My new article on Linkedin “From the Steam Engine to the Engine of Relations”

2020 was a culmination of a centuries-long process that started with the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Technology began to move apace when steam engines became efficient enough to be used in England’s factories in the late 18th century. Since then, technology has only been accelerating its development. Gradually, we moved from the steam engine and bulky machines to devices that grew smaller yet more powerful. We learned how to use gasoline, electricity, developed electronics, computers, and eventually even waves and magnetic force fields. Things that seemed like fantasy or science fiction to educated adults in the 19th century are a given to children in the 21st century, and the pace is still accelerating.

We have gone from large to small, to smaller, to invisible, but we have yet to find the force that makes it all work, the engine of reality. Humanity is at a crossroads. In order to find the engine of reality we must invert our perspective. There is one more force field to discover, but our current perspective cannot reveal it for a very simple reason: We are looking in the opposite direction. Until now, we have been observing the world outside of us and registering our discoveries. From now on we must start looking inward and register our discoveries about the force that makes us move: the force field of relations.

If you have ever wondered why every innovation that humanity has ever made has always been put to bad use, here lies the answer. If you’ve ever noticed the strange phenomenon that the most powerful engines of development have been negative, and usually related to the arms industry, especially since the beginning of the 20th century, here lies the answer. The force field of relations is injecting negative energy into the system, making our entire society sick with venom that forces us to invent things that hurt others. And as technology accelerates its progress, we inject more and more malice into society, and at a growing pace. Currently, such tensions have piled up that we are almost at the breaking point.

The way we relate to one another determines not only how our society operates, but how all of reality operates. This is why I keep saying that no vaccine will help defeat Covid-19 unless we first heal what’s really sick about us: our relations toward each other. We are creating viruses through our ill-will toward others. Not directly, of course, but through a chain reaction that ultimately creates viruses, and moves on to create every adverse effect in our world, from wars to earthquakes.

There is no point looking for technological innovations to improve our lives; they will only be used to our detriment as long as we are detrimental to each other. If we ever want to have a peaceful, happy life, we must focus on changing our relations, and as a result, everything we do will change for the better.

[Intensive Care Unit Nurse Merlin Pambuan, 66, is hugged by hospital staff as she walks out of the hospital where she spent 8 months with the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), at Dignity Health – St. Mary Medical Center, in Long Beach, California, U.S., December 21, 2020. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson]

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Question: You said recently that everything is developing so quickly that one wants to slow down the pace of this development. How can this be expressed in a group?

Answer: I sometimes hear from you that the movement forward has become so fast that it is like uncontrollable galloping horses. But this is actually how it has to be because these “horses” are managed by the Creator, and every new state is totally unexpected, while we must attain connections in faith above reason in every new state only through our common movement, so that below us a clear surface will be created, on which we can stand, even if we suddenly find ourselves in the air.

The attribute of Bina is the attribute of the air. There is such a concept as a castle, flying in the air. When we perceive and absorb the attribute of bestowal inside us, we feel that we are suspended in the air, and this is what we are being taught to get used to. We no longer have any egoistic base, and we cannot count on anything. There is no present, past, or future and there is no attachment to anything or to anyone. We are simply suspended not knowing where, how, and what is happening to us.

You accept this state and even more, but on one condition: that you do not know how it will happen and you also do not want to know. You only want to know that as a result of this condition, the whole correct state in the form of pleasure will go to the Creator.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 2/6/19

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Question: Is our task to reveal the world that The Book of Zohar gives us?

Answer: We must reveal the higher world of forces, properties, and their relationship with each other. The Book of Zohar gives us such an opportunity.

Everything that we perceive as existing outside is drawn inside us. All kinds of electrochemical parameters, forces, interactions, and reactions paint a picture of the material world in our brain, and we see such a hodgepodge of force. In fact, all this is not the real picture. This is how our brain depicts what it feels inside us.

When we begin to feel the upper world through The Book of Zohar, it shows us exactly those forces that stand before the earthly image and even higher, not all kinds of electrochemical reactions in the brain, but higher ones that control and determine them. This is called the upper world, the highest degree.

What does it give us? The ability to rise above the illusion of our world, above the illusion of the existence of our bodies, above the whole picture, which is drawn as if on the screen. In fact, it does not exist. Like in a cinema, if it were not for the projector, into which the reel is inserted and the film is spinning, there would be no picture.

