Question: In Russian psychiatry, patients with mental disorders have always been called “soul sickness,” meaning their condition is associated with the soul. Western directions call it a mental illness (mentally ill), associated with the brain. Where is this soul and what is it?

Answer: I do not know what a soul is in terms of mental, psychiatric, and psychological formulations. From their point of view, this is the highest nervous activity of a person that we can study.

In fact, the soul is a much higher structure, one might even say, the highest, which we cannot realize and perceive to the extent, in those volumes, in that knowledge, or in those feelings in which we are currently. But we can study it in ourselves, only in ourselves, if we undergo special psychological training.

Such training is determined by Kabbalah very simply. We must begin to act above our nature. It turns out that this is quite simple because if our whole nature is nothing more than an egoistic desire to receive pleasure, then we must begin to apply certain exercises on ourselves that would help us rise above this natural desire to bring enjoyment to ourselves to a different kind of impressions from ourselves and from the world, that is to work in the opposite direction, to bring enjoyment to others, moreover, above yourself, in spite of yourself.

This requires a certain environment that will push a person to this, organize him or her. Then one would begin to feel completely different inner impulses, thoughts, feelings, and attitudes toward others absolutely opposite to what one experienced before.

And these are not just kind, good relationships, because in the end they are transformed into a very interesting structure where a person feels themselves rising above their nature. Since we define the world as something that is given to us in our sensations, we rise above our world.

It turns out that such psychological training allows us to rise above ourselves, to see everything around us in a different way.

And then a person begins to feel oneself divided into two parts: into such a paradigm where one treats everyone with their usual egoistic nature in which we were born and develop under the influence of the environment to that new attitude to the world that was born as a result of Kabbalistic trainings where one has an attitude to the world different from the past attitude, an altruistic attitude. Only this should not be confused with the concept of altruism to which we are accustomed to in our world.

A person feels that they consist, as it were, of two parts: from the perception of the world in bestowal and love, in going out of oneself, let’s call this the “higher perception,” and then the attitude that one feels in oneself to the world and back from the world to yourself, is called the soul. And one’s past attitude to the world and the attitude of the world to it in the usual mutual egoistic flow will be called the body.

Thus, according to our methodology, we begin to divide a person into an egoistic attitude to the world, a bodily one, and an altruistic attitude to the world, a spiritual one.
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From KabTV’s “Kabbalah and Psychology”

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Question: In the scientific community there are always disputes about the effectiveness and efficiency of the system of governance. What can you say about this?

Answer: First of all, we must set the goal that we want to achieve. If the goal is to raise the overall level of the entire system and its components so that it feels like an integral whole, then Kabbalah believes that such a system can be applied because it works on raising the individual egoistic objects above egoism to work for the common goal so much that it becomes primary. In this case, the personal egoistic goal is suppressed.

When people unite in groups where their community is their goal and the quelling of egoistic individuality, their own benefit, is the means to achieve a common goal, then Kabbalah gives us the right method of implementing these ideas.

The application of this technique leads to the fact that we begin to feel as a single organism, as one common whole, in which we no longer distinguish the separate individual traits of the people that make up this organism.

We are talking about its common essence, that is, about the new quality of bestowal that we have acquired together, annulling our egoistic qualities, reducing ourselves relative to others, only to achieve one common force, one common idea, one common goal.
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From KabTV’s ”Science of management”

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Preparation to the Lesson

Lesson on the Topic “Raising Ourselves”

Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Study of the Ten Sefirot, Vol. 1, Part 2, ‘Histaklut Pnimit,’ Chapter 2, Item 19″

Selected Highlights

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Question: I have looked at a lot of literature on governance, but I have not found a single work that includes the scientific foundations of Kabbalah. Maybe it makes sense to take at least the first step?

Answer: Kabbalah is the science of government, but the science of managing the world, society, states, etc. with the help of the positive force, the property of bestowal, the property of complete connection with each other. Therefore, for modern society with more than seven billion people, it cannot become a practical method of management and implementation.

I think that Kabbalah will have to be gradually introduced only in small groups that strive to reach the perfect level of management. They will really achieve the vision of a common system. In this case, they will be able to make the right decisions, verdicts about their behavior, the behavior of these systems, and so on.

