Audio Version Of The Blog – 8/14/21
Posted on August 14th, 2021
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Prophets, Joshua 7:11-7:12: Israel has sinned, and they have also transgressed My covenant which I commanded them; and they have also taken of the consecrated thing, and have also stolen, and also dissembled, and they have also put into their vessels.
And the children of Israel shall not be able to stand before their enemies; they will turn their backs before their enemies, because they have become accursed. I will not be with you anymore, if you do not destroy the consecrated thing from among you.
“They have also taken of the consecrated thing.” That is, they took all kinds of jewelry, vessels, and valuables, which symbolize uncorrected desires. Therefore, the Creator says: “I will not be with you anymore.”
Question: Does the whole world practically lives off the accursed?
Answer: This all exists inside us. We must clearly separate one from the other in order to work only with the properties of bestowal. This will gradually happen. You just need to know that this is how it should be and wait for it to happen.
Arise, prepare the people, and say, Prepare yourselves for tomorrow; for thus says the Lord God of Israel, There is an accursed thing in your midst, O Israel; you will not be able to stand before your enemies, until you remove the accursed thing from among you.
And it shall be, he that is taken with the accursed thing shall be burned with fire, he and all that he has; because he has transgressed the covenant of the Lord, because he has wrought an infamous deed in Israel. (Prophets, Joshua 7:13, 7:15)
Question: Why are the children of Israel constantly given such severe punishments?
Answer: These are not severe punishments. Everything happens in accordance with what is inside them. If a serious egoistic property awakened in them that they still could not reject and they kept it inside despite the prohibition, then now they must somehow uproot it from themselves, bite into the heart, and squeeze it out of there.
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From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 7/12/21
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Question: Tatiana writes: “You are always scaring us that the virus will return, that it will harass us. You say that the reason is us, that we are bad, that we are egoists and think only about ourselves. But we won’t change! Why beat us? It’s like you’re demanding that we grow wings. But they won’t grow!”
Answer: In order for us to eventually learn and even want to even be beaten, but the main thing is that “wings grow.”
“Wings have grown” means that we have gained a screen so that the possibility of “flying above ourselves” has grown in us, above our egoism.
Question: Is that why we are being beaten now?
Answer: Yes. So that gradually, gradually, we want to rise, rise, rise above the earth. Like a bird, it does not immediately take off, it flaps its wings, and then takes off.
Question: So we are beaten in order for us to take off?
Answer: Of course! Exactly for this!
Question: Not for the sake of making us feel bad?
Answer: No! From the side of nature, there is no such thing at all! Nature does not punish anyone; it only corrects and pushes.
Question: So your answer to Tatiana is that we should “grow wings”?
Answer: Yes, absolutely.
Question: And we will “fly off the ground”? Above our ego?
Answer: Yes.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 7/1/21
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Question: What tests and obstacles does a person engaged in Kabbalah usually encounter? How can you recognize that it is an obstacle and not help?
Answer: An obstacle is also help. Help cannot come by itself. It comes precisely in the form of obstacles. For everyone who moves forward, the entire path consists only of guided obstacles where one moves forward as a result of a person’s struggle with them.
Comment: It is considered that help is when a person receives help.
My Response: Do not help in any way. The desire of a person to move forward is help. The fact that one is not allowed to move forward and all sorts of obstacles are placed before him is also a help. It is both of these forces, one that pushes forward and the other that does not allow him to go forward, that develop him.
Question: Which helps more?
Answer: The preventing force.
When disruptions do not allow a person to move forward and he is trying to figure out how to go through them and what to do with them, this is a real help. As it is written: “I will make for him a help made against him.”
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 6/23/19
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Question: Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo said “There is no law of Nature that cannot be overcome and changed, if we have the faith that all is ruled by the Lord and that it is possible for us to come into direct contact with Him, if we know how to escape from the prison-house of age-old habits and give ourselves unreservedly to His will.”
What do you think about this postulate?
Answer: I absolutely agree with him. Kabbalah says simply: What we perceive today, we perceive inside ourselves according to our qualities and properties.
We experience the world through our five senses. If we had five or fifty more, we would perceive the world differently. Behind the material organs of sensation is our thinking, sensory apparatus, which synthesizes a picture of the world for us.
