Inner work begins with our desire to get out of ourselves, to connect. And the way out of the connection is measured by how much it contradicts our desire and what forces interfere with the connection and fight against it.

These resisting forces just serve as help against us because they show a person where one still needs to make efforts to correct oneself.

And so a person gradually moves on and on. He tries to connect with his neighbor and bestow, and every time he receives rejection and correction of the direction, difficulties, burdening of the heart, and awareness of his mistake. But repeating over and over again gradually accumulates “penny by penny into a large sum,” and one day comes the “reckoning”; that is, he really reveals the power of bestowal, the power of faith.

And the main thing here is not to despair! After all, we start this path completely egoistically (Lo Lishma) and think only about how we can win big. We do not associate this with other people in any way and do not feel who this “neighbor” is.

These are still similar actions like a newborn baby who does not understand what he is doing at all and does not feel what is being done to him. But over time, he begins to feel a little, to hear, to see something, to react somehow, and so he grows! In the same way, we grow in spirituality! Only we are obliged to make efforts at every moment of our life, just like a child who is naturally pushed to grow by nature.

In fact, a person is not required to do more than what he is able to give. The main thing is to try! The main thing is to want bestowal, at least in some measure. And it is clear that this desire is not for real bestowal, but it doesn’t matter! The main thing is to want, and from these efforts a genuine desire will be born. Like a child who wants to be an adult, and thanks to his efforts to become big, to understand, to feel, and to do something he grows.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/08/14, The Book of Zohar – Selected Chapter “Hukat (The Statute), “Moses, Aaron, and Miriam”

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The melodies of Baal HaSulam are filled with spiritual meaning. It does not matter in what style they are written because he has put spiritual content into them. If it were not Baal HaSulam, then the same notes would no longer be perceived in such a way. There is nothing in the notes themselves and in their combination but just what he has put into them.

I think it is impossible to convey this to listeners.

Question: You explained that there is music that is the ultra-left line, and there is music that is the right line, and Baal HaSulam somehow combines all this, right?

Answer: I repeat once again, it is very difficult to convey this to a person, it is almost impossible. This is about inner feelings. A person who is in spirituality feels that there are special forces in this music, which the author has specially put into it.

Question: Musicians who play the melodies of Baal HaSulam say that this is music that conveys spirituality. To what extent does their performance pass spiritual information?

Answer: I do not think their performance passes anything. I believe that this melody should be just simple, not pretentious, although any melody should change its format over the course of generations because the souls are already different. But all the same, we need to play simply, clearly, and preferably as close as possible to the way it was intended by the author.

When the music of Baal HaSulam is performed in a rap style, I do not feel it. I hear that this is Baal HaSulam, but of course, there is no depth in it.

I am glad that his melodies are changed with love. They want to make them closer to the modern public; they want to attract the public to him by this. I understand these efforts. They are nice, good efforts. But for me personally, they… Not because I am an old aksakal [white beard, elderly], but still Baal HaSulam thought at a different pace, in a different clavier.

Question: Can a melody come from your students that will carry an inner experience?

Answer: Where from? Only if these students are in spiritual attainment, i.e., connected with each other so that the Creator is revealed between them, and they sing about that.

Question: Does it mean that everything that comes from people who are not yet in spiritual attainment is purely egoistic?

Answer: Of course! People perceive everything out of egoism until they go inside, into the spiritual perception. After all, everything begins from outside the spiritual world.

I do not think the melodies of Baal HaSulam can touch strangers. They do not tell them anything. This is the law of nature in which everything is measured by the extent of similarity.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Melodies of Spiritual Comprehension” 3/4/13

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Comment: I read an article in which our current period is called “interesting for a historian and sad for contemporary man.”

My Response: It’s interesting because everything is developing very rapidly. “Sad for contemporary man” depends on for whom.

Question: It says that in addition to all the troubles, wars, and natural disasters, long-term friendship is collapsing, a brother stops calling his sister, children stop calling their parents, parents curse children.

Eighty years ago, Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a former member of the resistance executed by the Nazis, wrote from prison and quoted the lyrics from a song by Hugo Wolf, “Over night, over night, joy and sorrow come, and sooner than you thought, they both leave you, and go to tell the Lord how you have borne them.”

How should we accept joy and sadness today? And maybe further about how should we accept sadness?