But if, at the same time they turned to society, society would not understand them because it cannot implement the laws of the altruistic world, perfect communication, when everyone acts as in a single system, in addition to each other, when everyone does not feel like a single unit individually, but feels like a single link in the whole system and acts only in accordance with the whole system.

I do not know how ants feel in their family, but this is life within society. In the same way, a person no longer has his own life, but the life of all mankind, or at least of his country, or of his collective. Therefore, even if Kabbalah wrote a management manual about this, it would be a guide to managing an ideal team.

Question: Did I understand correctly that Kabbalah, in general, is the science of management?

Answer: Yes. But the science of governing by the positive force of nature, which is hidden from us by our own egoistic being.
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From Kab TV’s “Kabbalah and other sciences” 6/22/21

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My new article on Linkedin “ The Ten Plagues of Covid ”

In the last week or so, it has become clear that we are in the beginning of the fourth wave of Covid-19 in Israel. We thought we had beaten the virus, and so did much of the world, but once again we’re closing down as the number of new cases quickly rises. Even though about 60 percent of Israel’s population is inoculated, we’re still losing to the virus.

As I have warned countless times before, we’re not sickened by the coronavirus; we’re sickened by hubris and conceit. Self-importance and egoism are sure recipes for disaster, and we are proving it every time we see that Covid cases are declining. What’s more, Covid is not a local or a national problem; it is the problem of the entire world, and unless the entire world is included in the solution, we will not get rid of it. Covid-19 will teach us that we’re in this together, for better or worse, dependent on each other. Unless we think about each other’s health, we ourselves will not be well.

In a sense, I’m happy that Covid is here because it teaches us this mutual responsibility. At the same time, I am equally unhappy about our obstinacy and reluctance to learn, as it is costing us lives, millions of lives. I myself lost friends, students, and some of their family members to the virus. No one is excluded from this bug, which is precisely why it is so effective in teaching us mutual responsibility.

Just as the ten plagues in Egypt ushered a new era in the history of the people of Israel, when they pledged to unite “as one man with one heart,” Covid-19 is ushering the world into the exact same state. Its plagues will grow less and less quantitative, and more and more qualitative, meaning leading us directly toward understanding that without pledging to care for one another, we will not survive.

In the desert, after they fled from Egypt, the Israelites did not willingly accept the pledge for unity. They, too, had to deal with their egos. The Talmud writes (Avoda Zarah 2b) that “The Lord had forced the mountain over Israel like a vault, and said unto them: ‘If you accept the Law [of mutual responsibility], very well, but if not, there will it be your grave.’” Today, it seems as though Covid is taking God’s role in forcing us to make the same pledge. I hope we will not be obstinate much longer since the plagues, we already know, will only grow harsher.
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My new article on Linkedin “Hatred Around Every Corner”

Today, Sunday, is the 17th of the Hebrew month of Tammuz. On that day, some 2,000 years ago, the Romans breached the walls of Jerusalem. Three weeks later, they reached the Temple and destroyed it, then exiled the remaining Jews from Jerusalem and we lost our sovereignty. But it weren’t the Romans who had conquered us. It was our own hatred that had set us off against each other. The Jewish-turned-Roman historian Flavius Josephus put it very simply: “The sedition destroyed the city, and the Romans destroyed the sedition.”

Israel regained independence 73 years ago, but we did not fortify our sovereignty with unity. In the absence of unity, sedition will destroy the country once again. Wherever you look, there is hatred. Within families, among different factions in the nation, among political parties, hatred sets the tone wherever you look. In fact, hatred is so prominent here that if we had to fight the Romans once again, we would destroy each other instead, just as our ancestors did two millennia ago.

Our nation was founded on unity, and on unity alone. We were declared a nation only when we pledged to love each other as ourselves, to be “as one man with one heart.” Among the first Israelites, who came from all over the Fertile Crescent, there were no other connections other than the pledge to forge unity and mutual responsibility. This was why our nation was so unique.

Two thousand years ago, the process of capitulating to our ego and division culminated in the civil war that ended with the ruin of the Temple. That hatred obliterated our peoplehood and destroyed the very basis of our nation: unity above all. Since the ruin of the Temple, we have not healed the hatred that destroyed it, and as a result, we have not regained the right to be regarded as a nation.

