Question:You constantly say that the Creator talks to a person all the time and that everything that happens around us is a theater. If this is a theater, then how do you play your role correctly?
Answer:In spiritual work, you play with yourself against your ego. You have to play the next level as if you do not have egoism in you, as if it has already been corrected.
The best thing is not to resist what is in you—listen to good advice. Instead of fighting at the lower level, raise yourself to a higher level, and it becomes easy and good for you. You play this state together with your friends.
Indeed, this is a theater! The theater causes a surge of the higher force on you because you are trying to reveal it within yourself. It exists around you in nature; it is a universal field of information and energy.
You do not have to fight with yourself. You just have to rise above yourself all the time! Do not pay attention to your egoism, do not live in it, and do not engage in beating yourself up, that I am such and such. Break away from the ego as if you are already above it. It will become easy for you. And it is very difficult to be in it.
This technique is very simple. The one who remembers it allows himself to save time and energy. [308456] From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. How to Realize Your Destiny?” 3/11/12
New Life 256 – Good Neighboring
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Nitzah Mazoz
How do we turn from merely tolerating our neighbors to a loving connection with them? In a certain way, our neighbors are closer to us than any other people. They affect us in our homes when we perceive their noise, music, odors, arguments, conversations, etc. When we create positive relationships with our neighbors, our homes and neighborhoods become places of safety, serenity, and tranquility, enveloped in a cloud of goodness and calm.
Dr. Laitman offers a set of practices that turns bad neighbors into good neighbors so that it becomes a pleasure to be around them. It begins with a set of five or ten meetings between neighbors, perhaps twice per week, in which we introduce the principle of “Love covers all crimes.” Rather than focus on any complaint, we leave the crimes “downstairs” while we build connection above them. Even if it is far from our actual experience, we must imagine our neighbors as ideal neighbors. When I pass their door, I bless them and only think positive thoughts about them. And so on.
Within a month or two everything will change. It will start to hurt my self-respect to think anything bad about my neighbors.
We can evaluate the shift that occurs by asking: How did my opinions about my neighbors change? How much did unpleasant thoughts about them awaken in me? How much was I able or unable to overcome these thoughts? How many transgressions are now occurring compared to what was happening before? We will find that we not only have much better relations with our neighbors, but also within our family and work relationships. Our efforts will lead to warm embraces filled with mutual love, to good feeling and contentment in our shared environment. This summary was written and edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman [123817] From KabTV’s “New Life 256 – Good Neighboring,” 11/18/13
Indeed, throughout history, the Jewish people have seen fellow Jews turn against their own people. Titus’ Chief of Staff, Tiberius Julius Alexander, who was Philo’s nephew and whose father donated the gilded gates to the Temple, commanded both the destruction of Jerusalem and the massacre of 50,000 of his native Jewish community in Alexandria. In the 15th century, Tomás de Torquemada, of Jewish descent, was Spain’s first Grand Inquisitor, and the architect behind the expulsion of the Jews from Spain.
During World War II there were Jews who fought and spied for Nazi Germany. Stalin’s personal assistant, Alexander Poskrebyshev, was a Jew and assisted him in everything, including his plan to exile all of Russia’s Jews to Siberia.
More recently, we have the infamous Bernie Sanders example where, as a Jew, he believed that Israel killed “over 10,000 innocent people” in the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict, when even Hamas’ highest casualty assessments were a quarter of that number.
Jews are said to be unique, but this profound self-loathing is not only unique, it is also very dangerous.
From the very beginning, we Jews were different. Even in the days when we were called “Hebrews,” we lived by different moral and social codes. While the rest of the nations lived by the sword, the ancient Hebrews exercised brotherly love and attempted to love their neighbors as themselves. And while the world nurtured individualism, the Hebrews fostered selflessness.
Our ancestors were an eclectic “bunch.” They did not come from a specific tribe or locality, but were a collection of individuals who took to the idea that mercy and brotherly love were the tenets by which to live. Unlike their Babylonian and Canaanite contemporaries, they did not try to hurl ego against ego to see who was left standing. They had come from just such societies and no longer wanted to live this way. Instead, they acknowledged that the ego, which they termed “evil inclination,” is indeed evil, that it is an inherent trait (“evil crouches at the door”), and that the one way to overcome it is to cover it with love. To put it in the words of King Solomon (Proverbs, 10:12): “Hate stirs strife, and love covers all crimes.”
Granted, it is not easy to constantly aspire to correct your ego and love your neighbor as yourself. From the very beginning, some Jews could not live up to that ideal and left the creed. In fact, after the exile in Babylon, the majority of the Jews abandoned their faith and mingled with the nations. The few who did return to the land of Israel became the Jewish people we know today. They were the ones entrusted with passing on the ideology of their forefathers: the idea that “love covers all crimes” is the way to live, and that “love your neighbor as yourself” is the great klal (all-inclusive law) of the Torah, the Jewish law.
