Audio Version Of The Blog – 7/19/23
Posted on July 19th, 2023
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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “Why Are People Influenced by Ads”
We are influenced by ads because companies study what we would like and create ads that pinpoint our desires, whetting our appetites with the use of various deception and concealment techniques.
For instance, if we have an initial desire for an iPhone, then advertisers show us that it is exactly what we need and want, and that we should think about it and look into it.
They then feed us with advertisements that show successful men and beautiful women holding iPhones, triggering our desires for social acceptance and respect, and we then start feeling as if we want one too.
In other words, advertising influences us by psychologically manipulating us to not just want the advertised product, but to want the enhanced feelings and perceptions of ourselves that the advertising implants into us. In the case of the iPhone, we then not only want the iPhone, we want to view ourselves as successful, beautiful, lucky and well-dressed, and that we are among others who are also like that.
We are made of desires. Our individual desires that we all have, regardless of our participation in society, are those for food, sex and family. Beyond our individual desires, we have social desires that come from our participation with others: desires for money, respect, fame, control and knowledge. And beyond our social desires, we have a spiritual desire that makes us question the meaning and purpose of our lives.
We have the natural capability to fulfill ourselves at the levels of our individual and social desires without the need for advertising. Yet advertisers create certain forms and images of how to fulfill such desires for various segments of society. They research us and sell us products that we do not need.
If the products were essential, they would require no advertising. For instance, do we need to advertise bread to people enduring a famine?
There was no advertising where I grew up in the Soviet Union because there was nothing on the store shelves. Nobody was struggling to buy anything there at those times. However, at the same time, there was plenty of advertising in America because it was a place that hosted an overproduction of goods, and the goal of the ads was to make people buy.
In our times, however, the spiritual desire is surfacing in more and more people, demanding answers to life’s most fundamental existential questions: What is the meaning of life? Who are we? Where are we from? Where are we now? Where are we headed? What is reality? Also, why is there so much suffering in the world?
The answers to these questions cannot be packaged to us as products that we can buy on impulse, and which require advertisers to deceive us in order for us to want to buy them. Instead, these questions’ answers require educational wisdom and a method that can guide us with principles and advice on how to apply ourselves at the level of thought, desire and action, and in connection with other people, in order to advance us to a higher level of consciousness.
Therefore, as our needs shift to requiring deeper fulfillment of our spiritual desire, people’s demands also gradually move away from the levels that advertising acts on. Today, we increasingly need wisdom, a method, principles and advice in order to navigate ourselves in an era where the new spiritual desire will continue emerging in more and more people.
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Today, scientists say almost the same thing as Kabbalists. Only they don’t have a recipe for how to fix humanity. But the fact that people should become global, integral, interconnected, and to unite according to the challenge of nature scientists are already exploring and revealing.
When people begin to see, feel, and understand this, they will have completely different thoughts, different desires, and a different understanding of what causes such events in the world and what the problem is with the real news that we hear every day.
And then it will be much easier for us to turn together with scientists and together with the masses to governments. For what? We need a system of global human education. People themselves must understand that if they do not change, then they will no longer live in this world.
For example, our body is able to withstand temperatures up to 40° C, and now a period is approaching when the temperature in the world can jump to 70° C. Our body is not designed for this.
So, it is here. We are approaching a state where the world is entering a virtual integral shell in which everything is interconnected. If you are not like this shell, you are not in balance, homeostasis, and harmony with it, and then you are simply unable to withstand it and you quickly die.
And then the next cycle will come when you will be born with different data. But you will come to the right understanding not just like that, but through wars, through problems. Why is this necessary if we can do everything quickly, well, and change humanity within a year or two?
After all, when huge masses are engaged in this, the very idea of correction and the possibility of unification for the sake of peace is in the air. At the same time, a person begins to feel the inner layer of the world, the force that controls us, one enters the level of control.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Rebuilding The World” 8/9/11
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Question: One student asked his mentor, “Teacher, what would you say if you found out I fell?”
“I would say: “Get up!”
“And next time?”
“Again: “Get up!”
“How long can it go on, this constant falling and rising?”
“Fall and rise as long as you live! After all, those who fell and did not get up are dead!”
Until when are we learning to fall and rise all the time? After all, we are growing and we do understand something.
Answer: But these descents and ascents grow in their quality along with my growth. Therefore, they are not the same, they are not equal.
