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My new article on Linkedin “Kill Yourself Already! Words Matter”

In a tragic incident, a distraught young woman called a police hotline dozens of times in the same evening saying she was in distress and was contemplating taking her own life. In the end, the officers at the station became impatient and one of them yelled at her, “Kill yourself already and leave us in peace!” The officers around him snickered, and the flustered girl on the other end of the line fell silent. She never called again. Two weeks later, she did as the officer had suggested and killed herself.

The officer was horrified when he learned of the girl’s suicide. “I don’t know what came over me,” he said. “I myself have daughters! I feel terrible; I was tired, under pressure from other calls, and I simply lost my patience.”

We all have our limits, but these limits change depending on the importance of the person we are dealing with. If it is a boss we are afraid of, we will tolerate a great deal. If it is our sick child crying in pain, we will not lose our patience and say, “Kill yourself already and leave me in peace!” On the contrary, the more the child cries, the more we will cry, too.

In other words, we behave according to our own emotional involvement or interest. We have a lot of patience for people who matter to us, and little to no patience for people who are not important to us. As our ego continues to grow, the little patience we still have diminishes even further. On the current course, we are headed for a complete social dissolution.

The only way to change this abysmal fate is to change how we feel about each other. The reason we have patience with a sick child or an annoying boss is that we feel connected to them because they are important to us for a positive reason or a negative one.

We may not know it but in truth, we are connected to everyone. If we knew how every ounce of negativity we emit into the world comes back to us with vengeance, we would count to ten, twenty, or a hundred before we dared to speak rudely to others. Indeed, we are all parts of a whole, an organism whose parts have been blinded to their connectedness.

We know that it is bad for us to live in bad neighborhoods, but somehow, we do not associate our bad behavior with the bad neighborhood we live in. If we were not bad to one another, we would not be living in bad neighborhoods, bad cities, or countries, or a bad world.

The bottom line is that by recognizing our interdependence, we will eventually come to care for one another. When we care for one another, not only will we have patience for people in distress, there will be no distressed people because our care for one another will prevent such feelings from arising in the first place.

Caring for each other is not a burden, as we think of it today. It is our only shield from adversity.
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Question: It has been estimated that the recent Internet outage cost Kazakhstan’s economy $189 million dollars. Loss of connection takes a massive toll on humanity and that’s just one country.

What if it happened on a global scale, a sudden loss of the Internet? Can we quantify the sum that would reflect the cost of the disrupted connections between us, between countries, between people?

Answer: I think it would be a net gain of a couple billion dollars, not a loss.

I think that humanity did not lose out from this, but only moved forward. They realized what it means to lose the connection between them. They realized what it means when there is no connection between people, when life support systems are not functioning, and so on. This is invaluable.

Question: Do you mean the realization that we cannot survive without the connection makes up for all the monetary losses? Is that it?

Answer: Of course.

Question: So will we realize that the connection between us is simply indispensable, that it is vital, and that we would not be able to survive without it only if we continue to be subject to such network interruptions?

Answer: Only if we don’t learn. It’s quite possible that we will wise up and won’t have to go through such outages.

Question: So you think that it came from above, that this kind of experience comes from the Creator?

Answer: Everything comes from above.

Question: Was this experience given to humanity so we could feel that there’s no connection between us?

Answer: Yes, of course.

Question: What’s going to happen once we do feel it?

Answer: We will begin to relate to it in a completely different manner. We will begin to understand the importance of connection between us, the importance of providing everyone with necessities, the way we ought to build our society, and so on.

Basically a society has to be set up in such a way that whatever happens, every individual or family gets their own package of essentials.

Good, reciprocal connection between us will resolve all problems.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 1/10/22

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “How did a perfect God create flawed human beings?“

We have been given a perception and sensation of reality as being flawed—that human nature is a terrible and deficient desire to enjoy for self-benefit, which is opposite to the perfection of the Creator’s attitude of absolute love and bestowal—in order to learn upon our seemingly flawed state how to attain likeness to the Creator, and by doing so, correct that flaw.