Answer: ”Blessed is he who has visited this world in its fateful moments.” But we live in a very intense era.

Comment: Yes, we don’t stop at any news. It’s different the next day.

My Response: I’m following it more or less. I am interested in how external actions affect people’s internal states, and how people change from this.

Comment: How it affects us is more or less visible. A dead end like this is approaching for people.

My Response: People can’t figure it out. They can’t in any way. There are very few true thoughts. They can’t put this together.

Comment: But all the same, humanity is sad mainly from everything that is to come, from hunger…

My Response: If there used to be some banner, slogan, future, or hope waving over everyone, today there is no hope for the future. Today the hope is only to live a good day, or at least if not very well, not very bad either.

Comment: Preferably with no scary news.

My Response: Yes. And to continue existing this way.

Question: How does a person accept this sadness that you are talking about? This pastor here said that all this goes to God and He looks at how you accepted it, so to say.

Answer: I would not say that all this goes to God. I would say that all this comes from God. Are we the builders of our spiritual future?

Comment: No, the Creator is building it.

My Response: Of course!

Question: So how do you accept sadness?

Answer: I think the whole problem is that we do not know the purpose of our creation; we do not imagine it in an explicit, clear form, but rather as in an unfocused lens, we see everything in such a fog, and it depresses us.

That’s what sadness is. After all, we don’t know how, or what, or for what, or in the name of what, which is the most important thing. For what purpose do some of the smallest events in our lives happen?

Question: And what if we knew in the name of what this is happening?

Answer: If we knew for what sake, the world would be different. We would immediately add more light and color to it inside ourselves.

Question: What is all this about? The biggest and smallest sorrows, what are they for? To add some light, maybe. Will it maybe work out somehow?

Answer: We can’t go into a sharper color state from this grayish and kind of blunt state. We cannot move from one of these states to another more elevated state if we do not reveal in ourselves all these colors and all these right attitudes to ourselves, to others, to the world, and to the Creator, who generally supplies us with all this.

The most important thing is, of course, to display the right position. Or what’s it called in the movies? To build a mise en scene. To see all this correctly, so that everything complements everything else and it becomes clear how it should exist.

Question: But still, what makes this black-and-white movie colored?

Answer: Only the attitude of a person.

Question: And what should blossom in me? What should light up suddenly?

Answer: When I realize that any events that surround me are necessary; they are mutually dependent. And if I relate them to the purpose of creation, then I will be able to focus them and assemble this whole picture so that it becomes one. What am I missing? It’s like in a kaleidoscope when the mosaic is assembled into the right picture.

Comment: In the meantime, I see fragmentarily, everything separately.

My Response: You can’t understand anything. You don’t understand anything, and therefore this is the main thing: that we don’t see the point in anything. When it all comes together, it makes sense. This is the most important thing. The meaning is always good.

Question: Why should all these fragments, all these broken pieces of glass, come together? In what picture? What’s all this about?

Answer: For me to rush to myself, to reveal the “I” itself.

Question: And what is it like?

Answer: It strives to direct everything that is revealed to me toward unity and connection so that I can form the image of the Creator out of everything.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 6/2/22

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Question: How can I hate bad qualities that are outside of me? How can I hate them inside myself?

Answer: It is done gradually. It is very difficult. It takes years because we are going through the most difficult period of internal formation. After all, the universe existed for billions of years before the inanimate, vegetative, and animate levels were formed.

And now we, people, are starting to develop. And look how fast we are developing compared to previous cosmic and geological periods. This is an enormous difference! One year today is like a hundred million years for the past levels or even more.

We are now developing at the inanimate level in the same way as the universe was developing. This is the bottom level of a pyramid, but it is the widest and thickest, and we do not see results while we are developing in it.

Nebulae, planets, the Sun, and galaxies collide. Everything swirls, flips, forms, explodes, disintegrates, and connects again. We do not see any of this yet because everything is happening in a kind of incomprehensible mass and, as it seems to us, it is an absolute mess.

In the end, everything gradually gathers together into the next level where the earth appears and living conditions emerge. So, we are now in the formation phase of all these conditions. We are already on Earth where conditions are being created for our spiritual life. The spiritual Earth kind of already exists, only the conditions of life have not yet been determined.