Comment: According to this sage, this is life. When they stop, this is death.
My Response: Yes.
Question: Should we expect falls all the time?
Answer: I do not think it is necessary to live with this. But, in principle, the fact that they will be is inevitable.
Question: Is it possible to teach a person and humanity in a different way?
Answer: No, a person will not reveal himself in any way if he does not go through descents and ascents.
Question: What is the secret in these descents; what do they teach us? They can lead to extreme conditions.
Answer: So, what? They can bring us to any state.
Question: You are calm about it. This is life, right?
Answer: This is life and this is development.
Question: Can the fall be such that a person will not get up? To whom is this given and for what?
Answer: These are special individuals. I do not think this is given to people often. And some people really need this.
Question: You have said more than once that a person is given only what he can endure. What do you mean by that? We see that there are many things that people cannot endure, but they are given them. Or can they still endure them?
Answer: They can. What can people not endure? It all just seems to us that they cannot endure and cannot survive. No. A person survives everything, endures everything, and can work on himself so much that no other being can survive it.
Question: What does “endure” mean? Does it mean to agree with this blow? What is “to exit out of it”?
Answer: Even to agree and even to understand, realize, and survive. This is called getting out of a descent. The fall itself is when I just give myself to it.
Question: What should be the principle of a person’s life in general?
Answer: The principle of a person’s life should be very simple: I have to feel others instead of myself, I have to live not in myself, but in others. That is all. In principle, this leads to the correct result.
Question: So, are you saying that if I close in on myself, then a descent is inevitable, and if I am always open to others and live for them, then I quickly jump out of it?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Why are we given these falls?
Answer: The descents are given in order to empty a person of the past so that he is ready to be filled with the future. Every fall and every rise is a renewal of a person.
Question: Until when can he be renewed? Which peak should he reach?
Answer: Until it completely renews itself. This is the state when he returns to the state of the first man, Adam, that is, to the root of his soul. After then, he no longer needs to change, so to say, internally.
Question: Does he then return to his permanent place, as it were?
Answer: He returns to his place in his original point in the soul of Adam.
Question: “Soul of Adam,” do you mean that this is a single soul?
Answer: Yes. He returns to his point in this soul. Each person has to go through this path of rises and falls in order to return to this point. We cannot run away from this.
Question: Do we know this point in advance? Do we know where we are going?
Answer: We cannot know it because we cannot feel it.
Question: At what point do I begin to feel it?
Answer: When you actually approach it.
Question: Why is it given to us not to feel it?
Answer: We do not have these properties of bestowal, love, connection with other souls, and so on.
Question: So, am I going to this connection, which will connect us into one? Is that where I am going?
Answer: Yes. Therefore, the commandment, that is, the main condition, is “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 6/5/23
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Comment: Throughout the history of mankind some people have tried to correct others, and there have always been penal colonies and prisons.
My Response: Prison is an invention of Pharaoh. We know from the Torah how Pharaoh threw Joseph into prison where he sat together with the cupbearer’s minister.
Judaism does not follow this because it is a clear imprint of Kabbalah. In no case should anyone be corrected. Just be patient and teach. No punishments!
There can be punishment only when you and the punished person know exactly what is happening and you work together on his egoism. He agrees that you are punishing him because otherwise his ego cannot be corrected, and he is grateful to you for this. For him, this is a correction. But this is not a correction in prison.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Prison” 8/16/11
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In Judaism, there are certain laws regarding kosher plants. For the first three years, you have no right to eat fruit from a newly planted tree. After that, you must separate a special part from them, such as the tenth, which a person separates from his earnings because the tithe (maaser) symbolizes the tenth part of the spiritual Partzuf Malchut.
There are also certain laws regarding the consumption of meat and milk, the right and left parts. After eating meat, you can eat dairy only after six hours, and after consuming milk, you can eat meat in half an hour or an hour. Why six hours? Because the Zeir Anpin includes six Sefirot: Hesed, Gevura, Tiferet, Netzach, Hod, and Yesod.
In general, all this comes from spiritual ideas. In our world, people fulfill these laws on the physical level although they have nothing to do with the correction of the soul. But when you do it, you start to think and ask: “What for?” And somehow you sort of connect with the spiritual.
