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My new article on Linkedin “To Change Our Earth, Change the Human”
“This is suicidal. We must end our war on nature and nurse it back to health,” said UN Secretary-General António Gutierres to mark International Mother Earth Day. There is not much to celebrate anymore—climate change, emerging pandemics, extinctions of animal and plant species, and rampant pollution are only some of the symptoms of an extremely distressed planet. How can Earth be healed? The remedy is to change the egoistic exploitive attitude both between humans and toward our environment.
“Restore Our Earth” is this year’s slogan of what promises to be the world’s largest annual awareness and educational event for environmental issues affecting the planet. But it is flawed thinking to assume that the Earth can be thought of like a broken machine we can fix in a repair shop. It is impossible to talk about restoring it with this skewed vision of our situation. We need to aim at a deeper transformation, a real change that is only feasible through changing our destructive human nature.
“Restore Our Earth” is this year’s slogan of what promises to be the world’s largest annual awareness and educational event for environmental issues affecting the planet. But it is flawed thinking to assume that the Earth can be thought of like a broken machine we can fix in a repair shop. It is impossible to talk about restoring it with this skewed vision of our situation. We need to aim at a deeper transformation, a real change that is only feasible through changing our destructive human nature.
Let’s take a look at current attempts to take the stress off planet Earth through changes in human diet, as an example of our incorrect responses to the problems we face. Animal agriculture is responsible for 14.5% of global greenhouse emissions, a contributing cause of global warming, according to official data. But new initiatives such as the production of artificial “meat” that claim to be more environmentally friendly will actually be more costly and less beneficial in the long term, similar to the consumption of processed products as replacements for what nature directly produces.
In other words, we will not improve our ecosystem by creating artificial solutions, through specific diets, or through international committees and global summits. Only an in-depth and holistic approach to the way we relate to one another as human beings and toward our environment can cure what ails the Earth.
We should not wait for great torments and environmental disasters to shake us into action. If we do, we are at risk of extinction ourselves, like the dinosaurs who disappeared from Earth. We have not yet realized that our planet is our common home and whatever happens within it has an endless chain of reactions that will eventually affect us. Someday, we will have to come to terms with the fact that the problems we face begin with the selfish nature of man who operates from an individualistic, me-centered, exploitative and narrow vision that wants to gain everything for self-gratification. Until we transcend individual and national borders and start thinking globally, nothing will help. We humans, for our part, need to comprehend that the state of nature depends on the relationships between human beings, as well as on the willingness of man to adapt to the integrality of nature, that is, to take only what is necessary for survival and to guard with care the good functioning of the entire system instead of considering only egoistic calculations.
How are human relationships connected to what happens in nature? There are four levels in nature: inanimate, vegetative, animate, and human. All levels except man exist in accordance with nature’s laws of reciprocity and balance. The other levels have no free choice in anything; they act instinctively and take only what is needed for their survival. It is only the human level that is different. Only humans commit atrocities on Earth and do so intentionally, consciously, sometimes just for the sake of causing harm. All of the negative blows we receive from nature are just its reaction, the natural consequences of our actions. Simply put, we bring these calamities upon ourselves.
The comprehensive solution to the ecological and social dangers we face is in our hands; the key is in our efforts towards global connection. If we try to build a harmonious system of human relations, all of nature will calm down. As we begin to feel how dependent we are on everyone else, we will think twice before engaging in the ill-treatment of one another. Only through mutual responsibility will we attain the necessary attitude, the right frame of mind, to save our common home and live safely and happily under one roof, our planet Earth.
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Question: Three-dimensional space plus time, do these four dimensions exist or are they an illusion? Are they there or not?
Answer: This is the illusion of our structure and that is why we feel space this way and divide it this way.
Question: Why are we given this illusion?
Answer: We cannot exist in an open space in which there is no basis for measurement, for the expression of something. Therefore, the three axes and the fourth, which is time, are what we need in order to talk about our state at all.
Question: But these three axes, in principle, characterize the current position of a person in space. The fourth axis is time. There is a past and a future. Do they even exist or not?
Answer: They exist in relation to a person. Everything is only in us, just like these axes. And what is outside of us, we cannot say.
Question: If I remember the past or think about the future, is it something that affects me in the present moment?
Answer: Naturally. In fact, no time exists. This is purely our subjective feeling, and we divide it into the past, present, and future.
Question: Then I am in the past; is it my illusion that I am in the present and this is how I feel, and I feel this way?
Answer: We always measure one thing relative to the other.
Question: Did dinosaurs even exist?
Answer: We cannot talk about what existed and what does not exist now, because it is all about a person’s feeling. A person makes excavations, takes out some bones from there, takes them for dinosaur bones, makes up their skeletons. Everything is beautiful, good. But this is all about our perception of the world. We cannot imagine anything other than the past, present, and future, and the person who observes all this attributes some vectors to these states.
