Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Are we all one consciousness?“

Nature relates to humanity as a single and whole system. Our current perspective, however, is fragmented because we are detached in our sensation from nature’s wholeness.

Nature is a pure altruistic quality, whereas our nature is the opposite—egoistic. In other words, nature relates to us in a manner of giving and love, and our attitude is opposite, where we wish to enjoy on account of each other and nature.

Accordingly, even though nature relates to us as a single whole, we make no such distinction, and exist in constant opposition to nature. Our opposition to nature is also the cause of all problems and suffering we experience.

However, nature is developing us to a state where our egoism will be replaced with nature’s altruistic quality, and we will then fully perceive ourselves—all of humanity—as a single consciousness. When we reach this shift in consciousness, we will discover a new harmonious existence that comes from abiding by nature’s laws.

We are currently in a transition from our individualistic egoistic consciousness to an altruistic consciousness that is balanced with nature, however our desires have yet to ripen sufficiently to such a level.

In order to aid and accelerate this inevitable shift in consciousness, so that we experience it enjoyably and with awareness, we need to learn the wisdom of connection. The wisdom of connection explains how nature functions in an altruistic manner, how our nature is opposite, and how we can make the shift from perceiving ourselves as separate egoistic beings to perceiving ourselves as a single system and soul that is balanced with nature. Without such learning, we can expect more and more suffering and problems to enter our lives, as the human ego will continue growing in opposition to nature.

Based on the online lesson “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman on March 17, 2019.

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

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In our world, it is very difficult to shift the emphasis, the goal, from the significance of the material to the significance of relations between people.

We definitely need to develop a sense of relationship, not to what is in the hands, not to material things, but to the correspondence between them, to their interaction, because the spiritual world begins with relationships, with interactions. It does not belong to anything material.

The material is everything that seems to us in our egoism. When our relationships turn into bestowal and a person gradually enters this property, tries to push off from himself and be in bestowal, not connected to himself, then the spiritual world begins.

Comments: Still something is missing here because it is important to people how others treat them. They are even ready to give their lives to be respected.

Answer: But only until the moment when a person begins to value spiritual relationships.

Question: It is important how I treat others, not how they treat me?

Answer: Yes. How they treat me I understand: to the extent that others agree with me or disagree, to the extent that they benefit from the fact that I exist, or vice versa.

And how I treat others is up to me.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 5/25/21

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Comment: Vincent van Gogh said, “If you hear a voice within you say you cannot paint, then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.”

My Response: I would not follow Van Gogh’s advice. A person should feel what his soul is pulling him to and choose his path in accordance with this. And to choose this path soberly, that is, to check whether he has all possible prerequisites for this. And if not, there is no need to hit one’s head against the wall.

Question: What about our wisdom Kabbalah, where in principle, the inner voice often says: “What is wrong with you, look at these heights! How can you?! Is it really possible to reach them?!”

Answer: What does it matter? It does not matter here, everyone has to learn this wisdom, and through it, everyone has to correct their soul. Thus, there are no people here who can say: “I am free.”

I must correct myself, fulfill my destiny. Therefore, everyone has his place in it. Everyone is obliged. The correction of the soul is the purpose of our entire existence, of everyone, of absolutely everyone! So, no one can get away from it.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 4/22/21

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World Kabbalah Convention, Preparation to the Lesson 1

World Kabbalah Convention, “My Spirituality Is Revealed Outside of Me,” Lesson 1

World Kabbalah Convention, Preparation to the Lesson 2

World Kabbalah Convention, “Arvut Inside the Ten,” Lesson 2

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Question: Is there Kabbalistic astrology?

Answer: No! There is no Kabbalistic astrology. There is only Kabbalah.

There is no divination by stars in it. Do not attach any red strings, holy water, Tarot, mysticism, or meditations to Kabbalah, although you can find a lot of pseudo-literature on those topics.

Spirituality is what develops in a person without any connection to the attributes of our world. This means that it is not related to stars or what is around me, only to what is in me.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 3/3/19

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Question: Is there a difference between love for one’s neighbor and love for the Creator?

Answer: In our correction, there is a difference, as it is said: “From love for the created beings to the love for the Creator.” There cannot be one without the other. First, we must regenerate the love for our neighbor.

