Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “Who We Are without Our History”

September 1st is the beginning of the school year in Israel. Beginning this year, Jewish Israeli students will not learn about the history of the Jewish people during the period of the Second Temple, its destruction, the Great Revolt of Judaea, the Cyrus Declaration, the Hasmonean Revolt, and other key events in the history of our people. To give you some perspective, it is as if American children were not taught about the Civil War, what the war was about and how it ended. How would they understand what is happening in America today without learning about the Civil War? What kind of American citizens would they be?

History lessons have been given less and less time in students’ curricula for decades. In the early 2000s, Israeli students still had nine hours of history lessons weekly. Beginning September, they will have five.

A person without a past, without a history, is not a person, just as a nation without a history is not a nation. Our history is an essential part of who we are. It defines our principles and our personality; it is everything! I cannot understand how we can determine who we are if we do not know about the history of our people.

History is not only my family tree, or the history of my nation, or creed. It begins with the creation of the universe, the emergence of our solar system and Planet Earth within it, the beginning of life on Earth, the evolution of the species, the emergence of humans, and the evolution of human civilization to this day. How can we determine our direction for the future if we do not know our past? It seems to me that whoever wishes to cancel our history must be planning some sort of revolution. I see no other motivation.

The history of the ancient world, including what happened during the period of the Second Temple, the Roman Empire, Greek Empire, and other key processes and events in the history of humanity and the history of the Jews, is the foundation of our civilization, and the foundation of our people. I know that I learned it because I wanted to know about man on Earth, and it taught me a great deal. For example, how will we correct past mistakes if we do not know about them? In order to know our place in the world, we have to know where we came from, why, and what is expected of us in the future.

Besides general history, which begins, as I said, with the creation of the universe, and ends with today’s civilization, we must also know the history of our own people. If teaching about the destruction of the Second Temple and that entire period has already been eliminated, tomorrow, teaching about the exodus from Egypt might also be eliminated. And if these are erased, then what is left of our legacy?

I think this is a terrible mistake. If you erase one’s past, you have erased one’s present, and you have denied one the ability to plan the future correctly. Without continuity, without a historic perspective, it is impossible to build a future. I do not see any developed country doing this.

Perhaps the teaching methods should change; perhaps they should be more engaging, modernized, but one way or the other, without our past, we cannot understand our present or know how to proceed toward the future.
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It is seemingly perplexing, for it speaks of the time before the worlds were created. Thus, which reality exists here, that the upper light should fill?

The thing is that all the worlds and the souls that exist and that are destined to be created with all their incidents until the end of their correction are all included in Ein Sof in their full measure and glory. (Baal HaSulam, Study of the Ten Sefirot, Chapter 1, Part 1, Restriction and Line)

This is about the fact that the upper light, which fills the entire reality, carries absolutely all the information about everything that has been, is, and will be. This gradually manifests before us, and we call it our world.

At the very beginning of creation, everything was flooded with one simple light, i.e., the emanation of the Creator’s complete love for future creations.

In other words, from the side of the Creator there is a thought of creation and absolutely everything is included into it up to the final state of each person.
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From KabTV’s The Study of the Ten Sefirot (TES) 8/14/22

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Question: As a rule, in order to exist, a person needs a job. With the money earned, he can eat, buy clothes and shoes, pay for the Internet, and so on. Therefore he cannot imagine himself without a job.

The main fear of a person is to lose his job. When they lose it, many are even ready to commit suicide because they are so dependent on the corporeal part. What will replace it? Who will make up for it? Who will give a person the necessary confidence in life?

Answer: Only a society created on the basis of integral education will. We create these communities. We can teach people through the Internet, through virtual communication, and through television. We have all the opportunities for this. Just give us a world channel and we are ready to conduct all this even today.

We will be able to explain to people where nature directs us and that spiritual work is not some whim, not mine, yours, or someone else’s. This is a law of nature. We see how scientists are gradually beginning to reveal the same thing. That is, we have something to rely on. There are great, wonderful prospects.

