Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Why hasn’t COVID-19 ended yet?“

COVID-19 has not ended yet because we still have not responded properly to the virus.

How were we supposed to respond? We were supposed to connect with each other, i.e., to come closer together and become a bit more humane and courteous toward one another. If we would have done so, then we would have weakened the virus.

We have to understand that COVID-19 is no ordinary virus. It is a virus that demands of us to change our attitudes toward each other for the better.

It might seem outlandish that the virus would know about how we relate to each other, but it indeed knows and includes everything. First of all, it is a living particle. It is not on the still or even vegetative levels of nature, but it is on the animate living level—just like us. It has intellect and emotion, and it perceives and influences the environment. It connects with other particles, enters the human body and takes control over it.

In short, the virus is much smarter than we think, and only when we make a significantly positive shift in our attitudes to each other will it go away for good.

If we wanted to check this in practice, then we could take one country or state—say, for instance, the State of Israel where I am living—and we could decide that we treat each other courteously, that we help the needy, the elderly and children—we think about others and try doing good. We should alleviate the situation where we become approached with questions such as, “Why didn’t you do this or that?” but we each make an attitude shift: we seek out where we could add in our positive attitude toward others, to show them that we truly wish to benefit them. If we do so for even one month, then afterward we could check what happened with the virus. Would it still be around or not? We could then also review other phenomena in our society, for instance, the amount of deaths by car accidents and other such problems in our society. It is very easy to review such results. Everything is in our hands to impact a positive change in the world.

Based on the video “Why Hasn’t COVID-19 Ended Yet?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash.

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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “Fighting for Independence”

Two days from today, Israeli Jews will celebrate Israel’s Independence Day. On that day, in 1948, while still repelling the charge of six Arab armies and immediately following the departure of the forces of the British Mandate, the leadership of the Jewish settlement in Israel declared the establishment of the State of Israel. Since that fateful day, we have not been independent. Moreover, we have yet to learn the meaning of the word, in its true and deepest sense.

In order to be independent, we need to learn what independence means and what denies us independence. According to Webster’s Dictionary, being independent means that you are a) “not subject to control by others,” b) “not requiring or relying on something else,” c) “not requiring or relying on others (as for care or livelihood),” and other, less significant definitions.

These definitions leave the most important aspect of our freedom untouched. Worse yet, in today’s world, Webster’s definitions of independence are impossible to carry out; we are all dependent on each other, living in an interconnected and interdependent world.

We could try going to the woods to live there independently. Some people do it, but for their perceived freedom, they give up every bit of amenity that civilization grants us, but even then, they are not really free. Besides, is it worth relinquishing the comforts of civilization for the sake of declaring yourself free? Clearly, most people do not think it is worthwhile.

So what does it mean to be independent if we are forced to be dependent on every thing and every one, and have no choice in the matter? Being independent means redeeming ourselves from the sneakiest, yet most powerful enslavement: to our own egos.

Like it or not, we cannot resist our ego. If it tells us to do something, we will do it. If we decide to go against it, it will be our own ego pretending to go against itself, manipulating us into doing what it wants.

Therefore, independence means liberation from our ego. How can we achieve this? If we think of others rather than ourselves, we will have become liberated from our egos.

Think of a mother who loves her child. She does not think about what she needs unless she needs it in order to enable her to keep tending to her child. She is not free from her ego because in her perception, her child is a part of her. Nevertheless, if we were to feel like this toward people who are unrelated to us, and toward whom we have no ulterior motive, that would be liberation from our ego, and then we would see how difficult it is to truly be free.

The State of Israel, returning to our subject, will win its independence only when Israelis are an example of independence from the ego. The Jewish people became a nation when they rose above their egos and united “as one man with one heart” at the foot of Mt. Sinai 3,800 years ago. Immediately after, they were given the task to set an example for the rest of the world.

Until the establishment of the Israeli nation, there was no precedent of a large collective of individuals from vying tribes and nations uniting above their differences for the sake of forming a new nation whose supreme value is love of others. But the people of Israel achieved it and therefore became indebted to the world to lead it toward independence from the shackles of the ego.

