Audio Version Of The Blog – 11/16/21
Posted on November 16th, 2021
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Comment: World Kindness Day was celebrated on November 13th. According to a study by researchers, people who do good deeds every day feel better physically, feel their life more harmonious, have better immunity, get sick less, and live longer. Finally, responsiveness is accompanied by uplifting, the hormone serotonin is produced, which regulates our mood.
My Response: Kindness presupposes such an attitude toward another.
Comment: This was the first time this day was introduced in Japan, in Tokyo. And indeed there is such a warm attitude toward each other.
My Response: Warning, I would say.
Question: Why can’t we treat each other like that? We kind of invite you to do good deeds: this will make you feel good physically. Why don’t we invite you to do good deeds, because the other will be fine, the other will be happy, he will feel warm, wonderful? Can’t you get to that level? Or is it possible?
Answer: No, it is impossible in a natural way. In a supernatural is possible. Our nature will not allow us to treat each other kindly, you see. Give me examples of kindness to each other in the world. Only between relatives to some extent. And that’s all.
Comment: But there is friendship.
My Response: But only when a person needs it. Here’s the problem, am I kind to others because they need it or because I need it? If I need it, then it is not considered that I am doing good. I do something because I need it.
Comment: But for many people it is hidden. A person has a feeling that he is doing it for the sake of others.
My Response: Yes, I understand. We do not even give a report about this. But in fact, real kindness should be against its will. I must overcome myself and do good to others. Then it’s really kindness.
Question: That is, I don’t think for a second that it’s good for my health, for my mood?
Answer: I think that nothing will come of it, but I just want to make such a gesture of goodwill to someone else. Otherwise it is not kindness. Otherwise, something just presses on me and I want to get rid of the internal pressure.
Question: And I feel better when I do good to another. And this “I feel better” is ahead?
Answer: Of course. This is the reason.
Question: Will we ever get to this ideal definition of kindness?
Answer: No. We will never reach it with our nature. It will be necessary to rise above our nature, when we are convinced that we simply cannot exist for so long, we eat each other, fangs will suddenly begin to grow, the jaw will become larger.
Question: Will it be revealed to us that we are not doing good?
Answer: Not only. It will be revealed to us that we are only doing evil to each other precisely in those actions that before seemed good to us. And then we will have to really remake ourselves. It will be necessary to create in ourselves such an internal tool for analyzing our motives and intentions, which will show us exactly what we really want: ourselves or others, good or evil.
Question: That is, one way or another, the start will be from this negative point?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Is it possible to move positively?
Answer: This is not in our nature! What can be done? It is said about this: “Go to the Creator who created you.” And we will go to the Creator. We will go and beg that we really want against our will, against our nature, in which He created us, to be different, to be kind to others. And then He will gladly do it.
Question: That is, by the same token that He turns us around like this, turns us around now, He wants us to turn to Him?
Answer: Yes.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 11/8/21
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My new article on Linkedin “If Ben-Gurion Were Alive Today”
Last Wednesday, Israel marked the 35th Ben-Gurion day, commemorating David Ben-Gurion, the leader of the Jewish community in Palestine before the establishment of the State of Israel, and the first prime minister of Israel after its establishment. He was not only a political leader, but also a visionary who dreamed of the people of Israel realizing the ultimate calling of the Jewish people, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Israel’s failure to achieve it was probably the reason he eventually departed from public life and retired to the desert. If he were alive today, he would see how right he was in doing so.
On January 15, 1949, a few months after the establishment of the State of Israel, David Ben-Gurion gave a monumental speech that was to become known as “Revolution of the Spirit.” In that speech he repeatedly proclaimed that the great human calling of the Jewish people was love of others. “‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ is the supreme commandment of Judaism,” he said. “With these words, the eternal, human law of Judaism has been formed… The State of Israel will be worthy of its name only if its social, economic, political, and judicial structures are based upon these eternal words.”
Ben-Gurion did not wish for the Israeli society to resemble societies of other democratic countries. He believed that love of others is not inherent in humankind and must be taught through education. In his mind, the judicial system, too, would not only require people not to hurt others, but also that they actively participate in establishing solidarity. “‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ is more than the commandment of the law,” he declared. “A principle of law can be interpreted in a passive, negative manner—not to deprive, steal, rob, or harm. Jewish law does not settle for these; it is not enough to refrain from hurting others. Human relations must be built on a common fate, mutual help, friendship of equals, and love of others. Only on the basis of the commandment ‘Love your neighbor as yourself’ will the State of Israel be true to the great human calling of Judaism. Only in this law will the key to Israel’s laws and ordinances be found.”