An international group where people who need to find the meaning of life gather together has already been created. That is, the support is already there, but it has not yet been shaped by us. We must take a more active part in this. Then it will turn out that vegetation will begin to grow from the ground, it will rise to the sun, to the sky. These should be our movements. This is what we do not have yet.

The transition from a lifeless state to the feeling of life and light is the most delicate, most subtle, and most dramatic period because inanimate matter must gradually come to life, turn into vegetative, animate—into a living one.

The force of life will appear in it because it consists of two qualities: bestowal and reception. What happens between them is the flow of energy and matter, the connection between the quality of bestowal—the Creator—and the quality of reception—creation—and in these mutual communications the middle, next state called man, Adam, will appear.

Question: So how can we hate external qualities inside ourselves?

Answer: The answer is simple: “You have to want to.” This is possible only through the friends. But we are still running away from this.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. How Can I Hate My Bad Qualities?” 3/9/13

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What should I be grateful for?“

In the morning, we should be grateful for waking up, that there is light, air and an entire day ahead of us.

In the afternoon, we should be grateful for having been through half the day already, and that soon we will finish the day, go home to rest, and have dinner with our families.

Before going to sleep, we should be grateful for soon being able to once again get up, and that tomorrow will be a good day.

It might seem that being grateful all the time is like shutting our eyes to the evil and bad that abound in the world, but what do we get as a result of seeing evil and bad phenomena all the time? We do not need to invest in looking for negative aspects of life, as they appear involuntarily. However, we should invest in opening our eyes from such a state and seeing that there are people who try to see the good in everything. The more we invest in trying to see the positive aspects of life, then the more we will see positive phenomena actually enter our lives.

Based on the video “The Power of Gratitude” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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Preparation to the Lesson

Lesson on the Topic “Living In a World of Intentions”

Writings of Baal HaSulam, “From the Mouth of a Sage” 

Selected Highlights

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My new article on Linkedin “Why We Do Not Remember the Moment of Birth”

Humans are emotional beings. Feelings guide us, determine our thoughts, our decisions in life, and our judgment. Whatever we do, we do it to feel good or to avoid feeling bad. Feelings are so central to our being that they even determine our memory. Why then do we not remember the most critical moment of our lives, the moment of birth? In fact, we also do not remember our formative years, when we are one or two years old. The reason is that in the first years of life, our physical senses quickly develop but our emotional world, our “self,” lags behind, and before we have a distinct “self” with its own emotions, we do not attach emotions to events, and therefore do not remember them, at least not more than as mere pictures.

Even later in life, at age three or four, from which many of us do have memories, they are still vague and incomplete, as though they are “immature” or “primitive” forms of memory.

“Real” memories begin when we begin to develop a psyche, a self that recognizes itself as an individual being. Once we perceive ourselves as separate beings, with our own thoughts and feelings, and we communicate with others as distinct individuals communicating with other distinct individuals, we transition from being little animals with the potential to become human beings into actual people.

The transition reflects itself in the way children connect with others, and becomes fully developed once we begin to develop hormonal attraction, in early adolescence.

This development, which is uniquely human, points to the reason for the creation of human beings. We are not meant to remain like animals; we are meant to ask about our world, about the reason for its existence, and for our existence in it. We are meant to ask about and understand the purpose of our lives beyond the physical level. Only once our emotions are fully developed can we begin to explore such questions seriously.

For me, that moment came with the question “What’s next?” I would ask myself, “What’s next, school, university, and…?” I did not have an answer. Because of it, I did not want to learn; I became apathetic. It was an awful feeling, a feeling of futility, of being forced to do something meaningless.

Not everyone is tormented by this question. Some people go through life chasing wealth or prestige, and are satisfied with that. The meaning of it all does not trouble them.

Yet, the meaning of life can be revealed only to those who ask about it. To varying degrees, the question appears in everyone, but only those who are haunted by it can find the answer.

The answer is that we are born and live only in order to develop the soul. The soul is not something within us, but between us. The soul is a special connection between people, which we can develop only if we feel that our existing connections, where we seek to constantly consume and absorb, do not satisfy us. When we begin to search for reciprocity, we begin to discover a completely new level of existence that is undetectable to those who are guided only by self-interest.