For example, frogs or bees have a completely different perception of the world, not to mention the fact that the thinking apparatus is built in accordance with this.
Therefore, when we talk about our human ability to unite into one common integral whole, we mean that we will be similar to the integral nature.
There is one unified force in nature. And today we are looking for this divine particle, from which all matter was created, in order to rise above the problems of movement, space and time.
We are going to achieve one single whole, the basis of the property of nature. When we begin to feel nature in an integral form, our egoism becomes our helper, and through integral vision we perceive everything in a completely different way.
I see the world as one common whole not through myself, but let’s say, through a dozen people, and therefore, my perception becomes multifaceted, integral. I begin to feel the universe, its inner forces, what drives it in a completely different way, and at the same time, as a person, I am changing nature, changing the world. It depends only on me.
I cannot say that today I feel the world as it is, because I perceive it in my senses, evaluate it in my conceptual apparatus, in my mind, built in a certain way.
And when I go out to others and try to unite with them, I achieve a completely different mind and feelings. Then, naturally, both nature and the whole world are perceived differently. We call it the upper world, because it is higher than our egoism.
But in principle, this is the world, only it is felt differently, because we have changed our perceiving apparatus. Nevertheless, we explore it completely realistically and understand that by changing ourselves, we are changing the world. The world is our reflection.
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From KabTV’s “The Science of Management”
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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report on widespread, rapid, and intensifying global warming. The report says that in the coming decades, climate change will increase in all regions: extreme heat waves, floods and droughts, flooding of coastal cities due to rising sea level, and so on.
The researchers claim that climate change is the result of human activity and call for urgent measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution. I, however, think that the main factor of all adverse changes in the environment is man’s egoistic attitude to inanimate, vegetative, and animate nature and to people.
There is no other reason. We can check: limit the amount of fuel we are burning and confirm that this does not change anything. Then we will start looking for other reasons, going through them one by one. But we do not have time for all these checks in order to find out that this is not the reason at all. We need to make the only change that depends on us.
There is no more dynamic factor than the relationship between people. Let’s correct the relationship between us and see how it will affect the climate and balance everything. Although there is no direct connection between one and the other, if we correct our relationship, we will almost immediately feel a positive effect. This is what the wisdom of Kabbalah says, and I have no reason not to believe it.
No limitation of greenhouse gas emissions and other similar measures will help. This will not affect the warming in any way. We are like little children who think that they can influence nature with their childish games. There is nothing we can do. One release of gases from a volcano into the atmosphere will cancel all our efforts to limit the burning of fuel. These are not serious measures, and they are just in order to report that we have done everything possible.
In fact, to influence the equilibrium of the climate and bring Earth into balance is possible only from a human degree. Changes at the inanimate, vegetative and animate degrees cannot help in this. We must balance the relations between us, good and evil between people, and reach a good state between everyone, as it is written: “They helped every one his friend,” “we all are comrades and brothers,” who live on one small planet, for which we are all responsible.
We just need to start thinking this way, and this will calm all the forces of nature. No other measures will help. All of nature is in balance, except for man because of his hatred for others. Each of us treats inanimate nature, plants, animals, and people egotistically and with hatred, in order to squeeze from others maximal benefit for himself personally without considering others at all.
We must come to a balanced state when we take care of others as ourselves. After all, we are on the Earth in a closed ecological system, and if we start thinking about everyone, we will balance all the forces of nature.
We see that animals devour each other. However, they act according to their natural instinct without freewill, and therefore, nothing else is expected from them. They do not disturb the balance in nature by eating each other. No predator will kill unnecessarily if it is not hungry, unlike a person who destroys everything around him on a whim. Of course, a person should treat inanimate nature, plants, and animals in a balanced way, that is, use them only to the extent necessary for life.
Yet, the main thing is the relationship between people because this is the highest degree. Today, we are wasting natural resources unnecessarily. We must use nature in the way it happens on the inanimate, vegetative, and animate degrees where each takes only what is vital from nature.
Then it will not be considered that we are harming nature. I am allowed to use inanimate nature, plants, and animals for my food to the extent that is necessary for life. Just like they use each other. This will not lead to any cataclysms in nature because we will not bring nature out of balance.