This is how we live. Some picture is being scrolled for us, and we play in it as if it is real. We interact with it and with each other, so we see each other and we feel all this really exists. And suddenly, through The Book of Zohar, you begin to see that this is all a holographic picture. It doesn’t exist.

There are only forces that painted these pictures for you. You go back to their root, you begin to understand what it was all for, why, for what reason. And as if from this external picture, you begin to rise to its sources: where is it from and why. You ascend to higher realms.

In this case, you do not lose anything. On the contrary, you begin to feel everything that happens more vividly.

This is similar to how people come to me and show me an advertisement they want to make, for example, about Kabbalah. I look: “This is not right, something isn’t working.” And they tell me that there is a picture with eighteen million colors in the computer. But I only catch seven colors of the rainbow and some other shades. Where did eighteen million come from?

In fact, when we rise to the sources that these pictures give in our world, we begin to enrich ourselves billions of times more in all sensations. Vision, hearing, smell, taste, and tactile sensations develop, and each of them becomes a whole world! Therefore, it becomes so rich, and most importantly, eternal, perfect, and determines everything.
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From KabTV’s “The Power of The Book of Zohar” # 1

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Question: The vaccine has come in various forms and there are studies showing that it works.

There are skeptics who are afraid, but there are those who want to get vaccinated so that all this will end. That is, people now have an opportunity and the thought: “Well, when this year ends, everything will return to normal.”

I find myself thinking that we are going to start meeting physically. Everything will return to normal, and people will again begin to fly to their friends and relatives, to travel, to live. Life will continue. Already this blockage will end.

This thought is in people’s minds that everything will return to normal, and life will begin again. What do you think?

Answer: Life has not gone anywhere. So, if it comes back, I do not know what we mean by life. This is first. Second, you cannot bring back what was. So this whole pandemic, this whole virus, will accompany us. I think we should realize what it has given us.

Comment: I generally follow the press; few people have drawn conclusions about why the virus came and what it came for.

My Response: No. They want to go back to what was, how it was.

Comment: Yes, this is the natural state of a person who is already tired of all this.

My Response: As if it were good.

Question: So what do we need to realize now in order to live a new life, but good?

Answer: We must look to the future as a new day that must be a consequence of the past day. We do not consider this past day! We do not want to get any information from it.

Question: Do you need to pull information from the past?

Answer: Sure. Only we do not want to. We want to jump back. That is all. As we we flew, we fly, as we walked, we walk. There were all sorts of shows on television, there were theaters, movies. We went to restaurants, everywhere. The streets were full of people, they went to any cafe, to any place.

Question: What information should be extracted from the past?

Answer: That if we want to return to rapprochement, then rapprochement must be internal in order to neutralize this virus. This is difficult to explain to people. But the problem is in us. The virus is in us. If I want to neutralize it, I need to fill my attitude toward others with feelings of connection, rapprochement, love. Then I will neutralize the negative effects of the virus.

Question: Are you saying that this connection, this love was not in our past life?

Answer: Of course not.

Question: Whatever a person imagines was there, What should he do with it?

Answer: He just felt free. The virus came to us and showed that you have no right to approach another, say closer than two meters.

You cannot get any closer to the other one! People should understand that the virus actually came from the spiritual level, that is, from the level of feelings, from the level of correction of the human being, and then it descends to the biological, animal level.

Question: So, is it asking us to reach this level?

Answer: Inanimate, vegetative, animate, and human nature! Human nature is higher than animals. That is, it is an emotional relationship between human beings. If we fix that, then there is nothing to fix at all the lower levels, everything will be right and good.

Question: So, should we correct our internal relations with each other?

Answer: Only that. It is necessary to reveal to a person what this means. He says: “I did not like others?! I was hugging them! I sat with them, drank!”

Comment: Of course. They were my friends, my family.

My Response: How can I explain to him that it was all an egoistic, rigid, purely psychological hateful relations?

Comment: This is very difficult to explain. The person kept the warmth toward his close people…

My Response: He did not think about it. Now we have to go to another level.

Question: So, must a person understand that he has lived using others all the time? Actually, his love was to use them, one way or another.

Answer: Yes.

Comment: It is not easy!

My Response: Then we will begin to explain to mothers what it means to love their children.

Comment: But the mother is 1000% sure that she loves her child!

My Response: She loves him, of course. But this is the animal level of love. Leave this state and only give the child a more inner content—eternal, perfect! With your awareness of where it comes from!

From your inner animal body, from your urge as an animal to an animal you want to hug him, you want to lick him, like a cow licking her newborn calf, and so on.

