My new article on Linkedin “Redefining Progress”

The James Webb Space Telescope Mirror is seen during a media unveiling at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center at Greenbelt, Maryland November 2, 2016.REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque/

This Saturday, NASA is planning to launch its much-awaited next-generation space telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope. The telescope, which has been in the making for decades, is the most complex space science observatory ever built. According to NASA, “Webb will peer more than 13.5 billion years back into cosmic history to a time when the first luminous objects were evolving. It’s the first observatory capable of exploring the very earliest galaxies… Webb will also study the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars, and observe moons, planets, comets, and other objects within our own solar system.”

Technology is a wonderful thing. It has given us abundant and cheap energy, appliances that make our lives easy and traveling enjoyable and safe. Technology has given us advanced medicine, longevity, knowledge beyond our dreams, and “eyes” that can see the edge of the universe.

Yes, for centuries, we have been pinning our hopes on technology to give us something that it isn’t meant to give us: happiness. We thought that making life easier and longer would make us happier, but we were wrong. This is why from the days when we derived light and heat from a fire we lit by banging stones against each other, to the days when we switch on an electric device energized by solar panels, we have not been able to satisfy our most basic need: to feel happy.

Happiness comes not from technology, but from good relationships with the people around us. If we keep pinning our hopes on technology to make us happy, we are sentencing ourselves to a life of misery. However, if we focus on nurturing good relationships with the people around us, we will surely be happy.

Once we have that solid foundation of good relationships and feel happy and content, technology can be a great addition. In this case, we will know how to use technology to improve and strengthen our relationships, and we will not be misled into thinking that technology itself can, or should, make us happy.

Currently, when we think of progress, we think of technological progress. But real progress is not in switching from fire-power to solar-power, but in building better connections that generate warmth between us. We need to redefine “progress” to reflect improvement in our relations rather than in our ability to generate more energy through nuclear fission or fossil fuel production.

When our hearts are lit up by the people around us, we will know what kind of energy to use, how much of it we really need, and how best to use technology for our sake and for the sake of everyone else.
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What can you say to a person who knows that his illness is incurable, his days are numbered, and he is tormented by the fear of death?

First of all, one must remember that everything comes from the Creator in order to achieve the ultimate goal. And as for the ultimate goal, it is clear that each of us will eventually say goodbye to this corporeal life, this lowest, heaviest, and most obscure world.

Therefore, the main thing is to try and be connected to the goal as much as possible. There is nothing to be afraid of because everyone will someday feel that this material life is ending, and you must bind yourself more tightly with the next, spiritual life.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/21/21, Writings of Baal HaSulam, Shamati #104 “And the Saboteur Was Sitting”

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “How do we change our perception of life to become happier?“

We first need to understand how we perceive life, which is through a lens of self-concern. We do not perceive life as is, but we have five senses of sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste, five openings through which we constantly receive information. If we transcend our five senses, then we come to sense a new and different reality.

Everything that we perceive is in our ego, i.e. in our desire to enjoy with an intention to enjoy for self-benefit alone. This ego accompanies and directs us to enjoy every moment of our lives, to gain as much as we can, and lose as little as possible. Nature has programmed us to desire, think and act out of self-concern at every moment, and our bodies do so in very sophisticated and clever ways. Our perception of life is thus very limited, in terms of what we want, what we understand and feel, what we receive, and what we own.

According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, we exist in an eternal, abundant and perfect reality, and our perception greatly narrows this reality to a tiny limited point. We have no idea about the vastness of the options and opportunities that exist in the universe. It turns out that our bodies are our enemies, not our friends, as they force us to live inside them, detached from the abundant pleasure that exists outside.

Therefore, the key to change our perception of life and become happier is to exit the perception of life we receive through our five senses, and enter into a new perception of life: one above our bodies, where we open a new sense that can perceive the eternal and perfect reality. The wisdom of Kabbalah calls this new sense a “screen” (“Masach” in Hebrew), and the entire method of Kabbalah is aimed at developing this screen up to a point where we discover everything we possibly can in our perception of life. By doing so, we gain access to the source of happiness, i.e. we achieve happiness in its eternal, perfect and true form, and thus become happy in the truest sense of the term.

Based on the video “How to Perceive a Different Reality” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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Question: Why does a person love someone and hate someone else? Wouldn’t it be better to treat everyone equally? Why are there such polar opposites?

Answer: Then why do I need everybody? One person is enough for me. And so proceeding from the fact that there are many different people, I can develop myself, project myself onto others, and study myself. After all, if there were no others, I would not know myself.

Question: Why is man given hatred? It would be much easier without hatred.

Answer: Not at all. Hatred is the greatest acquisition we have because everything that can be built, can be built precisely above hatred by rejecting it and building good, building love.

