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The Advantage Of Printed Books

209Question: Despite the fact that your lectures are recorded on video and audio, books are still published. What is the importance of printed books?

Answer: The fact is that the book will not disappear. It may be more convenient in electronic form. If I fly somewhere, I open my laptop where I can find any book on Kabbalah written several thousand years ago. I do not have to carry bookshelves with me.

However, the actual presentation of material through letters is eternal. It cannot disappear because it has its own spiritual root.

In the world of information from which all influences descend upon us, letters represent certain signs, certain forces. Their form, their image in our world is dictated by the structure and connection with the upper world, with the world of upper information. Therefore, it will not disappear.
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From KabTV’s “Questions about Kabbalistic Books” 10/22/19

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Fashion Will Be Different

961.2Comment: In Germany, due to the extension of the lockdown, the clothing trade has almost completely stopped. Loss from sales during this entire winter period equals ten billion euros. Half a billion fashion items remain unsold. They must already be destroyed because they will no longer be relevant next year.

My Response: I do not think that fashion will change. I do not think that fashion will exist at all. Therefore, I would not recommend destroying them. Rags are rags. People will not chase after this, as they do not chase after what is available today. It is over.

Question: That is, a person will not follow the season of 2021, 2022 and will wear whatever is comfortable and cozy for him?

Answer: Yes.

Comment: Realizing this, fashionable clothes at the fashion show in China were replaced with protective suits and visors against the coronavirus. High fashion on the catwalk is protective medical equipment and clothing for service personnel and for firefighters. It was the answer to the growing Chinese market.

My Response: Of course, they immediately realized that this is the way things should be.

Question: Who would you now send to the European catwalks?

Answer: I would demonstrate very practical clothes that do not hinder movements, are comfortable, wearable, and that is it, and not flashy.

Question: Do you think there may be a couturier and high fashion for very simple clothes?

Answer: Comfortable! Not simple maybe, but comfortable. I love jackets with many pockets, pants that fit comfortably and do not need to be ironed. Something very comfortable that does not hinder any movement. You can sit everywhere, do whatever you want, it does not get dirty. This is what needs to be invented, so that clothes do not get dirty. Even if I fall in a can of paint, I get out of there, take a shower, and it rinses off me even without soap.

This is how it should be! Let them invent! What happens, they deliberately invent things that quickly get dirty or break.

Question: That is, you are not even in favor of having a lot of clothes in a closet, but just necessary everyday things?

Answer: I think that if a person likes what he is wearing, then it makes no sense for him to change it. It is all just empty fashion that is imposed on him.

Question: And nothing will come back? That is, we approached simplicity?

Answer: Nothing will come back! The clearest direction is comfort. So that it does not repel others and is comfortable for you.

Comment: Beautiful and comfortable.

My Response: What does beautiful mean? To make people want to stroke you. Like silk, like wool—something very pleasant. This is how it should be. Clothes that complement a person’s image.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 1/18/21

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Do Not Stay In Egypt Forever

747.01Where can we get the desire to attain the light of infinity? Now we are in an ocean of endless light, but do we feel that we lack it? Not at all. We desire what we see in front of us, what is perceptible to our egoism.

And that is why Abraham asked the Creator: “How will I know that I will inherit it,” since they haven’t the Kelim [vessels] or the need for the great inheritance that You are showing me that You will give to my sons; they haven’t the need.” Where does an ordinary person get such thoughts because he just wants a quiet life and nothing more?

But the Creator says: “No! I have prepared for you the Egyptian exile as the quintessence of all evil. You will enter this period and acquire such desires in it that you will want to break out of them. You will feel that they are harmful to you.”

On one hand, there is no strength to get rid of them, and on the other hand, it is impossible to stay in them. Exile is such a prison that suffocates you, leaves you without a breath of air, but you cannot escape from it to such an extent that egoism suffocates you.

And you see that you are working only for your ego, which takes everything for itself. It is like you are trying to drink from a bucket full of holes: you scoop up water, dying of thirst, bring it to your mouth, and it is empty. And then there is no way out but to escape from this prison.

The one who remains an egoist and does not want to learn to give is called an Egyptian, not a Jew. After all, Jew means unity (Yihud), and an Egyptian does not strive for unity and will remain in Egypt.

The Creator explained all this to Abraham.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/11/21, “Pesach (Passover)”

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“The World Will Never Be Right If Our Thoughts Are All Wrong” (Linkedin)

My new article on Linkedin “The World Will Never Be Right If Our Thoughts Are All Wrong

Even if we make all energy production renewable, obliterate plastics, stop weapon production and destroy all existing guns, our world will not be healthier, cleaner, safer, or better in any other way. We will find other ways to mess up our lives, inflict suffering on all living beings, and especially on ourselves. Even if we correct everything that’s wrong with the world, we will still create new, worse wrongs until we shut down the factory that produces all our miseries: our bad thoughts about each other.