Question: If everything is characterized in relation to a person, then in principle, he can move from place to place, change places, and in general everything revolves around him? Can we say that it is not man who is on the earth, but the earth and the solar system that revolves around him?
Answer: No. Everything is in the person, in his sensation. No man—no world.
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From KabTV’s “Kabbalah Express” 4/12/21
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Question: Let’s say a person came out of Egypt (out of his egoism). What should he correct next?
Answer: He must understand what he is facing, what he needs to come to. Gradually, it is revealed to him what it really means to come out of egoism.
This is not just breaking away from the ego, but transforming it into altruism, that is, transforming all the desires with which a person existed in the state of Egyptian exile. This is a great egoism that has grown in a person under the influence of his existence in so-called Egypt.
In spiritual slavery, he realized how far he was from the truth, from the correct perception of reality, from the attainment of the Creator, and this pained him so much that he cried out, not agreeing to remain in this state. From this moment begins his spiritual liberation, the exit from Egypt.
A person gradually rises from spiritual slavery, agrees to undergo a complete separation from egoism. This is called the “crossing of the Red Sea.” Then he goes further. It takes what is called seven weeks that pass from leaving Egypt to approaching Mount Sinai for a person to come to an understanding, which means to change himself completely, and this period represents the elevation of a person above his past state.
He agrees to adopt a methodology that will change him. Although it is complex, and its implementation is not easy at all, a person is ready for it. That is why he is in such a long transition of seven weeks.
Seven weeks of seven days is 49 days. It is only on the 50th day that he reaches Mount Sinai. In the Torah stories, Mount Sinai and the desert are all allegorical images. However, in reality, this is a person’s recognition of his inner state. Mount Sinai is nothing more than his great egoism, and he stands before it and can do nothing.
At the top of the mountain is the Creator who Himself created this egoism, controls it, and, if necessary, develops it in a person, so that he eventually realizes how to work with it and transform egoism into the opposite quality, the quality of bestowal, love, and connection.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 4/9/21
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Question: What is the difference between the Egyptians and the mixed multitude? What do the Egyptians inside us want? Are they also egoistic desires?
Answer: The Egyptians just want a good life without any connection with the Creator. This is the usual consumerist attitude toward our world, like with most people. But there are also people who say: “No, we will do what the Creator wants from us,” that is, all kinds of commandments. The Creator’s desires are called commandments.
“We will fulfill these commandments, but not to be similar to the Creator, not for the sake of bestowal and love (after all, all the commandments boil down to “love your neighbor as yourself “), but in order to earn the future world by ourselves.”
Question: When the counting of the twelve tribes was taking place, the mixed multitude was not included there. Are they not related to correction at all?
Answer: No, the mixed multitude is those desires that we do not want to take with us from Egypt, to raise them from there. We cannot lead them across the Yam Suf, Final Sea (Red Sea). Although they chase us and try to bring us back to Egypt by force, we go on further and they either drown at theYam Suf (Red Sea) or return to Egypt.
Question: In the Midrash Raba (Great Commentary) it is written that the mixed multitude provided horses for the chariots of Pharaoh to catch up with the Israelites. What does this mean in spiritual work?
Answer: This means that they give everything to any egoistic forces so to stop those people who want to get out of Egypt.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 4/2/21
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My new article on Linkedin “What on Earth Are We Doing to Earth?”
This week, the world marked Earth Day 2021. The theme was “Restore Our Earth.” Indeed, Earth has suffered the punishments that humanity has inflicted on it for far too long. Regrettably, we cannot restore it, not right now, and not in our current state.
You restore what is broken, and seeking to restore Earth means that we acknowledge that Earth is broken. But Earth didn’t break of its own accord. We broke it! We, with our broken attitude to Earth and to each other, have done all the damage that we are now purportedly trying to fix. How can we restore something if the thing that broke it is still breaking it, and even faster and more intensely than before? Unless we fix ourselves first, any statements about restoring Earth are hot air, at best, if not a deliberate deception. This is why for years, our organization stated the motto: “To change the world, change man.”
Unless we fix ourselves first, any statements about restoring Earth are hot air, at best, if not a deliberate deception. This is why for years, our organization stated the motto: “To change the world, change man.”
A recent study by an Oxford University research center, Our World in Data, has found that since humans have become the dominant species on the planet, “wild mammals have declined by 85%.” We have not been less egregious toward the soil, toward the air, or toward the water and Earth’s flora than toward animals. In fact, we are so injurious to life that wildlife around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, which exploded in 1986 and created a radioactive no-go zone for humans, has thrived like never before despite the radiation. Researchers who studied wildlife in the no-go zone were so impressed with the increase in wildlife population and the robust health of the animals that they concluded that humans are more deleterious to nature than radioactive pollution.