When Israel’s remaining Jews had declined into unfounded hatred, they could not keep their unity, the Temple was ruined, and the Jews disintegrated into exiled communities. It seemed only fitting that the one who ruined the Temple, Tiberius Julius Alexander, was himself a Jew.
Soon after the ruin of the Temple, anti-Semitism in its more contemporary form of blood-libels, conspiracy theories, and accusations of disloyalty, began to dominate the nations’ attitude toward the Jews. At best, the aristocracy tolerated them for their economic and financial acuity. At worst, they were murdered and driven away.
Devoid of the ability to live up to the tenet they themselves had engendered, the Jews became as selfish as their host nations, and a great many of them could not understand why they should maintain loyalty to their religion. These assimilated Jews became our nation’s fiercest enemies, holding profound rancor toward their kindred. They knew that they were born into a creed that was meant to be “a light unto nations,” but they did not want to be the chosen people and resented the fact that the world expected them to be different, more ethical than others, when in fact they weren’t.
Non-Jewish anti-Semites have it relatively easy; they simply hate Jews and they rarely need to rationalize it. Jewish anti-Semites have a much harder life: they feel constantly obligated to justify to themselves and to the world why they hate their own people.
In doing so, they perpetuate and deepen Jewish disunity, driving us further away from the brotherhood that had originally propelled us into nationhood. And when we cannot form brotherhood, we cannot be “a light unto nations” and we therefore intensify the nations’ hatred toward us. This is the reason why the worst catastrophes happen to Jews in countries where we are the most assimilated and least united, as it happened in Spain and later in Germany.
We all have a part within us that resents its origin and objects to our task. Just like our forefathers, this is something we all have to overcome by uniting above our egos. If we let that Jew-hater within take over, we will increase the separation among us and the hatred toward us will grow even more.
The deeper the world falls into unbridled egoism, the more it needs a method to cope with it, and the more it will turn against the Jews. Being the ones who once had a successful way of working with the ego—by uniting above it instead of making futile attempts to crush it—the world will blame us for its woes, not realizing that all it really wants is for us to connect and set an example of unity.
While we may be unable to change the self-hating Jew without, or within us, we can use them as reminders of our task: to unite by covering our hatred with love, in order to share it by way of example with the world. We owe the world our unique method of connection. Until we implement it in order to share it, we will remain the world’s pariahs, whether we espouse socialism or capitalism. Our way to freedom lies not in hating one another and bonding with the world; it lies in loving one another first, and then bonding with the world.
Answer: Because they know how to handle money correctly, and have for thousands of years.
Question: What does it mean to handle money correctly?
Answer: To earn, to keep, to save, to turn money into a bank-type enterprise, and so on. That is what they can do. But it takes a long time to learn.
Question: And this can be learned?
Answer:I think Jews are not the best in this matter, but life forced them. They could not sit in one place, they could not work and create large enterprises because they were taken away from them, set on fire, smashed.
Therefore, they had only one opportunity left—to work with money. A lot is written about this. I believe that this is what led them to a relatively independent material well-being. [308332] From KabTV’s “Blitz of Questions and Answers” 1/6/23
Question:How much should we earn? You fight, you struggle, and you cannot earn anything significant.
Answer: Start thinking that you want to earn less. And then you will see that you have even more than you wanted.
Question: How can you enjoy working?
Answer: To do this you need to enter the craft. Whatever you do, you should strive to be a master of your craft, and then you will enjoy working.
Question: Where can I get energy for success?
Answer:It depends only on the importance of the goal. If you want to achieve something, you will have energy. But the most important thing is to understand that this is your goal, and you have to achieve it. [308292] From KabTV’s “Blitz of Questions and Answers” 1/6/23
Question: In 1950, Harvard biology professor Curt Richter conducted an experiment with rats where he drowned domesticated and then feral rats, one by one, in jars of water to study how long they would struggle to survive. The first rats did not last long, only a matter of minutes. The remaining domesticated rats swam for days before giving up. The hope of salvation gave them these vital forces. The feral rats, both aggressive and able swimmers gave up quickly after realizing they were in a glass enclosure.
How would you apply this to humanity? Today, many give up and drown almost immediately. Such a time has come. How can we tell this to humanity? Do we need to give hope to it and how?
Answer: Humanity does not want to agree with the salvation that the Creator dictates to us. It agrees to move to salvation only in its own way: “I will suppress others and thus survive.”
Comment: That is, the Creator says: “I will save you,” and we do not want to be saved. But if we wanted to follow the path of the Creator, then we could keep afloat for a very long time.
