Preparation to the Lesson
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Lesson on the Topic, “I to My Beloved and My Beloved to Me”
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Lesson on the Topic, “The Importance of Dissemination”
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Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Study of the Ten Sefirot,” Vol. 1, Part 4, Chapter 6, Item 12
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Selected Highlights
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Comment: It seems to us that in ancient times people were primitive. But you said that they were clearly aware of the connection between them.
My Response: In what way were they primitive? Twenty generations of Jews before and after Adam, ten before Noah, and ten from Noah to Abraham were not primitive. They were attaining the upper world in the connection between them. They realized that this was their destiny, and this was why they existed in this world.
Therefore, they did not do anything needless, and they did not create any great monuments, palaces, or deity-statues. They did not build anything! They did not need it. They were doing internal work. Everyone had a place to stay, bread, water, meat, and milk, everything they needed, and that was enough for them.
Look at the ancient civilization that lived here in Israel. What did they leave behind?
Nothing. Of course, there were cities and settlements, but very simple ones.
And the Temple! What was in this Temple? Nothing special. Two hundred by two hundred meters, or even less.
Everything was so simple because it was aimed at internal spiritual development. And when people went into exile from here to all countries of the world, they lost practically nothing; they took a book with them and left. They lived by completely different values.
And what did Greeks and Romans do? When I first came to Washington, I took a look: “This is Rome—one and the same!. Buildings and columns, this is all ancient Greece.” It is the same in Berlin. The thousand-year-old Reich is the heir of Rome. And in Russia they also built something similar.
And here there is nothing of the kind. Where is anything built here? Or where can you get something from ancient history that you would like to restore? There is nothing. One needs to just build ordinary buildings, live there, and that’s it. Everything else is inside.
Even modern new buildings, no one cares what type they should be. There is no architecture, no special music, no literature in the cultural sense, and so on. There is nothing, and there is no need for any of this! All that is needed is a normal living environment in order to provide clothes, shoes, and food that are necessary for the existence of the body. Everything else is just spirit.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Ancient People and Cultures of the Past” 3/8/13
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Comment: You once said that the world should be afraid not so much of catastrophes and environmental pollution as of unemployment that as soon as the world will be flooded with unemployed people, there will be chaos and a catastrophe worse than an external catastrophe.
My Response: The fact is that the countries will be obliged to support the unemployed. Maybe this will not be a big problem, although of course, it is still a big load. Society is not adapted to the redistribution of goods and satisfying the needy somehow. Everything works according to the old pattern, money, social benefits.
The problem is not that the unemployed are people who have nothing to live on. These are people who feel unnecessary to anyone and they must fill the feeling of emptiness, worthlessness, and insignificance within themselves. They have very bad problems.
A person is created for being able to participate in some kind of work. We see that animals are constantly in search of food, in some kind of communication with each other, in some kind of clarification, in moving from place to place. They are always in internal and external motion. Even if there are fights between them, they do not harm each other purposefully. All this is necessary and embedded in the life cycle of all living things.
A person who leaves work, kind of dies. How long can I sit on Twitter, Facebook, and other sites? There are such programs on television today that there is nothing to watch at all. That is, people degrade so much so that absolutely everything human disappears in them. They are not interested in any growth.
Why go to school? I learned to read and write a little, and even not to write with a pen but to type on the computer and that is it.
What else do I need? I can only send “ha-ha” and “ho-ho” in this correspondence, and that is enough. I watch TV shows, and that is enough. What school? What for?
Once upon a time, school was designed to prepare a person to become a worker, and if you continue your studies at the university, then you become a civil servant or an employee, and so on. But why bother now? That is, school is dying. The whole culture is dying. It closes in on this television, which in turn, drops, as they say, “below the baseboard.” People are in such a state. What will happen to them next?
We could leave it all to chance, but nature has its own laws, its own plans, and its own goal. Therefore, it is very difficult to just ride the waves. It will shake us all the time. Wars, riots, and wild things will happen in the world.
No government will be able to cope with this because in each country 90% of the people will be unemployed. What are you going to do with them?
The only thing that remains is the path of integral upbringing and education, for everyone, from young to old. Only this can raise a person to the next level, and then you will be in unison with nature, you will not have contradictions. You will definitely find good signs in this movement.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. If You Lost Your Job” 3/13/14
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Comment: We believe that people who lived a thousand years ago or even more were very primitive, and now we are so cool. Actually it is the other way around.
My Response: No, in Europe people were indeed really primitive. Look what was going on there in the Middle Ages, the way they lived, all the lawlessness, dirt, problems, lack of hygiene! Of course, there was wildness.
Who could read and write? Who understood history and geography? Who understood how he lives? Everyone was thinking only about how to survive. A small handful of people were busy burning away their lives, and the rest thought only about how to feed themselves.
Now they are showing us luxurious bedrooms and so on and so forth. Naturally, for the kings there was everything, and for the rest nothing. They slept like dogs on a litter and did not wash because they thought they might get sick from it.
What were they doing? What was the culture? What did they read? What did they talk about? They had none of this. I am not saying this in reproach. There were, of course, educated people, philosophers, theologians, etc. But I am talking about the masses.
The Jews for a long time maintained knowledge and a certain spiritual level. However when they fell from this level 2,000 years ago, they preserved their way of life, although it was purely external and mechanical. Study, education, upbringing, the relationship of husband and wife, children, all this has been preserved.
The book Shulchan Aruch contains the entire set of laws according to which Jews live in this world. It has not changed for 3,000 years. How to give birth, how to educate, how to cook, what is kosher, what is not kosher for eating, how to behave, marry, divorce, wash, etc., everything is specified down to the smallest details. A person is a machine; he needs instructions on how to use himself.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Ancient People and Cultures of the Past” 3/8/13
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Question: Is it possible to say that the Klipa (peel) represents obstacles that need to be overcome before acquiring spiritual knowledge?