It is similar to how we give children jigsaw puzzles or model car and plane kits. We do so in order for them to learn what is a complete thing, and how to construct something complete from something broken, fragmented and incomplete. In order to build completeness, the Creator needed to create something seemingly incomplete.

We create everything in our world based on incomplete foundations. Take, for example, how we prepare food or how we build a house: we start from various pieces or fragments of the whole thing that we wish to make, and we construct it until we can use it correctly.

We can only construct something complete if we engage in its construction. As this process unfolds in our corporeal lives, it is also the case in our spiritual lives.

Our understanding and feeling of the world starts off as incomplete in order for us to construct our understanding of the world, and develop our sensation, until we attain wholeness and perfection. The connections that we make in the process are in order for us to develop our understanding and feeling of the completeness of the Creator, and by constructing ourselves seemingly by ourselves, we discover the Creator. It is written about such a process in kabbalistic texts: The Creator says to those who construct themselves to become as perfect as Him, “You made Me.”

Based on Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman’s commentary on item 13 of Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag’s article “Introduction to The Book of Zohar” in the Daily Kabbalah Lesson on February 8, 2022. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Photo by Anubhav Saxena on Unsplash.

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Question: When rejection from friends appears, how should one work with it practically?

Answer: It is very simple: clench your teeth, raise the greatness of the Creator and the greatness of the goal to the point that you thank Him for giving you such contradictions and disturbances because it is now clear to you that by rising above them, you are rising to Him.

In our world, in our states, there is nothing more correct, more reasonable than when a problem is put before us. In this case, it is clear to you that if you overcome it, you will get closer to the Creator. That is, it is a hint and help from the Creator.
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From the International Convention “Rising Above Ourselves” 1/6/22, “Approaching the Creator Through the Network of Connections Between Us” Lesson 1

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My influence on the friends that passes through the common Kli (Adam) returns to me. In this return to me, there is also my effort to rise above myself, the desire to be in faith above reason and in mutual guarantee for others.

There are already some desires with intentions and efforts, as if we are starting to organize a spiritual Partzuf. There is a restriction and a reflected light when I do not want anything for myself but only for my friends, and, according to my efforts, I receive the forces of bestowal and connection from above.

And although it does not seem like a special spiritual action to us, all the elements of the Partzuf, the structure of the soul, already take place in it. Gradually, all this will develop and we will see in ourselves, in our friends, in our common Kli, and in all of humanity how it all settles in us and transforms.

Therefore, the implementation of the rule “faith above reason,” is the main one. And mutual guarantee (Arvut) is designed to help fulfill it and lead us to a state where we all will all be connected together. A loner will never be able to perform a single spiritual action if there is not at least one more friend next to him whose advancement he cares about.

We ourselves cannot pull ourselves by the hair out of the swamp we are in. We can only help others, and  through others ourselves, and so to each other. Therefore, this principle is called “mutual guarantee.”
It is said that only by fulfilling mutual guarantee toward all of mankind, will we consistently and gradually lead the whole world to correction and to the revelation of the upper world in everyone.
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From the International Convention “Rising Above Ourselves” 1/9/22, “Working in Mutual Responsibility” Lesson 6

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Question: What should I do if envy of my friends irritates me?

Answer: Get annoyed and try to appreciate what makes you angry. Envy can make you close your eyes to your friends so that you don’t see them and envy them. Or maybe, on the contrary, it can push you forward in order to study more and do something in order not to envy your friends but at least to be like them.

Question: Why is envy of friends considered an advancement; this is a property of egoism?

Answer: But they are big! They are on target! A lot of them! If I try to get closer to them, to join them—and envy is that quality when I want to get what they have—then I will get from them the desire to glorify the Creator, to get closer to the goal, to unity. Envy is a very good quality.

In principle, there are no bad properties at all, it all depends on how you use them. You will see how, with the right correction, the most terrible properties suddenly turn into absolutely positive ones. Now we cannot even imagine it, and then we will see the world as absolutely kind.

But where will anger, hatred, betrayal, neglect and other negative qualities disappear? We will see how this is corrected and by no means disappears. It just cannot be explained, just as it is sometimes impossible to explain to another where we think we are right and he is wrong. But some time passes, and suddenly he begins to understand that all this can be different.