Therefore, we will not be able to restore Earth until we transform ourselves from the self-centered beings that we are into caring and connected individuals, who live in harmony and peace with each other and with nature. We must self-educate ourselves away from narcissism and toward an approach that rejoices in connection, bonding, mutual responsibility, and balance. Reality is an integrated mesh of contradicting elements, and only humans try to be the sole rulers of the universe.
While the rest of reality celebrates sharing, we despise it. Not all of us, but as a whole, as a species. We exploit and deplete not only Earth, but first and foremost one another. Therefore, with one another is where we have to start. Only when we learn to treat each other with consideration, when we understand that the well-being of others affects our own well-being, even if we don’t feel it tangibly, we will learn to rejoice in the well-being and prosperity of others. When we achieve this, we will find that we are finally happy, and that everything prospers, including our poor and tormented home, Planet Earth.
Michael Laitman, On Quora: “How do we improve spiritual health?“
Spiritual health is a state where we positively connect among each other in order to draw closer to spirituality, i.e., to a state where we are united with a common intention to love and care for each other.
It is a state where we establish a connection with the upper force of love, bestowal and connection that fills reality through our common intention to connect as a single soul with such qualities in our connections.
By doing so, we evoke the upper force of love, bestowal and connection, a force that in the wisdom of Kabbalah is called “the reforming light,” into the connection between us, and this force binds us together with a common intention to love, care and bestow to each other.
Several people try to reach a state of spiritual health and well-being on their own, assuming that it is possible to do so. However, it is impossible to attain anything spiritual alone.
In order to attain spiritual health and well-being, we need to feel that we are in the field of the upper force, a force of love, bestowal and connection, and that we depend on this force. If we understand the extent to which we depend on this force in order to hold any sort of connection with spirituality, then we will aim our requests, demands and prayers at this force, similar to how a child holds its parents’ hand, not letting it go. We will then turn to this force in order to make improvements and corrections on ourselves, that whenever we discover anti-spiritual egoistic thoughts and desires in ourselves, i.e., thoughts and desires that prioritize self-benefit over benefiting others and nature, then we will request a change the direction of these thoughts so that they will be loving, giving and positively connecting, similar to the bestowing direction of the upper force.
We thus move toward a state of spiritual health and well-being by learning about spirituality, participating in a environment that supports our spiritual progress, and drawing the influence of spiritual forces (the “reforming light”). Such a process takes place until we discover where we are spiritually unhealthy, i.e., by reaching a state called “recognition of evil” in Kabbalah, where we see how our egoistic nature opposes and resists spirituality. Through such states, we gradually develop a true demand for spiritual health and well-being, a state called “correction” in Kabbalah, i.e., the correction of our ego that brings about division and hatred among people, to its altruistic opposite, which brings about unity and love among us—the qualities of the soul.
This is how we become spiritually healthy. We place ourselves in the place of the upper force of love, bestowal and connection, and become more and more like that force until we completely discover spirituality.
Thus, we should consider how to strengthen human connection and make it more positive, with bonds of love, care and giving. We will then eventually discover the great single soul that we are all parts of, perceiving and sensing how we are all like its cells and organs, mutually complementing one another to sustain the spiritual health of the entire system.
For the time being, we are still far from such a state. We have yet to begin a process of realizing our interdependence and interconnectedness in a positive manner, where we each aim to love, bestow and positively connect above all the egoistic forms of indifference, apathy, division and hatred that surface. We would thus be wise to learn and scrutinize the laws of mutual guarantee and mutual responsibility that bind the spiritual system together, which should lead us to actively seek how we can draw the spiritual forces into our connections and establish a spiritually healthy, peaceful, harmonious and balanced state among us.
Based on a Kabbalah Lesson at the World Kabbalah Convention in New Jersey, on May 12, 2012. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Question: Now we see that American Jews, extreme left-wing and totally against Israel, still feel like Jews. In Israel itself, there is a diversity of opinions and attitudes. How can such a large and diverse nation feel that we are in Egypt and choose this road?
Answer: The people are not numerous, it is just that each Jew is “too much.” Each of them represents a huge number of inner people within him. Therefore, it seems to us that there are many of them and they are everywhere. Sometimes it seems that there is no one else in this world except the Jews.
This is a special quality that is manifested in humanity this way. I hope that humanity will very quickly realize this in the kind sense of the word and understand what to do with it.
What should Jews do? There is only one way out—to unite in a good way. If not, then instead of the good Pharaoh who was in Egypt during their first seven years, there will be an evil Pharaoh during their second seven years.
Seven years are not years, but the period of government—Hesed, Gevura, Tiferet, Netzach, Hod, Yesod, and Malchut. It is the upper system of control that descends and governs in a good way, and if not, it also turns around and begins to govern in an evil way. If you do not understand in a good way, it will be in a bad way.