Here another thing is also necessary—why do I do this, for what, why does nature arouse such feelings in me? I cannot just blindly follow my instinctive impulses of nature, which urges me like this, forces me. I must understand why I must do this, agree with it, and confirm with my consent that I am doing it consciously. For what?

In order to fully know and justify the Creator’s program in these actions. So that in this love between us, between all people, we will unite in a system called Adam, and in the end, we would find the same connection of love toward the Creator.

Adam is a single soul. Then we will feel how He “licks” us, as a cow does to her calf, and we perceive it as a calf perceiving a cow, a mother.

This is what everything was created for. When this highest love is manifested on all levels down to the lowest level, then this is the revelation of the Creator to the creatures.

We are not going anywhere. This must all be revealed.

Question: Do we reveal that we are one in the hands of the Creator?

Answer: Yes. We must be even higher, even to the point that we must reach an equal state with Him, realize His attitude toward us, rise to the level of understanding and feeling the source of His attitude toward us, that is, to grow ourselves to such a level.

Question: Do we even have to get to the purpose?

Answer: Of course, otherwise what will we do? Like a baby in its mother’s arms? He feels good, and his mother feels good. We need to grow. In our spiritual relationship with the Creator there is also an inanimate, vegetative, animate, and human level.

Question: What is the purpose of creation, the last point?

Answer: To rise to this state, to the highest, when we feel from where His love arises in the Creator and descends on us.

We will get there. It is precisely programmed. We are just trying to do it quickly and for everyone.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 12/14/20

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “How can you end suffering in life?“

We first need to understand the source of suffering in life, and then we can implement a method to end it.

In order to understand the source of suffering, the wisdom of Kabbalah explains a key interaction between two fundamental forces in nature: one is a force called “light,” the force of love, bestowal and connection, also known as “the upper force” and “the Creator” (“Boreh” in Hebrew), which means “come and see” (“Bo” and “Reh”), because we need to attain this force as a clear perception and sensation in order to believe it. This initial force created the second force: the creation, which is also called “the created being” or “the desire to enjoy”—a lack of fulfillment, opposite to the initial upper force.

The upper force develops the desire to enjoy, making us feel as if we need and want several different kinds of fulfillment. We are essentially made of a set of desires—food, sex, family, money, honor, control and knowledge—and we each feel an instinctive urge to fulfill ourselves via these desires in differing extents.

If we fail to fulfill these desires, we suffer, and this suffering extends from sensations of emptiness to those of outright pain, the latter of which can even become intolerable.

Desires for food, sex and family are natural bodily instincts shared by all animals. By contrast, desires for money, honor, control and knowledge are social desires based on comparing what we have in relation to others, and such desires are unique to humans.

The source of suffering is thus the inability to fulfill these desires. In Kabbalistic terms, when the light (pleasure/fulfillment) does not fill the desire, then it suffers, and the suffering can be intense or slight, long-term or momentary, collective or individual.

Understanding that our desires’ lack of fulfillment is the source of our suffering, we thus find ourselves in a constant race for fulfillment. The problem is that our desire to enjoy only knows how to enjoy at the expense of others and nature, and thus we pit ourselves up against each other in a tug-of-war, each pulling to their own corner. That is why any kind of fulfillment we sense in this current setup is only transient, after which we once again feel empty and desire a different fulfillment again and again.

The solution to this predicament is to invert the direction by which we enjoy. If instead of wishing to receive fulfillment for ourselves alone at the expense of others, we would develop a new desire—one where we wish for the benefit of others—then we would enter a new level of life where we would feel constant fulfillment.

Image: Left: Direct reception of pleasure into the desire leads to its extinguishment. Right: The intention to benefit others redirects the pleasure, allowing for continuous fulfillment.

Our desire to enjoy for personal benefit alone immensely limits and narrows our sensation of fulfillment to very tiny and transient moments, and most of the time we feel emptiness and suffering in order to push us to seek fulfillment. On the contrary, the desire to benefit others holds unlimited potential for fulfillment, because by aiming to benefit others, we enter into balance with the initial force of love, bestowal and connection that is on the opposite side of reality, wishing to bestow just like it.

The wisdom of Kabbalah is a method that teaches us how to undergo such a transition. “Kabbalah” means “reception” in Hebrew, because it teaches us how to receive fulfillment in a way that is ultimately adapted to nature, a fulfillment that does not fade away but which constantly increases.