To achieve this sublime vision, Ben-Gurion saw legislators and attorneys as the guardians responsible for fashioning the image of the country. However, he did not leave the responsibility solely on their shoulders. He demanded that everyone participates in the process, to the last person on the street. In his vision, people would obey the law not because they were afraid of punishment but because it was “built on reciprocity and mutual help of all citizens, Jews and non-Jews, [and] everyone knows that in the State of Israel, it is not homo homini lupus est (man toward man is a wolf), but friends and helpers.”
When we think of education today, we think of acquisition of knowledge. In Ben-Gurion’s eyes, knowledge, as such, was of secondary importance, although he valued the contributions of great scientific minds like Einstein’s. Nevertheless, he realized that our strength lies not in knowledge but in fashioning a united society, and pushed for education of the entire nation toward that purpose.
Accordingly, the army was to be an educational tool no less than a military one. “Fundamentally, the army is an educational entity,” he said, “We shall not have an army that does its duty in our historic conditions if it is not accompanied by a greater educational effort than in all the armies in the world. The army must be the school of the youth, the cradle of the unity and strength of the nation.”
Ben-Gurion was well aware of the division and alienation among Jews in his days. “We all love immigration, but very few of us love the immigrants,” he quipped. But in a more serious tone, he realized that “immigrants will not be absorbed without a great educational effort … both among the residents of Israel and among the immigrants.”
Indeed, although Ben-Gurion realized the great importance of education toward unity and went to great lengths to realize it, the nation grew increasingly divided. In the end, Israel’s most charismatic leader and one of its greatest visionaries in modern history had given up. In 1970 he retired to a hut in a kibbutz in the Negev desert and spent the final three years of his life there working on an 11-volume corpus describing the history of Israel’s early years.
Since his departure, educating the people of Israel has only become more urgent. We have lost all sight of our vocation and the reason for our being here. Instead of exemplifying unity, we demonstrate internal loathing and division. We did not educate ourselves toward unity, and now we are suffering the consequences.
Nevertheless, as long as we are here, there is hope for change. We must still employ education toward unity. It should be mandatory, and it should encompass the entire nation, all ages and all factions. As Ben-Gurion said, unity is not a prerogative; it is vital for our existence.
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My new article on Linkedin “No Need for a Metaverse; a Pill Will Do”
We all heard that Mark Zuckerberg is building a hypothesized iteration of the internet called the Metaverse. In clips advertising the platform, we can see him moving over to live there, in his virtual universe. The idea is to allow people to communicate and even move regardless of the physical distance between them, and to allow them to travel between times and countries. I wouldn’t want to be near there. It will not be a place where people can be happy, and in such a place, I do not want to be.
The whole idea of the Metaverse, as I understand it, is to have people living in an illusion. On one corner, some superman is fighting a demon; on another corner, dinosaurs are dancing to pop music, or something of that sort, and I am in a room with them, enjoying the show.
Is this reality? No, it is a drug.
If all we want is to feel good, we do not need a Metaverse; a pill will do just fine. We can make a pill that slowly excretes drugs that make us feel happy, place it under our tongues, and let it pacify us through the day. We wouldn’t need anything else; why bother creating high-tech illusions when we can enjoy by simply taking a pill?
Pleasure is possible only when I want something so strongly that when I get what I want, I experience the relief as pleasure. But if I can take a pill that makes me feel good without the preceding deficiency, why bother feeling it? It is true that I will be a zombie, hooked on my pill, but as long as I feel good and do not hurt anyone, what is wrong with that?
I would be like a lion—laying under a tree all day and getting up only when its stomach is empty or it is mating season. But is this the life of a human being?
Human beings were given a society for a reason. Disconnecting from people for the sake of being in some fake universe would make us animals, while connecting to people can reveal to us a whole new world.
The real joys in life are not in numbing our desires and our minds, but in intensifying them and vitalizing our spirits. The only way to strengthen our desires is through connections with other people. When we see them doing things that they enjoy, learning things that enrich them and increase their capabilities, we envy them and want to emulate them. This is how we grow.