I think it would be wise to contemplate this idea this coming Independence Day. If we regain our independence from the ego, we will regain our respect from the world and the acceptance of the nations. We cannot be freed from our obligation to humanity to set an example of liberation from the ego. As long as we display division and self-absorption, we will be regarded as pariahs. But if we are true to our vocation, we will love each other and the world will love us, because we will show the way for them to love each other.
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Question: If a person asks God to change His attitude toward him, is that also idolatry?

Answer: Yes, this is a wrong idea about the Creator that He is supposedly acting badly now, but if I ask Him, everything will be alright.

Comment: But we all ask in this way.

My Response: Here is the problem. What are we asking for? Am I asking the Creator to change or for Him to change me?

Comment: Usually the scheme is simple. There are problems and a person turns to the Creator so that He would change His attitude toward him and remove the problems.

My Response: That is, now He is bad, and when I ask He will become good. Or should I ask that I change and see that His attitude toward me is excellent? After all, if He changes me, then I will stop seeing problems. Therefore, I must ask not for them to be removed, but for me to be corrected.

How can this be? I see myself from morning till night surrounded by negative forces affecting me and I must ask to see these actions as positive. For that, I must change.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 4/5/22

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Comment: Michael writes to you: “In a quiet, peaceful time I could agree with you that it is necessary to embrace your enemy and that love is above everything. This is what I used to do by the way. But now I see how impossible it is. Man cannot do that. You will never embrace a murderer or a rapist in your life. You will not hug them! So why are you talking about it?”

My Response: I am not saying that you must physically hug him. Even internally you cannot hug him. But you should try to imagine that you have descended to his level, because if he is a murderer and a rapist, then he is below you. Yet, you descend in order to somehow get in touch with him, to understand him in some way.

Question: So, in fact, contact is impossible, right?

Answer: No? Then you will not do anything. You must understand that man was programmed this way from above. After all, we are talking about Kabbalah, about Kabbalistic correction.

We must understand that a person was simply directed in this way. With all his egoism and inclinations, it is not his fault. The Creator arranged it all for him, the kind, almighty, and loving Creator. Therefore, we still have a great deal to correct in our understanding.

Only when you descend to his level and realize that everything that is in him comes from the Creator and this is depicted before you and within you so that you correct your attitude to what is happening and to the Creator, then you will be able to somehow come closer to him. You will not be able to hug him yet, but you can come closer to him and start correcting this condition together with him so that in the end you would be able to understand him, because it does not depend on him.

This is all the fault of the Creator who did it and did it in order to correct you so that together you can rise to the level of mutual understanding and then to mutual love between you for all of humanity, for the entire universe, and thus to correct everything.

Comment: What an impossibly difficult science we are engaged in!

My Response: This is not science. This is nature! Otherwise, we will not do anything!

Comment: It requires turning the guts inside out, washing the entire heart, and clearing the entire mind.

My Response: When you do it constantly for a long time, you reach it. People will go through these wars. These will be internal wars, wars of the Messiah. And everything will work out.

Comment: You understand, don’t you, that we are talking about a loved one, about someone dear who is no longer with us.

My Response: All relatives and friends will suddenly manifest in such a way that you will not see anyone who would be more distant from you than the closest one. And the most distant ones will turn out to be the closest.

Everyone will turn out to be absolutely close and absolutely ugly. And suddenly, you will have to love them and just adore them. There are real wars ahead; they are called “the wars of the Messiah,” the wars of liberation from our egoism.

Messiah (Mashiach)—from the word “Limshoch,” to pull out— is the one who pulls us out of our egoism. We stop looking at the world egoistically, we stop blaming people for it. We must relate this to the Creator and correct our attitude to Him from absolute hatred to absolute love.

Comment: Can you imagine! You say: “He is to blame for everything, He did everything, He is the main enemy of man.”

My Response: If this is how I perceive the world, then yes.

Question: What if it is the other way around?

Answer: If it is the other way around, then I must turn myself upside-down again; in the end, I must correct myself and there is no evil and harm in the world except for myself, my egoism. I have to correct it into the quality of absolute love where I see everyone as my enemies and haters and correct them into everyone I see loving and loved.

Question: Does it mean that I correct myself and they become loving and loved?

Answer: Yes.

Comment: That is, everything is aimed at making me sort myself out.

My Response: Yes. There are still things to do ahead of us.