On one hand, Kabbalah has become quite popular, but on the other hand, it is a hidden wisdom, because its results are felt in each person’s sensations and desires. Nevertheless, it is open for everyone, and it lets us understand how to work with our desires in order to receive fulfillment in an unlimited manner. By doing so, we become truly happy as we rid ourselves of suffering at its very source.

Based on “New Life episode 736: The Origin of Our Suffering” [28:27] on June 23, 2016. Written/edited by students of Kabbalists Dr. Michael Laitman.

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Question: In our world, there are such thrills as first love, the birth of a child, the resolution of some opposites, and the solution of complex problems. Can these feelings be compared to spiritual ones?

Answer: Yes, all this takes place in the comprehension of the upper world, but in a much more prominent, stronger form. This is already practical Kabbalah.

When a person comprehends the higher properties, forces, and actions that take place in a latent form, outside our earthly sense organs, then in accordance with this he begins to change himself in order to better feel the forces that secretly control our world.

Then he has the opportunity to influence his fate and everything that happens in this world. All his hidden desires begin to unfold. He begins to control his destiny, to go beyond the bounds of time, space, movement.

He no longer works with those forces of nature that earth sciences study within the framework of our world or interacts with them, but with forces and interactions above our world.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 11/12/18

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Question: I have been studying the wisdom of Kabbalah for a little more than a year. I have graduated from the Academy of the Wisdom of Kabbalah in Moscow (MAK). Lately, I have noticed that money, my position, and my work seem less valuable to me. Can you help me understand what is happening?

Answer: You need to relate to yourself seriously, also to your work, your family, and to everything there is, but only mechanically. You need to invest the rest of your energy in your spirituality. Yet one should not interfere with the other. You need to work with your corporeal essence in a precise manner for your family and for yourself, etc., while with your soul you should be with us.

All was programmed this way intentionally. Our world was not created against spiritual development. On the contrary, it is necessary so that a person will develop properly in two channels, which is the only way he will attain the goal.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 11/18/18

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Question: Should the selecting of people for integral upbringing groups be based on racial, national, and cultural characteristics?

Answer: No, this is completely wrong. Maybe they should be selected in accordance with their development level and mentality for them to be closer to each other. But in the end they all will be equal.

On the one hand, of course, the more similar people are, the easier it is for them to make contact, and on the other hand, the more opposite they are, the greater the success from their joint actions.
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From KabTV’s “Communication Skills” 10/16/20

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Preparation to the Lesson

Lesson on the Topic of “Simcha”

Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Study of the Ten Sefirot, Vol. 1, Part 3, Chapter 5, Item 1″

Selected Highlights

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Baal HaSulam, Shamati #70, “With a Mighty Hand and with Fury Poured Out”:

He said that we should know that of those who want to come into the work of the Creator in order to truly adhere to Him and enter the King’s palace, not everyone is admitted. Rather, he is tested: If he has no other desires but only a desire for Dvekut [adhesion], he is admitted.

And how is one tested if he has only one desire? He is given disturbances. This means that he is sent foreign thoughts and foreign messengers to obstruct him so he would leave this path and follow the path of all the people.

In movement toward the Creator, I must acquire the right direction toward Him. But I don’t see it. The Creator is only discovered at the end of my effort. I am walking in darkness every step of the way and I gradually discover Him as a result of my correct orientation. But how do we go about this in the right way? To do this, I must look through two points to strike a third point, as I would through the sight of a rifle.

If I am looking by way of a single intention, that is not enough, I must combine a second intention with it and then I will be able to strike the target.

So, I need some guiding points on the spiritual path. If I have three components: myself, a group (the “Ten”), and a teacher (the “Rav”), then I can be sure that I will “encounter” the Creator.

I must integrate fully in a group in order to do this, so that my ten will become a single unit. In this way I am guided by the same method that the entire group is getting from the teacher, and even though we don’t know anything about the Creator, we can be sure that we are aiming toward Him.

Question: How can my physical eye (the ego) feel and see the spiritual direction through characteristics that are the opposite of mine?

Answer: This is not a physical eye, but a heart and mind, my attraction to the goal.

Just as we look intentionally when we want to encounter a physical goal, so we want to encounter a spiritual goal through ourselves. It is specifically through the contrast of these characteristics that I direct myself toward the Creator and gradually change myself in such a way that according to the equivalence of the characteristics I begin to discover Him. This is working for my benefit and is changing my characteristics.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 12/9/18

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