Question: Does the feeling of hatred help a person in their development?

Answer: Yes, this is help from above. So it is said about the evil inclination of man that this is “help against you.” If you look at evil as standing against you, it will help you.
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From KabTV’s “Kabbalah Express” 12/6/21

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Question: You say that it is an art to build trust and good relations in couples. It can come after many years of crises and mistakes. What is the key principle in the art of building trust?

Answer: There are two things. The first is to understand that we are egoists and have been through different crises in life. The second is that from now on we want to build correct and good relations and to enjoy life.

Question: How do you define the concept of trust in a couple?

Answer: It is about setting an example, relating to your partner with an open heart, and receiving whatever comes from him or her as something that is basically good.

Comment: I see that you have great trust in people.

My Response: Not at all, but there is no choice. We need to know how to feed our egoistic beast so that it will agree to connect with our partner so we will live a life of joy.
From KabTV’s “New Life 1327 – Building Trust In A Relationship” 12/12/21

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Comment: You said that the feeling of hell is an inner state of a person. One of the reasons for feeling unfulfilled is the inner attitude toward others to use them for one’s own sake.

My Response: Ordinary desires to receive are animalistic desires. They are neither good nor bad because they obey commands of nature.

A person has an inherent desire to exist comfortably at the minimal level, and this is normal. Even within the framework of the law, if someone stole a piece of bread somewhere just to satiate his hunger like an animal, I do not think they would be judged for it because it was necessary to maintain life.

Yet, everything we want to acquire above animalistic existence is already egoism. After all, everything that we acquire above it directly or indirectly happens at the expense of other people. Thus, we use others, look for ways to be higher, and show our hatred for them.

I begin to feel that the higher I am or the lower the other is, the more pleasant it is for me. That is, I am already thinking about ways to make it worse for someone else because it will make me feel better indirectly or even directly. Egoism is in the fact that I wish evil to the other.

We do not feel to what extent in our world we use each other every second. We need to transform our evil nature into a good one, use the same qualities, only not to harm but to benefit others, to connect with them.

Egoism is good because it connects us. I look at others to find out what I would like to learn from them so that I can influence them and subdue them. If it were not for egoism, I would exist as an animal on my own and I would not care about others.

Egoism makes us connect with each other. But in the form we use it, it is called the evil inclination. I need to turn it into a good one. That is, from what I receive from everyone, subjugate, saturate, and bind to myself, I turn this connection into one where I serve them, fulfill them, and give to them as if they were my children whom I wish only the best.

Therefore, without the evil inclination that binds us together, we cannot develop. Thus, a universal, global evil connection between us is being revealed in the world today. Along with this, Kabbalah is revealed because we have come to a state where we begin to understand that we are connected in a bad way, and we have no other choice, we must be connected by good connections.
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From KabTV’s “Close-Up—Faith and The Book of Zohar“

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Comment: The code laws of Sodom included:

– Any foreigner is allowed to be robbed as well as to be mocked.

– Anyone who invites a foreigner to a wedding will be stripped of all his clothes as punishment.

– The duty of the Sodom judge is to ensure that every stranger leaves the country without a penny in his pocket.

Everything was directed specifically at foreigners and was against hospitality and against connection.

My Response: In principle, those who did not comply with this directive were considered foreigners.

Sodom is known as a special place. Nowhere else was there such a rule that reflected one of the four types of relationships between people: “What’s mine is mine, what’s yours is yours.”

This rule is the worst, because it does not allow people to have contact with one another. In any situation whatsoever, people did not want to have relationships with each other; only within one’s own clan, family, and way of life.

Question: Is the principle what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine considered better?

Answer: Of course! After all, you enter into some kind of connection with others, learn from them, pass on to them, receive from them, and exchange something.

Comment: But guided by this principle, people have plundered and fought throughout history.

Answer: It was necessary for their development. But not here. Here I have nothing to do with you and you have nothing to do with me.

Therefore, nature, the Creator, erased these cities so that there would not even be a memory of them. This is a dead-end branch of human development. If humanity had gone this way, it would have quickly ended its existence.

The sages who revealed these states described them for the edification of posterity so that this would not happen again, so that it can be discussed and we will come to the conclusion that the lack of communication between people is most destructive.

There have been no more such states in the history of mankind. This is only one case. It is described in the Bible and shows us that the lack of contact between us is the most vicious state.

Question: So we don’t have to go through this anymore?

Answer: No. We won’t be able to. In our world everything is so tied together with all its parts, peoples, and states, that no one can be separate.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 12/7/21

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QIn the News (BBC): “The ‘mountain’ of waste electronic and electrical equipment discarded in 2021 will weigh more than 57 million tonnes, researchers have estimated.