And even if you do not ask, you are still in some kind of automatic state of communication, not definite, not explicit, not conscious, but there is some small glow somewhere. Therefore, it preserves a person for the future, and when he really begins to show interest in the upper, in the meaning of life, it kind of pulls him up.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Kosher Pork?” 7/16/11
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Comment: You said that when a person feels pain, he is deliberately hidden from the Creator so that he does not harm himself.
My Response: If a person feels pain, it means that he is opposite from the Creator, nature, the quality of bestowal. Then, in order not to harm his attitude to the general system of nature, he forgets that he is in it at all and just goes deeper into pain.
Comment: But the pain should not be very strong.
My Response: No, you do not know nature. The pain can be severe to such an extent that a person will beg for death and will not be able to die.
Question: And what kind of pain allows him to wake up after all?
Answer: If while working in a group to unite with his friends he sees that he is not moving forward to connect with them, then this causes him pain. Meaning, it is a purposeful pain coming from the right goal, the right movement forward, the right vector. Then this pain is useful. It is called suffering from love, not just suffering.
When you want to be connected with the whole of humanity in one single system and feel that you are not able to—your body, your desire, your egoistic qualities do not allow you to do this—then your suffering is correct because it leads you to the need to correct yourself.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Pain = Help From the System” 8/29/11
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Question: What kind of movie would you like to make, one that would really work? What should it lead to?
Answer: I have not seen a movie like that, that would change people and lead them to some serious internal changes.
Question: But would you like for such a movie to exist?
Answer: Of course! Who would not want that? Practically everyone wants a good future. But I do not know.
Question: Are you saying that if a movie would change a person, then you are for such a movie?
Answer: Yes.
Comment: You have said more than once that we are as if in a theater right now.
My Response: We see that this does not change us either.
Question: If so, the first condition is that a movie should change a person, then next is from whom to whom, from what to what?
Answer: From who one is now. Now, a person is just a beast that thinks only about oneself and cannot think about others. Or if he can think about others, then only in the form in which what he does to them will return to him.
That is, if a person is actually given absolute freedom, he will be completely indifferent to everything around him except to the extent that the immediate surroundings will be pleasant to his eye.
Comment: This is the man of today.
My Response: This is man.
Question: We are talking about correction. What should this beast come to?
Answer: To begin to understand that the most important thing is when your joy is in others. For this, it is necessary to change the nature of man.
Question: “Your joy is in others”—what do you mean by this?
Answer: It means that when others feel good, you feel good. But how can this be? It is the other way around. You can be happy, on the contrary, that you are better than others, that they are worse than you.
Question: I see. One way or another you always lower others so that they are lower than you, right?
Answer: Naturally. Instead, you should raise them above you.
Question: Is this the main change? If there were this kind of movie that directs a person in this way, are you for such a movie?
Answer: I am for such a movie, but it would not be successful.
Question: Financially?
Answer: It would not have any success. No one would be enthusiastic about it.
Comment: So, you do not want to dream, you are going back to reality.
My Response: For a long time I cannot dream, I am not young anymore, to put it mildly.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 5/18/23
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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What comes before thought?“
The foundation for everything, the only matter that was created, is desire.
Desire is thus primary, and thought is an upshot of the desire.
However, in order to obtain what we desire, the mind develops alongside the desire, in correspondence with it.
No matter how much we might resist the idea that desire precedes thought, nonetheless the mind—and thus, thought—is the desire’s servant, developing solely for the sake of serving the desire.
We can thus never make our minds objective and independent of our desires. But we can change our desires under the influence of the environment (see the article “The Freedom” by Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag [Baal HaSulam]), i.e., under the influence of social, cultural and other educational impetus that surround us. In other words, we can observe examples in our environment that promote the importance of fulfilling one desire over another, and by doing so, we can change what we desire.
Understanding this principle and the vast importance of the environment’s influence over us, then under the influence of an environment that leads us to the ultimate goal of our lives—to a harmonious connection where we reveal the positive force hidden in nature—we can constantly develop both our desires and our minds in harmony.
Moreover, if we have big desires but our mind is undeveloped to actualize them, we could then lose our ability to sensibly control ourselves.
Preparation to the Lesson
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1st part of the Lesson — Writings of Rabash, Article 19, “Why Is the Torah Called “Middle Line” in the Work?-2”
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2nd part of the Lesson — Lesson on the Topic of “The Ruin as an Opportunity for Correction
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Selected Highlights
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