Look at how attentive little children are to their environment. Their open eyes are always looking for new things to see, and their ears are always listening for new sounds and words. They are eager to learn from the world around them; their deficiency is enormous, and this is why they grow so fast.
As we grow up, we close our eyes, our ears, and mainly our hearts to connections with others. We lose the spirit in our lives and seek compensatory pleasures to fill the void within us. But in doing so, we relinquish the purpose of our lives.
We were not meant to be lions. We were made to be conscious human beings, aware of everything around us, connected to reality, and in constant interaction with the world around us. We were meant to discover how the world operates and how its elements intertwine. We were intended to discover it by interacting with everything. If we want to live, we must give and receive, connect and disconnect, and in this way grow. We do not need a metaverse for this, but a real universe where we can truly live.
What can be considered an action of bestowal in regard to the ten? It is when I take care that the entire ten is healthy in both corporeality and spiritually and that we are united.
The ten is like a boat that I am protecting so that it does not sink, but rather crosses this raging sea and reaches the shore. Only then will we understand why the Creator took us through this storm.
In the meantime we all need to take care of our little boat because otherwise we will not survive. I cannot throw myself into the sea of egoism, the Sitra Achra, and swim across it. I need a boat and I need mutual guarantee (Arvut) from which the sides of our boat are assembled.
This is the only way we can cross this sea, it is when everyone takes care of the sides of the boat and tries to move together. Due to the fact that we are constantly making efforts to strengthen the connection between us in every possible way, to connect more and more, and to hold each other even tighter, we advance further and further until we reach the goal.
If we do not do that, we will not achieve anything. We will still advance a little because we are making some efforts, but this is not enough.
Therefore, instead of making egoistic requests to the Creator and complaining that He threw us into the raging sea, we must understand that there is no way out and act like Rabbi Akiva who held onto a log and lowered his head before each wave so that it rolled above him, and thus he reached the shore. Are you ready for the same devotion in order to reach the goal?
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/13/21
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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Is prosperity the goal of humanity?“
The goal of humanity is to reach an inclusive mutual connection with one another, where our desires for self-benefit will invert to desires to benefit others and nature, and by doing so, we will resemble the perfection of nature’s quality of love and bestowal. By attaining such a goal, we will achieve prosperity in the fullest sense of the word: a sensation of paradise.
Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Comment: The Pandora Papers, the world’s largest leak of financial documents revealed secret deals and immense property holdings of hundreds of world leaders, politicians, and billionaires. It also exposes how money was laundered in offshore accounts. There has been a lot of noise about this. But I noticed that no one blushes or beats their chests; nobody repents. All this is perceived calmly. The feeling is that they will make noise, make noise and that’s it.
My Response: Of course! And there won’t be much noise. This characterizes our time. Special! The triumph of egoism!
Comment: Yes, the feeling of some kind of shame that I was caught doing something illegal has disappeared.
My Response: No! Who is worried about anything today? There is of course a chance to put a person in jail, but such people as a rule are not imprisoned. So they don’t care.
Question: And where does this lead us?
Answer: To complete lawlessness, freedom even from those laws that today allegedly exist on paper.
Question: Once a person believed in someone, and someone was a leader for him. And today what can a person grab onto?
Answer: No way! If you have money in one pocket and a gun in the other, then you are the boss. As long as egoism reigns in the world, you will not be able to find a pure example of selflessness, devotion, bestowal, and so on. All this will be based on egoism. And so it was originally illegal.
Question: But how then to conduct education if there are no examples, no figures? What should a person hold on to?
Answer: In our time a person should try to hold on to a quiet place in order to provide for himself and his family, and as much as possible try to reach some kind of high spiritual sources, roots, that do not depend on the rulers of the world. This is what remains for a person. I am glad that it is so. And this is gradually becoming more evident.
Question: Do you think that what is happening is forcing us to rise above egoism? To understand that everything has been bought on this plane?
Answer: Yes, this plane has completely compromised itself, and there is nothing to look for in it. And this is actually good. We are shown the direct path to a truly free society.
