Question: Filmmakers are using technologies firms in many companies are developing to synthetically create dialog and visuals in their productions. 

The reality is that in a year or two such technologies that completely copy, not just the visual appearance of a person, but also his voice, that can place anyone in any situation, will be available to everyone. The Internet will be filled with material in which I could see myself in places where I have never been. The frameworks a person can rely on are disappearing and the boundaries of reality are being blurred.

What awaits us when everyone can use your image and voice to create any content?

Answer: We will not pay attention to it. Let’s say they make a puppet out of me and twist it any way they want. Be my guest!

And what is there about me that they can do? Something with me personally? With my image? Everyone will know it is or it is not so. In the end, what difference does it make to me?

I think society by this time will be mature enough for understanding that there are higher values that do not include copying a person and making a parody out of him. Personally, this would not anger me in any way. It would not bother me.

Comment: But in such situations a person feels that the framework of his self-identification, the old reference points, are dissolving. And he does not seem to feel the new ones yet.

My Response: A public person might feel that way. After all, it can confuse voters and they might think: “Look what he said, what he did.” But I think humanity will quickly figure it out.

Everything is coming to a point where we will not pay any attention to what they say about us, what they think, and how they represent us. So, my image runs across the screen as if it is a 100% me and does some tricks: here I lead a gang of robbers, and there I am involved in a theft. So what? If all this becomes routine, we will simply stop focusing on it, we will look at it as tricks performed by a puppet.

Basically, each of us is a puppet. We all play certain roles because they are somehow placed in us and played-out. And man is entirely a product of a certain program. I think humanity will understand this rather quickly.

The most important thing in all this is to rise above your animate, egoistic self and start building yourself on a completely different level where no one can get you because you work for bestowal, for altruism, for connection, and for good relations with others.

And then, no matter what they say about you, it remains somewhere below, on the animate level, and has nothing to do with you. Because in these good states toward others, you are now forming yourself. And it does not bother you at all that Hollywood cartoons are being created from your egoistic self. After all, you are building your altruistic self, not out of caricatures, but by wanting real paintings.
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From KabTV’s “Kabbalah Express” 12/6/21

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Preparation to the Lesson

Writings of Baal HaSulam “Introduction to The Book of Zohar,” Item 42

Writings of Baal HaSulam “Preface to the Wisdom of Kabbalah,” Item 139

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

Selected Highlights 

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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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