And then we achieve love for the Creator. We reveal that He is among us. If I start to relate to others with a sense of giving and responsibility for their condition, then a state of love comes. That is, love for one’s neighbor is the cause, and love for the Creator is the effect.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States, Day of Love-Tu Be-Av” 05/29/2021

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Comment: I arrived in Israel now and realized more than ever that Israel is on the verge of civil war, that within this society are all the contradictions combined: both socio-economic and political because the left and right really hate each other, also religious and ethnic problems.

It seems that within one country there are five or six different countries and five or six different groups of people who do not hear and do not understand each other.

My Response: Yes. This is why if we solve these problems here in Israel, we will thereby act to solve these problems all over the world.

Question: Obviously, this is possible. It simply amazes me when at night I watch the lessons broadcast from your center and I see representatives of different nations, different ethnic groups, and different religious denominations on the screen! When students from other countries, Muslims, Buddhists, Catholics, and Protestants listen to the lessons, I understand that, in principle, this is possible. You are constantly talking about this, constantly stirring up society.

But what should happen in practice? What do we need to do so that people in Israel would start hearing and seeing each other?

Answer: I do not know if I have an answer. I can give some formal answer, but whether it is actually effective, sustainable, and has the right to exist and be implemented, I do not know. I am trying to act according to the Kabbalistic sources, as far as I understand them. I do not see any Kabbalists in Israel or in the world who are trying to solve this problem.

I think that nevertheless, we must aim to reach the state when, first of all, we ourselves, our small society—not so small since there are many thousands of people in it—come to a very serious interaction, a recognition of the need to unite, an understanding that the entire world is behind us, and it has no idea toward what it is advancing and what is ahead of it. We just need to continue our efforts to unite, and most importantly, to disseminate.
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From KabTV’s “Talks. Leonid Macaron and Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman” 5/21/21

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My new article on Linkedin “A New Level of Pressure”

Operation Guardian of the Walls may seem like yet another round in a seemingly endless campaign between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but it isn’t. By all indications, it marks the onset of a new level of pressure on Israel and Jews the world over, one that will impel us all to reflect more intently on the reason for our being here in Israel, and the existence of our nation altogether.

Antisemitism is no longer exclusive to Republicans or Democrats, to Europe, or to the US. It is omnipresent, and Jews the world over are beginning to feel that there is no escape from it. This is the positive thing about it: It is clearly a pervasive, natural phenomenon that we cannot dodge. From day to day, humanity is being divided in a way we’ve never seen before: Jews on one side, and everyone else on the other. Those on the Jewish side are feeling mounting pressure from the world’s intensifying hatred, while everyone else is being prompted to hate the Jews.

In a sense, it is reminiscent of Abraham’s situation when he started talking about the need to unite and rise above the ego in his homeland of Babylon and found himself at odds with almost everyone, including the king, and even his own father, Terah, who supported pushing his “unruly” son into the furnace.

It is not an indiscriminate pressure. The nations are pressing Israel and Jews to change their behavior. The demand itself is correct, but without understanding the nature of the change, the Jews experience it as arbitrary hatred rather than as a demand for a specific correction. If this continues, it will explode with an attempt on the part of the world to inflict on the Jews a final annihilation. In fact, the only reason that this has not yet happened is that our vocation requires our presence in order to carry it out. But if we shun it for not much longer, nothing will help us, just as from a certain point, nothing helped European Jewry in the 1940s.

As the world grows increasingly belligerent, people feel that the origin of the aggression is the Jews. Even if the Jews don’t feel it, this is what the nations feel, and they say it very openly. Denying it won’t help since this is what they feel, and reason never defeats emotion. They will buy into any pretext, and there will be no way to convince them otherwise, since they will be right: We are the cause of their misfortunes.

The ancient onus on the people of Israel to bring unity to the world, to set an example of implementing “Love your neighbor as yourself,” has never been revoked since it was given. As then, so now, the people of Israel are the focal point of humanity. We were, and we are the purveyors of the faiths, ideologies, and ideas that drive the evolution of humanity, and we cannot opt out. But the only thing that the world needs now is unity, solidarity. It’s got plenty of everything else, but zero care and mutual responsibility. Our nation, which was established on the basis of mutual responsibility and love of others, and from which entire nations drew their social ideals and morals, must revive its commitment to its task, establish internal unity, and become the example that everyone expects it to become.