King Solomon stated, “Hate stirs strife, and love will cover all crimes” (Prov. 10:12). We are pious when it comes to fulfilling the first part of the verse, but we are equally irreverent when it comes to fulfilling its second part. As long as we let hatred set the tone among us, we will not merit the title “nation” and the country will decline to the point of collapse.

The choice is in our hands. If we choose unity, we will thrive and prosper. If we succumb to our egos and let division, derision, and odium come over us, we will be ousted and persecuted as we have been for the past two millennia.
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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Why do we consider some lives to be worth more than others?“

We consider some lives to be worth more than others because we fail to see the general system of our global interdependence and interconnectedness.

We belong to a single system. In essence, we are all one organism. Each of us is like a cell in a single organism, a cell that needs to take care of the well-being of the whole organism. If we will see that humanity is ultimately one organism with different organs and parts, then we will understand that every person is immensely important.

In a live organism, it takes just one cell to become cancerous in order to set off the organism’s demise. Our egoistic nature works in the same way: by nature, we wish to “consume” others, i.e. use others for the sake of personal benefit. Likewise, today we all behave like cancerous cells. This dire situation is being increasingly shown to us in our era: the more we discover our global interdependence and interconnectedness, the more we also see how our egoistic nature does not let us enjoy our tightening connection, but on the contrary, we feel it in increasingly negative and threatening ways.

If we recognize the conflicting tendency of our current development, i.e. that the more connected we become globally, technologically and economically, then the more we suffer from our egos clashing with each other, then we will start realizing that we need to heal in our attitudes to each other—to reject our egoism, consumption and the exploitation of others, and shift to a state where we positively connect to each other above our egoism, developing new altruistic threads in our connections.

By discovering the crisis of our current development and the direction our development needs to undergo in order to progress to a better world, we will then see that life lies in enabling us all to contribute positively to society. If we encourage everyone in society to contribute to society, we will then discover our equality. Then, the life of one person could not be considered as more or less important than the life of another person.

Based on a Q&A with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman on September 9, 2006. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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My new article on Linkedin “Brace for New Well-Poisoning Libels”

In the 14th century, a bubonic plague, aka The Black Death, wreaked havoc across Europe in what became the most fatal pandemic in human history, annihilating nearly half of Europe’s population. In those days, people had no scientific knowledge or sanitary conditions to stem the spread of the pestilence, so their only refuge from complete despair was rumors, usually completely fabricated. One such rumor was that Jews had caused the disease by deliberately poisoning wells.

Jews were often the target of false rumors when attempting to explain crises. This time, however, the result was particularly painful: Between 1348-1351, 350 pogroms against Jews were recorded, in which no less than 210 communities were simply exterminated. Even years after the plague had subsided, pogroms related to the well-poisoning libel still took place. In 1370, for example, the libel ignited the Brussels massacre which wiped out the Belgian Jewish community.

The current pandemic, Covid-19, is likely to repeat the pattern. Although Jews, and particularly the Jewish state, Israel, have already been accused of causing it, such libels are still in the margins. Yet, the more the current plague continues, and the more helpless humanity feels, the more people’s eyes will turn to the Jews, and their fingers will point to us as the evildoers.

As then, so now, we will make every reasonable argument to prove that we are not to blame, that we did not cause the pandemic. As then, so now, no one will listen. In that regard, the world has not changed since the Middle Ages. If we think people are more reasonable or civilized today than they were then, we need only look at what happened in Germany less than a century ago to realize that humanity is today what it has always been: Inherently irrational and ever willing to pin the blame on the Jews.

But is humanity wrong? If everyone tells us that we are to blame, and we’re the only ones who think otherwise, then who is right? Because even if we didn’t cause The Black Death or Covid-19, and we didn’t, for sure, perhaps there is some other fault in us that we are unaware of and that the world cannot articulate, and it expresses it through its most convenient pretext. Perhaps this is why the world blames us not only of starting The Black Death and Covid, but of causing all the wars, the HIV virus, every economic and financial crisis that’s ever struck humanity, every violation of human rights, in every country, even where there are no Jews, and in general, of everything that’s wrong with the world.

