Comment: A letter from Irina: “We were together since the first grade at school, and we never quarreled. He used to carry my school bag already in the third grade, and all the boys laughed at him. But we became even better friends, and everyone envied us. After school, we studied at the Institute of Technology together, in the same department. In the third year we got married. Our parents were friends. We gave birth to two children. I do not understand where the irritation, rejection, and hatred have come from, we knew each other thoroughly!

Today we are already divorced. Until now court trials and disputes have been going on. It was a terrible break-up! I cannot hear his voice, I cannot see him! I have constant inner pain! I do not understand how this could have happened to me! I do not know what I did wrong!”

My Response: You did not work on yourself. You thought nothing would change. But a person is constantly changing, not to mention two people, and even more so those who have known each other and have been together all the time. They change a lot throughout their lifetime. And since they were used to each other, for them the slightest changes lead to very sharp internal reactions.

It turns out that I can suddenly see another person as mean, disgusting, opposite to me, constantly perceiving me and my attitude ambiguously, and so on. It is precisely because they know each other too well. Therefore, now even the slightest change causes huge disturbances between us.

Comment: According to human logic, the better we know each other, the closer we are and the greater is the love between us. And you claim that it is the other way around.

My Response: The bigger the commotion can be. Therefore, we need to constantly arouse all sorts of allegedly negative properties and relationships between us so that we can train with them and turn them into positive ones.

Question: So you say that marriage is a constant exercise?

Answer: A permanent one! As my teacher said: “Love is a beast that lives between you, an evil beast. And if you constantly feed it, then everything is fine.”

Question: What does this beast grow into if it is constantly fed?

Answer: It will be big next to you. And you will be dealing with it together until old age.

Question: And this beast is called love?

Answer: Yes. And in fact, it is very, very scary.

Question: So they must see in advance that their relationship will change sharply and oppositely?

Answer: Yes, they should foresee it. And they should even play it.

Question: What do we feed this beast with?

Answer: With concessions. That is, we can deliberately annoy it and learn to concede.

Question: Please, reveal the secret of a long married life together. What does this mean for you?

Answer: For me, it means to let the husband live his life.

Question: And what about the wife?

Answer: The same about the wife. And if they have something in common, it is, of course, children.

But neither with my studies nor with my profession do I in any way invade her respective area and she does not invade mine. In this way we give each other the possibility of life—inner life, basically, after all.

And the most important thing is taking care of children. It is our common area. In principle, after all, people couple and get married in order to give birth and raise children and grandchildren.

Question: What is love?

Answer: Love is the desire to let another person exist next to you in a way that is comfortable for him. This, I think, is the secret of love and a long, normal life together, although it is very, very difficult because we live for a very long time, twice as long as we used to. And that is why it is not easy.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 12/9/21

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Question: What does a covenant of salt mean?

Answer: Salt is a substance that does not spoil. On the contrary, it preserves everything that is put into it.

Therefore, the covenant that we make between us and with the Creator means an eternal covenant. Salt in our world represents exactly this quality of the covenant.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 12/28/21

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Preparation to the Lesson

Lesson on the Topic “Winning the War (Against the Evil Inclination)”

Writings of Baal HaSulam “Peace in the World”

Selected Highlights

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Listen to an Audio Version of the Blog
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My new article on Linkedin “A Sensitive Spot in Humanity”

The conflict in Ukraine is not a regular conflict between two nations. It is a very deep crisis that originates from a very special place in the common human soul. It is a sensitive spot in humanity, and we can see how powerfully it impacts all of us.

We will not resolve this crisis through diplomatic measures. At best, we will calm it down for a while, but it will only erupt more violently afterwards. We will also not end the conflict if one side completely overruns the other; no one will capitulate here, and the fire will continue to burn underneath until it explodes again.

There is only one thing we need to do in order to resolve the crisis: increase the importance of complementarity, the importance of the necessity to unite the hearts of the members of the rivaling nations above the enmity. To be clear, simply wanting the war to end will not end it; we need to want the separation between us to end. We need to want to feel each other’s hearts, and this, among many other benefits, will also silence the roaring guns.

We are in a very difficult, very treacherous situation. We should not blur things or try to cover them up. Tactics and political artifice will not resolve the crisis.

The only solution is to make an effort to bring people’s hearts closer above, and despite the hatred that has erupted among them. Otherwise, there will be no solution to the conflict, it will only escalate and drag more countries into it, and we all know what that means.

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Medium published my new article “Why We Cannot Work in Synchrony”

The war in Ukraine, the inability of the world to sanction Russia effectively, the uneven distribution of medications, the uneven distribution of wealth, staples, education, wherever you look, there are growing gaps and growing instability in human society. Now let us look at nature. In nature, everything is balanced and harmonious, synchronized to the last detail.

There is a famous natural phenomenon called “spontaneous synchronization” that causes bodies in close proximity to synchronize their movements. Metronomes, for example, spontaneously synchronize their beats even if you deliberately start them at different times.

But spontaneous synchronization applies not only to pacemakers; it applies to all levels of reality. This is how award winning Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University Steven Strogatz explains the phenomenon (Min 10:09–10:37): “One of the things that I find most appealing about it is how universal it is, that it occurs at every scale of nature, from subatomic to cosmic. It uses every communication channel that nature has ever devised, from gravitational interactions, electrical interactions, chemical, mechanical, I mean you name it. Anyway that two things can influence each other, nature uses that to get things in sync.”

It seems like the only element in reality that “escapes” spontaneous synchronization is humanity. It is as if the rules that apply to all of nature do not apply to us.

To an extent, this is true. In addition to belonging to the animate level of life, we are also sentient beings, and our actions are determined by willful decisions. In order to synchronize our actions, we need to want it to happen.