If we feel close to one another, we will not exploit, patronize, demean, or otherwise mistreat other people. This alone will radicalize our lives and make us feel comfortable with others, confident, and happy.

What haven’t we tried? Renewable energy? Check! Electric cars? Check! Vegan meet? Check (even though vegan meet is an oxymoron. Ban on nuclear weapons? Check! But none of these has even begun to change the world’s negative trajectory. We’re creating more pollution, killing more animals and cutting down more forests for cattle, manufacturing more weapons, and the nuclear threat is still hovering over our heads. In short, we haven’t even begun to solve anything through all our agreements and developments. It will also never happen as long as we don’t do them for the right reason: to make everyone’s lives better, and not for selfish profits.

When we do everything in order to achieve dominance and control, we can’t expect any good results. Our negative thoughts about each other turn every good thing we do, every noble idea we have, and every positive word we say into deleterious activities that the world would be better off without them. To right the wrongs in the world, we first have to make our thoughts right, and then everything will be alright.

In fact, even if we can’t control our thoughts, and certainly not our ill-will toward each other, merely knowing that they are the root of what’s bad in this world is enough to start improving things. We will learn how to change our negative thoughts and ill-will toward each along the way, but we first have to start practicing it. We know that practice makes perfect, so we needn’t worry about the results, right now, but about practicing good will, wanting to create closeness in our hearts, a familial feeling toward strangers, or at least toward people in our environment for whom we don’t wish well.

We needn’t worry about anything else. There is a saying in Kabbalah that everything is scrutinized in the thought. It means that if you have good thoughts, everything you do will turn out to be good. If we feel close to one another, we will not exploit, patronize, demean, or otherwise mistreat other people. This alone will radicalize our lives and make us feel comfortable with others, confident, and happy.

As a result, we will not need to consume needless stuff just to feel good about ourselves or to feel superior to others, and we will not need to arm or protect ourselves since we will feel close to one another. The whole of society will change as a result of our new relationships, and we will stop overconsuming, pollution will drop, arms races will cease, and the countless unsolvable problems we have today will disappear by themselves once we needn’t raise walls from the hostile world around us. Therefore, if we want to live in a good world, where life is easy and enjoyable, we need only practice changing the way we think about each other from negative to positive.
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“Was Pharaoh Of Passover Really A Bad Guy Or Just A Victim Of His Royal Birth? He Was No Haman.” (Quora)

Dr. Michael LaitmanMichael Laitman, On Quora: Was Pharaoh of Passover really a bad guy or just a victim of his royal birth? He was no Haman.

Pharaoh is a very powerful force. The wisdom of Kabbalah does not discuss Pharaoh as a personality, because in practice it is a nonexistent persona. According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, Pharaoh is the very big ego that the Creator created. It is a great desire to devour everything in the world for self-benefit.

The more humanity develops, the more this force of Pharaoh, the egoistic force, surfaces. One of its expressions is that we aspire to all kinds of accomplishments in our world, and the more we achieve, the emptier we feel. Likewise, the world appears to worsen the more we develop.

We become more and more dissatisfied with life. The more we connect technologically and economically, the more internally detached we feel from each other. Today, we witness such instances as people no longer feeling secure in the most distant villages. Our tightening global interdependence has led us to such paradoxes where farmers cannot even feed themselves from their own land.

Pharaoh represents the egoistic intention behind everything we do. On one hand, we make tremendous progress technologically, and we find ourselves in a situation where we are more dependent on others all around the world. On the other hand, we find ourselves feeling more and more detached from each other, and that we cannot tolerate being so tightly connected to others.

The ego, however, leads us to the need to correctly connect to each other, where we yearn for, build and ask for connection. What this means is that Pharaoh, by transforming our world so that it becomes increasingly interdependent and interconnected, brings us to a state where we hate the feeling of division, and we then transform our world into another one with positive connections. In other words, by abiding to our ego’s demands while connecting more and more, we find that we will simply be unable to achieve long-lasting happiness, success, or even survive. Pharaoh, however, constantly spurs our divisiveness. On one hand, Pharaoh awakens in us a desire for unity and acts so that we cannot live without making the right connections between us, since otherwise we cannot provide ourselves with essentials. On the other hand, Pharaoh will not let us unite. This contrast sums up Pharaoh’s merit.

We then start understanding that we have no other way out besides rising above and escaping from Pharaoh—the egoistic desire for self-benefit. Our escape from Pharaoh, from using others egoistically for the sake of self-benefit, is called the “exodus from Egypt.”