Answer: Yes, it is not just obstacles. They are specially designed in such a way as to protect the fruit. Therefore, a person who wants to reach the inner filling of the fruit must overcome these external forces that protect the fruit.
He must correct himself in such a way that external forces are not an obstacle to him. That is, the Klipa (outer shell) protects the fruit from a person who is not yet ready to taste it.
The fruit is knowledge. If it opened up before the Klipa surrounded the fruit, it would harm the person. We see that whenever knowledge falls into the hands of people who are morally unprepared for it, they use it to the detriment of themselves and others.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 8/21/22
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Medium published my new article “Alone Is Not Always Lonely”
It seems like social media, pandemics, and modern life have made us isolated people, more alienated from each other than ever, and enjoying mainly our own company. People’s conversation time has been declining for nearly thirty years, and even video calls cannot reverse the trend. It appears that communicating with other people is simply not appealing to more and more people. But considering the fact that we are growing increasingly narcissistic, this trend should not surprise us. In the future, we can expect it to continue, and even accelerate.
I, too, feel that I would rather stay in my room and spend my time the way I like to than to socialize with people who largely do not interest me. I have my books; I have science news and other news that I watch; and I have various other interests.
I can sympathize with people who feel they do not need other people to satisfy their social needs, since we are all becoming increasingly focused on ourselves. The need for reciprocity, for approval from society, is diminishing in many people.
However, it is not that people are becoming increasingly anti-social. They are becoming increasingly fastidious, and do not want to waste their time or energy on futile connections that bring them no real benefit.
People are indifferent to other people because they are becoming more goal-oriented. They choose their goals in life and exert themselves to achieve them. This is a positive development that will lead people to pursue their life’s purpose.
As for me, despite my reclusive nature, my life’s purpose requires that I connect with as many people as possible, and on the deepest possible level: in my heart. To achieve my goal, I am willing to connect with any person and embrace any person. But were it not for my goal, I would still be happily secluded in my room as I was before I began to disseminate the wisdom of Kabbalah around the world, which is my life’s purpose and for which I will happily make any sacrifice.
And as I am, so are many other people becoming increasingly goal oriented. It is an evolution in humanity, and not regression. In the future, we will see more and more people connecting around common goals and avoiding casual interactions, which will seem pointless to them. They will be living on two levels: On the superficial level they will appear aloof or reserved, but on the deeper level they will be deeply connected to those who share their goals.
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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “Mikhail Gorbachev – a Personal Impression”
The passing of Mikhail Gorbachev reminded me of a brief conversation I had had with him. Even before I met him, I had the impression that he was truly a different kind of politician. He was not inherently bad; he understood people and felt close to the regular folk. In the impossible framework where he operated, I think he did his best, and in everyone’s favor. Had he not been taken down from his post as the leader of the Soviet Union, he would have done more good for his country and for the world.
By the time I met him, in November 2005, he had been out of office for nearly fourteen years. Nevertheless, he was still trying to help make the world a better place. We met at a conference in Tokyo, Japan. At the time, I was a member of the World Wisdom Council (WWC), and he was an honorary chairperson of the organization, which was headed by Prof. Ervin Laszlo.
In that event, the Goi Peace Foundation, located in Japan, had invited the WWC for a conference in Tokyo, to participate in its initiative titled, Creating a New Civilization. The highlight of the event was a series of speeches in a hall in downtown Tokyo before an audience of 5,000 people including ambassadors and other officials from 46 countries.
The night before the event, the members of the WWC met for a social gathering with a more casual tone than the formal discussions. That evening I exchanged a few words with Gorbachev. He was very friendly and informal, the last thing you would expect from a former president of the USSR.
In our conversation, I told him that I appreciated his efforts to make the world a better place. He replied that he appreciated my understanding of his intent, and said that he was still active and trying to help wherever and however he could.
I think that considering the circumstances under which he operated, coming from a Soviet, communist background, the reforms he had carried out were astounding, inconceivable until he actually began to make them. In that sense, he was truly a pioneer and deserves the world’s respect for his contribution to humanity.
Creating a New Civilization Conference in Tokyo (2005) Credit: Michael Laitman
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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Is globalization reversible?“
This question came up recently when one of my students mentioned the German government’s preparation for an energy crisis following a reduction in Russian gas supplies. Germany’s Minister of Economy discussed gas as a scarce resource and called upon the Germans to save as much electricity as possible, with the government reactivating coal-fired reactors in the meantime. As a result of this situation, the student could not believe how Europe’s most developed country was asked to save energy, and he thought that we should wake up from the dream of globalization where everyone supplies everyone with everything, and that every country should return to producing what they need for themselves.
Globalization, however, is irreversible. If we returned to each country only providing for itself, then we would find much greater costs across the board, for electricity, cars, food and so on and so forth. It becomes much cheaper for everyone if we provide these supplies to each other.
I understand the constant risk in this situation: All it takes is one government in this globalized connection to make problems and everyone suffers the consequences. For that very reason, we need to make sure that we sustain positive relations. While it might seem impossible, as there is always the ability for one to burst out from a general balance, we nonetheless need to invest in building positive relations. And even if a certain country breaches the balance here and there, it will nonetheless remain much cheaper and more sustainable than if each country supplied all their own needs from beginning to end.
Globalization should lead us to a state where we understand the need to work on positive connections among all people and nations. In such a state, we will have no negative thoughts about each other, and people will not think about exploiting each other, otherwise we will simply end up without our life’s essentials.
Based on the video “Is Globalization Reversible?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
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