result of exploiting someone to our advantage, but in such circumstances we are never relaxed, nor do we experience the potential good life nature has given us to realize.

Our era marks a unique and highly significant transition point, we bear witness to our egoistic development reaching a dead end, we feel increasing difficulty to be fulfilled from selfish pursuits, which gives rise to a plethora of negative attitudes in society. People are taking their dissatisfaction out on each other more and more, which leads to increasing polarization and hatred throughout society.

Today’s unsettling state thus points the way to the need for us to draw an opposite, balancing, positive force in order for us to create good relations between each other and with nature. It is the force of love, the strongest of all. If we open up the ability to live under the premise of “love your neighbor as yourself,” we will create a pleasant and encouraging atmosphere that will free us from the need of taking advantage of others.

The best example of the immense potential of love is in our relationship with our children. Nature has given us love for them so we constantly make sure that everything is good for them, that they are happy. No one pressures us to do so, we feel a tendency from within, and this is also what makes us the happiest in life.

We are advancing toward a more connected world where we will discover from day to day how much we all depend on each other. The only relationships that will allow us to live a secure life involve complementary connection between people from all different backgrounds and characteristics, even opposites, to a level of mutual love. And as we each struggle with our own egoism, which pushes us in opposite directions, we will begin to feel how indispensable it is to support and cherish each other to enjoy life in the full sense of the word.
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“No Heroes When It Comes To Covid” (Linkedin)

My new article on Linkedin “No Heroes When It Comes to Covid

Can you still remember how you felt this time last year? Do you remember your hopes, your dreams, and your visions of the newly born decade? What’s left of those dreams one year later? If you took your wildest guess about 2020, would it be anything like the reality that unfolded? Covid-19 has taught us a great lesson: We don’t know anything, and we don’t control anything. In fact, we don’t even know what we don’t know, and we certainly can’t control something that we don’t know exists!

But if we don’t know anything, how can we make any plans? What’s the value of our high-tech medicine if a month after we rolled out the vaccines with much fanfare, three new strains of Covid appeared, for which we are not sure that the vaccines are even effective, and which are far more contagious and possibly more violent than the original strain? In the first few days in office, the new administration, which disparaged the previous one over its handling of the pandemic, has already released two defeatist declarations: The first one stated that Covid will “get worse before it gets better,” and the second, even more disheartening, stated that “There’s nothing we can do to change the trajectory of the pandemic in the next several months.” Put simply, the previous administration tried and failed, and the current administration failed before it even tried. Clearly, when it comes to Covid, there are no heroes.

This brings up interesting questions: What will happen if we surrender? What does it mean to surrender to the virus? Does it mean that we will all die or perhaps something else? Is there a way to hamper the spread of Covid-19 besides vaccines?

There are simple answers to this: We can impede the spread of the virus by following the requirements we all know are helpful: social distancing, wearing masks, and washing hands. But will that defeat the virus? Will it make it go away? At best, these measures will slow down its spread, but they will not obliterate it.

It may sound counterintuitive but to eliminate the virus, we must stop fighting it. The virus is like a grownup seeing a child about to bump his head against a low hanging branch that the child doesn’t see because he’s searching for treasures on the ground. The grownup has no choice but to push the child’s head down before he hits the branch and hurts himself. The child, who doesn’t see the branch, looks up in anger at the “aggressive” grownup and tries to keep walking upright, so the grownup is forced to push the child’s head down even more forcefully, since his push, however unpleasant, is far less painful than bumping his head into a heavy branch. The grownup tries to show the child that there’s another way that he can go, where he will find all the treasures he is looking for, and there is nothing where he insists on going. Still, the child is obstinate and insists on going the wrong way. What should the grownup do? Should he let the child keep risking himself or insist until the child understands?

The answer is clear, but not that simple to do. For the child to understand, he must stop fighting the grownup. Only then will he see the branch and look to where the grownup is pointing. But until the child gives up the fight, he will continue to push forward and the grownup will continue to stop him, a little more assertively each time.

Like that mulish child, we insist on pushing toward the normality we think is good for us: the life we had in the previous decade. However, it collapsed at the end of the decade. The appearance of Covid at its conclusion marked the demise of the old way of life, and returning to it will hurt us far more than if we bumped our heads against an allegorical low hanging branch.

The coronavirus stops us every time we try to walk back to where we came from: an outdated, obsolete world. Only if we surrender to the virus, follow the requirements to hamper its spread, we will find that along with impeding the contagion, we also learned new ways to treat each other and, inadvertently, transformed our inimical, unwelcoming society into a healthy one where it is a delight to live, where consideration, acceptance, and mutual responsibility are truly the dominant values. And once we have transformed ourselves, it will be effortless to do what it takes to completely block the spread of Covid-19, and the virus will become a chapter in our history.