Question: So many gadgets are thrown away. People will not give up gadgets, electronics, or anything. Where does it all go when it is thrown away?

Answer: I believe that a person who buys something new is obliged to bring the old one and take it to the same store for recycling. It is necessary to organize everything in this way. You can’t buy any new product without returning the old one.

Question: Otherwise they should not sell me anything else?

Answer: Yes. They don’t have the right; they have to get the old one first.

Comment: Once you said something fantastic, that if a person changes his thoughts, then all this will not need to be done; it will disappear by itself. People perceive it as fiction.

My Response: No, the fact is that if we were spiritually close to each other, we wouldn’t need these gadgets. Why do we need to talk or correspond so much? It’s all in the air. We would just feel and understand it, and we wouldn’t have to write. Why should I write things that are already absolutely clear and understandable to everyone?

And so we clog up the ether, we clog up the earth, we clog up everything. All this is “hanging in the air,” as they say. All information.

This is even more than gadgets. What is happening in the air now? It’s all being recorded. There is an organization, each country has its own, which records on one huge disc, as on a CD, everything that is in the air. Absolutely everything! And when you need to get something, it is read at a certain frequency. And there you can hear your frequency, my frequency, his frequency.

And that’s how our conversations are pulled out and listened to when necessary. And when not, the record is deposited and a new record is recorded, for example, a new one every day.

Question: Are you making up some kind of scenario or are you talking about reality?

Answer: I’m talking about something that exists. Imagine a disk on which absolutely all the noises in the air and passing through all networks are recorded. And they are all recorded on this record. It’s a terrible noise, there’s nothing in it. But when you then read it with a certain filter tuned to a certain frequency—for example the frequency of your gadget—then you can hear what you were saying there.

Question: So there are no secrets? All phone conversations, all recordings?

Answer: There is no question about it at all. Who cares about secrets today?

Comment: We started with the environmental problem of gadgets, and now we are approaching the crazy problem of pollution of the entire ether.

My Response: This is a very big problem!

Question: What is scarier?

Answer: The ether is scarier, but we don’t know much about it.

Question: In what case will we get rid of these gadgets, these records, such thoughts?

Answer: When we have a good relations between us, a good connection between us, when we will not hide anything from each other and it will be clear between us without words how we treat each other.

A baby, when he is in his mothers womb does not need any gadgets. And when he comes out there is already a language, some gestures. But in principle, this is all a pitiful semblance of an internal connection between them. It’s the same with us.

We must gradually strive for an inner connection between us, and then we go to a completely different level of interaction and do not clog up any ether; rather we lift everything only to the area where there is only one upper light.

Question: So we become such an embryo of the upper light?

Answer: Yes. We exist in it now.

Question: Our task is to realize this?

Answer: Yes. And to abandon these primitive devices of ours, these means of communication, and so on.

Remark: And then a miracle will happen?

Answer: Yes.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 10/21/21

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Question: One of the most common concepts today is that a man lives once. Nevertheless, according to research by some sociologists, the fear of death is one of the three strongest fears that most people experience.

But if a person lives once, why is he initially given the knowledge that he is mortal?

Answer: Of course, it would be better if we were like animals who do not understand what death means. They fear death instinctively, but they do not have the feeling of “I will not exist.”

And people who are at, I would say, still a rudimentary level of development, do not have such a feeling either. And then there appears not really the fear of death but the fear of disappearance.

Why is it given to a person? So that he becomes human. But instead, we try to rationally use this fear for our elevation, for our development. As a result, we try to somehow suppress this fear, camouflage, and obscure it so that it does not appear in us.

Whatever concerns death, we distance from ourselves be it a cemetery, a morgue, hospitals, or nursing homes, it is all out there somewhere, but we think less about it and touch it only if necessary. And what is beyond and if there will be anything after, we do not know at all.

Therefore, we are trying with all our might to attach ourselves to the years when we really exist. Instead of looking at the end of his life, a person looks at the younger generation and engages with it as if seeing his continuation in them.

But in fact, this is nothing more than self-deception because we have no clue. There is no correct, clear vision of what exists after death. Why is everything so ridiculous, so strange? Why does everything exist? This is the most important problem of man and humanity.

After all, if there were no death, our whole lives would change: my view of the world, my attitude to it. Let’s say we would live endlessly, we do not change, we do not get old. We would have no idea how we would exist, what our relationship to each other would be, what a completely different world we would be building.
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From KabTV’s “Close-Up. Mystery of the Sphinx” 2/5/10

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Preparation to the Lesson

Writings of Baal HaSulam, Shamati #240 “Seek Your Seekers When They Seek Your Face” 

Writings of Baal HaSulam, “The Love of God and the Love of Man”

Selected Highlights

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