People who develop the soul begin to see the web, the network that connects all things, and how everything affects everything else. These connections are the soul, and revealing them is the purpose of our existence. All other beings function instinctively within the network, and only humans can come to understand this matrix of existence and operate within it as cognizant beings. Developing that consciousness is the purpose of our lives.
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My new article on Linkedin “The Answer Is Clear If We Ask the Right Question”

In the end, what everyone wants is to have a good life. A good life means more or less the same for everyone: a decent place to live, food on the table, good health, education for the children, and most importantly—the certainty of a bright tomorrow. When we ask ourselves what is preventing us from leading such a life, it is clear to most people that only our ego, in all its forms—pride, tyranny, exploitation, bullying, cruelty—prevents us from leading a good life. However, instead of asking how to overcome the ego, we ask how to protect ourselves from other people’s egos, in the best case scenario, or worse, how can we impose our own egos on other people.

There is a reason why we are not asking the obvious question: How do we overcome the only obstacle on our way to happiness? The thing that obstructs us, namely the ego, distracts us and diverts our attention into seeing other things or other people as the problem. But if we rise above our feelings and think logically for just a moment, we will realize that if we felt close to one another, if we felt like family rather than like enemies, we would not fight against each other.

The tricks that the ego plays on us are nothing new. For thousands of years, it has been pitting us against each other. For thousands of years, we have been killing, exploiting, abusing each other, and rejoicing at our neighbor’s pain. No other being does that, only humans, because only humans possess the inner serpent called “ego.”

Past societies were not as venomous as is ours today. In some cases, they truly lived like a family. But the ego does not remain static; it intensifies and poisons everything on its path. Humanity has tried every option. It tried the extreme left and the extreme right, capitalism and socialism, anarchy and rigid orders, monarchy, democracy, theocracy, and the list goes on and on. Nothing has worked and nothing will work as long as the ego governs our minds and hearts.

While humanity has been embroiled in incessant fighting, one man, who lived nearly 4,000 years ago, asked the right question: How can humanity defeat the ego in our hearts? The answer he found made him so happy that he realized how to help humanity, that he began to spread it wherever he went. That man’s name was Abraham, and the message he gave to all of humanity was that instead of trying to defeat other people’s egos, or even our own ego, we need to focus on the positive, on nurturing non-egoistic connections.

Abraham, who became known as “the man of mercy,” thanks to his novel idea, began to accumulate followers who understood that he was right. Pressured by the self-absorbed authorities in his homeland, Babylon, Abraham took to the road and headed for Canaan. Along the way, he accumulated more followers who saw the beauty in his idea. They were not a nation, at least not yet; they were a crowd of people who sympathized with their teacher’s idea. It was only when they began to implement Abraham’s method among themselves by nurturing care and consideration instead of alienation and selfishness, that they began to form a never-before-seen manner of unity.

Through their unity, these people discovered something that people did not know before: Everything is connected. Because they added the element of giving to their self-centered nature, they could feel that everything in reality not only receives but‎ also gives to everything else. In this way, they established a balanced and harmonious society that became a model for the rest of the world. That society became known as the “people of Israel.”

However, they did not maintain their solidarity. Their egos kept growing, as the ego grows in each and every person‎, so eventually, they, too, succumbed to it. Nevertheless, Abraham’s legacy remained in them, and very few among them kept that teaching alive in books and teachers.

Today, this wisdom is opening up to the whole world, since the world has exhausted its options. The futile efforts to find a way to overpower the ego have opened people’s minds to a wisdom of connection that does not try to suppress the ego, but to enhance connection. My teacher, RABASH, as well as his father, Baal HaSulam, were such teachers, and I try my best to make their teachings accessible in any language and in every place. Today, we are ready to ask the right question: How do we overcome the ego? Today, the ego will not be able to lure us into false ideologies that lead nowhere except to more misery.
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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Does Israel really want peace?“

The problem is that the Jews in Israel do not understand what it means to make peace. Making peace means coming closer to all other Jews and convincing them to come closer to each other.

It might seem that the Jews in Israel do not need peace with their fellow Jews, but that they need to make peace with their enemies that surround them.

But it is not the case.

If the Jewish people make peace among each other, then there will be peace the world over.

While it might seem far-fetched, when we can see nature’s inner workings and laws, then we see this as a clear condition set in stone: we determine in our relations what will pass throughout the world, and how the world relates to us.

Based on the video “What Does Peace in Israel Depend On?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael

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