“Nothing Wise About Elon Musk’s Mars Colony Idea” (Linkedin)

My new article on Linkedin “Nothing Wise about Elon Musk’s Mars Colony Idea

Billionaire Elon Musk, owner of electric car company Tesla and Space Exploration Technologies Corp SpaceX, has a grand vision for humanity. He calls it “Mars & Beyond: The road to making humanity multiplanetary.” Put simply, Musk wants to colonize Mars with humans. Regrettably for him, it’ll never work. There is nothing wrong with Planet Earth except for the people inhabiting it. So, if you carry into your new world the injurious element that is ruining your current world, what chances have you of building a sustainable colony on the new planet?

If you want to succeed in your new home, you must make sure that everything you carry with you is helpful and beneficial. This means that the people who go there will have to be freed of the flaws that make humanity noxious to Planet Earth. But, if you can cure people from their harmful traits so they become beneficial to the environment rather than detrimental to it, what’s the point of taking them to a new planet? The whole idea of moving to Mars was because we ruined earth, but if you can fix the ruinous element in man, we will stop ruining Earth, the planet will heal, and there will be no need to move.

Moreover, Earth is our home. We are made of it; it engendered us; and our bodies contain and need every element that exists on earth, even the most toxic. These elements don’t exist on Mars; survival will be a formidable challenge. In other words, not only are we taking with us the very cause of Earth’s problems—ourselves—we are creating countless new problems by placing ourselves in an environment that was not made to create and nurture humans.

When astronauts return from missions on the International Space Station after a few months in space, their bodies need several more months under medical supervision to readjust to the conditions on Earth. The effects on the bodies of people who will travel to Mars for months, then live on it for years, if not for the rest of their lives, are anyone’s guess, but they will not be good.

However you look at it, besides questionable prestige to the entrepreneur, there seems to be no sense at all in the project of colonizing Mars. If Musk wants to create an idyllic society in a secluded place, it would be much cheaper, easier, quicker to implement, and far less risky to simply buy a small, secluded island and populate it with the participants in his experiment. If they succeed, he will have all the prestige of the savior of humanity, who discovered the secret of turning human nature from evil and abusive to kind and inclusive. If he fails, people will simply go back home and all will be well. At the very least, Musk will be respected for trying.

And finally, Musk recently announced that he would pay $100 million for the best carbon capture technology. The isolated island experiment would cost him much less, and give him much more than carbon-free air. If it succeeds, it will give him an ego free society, a pristine Planet Earth, and a happy and peaceful humanity. If you ask me, it’s a steal!
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The Whole World Toward The Challenge Of Nature

259.02Question: How can humanity rise to the challenge of nature that it now faces? It is clear that everyone makes a decision about themselves. Doctors go to hospitals to save lives. Scientists are developing vaccines. How can this happen to all of humanity?

Answer: Only if there really is a huge problem that absolutely all people on Earth face, and everyone will feel their complete dependence on some upper threat, then, quite possibly, all the people of the world will stand up and unite with each other to overcome this threat. That would be great!

In the meantime, I do not see that. Everything depends on the appearance of a universal external threat. Even if something rumbles somewhere, such as the tsunami in Japan or the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, then the rest may not know about it. We need for something so extreme to happen that everyone on Earth will shudder and begin to think about what to do with our lives.

Question: Does the feeling of such a problem carry within itself some force of connecting people? Maybe it will be some kind of psychological shift, a psychological shake-up?

Answer: No. I think that something very serious must happen, like, say, a worldwide earthquake, so that the Earth is properly shaken. Then there will be a need to unite in the face of an external global threat.

Even the fall of a meteorite would not be able to bring such fear to humanity, because only some part of the Earth would be damaged by it. If an entire continent goes under water, it is not a loss for all of humanity. It is necessary for everyone to experience the horror of loss to such an extent that it will be ready to act correctly after that.

I have seen such people who have been released from Soviet prisons. They were saying, “Just bread and water, that’s all we need. We are ready to live like this all the time: work, bread, and water. And if we will have a family, and a plate of soup with bread and water, then it is paradise.” This is the shock that everyone must experience in order to have the opportunity to correct humanity. A person is softened by suffering.
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From KabTV’s “Kabbalah Express” 1/12/21

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What Did 2020 Want To Tell Us?

963.6Comment: The well-known and respected Time magazine dedicated a cover to 2020 and called it “The Worst Year Ever.”

The cover displayed the number “2020” in black with a huge “X”  drawn in red marker crossing it out to illustrate the feature story “2020 The Worst Year Ever.”   In it, the author wrote: “The rest of us have had no training wheels for this–for the recurrence of natural disasters that confirm just how much we have betrayed nature; for an election contested on the basis of fantasy; for a virus that originated, possibly, with a bat only to upend the lives of virtually everyone on the planet and end the lives of roughly 1.5 million people around the world.”