The commissions researching climate change cannot be objective since they are interested in continuing this process. The more cataclysms there are in nature, the more necessary these experts will be and the more funding they will receive.
Doctors are interested in having more patients, committees against anti-Semitism are interested in having more anti-Semitism, and so on. After all, everything is based on the egoism of a person who is looking for ways to raise his importance in the eyes of others.
Therefore, anti-Semites and Zionists help each other with their activities, and this is how all of humanity acts in everything. My neighbor, who runs a car repair shop, prays for more rain because there are more accidents in the rain. What will the doctors do if there are no patients? It is clear that they do not want epidemics and increased workload, but it is also not in their interests to completely eliminate diseases. This is how it is in everything.
What will the government committees do if there is no friction between the countries? Everything is based on an evil egoistic inclination, and we need to understand how to correct and balance it.
Every committee to combat extreme changes wants to ensure that these changes continue. We can see how the importance of environmental committees has grown over the past ten years. Now it will begin to decline because we are discovering that we are not able to control the forces of nature through the measures they propose, by reducing the amount of fuel burned and so on.
The world has begun to realize that it exists in a global system. The coronavirus has shown us that we live in a global world that requires us to take global responsibility. We will feel global blows and global interdependence and understand that we need global responsibility. The Earth is one system, very delicate, vulnerable, and closed. And we bring it out of balance.
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From a Conversation with Journalists, 8/10/21
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At the just-ended Olympic Games in Tokyo, there was a very touching moment when an Israeli athlete Linoy Ashram, who won first place in rhythmic gymnastics competitions, took off the gold medal she received and hung it around the neck of her coach. And in fact, this is not surprising, because a coach for an athlete is like a father or mother, everything depends on the coach. Without him, an athlete is only raw material in the hands of a sculptor. The coach makes him a champion, and, of course, the medal rightfully belongs to the coach.
The athlete feels that it is the coach who took first place. And the coach feels that the athlete sacrificed himself to faithfully follow the instructions of the coach, and this is their joint success. There is usually a very close, warm connection between a coach and an athlete, and it cannot be otherwise.
It is said that “a person is jealous of everyone except for his son and his student.” After all, a real teacher puts everything he has into the student, and the student’s achievements indicate the teacher’s skill. The medal is awarded not to the coach, but to the athlete, but it does not matter. After all, the teacher’s reward is not in a medal, but in an inner feeling, in reaching a new degree.
If I ever achieve high achievements in spirituality, it will be only thanks to my teacher. I can still feel him guiding me.
I really hope that my students, whom I “coach” for spiritual ascent, will reach such high levels that the Creator will be revealed in each of them, and they will also turn into great teachers for all mankind.
I see in the students the continuation of the path. The student becomes the hands of the teacher, his mind. Everything that I want to achieve in life, I bring to my students, and they continue to pave the way.
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From KabTV’s “Look from the Inside” 8/9/21
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My new article on Linkedin “National Lazy Day – What a Great Idea”
Tuesday this week, August 10, to be exact, was National Lazy Day, an unofficial holiday that celebrates the “inner couch potato,” according to the website Time and Date. We are taught to despise laziness and admire diligence, but the current state of the world is a direct result of our excessive hard work. Maybe if we took a break once in a while, we’d give Earth a break, as well, and all of us would be a little safer and calmer.
Considering our current attitude toward the world, laziness is good for us and for everyone else. Since everything we do is for ourselves—amassing wealth, power, possessions, and preferably at the expense of others—the less we do, the better for everyone, eventually also for ourselves. In fact, if we could impose a month-long break on all of humanity, everything would suddenly blossom. Birds would sing, the weather would calm, and there would be no floods, no fires, and no wars, if only we could take a break for a few weeks.
We need to start being accountable to nature and understand that we are the only harmful element in it, and a very potent one at that. This is why we must impose that pause on ourselves. Because of our harmful nature, our sages instruct in the Talmud, “Sit and do nothing—better” (Iruvin 100a).
Doing nothing doesn’t mean we have to sit on the couch all day. We can take the children to the beach, go for a walk, do something in the garden, etc., each according to one’s circumstances. The point is not to “produce,” “manufacture,” since this is where we harm others and nature.