So everything is ahead. The most important thing is not to deny anything, not to neglect anything; try to unite with the friends in the group in all their qualities. Forcibly do not remake anyone, only yourself.
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From the International Convention “Rising Above Ourselves” 1/8/22, “Deriving the Greatness of the Goal from the Friends” Lesson 4

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To advance toward the goal, I can demand  greater rapprochement and love from the friends despite all their negative qualities.

If we would unite with each other today, now, with all our negativity, rejection, distrust, unwillingness, and so on, we would definitely reveal the Creator all the way to final correction (Gmar Tikkun).

There is no other way out, so we are advancing in that manner. We have only one way— to rise, as we call it, above our sins, i.e., our neglect and distance from each other.
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From the International Convention “Rising Above Ourselves” 1/8/22, “Deriving the Greatness of the Goal from the Friends” Lesson 4

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Preparation to the Lesson

Writings of Baal HaSulam “Introduction to The Book of Zohar,” Item 33

Lesson on the Topic: “Everything Is Obtained by the Power of Prayer” 

Selected Highlights 

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In the News (Newsweek): “Two-thirds of Southern Republicans say they support breaking away from the U.S. and forming their own country with nearby states, while nearly half of Democrats on the West Coast would do the same.

“A 66 percent majority of Republicans in 13 Southern states including Texas and Florida are in favor of seceding from the union, according to a poll released Wednesday by Bright Line Watch. Half of all independents in the South agreed, while only 20 percent of Southern Democrats were on board.”

Comment: Politicians, philosophers, and writers argue that the United States is already ripe for collapse.

My Response: I think this will eventually happen because the way they are going will definitely divide America into two parts. Everything is coming to this.

Republicans wouldn’t have done that. But the Democrats, who are now in power, will do everything to aggravate mutually antagonistic relations with the Republicans. I think that if this continues, these trends will intensify to the point that some people will start moving to Republican states, others to Democratic ones. That is how it will manifest itself.

Question: Isn’t this a return to the Middle Ages, when states were breaking up into small principalities and so on?

Answer: No, it means that this is mine and this is yours, but there can be good mutual neighborly relations between us.

Question: So one way or another, further connection is waiting for them in the future, but for now separation?

Answer: No, not that there will be connection in the near future. Only separation and such mutual, good development. That’s at best, of course. Republicans are more ready for independent development. These are strong, enterprising people. And the Democrats are more drawn to begging.

Question: What about your call for unity?

Answer: Unity can only be above when everyone is confident that they can add something to the other and can get something beneficial from the other. And there is no such progress here yet.

They will separate, and let them separate and live separately. Of course, they will have some kind of cooperation. They are still called the United States of America. And each state has its own set of laws, police, courts, and so on.

Question: So have they quietly prepared themselves for such a step?

Answer: They had it originally. I think that all this will pass.

But they will have to respond to this challenge because it comes from society. They will have to divide this society anyway, and then the understanding will come that education in the spirit of mutual addition, connection, and so on is necessary. But this is the next stage.

Question: But these two sides who hate each other today, Democrats and Republicans, will they eventually have this understanding that it is simply necessary to rise above hatred?

Answer: They must first realize the huge gap that exists between them in their psychology, in their approach to life and to the world, in their mutual hatred, where it comes from, and so on. All this is impossible without the recognition of evil. And for this it is necessary to reach some critical point.

Question: So do you consider this process to be correct?

Answer: It is the same in nature. A person cannot begin to change unless he recognizes the evil in his state. Neither one side nor the other is willing to recognize the evil in themselves.

Question: And how do you see this from the position of a Kabbalist?

Answer: Very true, this is dialectic.

It is necessary to determine the present state: who is right, what is to blame, to give everyone the opportunity to determine this for themselves, to realize the need for unification, and if it will manifest quickly. And if not, then exist like this until there is some kind of universal consensus in a natural way.

Question: Should some kind of unified leader appear for this later? What do you think?

Answer: He may appear. But he will not appear exactly as black or white, as a Republican or a Democrat. He will appear as someone who can unite everyone. So far this is not visible.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 12/20/21

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