It will arise. The whole question is how much we will suffer to create something new. This is the problem.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 10/7/21
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We exist for the correct implementation of the connections between us, the correction of the soul, and the revelation of the Creator in it. In order to love your neighbor and reveal the Creator in the ten, it is necessary to fulfill all the conditions of the connection of the friends with each other, to reveal the greatness of the Creator, to give an example to the friends of how I can annul myself before them, how I am ready to do anything just to serve them and support the group.
A necessary condition in the ten is to reach mutual guarantee, when everyone annuls himself before the others. At the same time, all together we gradually form a prayer to the Creator so that He will help everyone receive the quality of love for other friends.
Thus, the feeling of the Creator will arise within us as within a correct ten, which will increase all the time until we come to an absolutely complete correction of egoism.
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From KabTV’s “Conversation about The Book of Zohar”
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Question: The entire economy, in principle, is built on consumption. If people stop consuming, how will the economy survive?
Answer: We do not need such an economy. We drain the Earth, we pollute it, we drain all our resources, we engage people with completely useless businesses. We need to free people from everything except the essentials.
Comment: But we live much better than before.
My Response: If I have 20 suits hanging in my closet, how is it better for me? Offer me what is really necessary today: to be healthy, to feel that my children are being brought up correctly, that my wife and I have no problems, that I do not work for nothing, just to do something and then quickly throw it away. The fact is that we are able to arrange a reasonable life from the tools we have, but we cannot do it because of our egoistic nature. Therefore, we need to balance it, put it in order. And then, with our current capabilities, we will be able to make it really comfortable.
Question: So you are in favor of reasonable consumption? Does Kabbalah speak about this?
Answer: How will it be reasonable? How much does a person need so that he feels that he does not need anything? It depends on the upbringing. But in any case, a person should not suffer. He does not have to eat grass.
Comment: Today we have been brought up to consume in such a way that if I don’t change my mobile phone every year, I feel bad. I have to change it.
My Response: You were brought up to consume in this way because capitalists need it. Why do you need to change your cell phone? To chat with the same shallow people? For example, I have been using my mobile phone for 6 to 7 years. I need to call, I call 2 to 3 times a day and that is enough. I don’t need anything else. What for? Everything I need in the world is in the computer.
It seems to me that this is just a tribute to fashion and nothing more.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 1/3/19
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The wisdom of Kabbalah speaks of what we do not feel but what we want to feel and we have the opportunity to. Kabbalah exists in order to introduce us sensually into the sensation of the upper world.
This world, in which the properties of bestowal, connection, and reciprocity reign, is opposite to our world where there are only the properties of rejection, receiving for oneself, and attraction from another of everything that is good and pleasant to me. Moreover, all this is embedded in every object of our world and happens automatically and instinctively.
Thus all the desires of our world are egoistic; all desires of the upper world are altruistic.
And here we need to understand how we can break out of our nature. This is similar to how a spaceship rises, breaks through the Earth’s gravity at the first, second, and even third cosmic speed, and flies away to the stars.
Therefore we must learn how this can be done with ourselves, how we can rise above the field of attraction of our egoism. And this is not just the Earth. Egoism pulls us from all sides in terrible omniscience, all-seeing, at all levels of our understanding, sensation, and awareness.
It works completely inside of us. We are in it. How can we get out of this bitter fruit? It is a big problem to get out of egoism, even to understand this, at least in theory, to agree with what needs to be done, and then find out how we can practically implement it.
I know the way. But at the same time, I cannot help another in any way, except with words. Because everyone has freewill, and each one must realize it. Only in this way can a person rise above oneself and cleave to the Creator.
We can do this with the help of study and causing, by certain actions, the attraction to the upper world on ourselves . We can help each other. But this is all external help. It is also internal, but still external, because I must enter the upper world with my strength, my conviction, my persistence, my burst of energy!
And no matter what we do, even when we create a certain environment of our own kind around us and organize everything as needed, all the same, when a person goes beyond his egoism, breaks away from it like a rocket from our planet toward another cosmic body—each time it’s a miracle.
This is the purpose of our life. What else could it be? To fly like Munchausen, sitting on the core, somewhere on another Earth-like body? And what will happen if we do that? We want to go to another space, to another dimension. It cannot be explained.
But still, we need to push people to read, to study, to work on themselves, because by this we excite a higher power that can pull us out of egoism and push us to the feeling of a new nature.
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From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 9/13/21
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