It is quite complicated because we still need to discover these concepts within ourselves. We live in a unique era. Today, we increasingly discover what has been prepared for us in the form of Pharaoh, i.e., in an egoistic form. We see a globally interdependent and interconnected world closing in on us more and more, and at the same time, we find ourselves feeling more internally remote from others. We thus need to respect Pharaoh, this overblown ego we find ourselves in today, because it leads us to realize how bad it makes our lives, and through such a revelation, we gain a desire to exit our ego and enter into a much more meaningful and joyous world where we are positively connected.

Based on “News with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman” from April 12, 2016. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

“Erasing The (Inner) Distance” (Linkedin)

My new article on Linkedin “Erasing the (Inner) Distance

As Jews around the world are preparing for Passover, which celebrates the exodus of the ancient Israelites from enslavement in Egypt, it seems as though the entire world is experiencing somewhat of a “global Egypt.” While Covid didn’t exactly enslave us, it certainly did restrain us. But more importantly, the way to escape Covid is the same way by which the Hebrews escaped Egypt.

Today, humanity is in a similar situation. The story of Egypt should serve as an allegory for us. If humanity chooses the same instrument that the ancient Hebrews did, namely unity, we, too, will be redeemed from the shackles of Covid, and indeed from all the adversities that have landed on us in the past century or so, and that are destined to land on us if we do not choose unity.

After Joseph, who was both the leader of the Hebrews and Pharaoh’s viceroy, died in Egypt, the state of the Jews continually deteriorated. They became dispersed and disintegrated, and wanted to mingle among the Egyptians. “Let us be as the Egyptians,” they said (Midrash Rabbah, Shemot). The Egyptians, in turn, who until then were very fond of the Hebrews, became increasingly hostile toward them. The Midrash continues to tell us about it: “Because of [their dispersion], the Lord turned the love that the Egyptians loved them into hatred.”

In the end, the Israelites found themselves separated, hated, and abused by their previously friendly hosts. They remained that way until Moses, who was both a Hebrew and the prince of Egypt, and grew up as Pharaoh’s adopted grandson, returned to his Hebrew roots and began to fight for his people. His struggle was tough. He had to fight not only against Pharaoh, but also against his own people, who did not want to unite under his leadership.

But once they agreed to start working on their unity, they were liberated from Egypt, fled to the desert, and eventually solidified their bond to such an extent that they achieved an unprecedented level of unity, which made them “as one man with one heart,” as the great 11th century commentary RASHI put it.

Today, humanity is in a similar situation. The story of Egypt should serve as an allegory for us. If humanity chooses the same instrument that the ancient Hebrews did, namely unity, we, too, will be redeemed from the shackles of Covid, and indeed from all the adversities that have landed on us in the past century or so, and that are destined to land on us if we do not choose unity.

While our world has become increasingly interconnected, our hearts have become increasingly disconnected from each other. Alienation and narcissism are pushing us apart and pollute our relationships much more than fossil fuels are polluting the planet. Our self-absorption has become so noxious and so antisocial that it became necessary to separate us from one another altogether. This is when Covid entered our world, forcing a global closure on all of humanity, but mainly on the developed, most self-centered parts of the world, namely the US, Western Europe, and China.

We should have used the timeout from excessive consumerism, exploitation, and mutual abuse to bring our hearts closer, similar to what the Israelites did in Egypt, once they were afflicted as a result of their own social disintegration. We didn’t do it. Instead, we waited for vaccines to be developed and yearned for the moment when we could resume our toxic living. Now we have vaccines, but we will not be able to resume our pre-Covid days. Since we did not work on bringing our hearts closer, our hearts only grew further apart. When we try to resume our former way of life, we will discover that we simply do not enjoy it anymore.

In the absence of pleasures in life, people’s depression will intensify and extremism will flourish in myriad ways. Humanity is going to reveal the worst of human nature, until it says “Enough!” and resolves to erase the inner distance among everyone, and build a united humanity.

Just as the consent of the ancient Israelites to work on their unity was enough to deliver them from Egypt, humanity’s consent to work on unity among all people is enough to deliver us from Covid, and from any adversity that is currently afflicting us. As long as we remain on the path of unity and keep improving it, we will go from strength to strength. If we revert to alienation, the plagues will return.

For the first time in history, we have a clear work plan, a path out of misery for all of humanity: Try to connect and you will succeed. Abandon connection, and you will suffer. This is what we will discover if we only begin to work on erasing the distance in our hearts.