Question: You say that there are serious wars ahead. In any case, are we being prepared for them, or will we be thrown unprepared into this scorcher?

Answer: No! Who is there to throw? It is like throwing a baby into a real fight.

Question: Are we being led to them one way or another and we will come to this already wanting these wars?

Answer: Yes. We will understand their necessity.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 3/17/22

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Question: How can Pharaoh, the negative force in us, bring people, who want to attain the Creator, closer to His revelation?

Answer: The Pharaoh’s force only seems negative to us. In fact, it kind of teases us and brings us closer to the Creator.

It awakens egoism in us and draws us forward, ostensibly for egoistic fillings. When we get closer, it suddenly turns out that we cannot reveal anything and anyone with the help of egoism. We remain as if with a broken trough.

This means that we come to attain the Creator through the realization of the evil of our nature.

Question: Pharaoh means working within reason when a person wants to understand the whole process with his mind. What is wrong with that?

Answer: That is not the point. There is neither good nor bad in this. But it is impossible to understand this process with your mind, just as it is impossible to see the spiritual world with our eyes. We understand that our vision perceives only a certain amount of information at a certain frequency and nothing else. Proper tuning is necessary here, and it is achieved through diligence.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual states” 4/14/22

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Comment: Kabbalah explains all the sections of the structure of desire and you see how it works.

Why can’t people understand and accept that you just need to reconsider many things and rebuild your life? It is more pleasant for them to live in some kind of abstract mass, that there is a big world, that there are prospects beyond the horizon. It could be an adult, maybe even an elderly person who has lived his life, but still thinks like a child.

My Response: There are no prospects today, I do not see people who still live with them because the world knocks them out of all prospects. Everything changes so unpredictably quickly, everything closes and opens so that a person cannot plan anything, and therefore lives case by case, so to speak. In addition, the new generation is very special, it has completely different views and approaches to the world.

Question: What does this click, this transition to a new understanding, depend on?

Answer: It depends on the recognition of the need for this transition, the recognition of evil, when I can no longer live like this, in the present state.

After all, a person comes to our community because he believes that without attaining the cause, the purpose of the world, he has nothing to do in it, there is no point in existing, “I must understand, I must realize, I must figure out why I live at all, why everything exists, what meaning each of my actions and each of my days has; I cannot just live like that, I need meaning, purpose, fulfillment, otherwise I do not have the energy for movement.”
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Forecast for the next hundred years” 12/10/09

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Question: When we go beyond the limits of material existence, should our development stop?

Answer: It should stop, but, in principle, by itself it is infinite. In Kabbalah, we study another additional stage of our development that is available to us.

With the help of Kabbalah, we can reveal our next existence, so to speak. Just as our stay on Earth ends after 70 years of life, so the unfolding spiritual existence ends with 125 degrees of spiritual development.

Then there is some other line that we do not perceive, but we see that this line exists, and, as Kabbalists say, it is also moving away. It will become clear to us only when we begin to approach it.

Now humanity has developed to the condition where we ask about the meaning of life, in fact, about the border of the volume in which we exist: “And what is beyond its border? There must be something.”

Nature is infinite, continuous, eternal, beyond time, space, and movement, we reveal this even with the help of our sciences. Therefore, we cannot say that there is a border somewhere and that is it. No.

Even our minds and our feelings are not connected to our bodies. What does it all transfuse into, pass into? It means that there is a transformation of one kind to another.
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From KabTV’s “Close-Up. Is Frankl Right?” 8/8/10

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Question: Why do people constantly compare their achievements, for example, who has something that is more beautiful or better?

Answer: Because it is a symbol of power, wealth, or height. After all, this is why egoism values people. How can you know what kind of person I am? I can be a great sage and sit somewhere in a corner in rags. Or I can be a great ideologist and at the same time be very modest and humble.

When people put themselves on display, it is clear why this happens. Everything is moving toward a common recognition of evil. This serpent must come out completely, show itself in all its metamorphoses and guises, and manifest itself so that every person will see how much it is devouring him from the inside.

Only then will it be possible to talk about correction.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Whose iIs Better?” 4/24/10

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Preparation to the Lesson

Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Study of the Ten Sefirot,” Vol. 1, Part 1, “Inner Transformation,” Chapter 6, Item 26

Selected Highlights

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