As a result, it turned out that Jews left Egypt a little earlier. This is done on purpose.
Although it was predicted that they would be in Egypt for four hundred years, since all four stages of self-awareness and egoism and the exit it from it must be completely passed (by the name of the Creator—Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey,—Keter, Hochma, Bina, Zeir Anpin, Malchut), but they stayed there for only two hundred and ten years because the so-called years fall on the rest of the period before our time. But even in our time, we are still in exile.
By exile, we mean spiritual exile, not physical. The fact that we ended up here or someone ended up in America and the person says: “I am not in exile, I am in the holy land”—this is all wrong. We are still in exile.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 4/12/19
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Comment: Iliya writes to us: “I watched your video clip where you say that if you want to help someone, you must not expect any kind attitude, or gift, or gratitude, not even simple “thank you,” nothing. This is what you call real help. But this is impossible. To do something good and not to expect at least a grateful glance or a smiley face for it. Dear Michael Laitman, this is utopia! You have to agree that this just cannot be!”
My Response: I understand you. It is really very difficult, even impossible. However, if at the same time you think that you are bringing a good force, a good state into the world, then your self-esteem, the greatness of your action, will increase.
Question: Does pride also increase at the same time?
Answer: No. Provided you think that you want to make the world better, to bring kindness to the world.
Question: If I do a good deed and think that I will get a thank you, some gift, even a small smiley face, or at least a grateful look, do you think this is not a good deed?
Answer: You are doing business at the same time. One will say thank you, give you a look, a woman will smile, a child too.
Comment: And right away I begin to feel good.
My Response: Yes, of course.
Comment: What you are suggesting is a very tall order.
My Response: No. Anyone in the world can say that our world needs kindness or it will fall apart, and let us arrange so that we just think about how to bring good actions, deeds, and good force into it. Let us do it and be thankful that our egoism allowed us to do it.
Comment: That sounds really nice.
My Response: Yes. Is this a big deal? Can you do this?
Comment: But I am an egoist by nature.
My Response: But you do give pleasure to your egoism: “I will do good for the world.” I can respect myself for this.
Question: Does this require some kind of preliminary education or is a person really capable of it?
Answer: I need to calibrate myself so that I respect myself for this.
Question: How will the world change then?
Answer: The world will change for the better. I will suddenly begin to see a lot of good in the world instead of what I see today, that there is only evil in it.
Question: Is it just because I changed my intention?
Answer: Yes. After all, it all depends on how I look at the world.
Question: That is, I am changing and the world is changing?
Answer: Exactly!
Question: Is it possible?
Answer: It depends on you! So, it is possible.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 2/18/21
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Question: Why is it so difficult in our world to kindle a desire in people to attain and discover the upper light, the Creator?
Answer: A system exists in which an immense number of desires are concentrated. In the initial state, all of its parts were connected and the system was in an absolutely balanced state of eternity and wholeness.
After that, a breakage occurred, meaning that the connection between the parts in the system disappeared. Those broken parts that do not make it possible for the system to connect are called, “egoism.”
Why is this good? It is because the creature became distant from the Creator and therefore independence appeared in it. A system that was completely similar to the Creator became contrary to Him.
After the breakage, the system continued its egoistic development to our world. We have reached a situation in which the egoistic forces have become in complete control over the entire system. But the Ohr Makif (Surrounding Light), the Creator, still continues to operate on it.
He is beginning to shape the system, taking out and isolating the outermost circle first, then the next circle and so on, from a small egoism to a bigger and bigger egoism to the biggest egoism.
Under the influence of the light, the system first began to recover on the still, vegetative, and animate levels of nature. But when it reached the human level, a problem appeared since here a conscious understanding was required, which is where we are found, and it is up to us to assemble and manage it ourselves. In this way our mission is concluded.
Starting with our time, the system has stopped developing; it completed its development in the previous form on the still, vegetative, and animate levels, and we have reached the human level. A conscious attitude, an understanding of what we are doing is required here. So, we are living in a time which is not simple.
We must restore and reconstruct among us all of the various parts, gather and assemble the entire system into a single whole.
To do this, we must unite and participate in its assembly. How can we do this? Humanity is constantly trying to assemble itself because nature and society are pushing it toward this, but nothing has been successful. This is because to do that, we must arouse the higher power so that it will influence us.
The wisdom of Kabbalah has been given to us for that purpose. It explains how to attract the same force that will shape us. We just need to ask correctly. Before we ask, we must formulate the question, the need. It is precisely for this purpose that we are studying. Where are we, what must we ask, how do we ask? Which is to say, how do we develop a desire that is ready to correct. The entire wisdom of Kabbalah is preparing us just for this.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 2/10/19
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