Therefore I hope for a bright future and not for a terrible solution to problems that will still lead to the same result but with a lot of blood.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. If You Lost Your Job” 13/3/14

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Question: Why is nighttime the most productive time for mental activity? In principle, Kabbalists always studied at night when the concentration of thoughts is much clearer.

Answer: Firstly, it is physiologically conditioned because a person feels that during that time he has nothing else to do and he can concentrate on some work while everyone else is asleep.

Secondly, at that time, not many stimulating centers are activated in him, and therefore he can more easily concentrate on one thing.

Thirdly, if we are talking about spiritual work, then this is the time when you really need to connect to the spiritual root, root to branch or branch to root. At that time, new desires are created in which a person will continue to acquire an attainment.

Such work begins from midnight onward. Therefore Kabbalah encourages people to get up at twelve o’clock at night and start studying. Twelve at night, midnight, is not half of our night, but a conditional night. If you break the whole night from sunset to the appearance of the first ray of light into twelve parts, then the middle part, the sixth, conditional hour, will be midnight.

The night hour can be forty minutes, fifty minutes, or an hour and twenty minutes. We use mechanical clocks, but in general, in nature, clocks are not mechanical but rather solar and lunar. Therefore the hours are conditional.

Our body works the same way according to its internal conditional clock. The human body works completely differently during sleep in winter and summer. All this is taken into account in Kabbalah. That is, night and midnight are purely astronomical values and not mechanical according to the clock, which ticks no matter where and how.

Comment: But there are different regions.

My Response: Man is connected with nature; he is an integral part of it and cannot be separated from it.

And the regions are indeed different. Therefore there is a problem of how to study. But it is believed that it is still better for us to study together. This is most important.

Baal HaSulam writes that joint study, joint appeal, and joint actions override all other parameters.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Everything Happens at Night” 3/5/13

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Question: If my wife is a part of me, is it possible to judge a friend by his wife?

Answer: It depends on the couple. If you and your wife have lived a long time together, but you are an ordinary earthly couple, then this is immediately felt. If you are a spiritual couple, it is also felt. It is even felt if you are at different degrees.

A spiritual couple is two people who feel a mutual aspiration to one another and to the goal, who feel each other and see themselves united in the goal with each other, with the rest of the world, and with the Creator.

In principle, people who live together for a long time feel each other without words, understand each other without words, and, as they say, live in perfect harmony. It is natural. And on a spiritual level there is an even greater closeness. It is part of telepathy, of the feeling of others.

Comment: You always say that a man should be married because through his other half, so to say, he speaks with the Creator. But there are completely opposite, conflicting couples. You look at them and it seems that this single whole consists of the two of them.

My Response: In our time, a couple is not at all what it used to be when people took care of each other, when they had the same feelings, the same thoughts, and the same goals, when they were engaged in a common household, and so on. They had joint standard sensations.

Today this is practically non-existent. Everyone does their own thing; in the morning they run away, in the evening they run back to the same apartment for a few hours of sleep, and then run away again. It is the kind of slavery where there is no place for anything shared.

This is good because they have become so egoistic that it would be difficult for them to live with each other for a long time, but only for a short time if they go somewhere on vacation where there is nothing in common and they do something external. If they took care of their household and were free a couple of days a week, then it would be a terrible state.

That is why those people who are unemployed today are so unhappy. This is a cause for very big conflicts.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Spiritual Couple” 3/24/13

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Question: If we open the curtain and remove all the tinsel that people are attracted to, if we completely take away everything that they chase all their lives, then what is left in their lives? People need some goal, don’t they?

Answer: Then you would have to clean out this entire world and leave only the inanimate, vegetative, and animate nature, and humans. You need to let this person live in a calm way, sustaining existence in his body while directing everything else to the connection between people so he would start sensing the upper world in this connection, the true nature, true forces.

Once he enters the sensation of the upper world, he will lose the sensation of the lower layers: the inanimate, vegetative, and animate. This world, this cosmos. will disappear for him since all of this exists only in his still immature consciousness.