In other words, let’s cross out this year, exclude it from the history of mankind, this worst year ever.

My Response: 🙂 People do not understand. They do not understand that it is nature that plays with man, but man plays the trumpet.

Comment: This year has fallen on us heavily…the virus!

My Response: The Coronavirus, nature reacts to our interference with it, which is simply no longer acceptable

Question: So we messed it up so much that it now…?

Answer: Of course! We are in a huge, closed system of nature. Scientists talk about it. Time magazine reports that this year has been so bad. The magazine has to sell, I understand. But in fact, this is not how it should be presented to humanity.

We must seriously explain to people where we are, in what kind of system, a closed system of nature! These are laws! If we break them even by one iota, they give a reaction.

Comment: But nobody told me this is a law.

My Response: Go back to school and learn. Create other subjects in school so that you are not taught any “isms” but taught seriously—biology, zoology, botany, natural science, physics, chemistry, and so on—so that it will be explained that we exist in a system in which everything is very clearly and rigidly connected.

The fact that Time magazine is outraged, just shows that there are idiots sitting there. I am completely serious. Why can’t they open this magazine for educational purposes: “Guys, we are here…you know, we were lost.”

Comment: Let’s look at this year. Let’s not cross it out. I have a feeling that this for you is the best year in the history of mankind.

My Response: A wonderful year! This is the year of change! This is the first year in which nature shows us in a more open way than before how it reacts to our impossible-to-endure-further distortions in its system.

Question: Would you put another article there?

Answer: Of course! They do not understand that their task is to teach people how to react correctly and change humanity.

I would say this about the outcome of this year: in all the billions of years of the universe and millions of years of humanity, there has never been a better year than the last year that is ending.

This is the first year when the Creator shows Himself to us more clearly. The Creator means nature, the system of nature. When it shows itself more clearly and says: “My children, if you continue to behave like this, I will have to teach you like a loving mother who has no other choice. I will punish you, beat you, and at the same time help you, show you what to do and how to do it.

But I have no other choice because you do not perceive it in a good way. Why? Well, look at what you write back to me. Your representative, the media, look at what they are doing, how they express my attitude—the attitude of nature!” I speak on behalf of nature.

My attitude to humanity, to you, to everyone. Look how they say we are not happy with nature, that what it has been doing to us lately is the worst thing that could have happened to us. Is this called a loving mother? It is like a child stomping his feet and yelling: “Bad mom!”

And nature has no other choice. It has only one condition: to lead us to the best result. Like a mother. She wants the child to succeed in his life. She will have to somehow push him, help him, and, at the same, time twist him and try to get him into this system, into this format from which he will get the best result.

We must sympathize with nature, the Creator, what a hard job He has with such children!
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From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 12/10/20

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You Must Know How To Love

294.3To love is not to look at each other, but to look together in the same direction.
 (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry)

That is right. The same direction means that I must find in myself and in the other person a state resulting from our mutual relations. It is something beyond both of us.

Question: So now are you talking about the purpose of life we, that we advance toward one goal, love the same goal, and move toward it?

Answer: It means that we love each other precisely because we are aimed at the same goal.

Comment: What if we do not share the same goal?

Answer: Then it is not love.

Question: This is interesting. So, I cannot just love you and simply live this way?

Answer: No! There must be a third component; it is not superfluous.

There must be something outside of both people that connects them, unites them. It is the yearning to unite in this third part that results in the quality of love.

Question: What kind of a goal makes this love strong?

Answer: When they realize that they owe each other achieving this eternal goal.

Question: Can a goal be to build a house, grow a tree, or create a family?

Answer: No. Never! We are talking about an idea, an ideal.

Question: But what is it? What could it be? Can we talk specifically about this?

Answer: Only the attainment of the purpose of nature. Nature has created us, and we must understand the goal that it wants to bring us to.

Question: What goal does it want to bring us to?

Answer: To unity. So that together with us it can achieve the absolute meaning in this union! That is, it would become one common whole—us, all of humanity, and nature. Us, as a receptor element of nature, and nature itself as the filling element.

That is how it should be.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 12/10/20

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“What Is The Difference Between Physical Love And Spiritual Love?” (Quora)

Dr. Michael LaitmanMichael Laitman, On Quora: What is the difference between physical love and spiritual love?

Physical or corporeal love comes from receiving pleasure from someone or something.

Spiritual love, on the contrary, means that we feel repulsion and rejection from others, and above these negative sensations, we build a loving attitude.

It is written about spiritual love that “Love will cover all crimes” (Proverbs 10:12). Spiritual love does not replace hatred, but emerges above it.