Otherwise, if we leave it to nature to decide, human nature, which is inherently self-centered, will override the system-centered nature of the rest of reality, and we will remain deeply discordant, and as a result, profoundly antagonistic to each other.

Over the past few years, the level of our alienation from each other has increased to a level that makes the possibility of another world war a realistic scenario. The only way to avoid it is to consciously and willfully adopt synchrony among us. What nature does spontaneously, we must do consciously and voluntarily.

There is a good reason for this. When we choose to follow a certain path, we do so after examining and evaluating all the options for and against it. If we behaved a certain way because we only followed our instincts, we would be animals not people. The difference between us and animals is that we think, debate, and question until we finally decide. As a result, the picture we see is more complete and deeper than any being in nature.

Yet, the price we pay for being sentient is often far too high. If we want to live in a peaceful world where people are wise and kind, we must make it happen. We must choose synchrony and harmony over friction and dissention. To do that, we must consciously raise the importance of synchrony in all of humanity.

Harmony and synchrony will not make us the same or even similar. Rather, they will make us harmonious and complementary. They will make us enjoy contributing our skills and abilities for the greater good, and together we will build a strong and solid society whose members are safe, healthy, and above all, happy.
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There is only one way to win the internal war: it is to cover all crimes with love and to rise above arguing who is right and who is wrong. Then the corporeal war, which was a consequence of the internal one, will also end.

If the war does not end with victory, first of all in the spiritual sense, then corporeal victory will not help. The battle may subside for a while, but it will certainly resume.

Therefore, we must fight in order to cover all crimes with love, not try to figure out on whose side the truth is in this conflict and confrontation, but to rise above both poles. This is possible only if we understand that all the forces of confrontation come from the Creator and that only by rising up to Him can we reconcile them by ascending to their source.

The conflict is arranged by the Creator, there is none else besides Him. Only by combining two opposing forces can we win, not by choosing which of the two lines is right, but by walking in the middle line. The Creator started the war and is waging it, and therefore, only by appealing to Him with a demand to reconcile this dispute can it be ended. As it is written: “He Who makes peace in His heavens, may He make peace for us.”

We did not make timely corrections, and therefore the corruptions accumulated and have exploded as an exacerbation of a neglected disease. And that is what is happening now. For tens and even hundreds of years these problems have been hiding in humanity, breaking out here and there as symptoms of an internal disease.

We must understand that if a problem has been revealed, then it has already existed before. Now, when it has manifested, we have the opportunity to correct it and reach the end of correction.

The Creator arranged the shattering for us. It is not our fault that we received a shattered world in which the egoistic force rules. We only need to reveal this and ask the Creator to make a correction because through it we adhere to the Creator.

He does everything—not us. We just need to turn to Him above all the revealed problems. We understand that all this was arranged by Him and done on purpose so that we would ask Him for corrections. This is called: “My sons defeated Me.”
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/1/22, “Winning the War (Against the Evil Inclination)”

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KabNet published my new article: “Toward Worldwide Shortage of Staples”

The war in Ukraine poses many threats not only to Ukraine, but to the entire world. The sanctions against Russia are extreme if not unprecedented.

However, we should not believe that this will come at no cost to the world. Already, the prices of wheat and oil are skyrocketing, but it is still not the worst of it. The worst will come when there is none of them, when supermarket shelves in Europe and the US are empty because of the war in Ukraine. The most important lesson we can (and should) already learn from this war is that the world is one, interdependent global village, and that when you hurt someone else, you hurt yourself.

Even before the war broke out, the strain on supply chains was driving up prices, and inflation was breaking records in the US and elsewhere. But now, for some products, the supply chains will collapse altogether.

We should not deal with this crisis only on the superficial level. We should not settle for looking for substitutes for the missing products. If we do, the substitutes will fail us, too.

Instead, we need to use the opportunity to correct the reason for the broken supply chains: our broken connections. The sanctions against Russia, with their implications to both Russia and the West, should make us realize that we cannot build our relationships on mutual exploitation. Our relations will be sustainable only if we establish them on trust and mutual complementation.

It is clear that in every transaction, each party has its own interest in mind; there is nothing wrong with that. However, when parties seek not only to profit from their deals, but to extort the other parties, to take from them more than they are willing to give, either by deceit or by force, this will not work for long. We must change our attitude from using our resources to impose our will, into sharing our resources for the greater good.

It is not as though we should suddenly love each other, at least not yet. But even if we cannot stand each other, we all have goods that others need but do not have, and others have goods that we need but do not have. Therefore, even if we cannot stand each other, we must share with one another. But for the chain to remain open, we must work with mutual respect and decency.

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Question: There are four covenants in spirituality. Is there an order in which they take place?

Answer: No, we should just work on our common desire within the group and aim to fully link it to the quality of bestowal. This is all done during the study in stages. Once the Creator grants us the upper force, it will happen in us.

Question: What if I am somewhat confused about these four covenants?

Answer: Do not even think about how many there are! We just need to think about connection with our friends and with the whole huge world group studying the advancement toward the Creator, and then with the whole of humanity to bring everyone to the full extent of their strength and capabilities to a covenant with each other and with the Creator.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 12/28/21

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Question: How do you pray for your friends if you clearly feel that there is no one else but the Creator?

Answer: If you feel that there is none else but the Creator, then everything is fine. Perfect! So, this correction has already been passed through you. I congratulate you! This is already a big step.

But then all the friends must be included in the Creator. You must relate to them as you would to the Creator.

Think about the fact that the attitude toward your friends and toward the Creator should be completely identical for you. Check yourself and realize that you are not yet at all at the level where the Creator and your friends are the same for you. We need to move forward.
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From the International Convention “Rising Above Ourselves” 1/9/22, “Asking the Creator to Fill the Place Between Us” Lesson 7

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