We must understand that our conflict with the Arabs is not really with the Arabs; it is with all of humanity. This is why the whole world sides with Hamas, a designated, officially proclaimed terrorist organization. The fact that humanity is on the side of the terrorists indicates that the one thing that is worse in the world’s eyes than terrorists, the one thing that does more harm than a genocidal organization that uses children as human shields, is the Jewish people.

Even if they cannot articulate it, their demand from us is unity. If we unite, they will lift us on their shoulders as in the prophecy of Isaiah (49:22), since they, too, will be able to rise above their conflicts and establish world peace. If we do not unite, the world will unite against us.

For more on this topic, refer to the books The Jewish Choice: Unity or Anti-Semitism, Historical facts on anti-Semitism as a reflection of Jewish social discord, and Like a Bundle of Reeds: Why unity and mutual guarantee are today’s call of the hour
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My new article on Linkedin “The Conflict Isn’t Territorial, It’s Spiritual”

We think our struggle with the Palestinians is over territory, but it isn’t. It is a purely spiritual conflict, and not with the Palestinians, but with ourselves. Since the Jewish people has abandoned its cause, it lost its legitimacy to exist as a nation. Until we restore our unity, we will be pariahs in the eyes of the world, which will tolerate our presence only as long as it hopes that at some point, we will return from oblivion, restore our solidarity, the essence of our nation, and be the example that everyone expects us to be. If we wake up in time, the world will unite around us. If we overstay its patience, it will unite against us.

Any attempt to attribute a historical aspect to the conflict misses the point and distracts us from our task. Instead of trying to prove that we were here first, which is like the chicken and egg argument, we should accomplish what we were made to accomplish, and this will end all the arguments and conflicts since everyone will support us.

To accomplish our task, we must remember that the Jewish nation is unlike any other nation. It began as an eclectic cluster held together by the idea that unity and solidarity are the keys to a solid society. The early members of the nation left their homelands and countryfolk to join a group whose members they did not know, and who often came from rivaling clans and tribes, yet subscribed to Abraham’s ideology that solidarity should be the backbone of society.

Our ancestors struggled quite a bit among themselves, rising and falling according to the level of their unity. Nevertheless, by the time of the Second Temple, the word of the innovative society had gotten far and wide, and people from all the nations came to see the miracle. Greeks scholars came, learned from the prophets, and returned home to develop the Greek philosophy. Ptolemy II, king of Egypt, summoned seventy sages from Jerusalem to translate the Five Books of Moses into Greek, thereby creating the first translation of the Bible. But before he let them translate, he sat with them and learned from them. According to Flavius Josephus, after two weeks of extensive learning he said “he had learned how he ought to rule his subjects.”

The renowned philosopher Philo of Alexandria wrote that Jewish pilgrims, who gathered in Jerusalem three times a year, “made friendships with people they had not met before, and in the merging of the hearts … they would find the ultimate proof of unity.” Likewise, the book Sifrey Devarim writes that gentiles would “go up to Jerusalem and see Israel … and say, ‘It is becoming to cling only to this nation.’”

Eventually, we fell from unity and invaders started flooding the land. First came the Hellenists, the Jewish converts who adopted the Greek culture and abandoned unity. Then came the Seleucids, who destroyed the Temple once. The Maccabees defeated them, rebuilt the Temple, but not the unity, and so the Romans came and ousted us from here entirely.

We didn’t lose the land because we were weak; we lost it because we were divided. When we are divided, the world stops loving us, stops seeing us as an example they want to follow, and does not want us around. Following the crushing of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 AD, The Roman emperor Hadrian wanted to do away once and for all with the pugnacious Jewish people. To achieve this, he not only dispersed the remaining Jews in Judea around the Roman Empire, he changed the name Judea into Syria Palaestina (lit. Palestinian Syria).

To this day, the world sees this stretch of land as Palestine, and not as Israel, since we have not lived up to the name Israel, which entails mutual responsibility and love of others. If we want the land of Israel to become Israel once more, we first have to become the spiritual people of Israel: united “as one man with one heart.” Only under this condition will our struggles be through and we will find peace among ourselves and with the nations.
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