“Will WW3 Start Because The Tensions Of Israel And Iran?” (Quora)

Dr. Michael LaitmanMichael Laitman, On Quora: Will WW3 start because the tensions of Israel and Iran?

Iran often discusses its aims to destroy Israel, while at the same time, it is paying a heavy price for its aspiration to build nuclear weapons. In fact, Israel does not disturb Iran, but helps Iran stand out. Iranians seem willing to sacrifice themselves in order to be seen as important and intimidating in this setup.

Regarding nuclear weapons, it is no more than a game. Leaders with nuclear weapons have no desire to use them. Historically, those who had nuclear weapons became more restrained, because the use of nuclear weapons draws the same threat onto themselves.

The Iranians are seemingly ready to die in order to gain respect, but what is it worth? When we die, we have no feeling or memory of any respect we received here. Therefore, the game is important for keeping them in the spotlight.

Israel should do nothing but hold a correct intention toward the situation, using it to come closer to the upper force, realizing the laws of nature among the relations of the people of Israel, with the most important one being, “Love your friend as yourself.”

On the physical level, Israel is correctly countering the looming threat from Iran for the time being. The problem is that Israelis are divided, which distances them from the upper force. At the end of the day, only the upper force can provide true protection.

This has nothing to do with religion. We have to understand that “Love your friend as yourself” is a law, a commandment, and it determines human relations. Moreover, implementing this law is the positive example that the people of Israel have to show the world.

If the people of Israel fulfill the commandment of “Love your friend as yourself,” then even the Iranians will start to love Israel, and this will become their source of respect: to connect to Israel, the nation that brings the method of correction to the world, i.e., the way to reach “Love your friend as yourself.” It was the revelation of this method that gave the people of Israel their name in Abraham’s times (“Israel” from “Yashar Kel” [“straight to the upper force”]).

The problem standing in Israel’s way to become a positive example for the world is simply hatred between Israelis. Therefore, a more unified and positive future or its opposite depends on whether or not the people of Israel come together, above their hatred, and show a positive unifying example to humanity.

Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

The Infinite Power Of Prayer

236.01Everything is achieved by the power of prayer. Our whole future, our state, everything in general depends on turning to the upper force.

Man is born an animal because in our world there is nothing but the still, vegetative, and animate levels. And if we continue to develop in the same plane, then we will never leave the animate level, as it is said: “We are all like mortal animals.”

Man can rise from the animate level to the human level if he changes the way of his existence. That is, he will cease to act as the master of life, changing the world with the help of the animalistic power given to him by nature, which humanity has been doing throughout its history.

The revolution consists in the fact that man would cease to use the egoistic force given to him from birth, which he has developed in every possible way, and shifts to another force, the altruistic one. He sees that it is no longer possible to remain in egoism. Life experience shows that people are born and die, and a person has no power over his life and death.

And most importantly, he does not understand what he lives for and that all efforts are wasted. Gradually, he begins to feel and realize his dependence on the upper force, that is, that there is a certain higher power in our life that controls us.

A person feels that he is unable to control his life and is forced to establish contact with the higher power. And this is despite the fact that modern people are highly educated in science, technology, philosophy, and it is difficult for them to admit that some intangible forces govern our life.

Even belonging to a religion is rather a cultural tradition that does not lead to a real connection with the Creator, which is what the science of Kabbalah speaks about.

A person feels the need to find the source of life. It is not here among us in the material plane, and it is impossible to reveal it by improving our natural senses. It requires higher attributes inherent in the force that gave birth to us. Therefore, they existed even before us and above us.

And after many years of such searches, a person despairs of them and realizes his complete powerlessness and inability to manage his life. He understands that everything depends on his appeal to the upper force through the ten. And if the Creator does not help him, then there is no chance of finding the source of life, which means that he was born as an animal and will die the same way.

To shift from the egoistic desire, with which a person was born, into the opposite desire for bestowal, that is, to acquire the power of the Creator, is possible only if he really wants to turn to the Creator, does so, and leaves the Creator no other way but to help him and give him the power of bestowal from His powers.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/5/21, “Everything Is Obtained by the Power of Prayer”

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When You Feel Rejection From Your Friends

530Question: What can we do when a person feels rejection from his friends, even though he understands that they are the only key for advancement, but he can’t help himself?

Answer: Pray. There is only one thing left to do—to shout to the Creator and ask his friends to pray for him, so that they will pull him out of this state.

Question: In principle, it all depends on the person?

Answer: And the Creator because even if it happens that the Creator throws him out of this group, he still should not be disappointed and should still seek his way to the Creator outside of this ten, outside of this group, in other ways. Perhaps sit alone at home and study until another opportunity comes, but just don’t leave.
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From KabTV’s “Teacher – Student” 2/7/19

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