If we want to participate in more productive activities, we must first contemplate why we want to do them, and mainly who will benefit from them. Beyond tending to the basic sustenance of ourselves and our families, everything we do that is excessive is also detrimental.
Therefore we must reflect on why we want to do what we want to do, who stands to benefit from it, and who stands to lose. If we find that in the end, it is a self-centered act, it’s best that we avoid it. But if it is in order to help others, then we are more than welcome to work on it as hard and as long as we can. That is, if we can invert the intention of our actions, the beneficiary of our efforts from ourselves to others, it will be a blessing to the world and to us. Any other motivation to act will lead to negative results. In that case, it is better to be lazy and avoid unnecessary work.
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My new article on Linkedin “Being an Environmentalist Pays Well”
A recently released report by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) states that “Human influence has warmed the climate at a rate that is unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years. … Human-induced climate change,” the report asserts, “is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. Evidence of observed changes in extremes such as heatwaves, heavy precipitation, droughts, and tropical cyclones, and, in particular, their attribution to human influence, has strengthened since [the last report in 2013].”
This summer, there is not a region in the world that has not suffered because of the changing climate. According to the IPCC scientists, the horrible future they have been predicting is already happening, and from here on, it will be all downhill unless we do as they say.
With all due respect, I think that cutting emissions, switching to renewable energy sources, prohibiting the use of plastic, and all the measures that the distinguished panel is suggesting will not improve our situation one bit. It will only create well-paying jobs for people who make a career out of telling us off. It is not even a matter of the panel’s inability to impose its suggestions on countries. It is that the remedy they are prescribing is the wrong remedy since their diagnosis is wrong from the very beginning.
We can test their suggestions—burn less fossil fuels, produce less plastic and so forth—but by the time we recognize the futility of their ideas, we will be much worse off than we are today, and things are already quite dire. Instead of wasting time, resources, and lives, we should work on the only element that we know is malfunctioning: people, or more precisely, relationships among people. Even if we do not see the connection between the exploitative nature of our relationships, our exploitation of nature, and the growing instability of the climate, it is still worth trying to experiment with connection because 1) it will improve our relationships, which is a definite plus, and 2) we haven’t found another remedy. In fact, we are so uncaring that we cannot bring ourselves to experiment with restraining the use of fossil fuels. Since we insist on over-consumption, environmentalists suggest we use renewable energy sources. But this is completely useless.
Also, we already see that our planet is a single system where everything affects everything else. We also see that everything is balanced in nature and runs in its course, except for us. In other words, we understand that the problem lies only with us. Now we need to understand the depth of the problem—that it isn’t that we are burning the wrong kind of fuel, but that we are injecting our volatile temper into the system that sustains us: Planet Earth.
Nothing in nature fights. Animals hunt or struggle over prominence in order to reproduce. But once an animal has eaten and is not in the midst of mating season, it is quiet and peaceful. Conversely, we are ever belligerent, always looking for the next peak to climb, and the next climber to throw off the mountain on our way to the top. Since our species is at the top of the pyramid, our negative mode of thinking spoils all other levels of nature and upsets their balanced and harmonious existence. Succinctly: Every problem—from climate catastrophes through earthquakes, to plagues and wars—stems from the corrupt human nature. Fix humanity, and you have fixed the world.
By fixing, I mean fixing our relationships. If we change our attitudes toward each other from hostile to caring, we will change the whole of society. Instead of wishing to exploit others, we will seek to support them. Instead of wishing for other people’s failure, we will wish for their success, and they for ours.
Because of our positive relation toward each other, we will stop depleting natural resources since that would be unfair to other people and to future generations. Likewise, we will not want to extinguish wildlife, cut down forests, pollute the air, water, and soil because these would be detrimental to others. Soon, we will realize that we want to use only what we really need and dedicate the rest of our time and energy to supporting, encouraging, and nurturing others. In this way, by caring for each other, we will heal society and restore the balance in the climate and the soil.
Admittedly, caring for others does not pay well to those who make “fighting” climate change their career. They will tell us that we should look elsewhere for solutions, and not at our relationships, but they will be wrong and misleading. If we want a good future, we should insist on caring for each other’s future, and then our own will be secured, as well.
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