My Response: No problem. If these experimental rats, for example, had held onto each other, they would not have drowned. Therefore, our task is to hold on to each other, and then we would be like on a raft.
Question: What are the conditions for this raft to exist and float?
Answer: Mutual guarantee. This is what the Creator wants from us: Each of us lives for others.
Question: Is this hope, is this salvation, and is this everything?
Answer: It is the only solution.
Question: I understand that this is the voice of the Creator. How can we hear it?
Answer:Love your neighbor as yourself. This formula should be the main one, when everyone will think for the other, about the other, for the sake of the other, and not for themselves. Then people will feel that this is the force that will support them forever. [308682] From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 1/5/23
Comment: A beautiful Jewish parable goes like this: The rich inhabitants of a town hired a man to guard their possessions at night and their big wealthy homes. Late one night, a sage met the watchman and asked him: “Who do you work for?” The watchman answered him and, in turn, asked the sage: “Who do you work for?” These words pierced the sage’s heart. He answered sadly: “It turns out, I don’t work for anyone.” They walked for a long while and talked. The wise man asked the watchman: “Will you come work for me? I’m ready to pay you whatever you ask.” “With pleasure! But what will I have to do?” the watchman asked. “Keep reminding me,” said the sage.
My Response:Yes, that’s true.
Question: So even a wise man demands to be reminded that there is someone he works for?
Answer:Of course. This is the reason he is considered wise; he seems to have everything except the most important thing: he does not have good connections with everyone else.
Comment: But he still asks: “Who do you work for?” So it is not that he forgets, but that he needs to always remember that he works for the Creator.
Answer:Yes.
Question: The sage said: “I’ll pay whatever you ask.” Can you in fact pay to be constantly reminded?
Answer: This is the most important thing. After all, this is the only way you earn, if I may say so, your real wealth.
Question: If you don’t lose the connection?
Answer: Yes. If you constantly increase your connection with the Creator, you invest in it.
Question: Is it possible to stay connected all the time and not to lose it? Or should there still be these ups and downs, interruptions, ins and outs?
Answer: There must be ins and outs all the time. There must be disconnections, because otherwise there will be no renewal of the connection between a person and the Creator through other people. And that is why we are in such a constant stop-and-go movement.
Question: Is that why it is written, “And there was evening, and there was morning”? So the “evening” is my loss of connection with the upper?
Answer:Yes, which specifically comes from above. This is called “awakening from above.” And below, there should be a drive from below, which would push a person to a prayer, to form a request, and so on.
Comment: According to this parable, awakening from below can only happen from some connection with the watchman, with another person who reminds me.
My Response: That is why it says so in the parable, that he reminds.
Question: So can I not do it myself all the time?
Answer: No way.
Comment:After all, he is a righteous man, a wise man, a tzaddik…
My Response: That is why he is a righteous man, a wise man, and a tzaddik, because he knows himself, his state, and how to remain at this level.
Question: Only if he is reminded of this?
Answer: Yes. While somebody else, on the contrary, would say that everything is fine, he is in full connection with the Creator, and all is well.
Question: Can we call one who says so a sinner?
Answer: Yes. Because the righteous is the one who justifies the Creator for the fact that He created our world not so perfect, but left a place for man to improve. While the sinner may consider the world to be absolutely perfect. It is the opposite. Humanity thinks quite differently.
Question: So the sinner is the one who says: “Everything is created perfectly, everything is in full connection,” and so on. Is such a person a sinner?
Answer: Yes. While the righteous man says: “Everything has been created perfectly because there is work left for me. And in this way, I can raise this world.” [308221] From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 12/15/22
Comment:You said that pride is the best quality of a person.
My Response: Of course! After all, it is specially created so that a person can see how different he is from the Creator.
Due to the fact that he is at war with pride, he gets closer to the Creator. Every time he uses it the other way around, i.e., belittling himself, not helping his egoism, but reducing it and putting pressure on it, he thus rises above the ego.
Imagine that there is one point in a person and this is his embryo. Pride begins to grow under this point and raises it all the time. If a person can annul pride, then he rises, absorbs it into himself, and grows. If he cannot include this pride in himself, that is, to act with it exactly the opposite, to bestow, then it becomes lower and worse.
This is a very serious period in our life! It takes many years for a person to realize this. This is the most difficult period! Then it gets easier and easier.
Of course, there will also be difficult conditions in the future, but they are understandable and easily processed by the soul, heart, and mind.
In the first stages you become simply untenable and do not know where you are going, where to go, and what to do; you are knocked out of these states and you do not hear anything.
But then, no matter what the states are, you control yourself and understand why they are created in you. [308463] From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Pride Is the Key to Success” 3/11/12
Question: You constantly say that the Creator talks to a person all the time and that everything that happens around us is a theater. If this is a theater, then how do you play your role correctly?
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