The problem is that we are unaware of what our own sages teach. If we were more informed, we would realize that they, too, thought that everything that’s wrong with the world is because of the Jews, and that the Jews can and must correct it.

Our sages attributed all our troubles and all the world’s troubles to our lack of unity, and as a result, maintained that our unity, the unity of the Jewish people, is the cure for everything.

For example, the Talmud writes (Yevamot 63), “No calamity comes to the world but for Israel.” Incidentally, “for” means both “for our sake,” to help us, as well as “because.”

Similar to the Talmud, the book Shem MiShmuel writes, “When they [Israel] are as one man with one heart, they are as a fortified wall against the forces of evil.” Rabbi Nathan Sternhertz writes in his book Likutey Halachot [Assorted Rules], which describes how Jews should behave, “‘Gather together and hear, you sons of Jacob,’ precisely ‘Gather together,’ for he revealed to them that the primary element of correction is the advice to gather together, meaning that there will be unity, love, and peace in Israel, that they will gather together to speak to one another of the final purpose. Thus they will be rewarded with completeness of the counsel, for Israel and the Law are all one to the extent of peace and unity in Israel.” Rabbi Simcha Bonim Bonhart of Peshischa wrote similarly in A Broadcasting Voice: “This is the mutual guarantee on which Moses worked so hard before his death, to unite the children of Israel. All of Israel are each other’s guarantors [responsible for one another], meaning that when all are together, they see only good.”

The book Bina Le’Itim explains not only how division hurts us, but also how unity saves us: “The foundation of the wickedness of evil Haman, on which he had built his request of the king to sell the Jews to him … is what he had begun to argue, ‘There is a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed,’ etc. He cast his filth saying that that nation deserves to be destroyed, for separation rules among them, they are all full of strife and quarrel, and their hearts are far from one another. However, He put the healing before the blow [took preventing measures] … by hastening Israel to unite and adhere to one another, to all be one, as one man, and this is what saved them, as in the verse, ‘Go, gather together all the Jews.’”

And finally, The Book of Zohar explains not only that our disunity causes our troubles, but that it also causes the world’s worst calamities. In the section Tikkuney Zohar [Corrections of The Zohar], Tikkun [correction] no. 30, the book writes, “In such a generation,” when Israel do not correct themselves through unity, “all the destructors among the nations of the world raise their heads and wish primarily to destroy and to kill the children of Israel, as it is written, ‘No calamity comes to the world but for Israel’ (Yevamot 63a). This means, as it is written in the above Tikkunim [corrections], that [Israel] cause poverty, ruin, robbery, killing, and destructions in the whole world.”

There are countless other examples but regrettably, they cannot all fit into one essay. Nevertheless, the picture is clear enough. If our own sages and our own texts tell us that we are responsible for our own fate and for the fate of the world, that we determine what happens to us and to the world through our unity or division, do we not owe it to ourselves and to the world to at least try to follow our sages’ advice? Can we blame Jew-haters of baseless hatred when our own sages speak so similarly? I believe the answer is clear, and the onus is on us.
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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What is lacking in our education system?“

Education is what we receive from our environment.

We receive our education and culture by the example we get from society and our parents. Schools do not provide education, but only trades. Education, which is our inner culture, is determined not by knowledge, but by our correct inner development, when we reach perfection in our attitude to life and to the world.

This is why truly positive education means teaching knowledge about what the general law of nature demands of us all—to become harmoniously connected, and to take care of each other similar to how cells and organs of a human body each operate for the whole body’s benefit.

In our present times, from one day to the next, we discover how we become increasingly interdependent around the world. Society should thus provide examples of how to realize such interdependence in a balanced and positive manner to the younger generation by showing how caring for humanity as a whole is life’s highest value. By doing so, we will reliably educate our generation for living harmoniously in a growingly interdependent world, and then our future generations will truly be able to enjoy their lives.

If we will bring knowledge into the world about the fact that mutual consideration, responsibility and love will save the world, then we will be happy to open ourselves up in order to become positive parts of a whole system, and enjoy the fruits provided by that system. By doing so, we will discover that we are not like cancerous cells in an organism, but like healthy cells in the body of humanity.

Based on a Q&A with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman on September 9, 2006.
Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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