To the extent that we suffer from such hatred, i.e., that we want to love others but find ourselves in opposite sensations that contradict the love we want, then our construction of positive connection above such negative sensations awakens spiritual love.

Spiritual love is thus measured according to the distance from whom we want to love. Attaining spiritual love thus also requires a great amount of learning and preparation, with the understanding that it is an attitude that we need to attain toward the whole of creation.

Creation, according to the wisdom of Kabbalah, is the desire to enjoy. A single desire to enjoy is positioned behind everything we perceive in reality.

The desire to enjoy in and of itself poses no problem, as it is simply matter. Problems emerge when the desire to enjoy wants to individually benefit at the expense of others. Among cells in an organism, such a tendency is considered cancerous. Among us humans, the desire to individually benefit at the expense of others is the basis for every problem we experience in life.

The more we develop, the more the desire to enjoy grows, and the more we find ourselves in a swamp of problems and crises. Such a process is leading us to a state that the wisdom of Kabbalah terms “the recognition of evil,” where we gain awareness of our egoistic nature that wants to self-benefit at others’ expense as the root of all problems. At that juncture, we will reveal that we hate the egoistic nature within us, and we will then genuinely yearn to have a loving attitude upon it.

The desire to enjoy is our nature. We cannot get rid of or destroy it, nor do we need to. We need only treat our nature as the ground level in a building that we need to construct, where the second level and upward is built out of a positive and loving attitude upon the desire to enjoy from other people and nature.

How can we reach such spiritual love?

It is done by asking for it from a higher degree. The desire to enjoy is the nature of creation, and opposite it is the nature that created it: the desire to bestow, love and give. In the wisdom of Kabbalah, the desire to bestow and love has several names, including “the Creator,” “the upper force,” “the light,” and also “nature.” It describes the quality of giving and love that exists in reality, concealed from our inborn desires. When we reach a sincere desire to love others spiritually, i.e., without wanting self-benefit laced within that love, then we reach a true request to the Creator—a prayer—to perform that self-transformation.

Why would we even want to reach such a state?

It is because by doing so, we bring ourselves closer to the source of our lives, elevating ourselves from the animal degree of existence to become human in the fullest sense of the term. “Human,” in Hebrew (“Adam”), refers to the phrase “similar to the most high” (“Adameh le Elyon”). Therefore, reaching spiritual love means attaining resemblance to the Creator, which is described by Kabbalah as the purpose of life—the highest, most harmonious and balanced state of perception and sensation that we can achieve, while alive in our world.

Based on the Daily Kabbalah Lesson of January 23, 2021. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

“According To The Bible, What Is Spiritual Growth?” (Quora)

Dr. Michael LaitmanMichael Laitman, On Quora: According to the Bible, what is spiritual growth?

The purpose of our lives is to reach a state of perfection by harmoniously unifying with humanity in a single integral system—our soul. This state is called “the revelation of the Creator to the created beings in this world,”* and it is attainable while we are alive in our world.

The Bible was given to us as a means by which we can correct ourselves in order to unify with others, i.e., to ultimately reach a level of “And you shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). The word for “Torah” in Hebrew connects to two words, “Hora’ah” (“teaching”) and “Ohr” (“light”). That is, the Torah is a means by which we draw light onto ourselves, which corrects our intention from self-benefit at the expense of others to bestowal and love for others.

Spiritual growth takes place by rising above our inborn egoistic nature to increasing positive connection and unification with others. In the Bible, such ascent is described by degrees called holidays, weekdays, the Sabbath, Rosh Chodesh (the beginning of the month), the nations of the world, Levites, Cohens, Israelites, and so on.

It is important to understand that the Bible does not describe corporeal phenomena, but spiritual degrees, structures, and processes, which are ultimately degrees of love, bestowal, and unification. The correct study of the Bible should draw upon us the light that brings us closer to attaining those degrees. When we attain the spiritual degrees described in the Bible, we can perceive what it means to be on the degrees of King David, King Solomon, Moses, Aaron, Joseph, Jacob, and so on.

The more we grow spiritually, the more we feel that we elevate from the lowest degrees to the highest, and encounter several states on the path. In other words, the more we unite among each other, and with humanity as a whole, the more we experience the various depictions contained in the Bible. Such spiritual growth takes place until we integrate the entire world inside ourselves and become “human” in the fullest sense of the term (i.e, “human” [“Adam” in Hebrew] from the phrase “similar to the most high” [“Adameh le Elyon” in Hebrew]), which means that we resemble the Creator.

We should thus perceive what is contained in the Bible as degrees of our spiritual growth that we undergo until we reach the complete harmony, perfection, and eternity of our soul—in equivalence with the Creator.

* See section “What the Wisdom Is About” in “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah” by Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag (Baal HaSulam).