A person will rise to the level of forces. It is the only thing that exists rather than what is depicted in the form of some images: here is a wall, here is a table, and so forth. He will see that all this does not exist because it does not exist in the world of forces.

These are all configurations of forces in relation to my animal senses. When I rise to the level of other senses, the senses of forces, then all of these will disappear. This is why the word “Olam” (world) comes from the word “Neelam (disappearing).”

Overall, this is what we have to do. Why should we vegetate at this level when we already can rise to the next one? After all, there is nothing worse than this world! Why would we stay?

When you stay here beyond the time needed for your maturation and ascent, then you begin to live through dreadful times. We become an overripe fruit, like a fetus that exceeds its term in the mother’s womb. This is very dangerous for us.

Now we will start experiencing such forces—just hold on! They will be pressing on us in order to push us out, to birth us at the next level. We have to help them ourselves!
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. How Сonsciousness Сhanges from Kabbalah” 3/8/13

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Preparation to the Lesson

Lesson on the Topic “I to My Beloved and My Beloved to Me”

Lesson on the Topic “The Importance of Dissemination” 

Selected Highlights

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “When should I tell the truth and when should I lie?“

I recently received the following letter: “Hello, Dr. Laitman, my name is Avi, and I’d like to share a problem that I’ve been dealing with from a young age. Since I can remember myself, I hated to lie, even when I knew that I’d have to pay the price for telling the truth. Many times telling the truth to people’s faces cost me dearly, and over the years, I’ve lost many friends. Even when I knew that they wouldn’t like hearing what I had to say, I couldn’t lie. And my question, Dr. Laitman, is why don’t people like hearing the truth? The truth is the highest value.”

So I told him that he was right, but that I recommended he do one more thing: that when he is saying the truest and most correct thing, where he has no doubt that he is a hundred percent accurate, that he should consider how much the other person wants to hear it, and if the other person would not like to hear it, then why is he saying something detrimental to the other person?

We need to be considerate of other people. Even in special cases where it is a matter of life or death, there too, we have the ability to thoroughly examine the situation and only then say what we have to say.

What, then, does it actually mean to speak the truth? Speaking the truth means that we do everything that is completely to the benefit of the other person according to the rule, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Based on the video “When Should You Tell the Truth and When Should You Lie?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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Medium published my new article “Quiet Quitting — a Step toward a Better Balance”

The signs have been there for a long time, but the lockdowns have given them a major boost. Now, “quiet quitting” is a major problem for employers, especially since many people still work from home, blurring the boundary between work time and free time. Although there is no clear definition of the term “quiet quitting,” it basically means that people strive to do less, work fewer hours, and forget about work once they are out of the office. Succinctly, it means working as little as possible without getting fired.

Some pundits blame this phenomenon on the employees, arguing that people are getting lazy. Others pin it on the bosses and argue that executives need to learn how to work with millennials if they want to get more out of them.

I think it is simply that people want to find a balance. A healthy balance between work and leisure is key to leading a good life. It is not a rigid line, but something that each person must determine for oneself based on one principle: work only as much as is necessary. Anything beyond what is necessary is redundant, and therefore draining, unpleasant, and detrimental.

This approach pertains to much more than work. It is the only way we can reach sustainable levels of consumption, the only way we can save the earth, the air, and the water from depletion and pollution.

If we balance our time and effort between work and leisure, it will give us time and energy for more emotionally rewarding activities. In short, we will all benefit from finding the right balance between work time and free time.

As for concerns about production demands and economic growth, I think we are already producing far too much. Most of the products we make and purchase do not add value to our lives. They do not make us happier and do not make our lives easier. The only ones who benefit from them are the makers’ shareholders, while the rest of us suffer from the consequential pollution, traffic congestion, and countless hours spent building redundant stuff.

Economists, and those whose livelihood depends on keeping the economic machine running, may sound the alarm at the sight of quiet quitting, but for the rest of us, I think it is good news. It is time to start living sanely. It will be better for us, better for our children, and better for Planet Earth.
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