Who is the Creator that I should listen to Him?” is a question in the mind. And the second question: “Why do you need this work for the Creator?” is a question in the heart.

But neither of these can be answered. It is just important for a person. He says that this is the preparation of desires for the mind and for the heart, which is in him, and due to it he moves forward.

Question: So when an altruistic force aimed at the need to unite, to love one’s neighbor, etc. manifests in a person,  then he asks the question: “Why do I need this? What is the benefit for me?”

Answer: There is no answer to that. After all, if we speak from the correct understanding, then there is no benefit to a person whether he is in this world or in the spiritual one, since from the point of view of egoism he cannot evaluate both worlds.

We always subconsciously feel: “After all, this is the future world, the upper world, the light, the Creator, and this is our world.

What is special about it? What do I risk when I lose it? What is there in it that I still do not know? I do not want it anyway.” But that is not how the question should be asked. The right question arises in people when they are seriously engaged in working on themselves.

And if you just believe in God, as it usually happens, then these questions are really incomprehensible. People study the Torah, touch it slightly, and everything seems to be clear to them: I have to do certain actions and due to this I will receive the future world.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 4/14/22

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Question: It is written in the Torah that the sons of Israel took all the Kelim (vessels) from the Egyptians. For what?

Answer: They took from the Egyptians, from their past states, all the intentions and desires, everything, that relate to egoistic use in order to correct them into the quality of bestowal and love.

We can say that they took the experience of the past work in egoism. Meaning, everything that we go through in our world, we then use all those states with the right intention.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 4/19/22

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Question: What is “Passover“?

Answer: Passover, “Pesach,” is from the word “stepping over.” This means stepping from the world in which egoism operates to the world in which altruism operates.

Question: On the eve of Passover four questions are asked. What are these questions?

Answer: These four questions relate to the four degrees of egoism that exist in every person. They symbolize our desire to get out from under the force of general egoism, which is divided into four degrees.

Therefore, the youngest in the family, the smallest, the one who is just beginning to grow, asks questions about his spiritual growth. This is the allegory.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 4/19/22

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Question: Who is Moses? What is this force in a person?

Answer: Moses comes from the word “Limshoch – to pull out.” According to the legend, the daughter of Pharaoh Batya found him in the water and pulled him out.

Moses, who grew up in the house of Pharaoh, matured and broke away from them and became the leader of the tribe, which in ancient Egypt was called the Jews. The whole being of Moses, his whole mission, was to educate and lead this group that in the future will be called the people of Israel.

According to Kabbalah, inside each person there is an inner point that pulls him from egoistic into altruistic life, from the fact that he exists by himself like a small animal and thinks only about filling his temporary egoistic desires for food, sex, family and knowledge, i.e., everything that makes up our world.

And the desire called Moses pushes him to the next attainment—reaching the root of his existence. This is the manifestation of the point of Moses, from the word “Limshoch –to pull out” from the sensation of our world into the sensation of the spiritual world.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 4/19/22

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What is the root of depression?“

Depression is rooted in our nature, which is a desire to enjoy.

If we fulfill the desire to enjoy with a suitable fulfillment, then we feel good. But if we do not give the desire to enjoy what it wants, then it starts eating us alive, and we call that feeling “depression.”

Ultimately, the solution to depression is in finding a way to bring our desire to enjoy fulfillment that is constant and increasing.

This is what the wisdom of Kabbalah teaches: how we can receive that which will make us feel good and better all the time. It is a sensation like nothing we have experienced in our world. Think about being hungry, and then you get to eat as much of your favorite food as you want, and in addition, the pleasure from the food together with your hunger just keeps increasing the more that you eat.

In order to fulfill ourselves completely, we need a new fulfillment that extends from the same root as our depression, our empty desire, and which can thus become fully compatible with that desire.

Based on the video “Depression’s Causes and Solution [in 2 Minutes]” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Photo by Damir Samatkulov on Unsplash.

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Question: What can you learn from Pharaoh?

Answer: Everything except direct work for the Creator.

In general, Pharaoh is everything! He even teaches us how to work for the Creator. Only we do not understand how he teaches us.

However, everything that exists within us, everything that leads us forward, twists us, trains us, builds us, and directs us—all of it is Pharaoh.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 4/14/22

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Preparation to the Lesson

Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Foreword to The Book of Zohar“

Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Study of the Ten Sefirot,” Vol. 1, Part 2, “Inner Observation,” Chapter 1, Item 1 

Selected Highlights

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Listen to an Audio Version of the Blog
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My new article on Linkedin “Is Hunger Possible in Today’s World?”

When we hear about hunger crises, they usually refer to poorer and war-torn countries in Africa or Asia. We rarely think of hunger crises when we think of Europe or the United States. But recently, more and more voices are warning that there could be hunger, and even starvation in the West, as well.

These are not merely fears; they are based on steps that countries are already taking to protect their population, often at the expense of other countries. The war-related devastation of the wheat crop and vegetable oil in Ukraine was only the beginning. Now, India has also banned exports of wheat due to the heat wave that devastated much of its crops, and countries around the world are suffering food shortages and a price spike.

Growing up in Russia in the 1950s, I lived in a neighborhood where everyone kept a few chickens and grew vegetables and fruit trees in their backyards. In today’s backyards, if one is lucky enough to have one, you can hardly find any open ground to plant anything.

Also, back then, there were far fewer people than there are today. In 1950, there were only 2.5 billion people. Today, there are nearly eight. Without sufficient food, billions will not only starve, but wars will break out and destroy everything. Hungry people have no restraints.

To prevent such a cataclysm, we need to stop the endless drive for hegemony and begin to relate to all of humanity as one, interdependent society. To relate to society in this way, we need to understand why we, humanity, are here in the first place. Without understanding what we are living for, we will not be able to plan our future or how to relate to one another. In such a scenario, we will undoubtedly end up in terrible states.

If we think about why we are here, we will realize that we are not here to oppress other people or take pride in our power. On the contrary, we are here to establish a harmonious society of our own making. Just as nature has built the universe as a harmonious system where all the parts complement each other, we should build a human society in which all people complement each other. The difference between nature and humankind is that nature does this through instincts, through a built-in program, while we have to do it through consciousness and of our own volition.

That is, we work the opposite of nature. When animals are well fed, they rest and do not bother anyone. We, however, are never satiated. We want more of everything we have, more than everyone else has, and in the end, we want everything for ourselves and nothing for others. On top of this voracious nature, we must develop a human society based on reciprocity and balance as does all of nature. Since we are completely opposite to it, we can achieve this only through a conscious and collective effort.

In doing so, we will discover a far deeper and broader reality than we could ever imagine with our current, egocentric perception. We will discover that the purpose of our lives is not to wallow in selfishness, but to leap into the perception of the whole of reality, where everything is interconnected and interdependent, and where life is an endless stream.

The wars and disasters that pummel our world are the “whip” that nature uses to make us grow out of our innate self-centeredness and into the expansive perception of reality. The sooner we begin to follow this path of our own accord, the sooner nature’s whip will vanish, and problems such as hunger, war, and disease will be a thing of the past.
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From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 5/16/22

This Saturday, a man went into a Tops Friendly supermarket in Buffalo, NY, and shot ten people dead in what appears to be a racially motivated crime. This massacre, the latest in an endless stream of violence, is a reflection of our world. Brutality is engulfing not only the United States, but the entire world. There is senseless killing in Europe, senseless killing all over the Middle East, and in Africa. Even where there isn’t senseless killing, there is abundant, systemic abuse of people, from modern slavery through human trafficking to abuse of power. At the end of the day, it is only people who make other people miserable. If we could only change our ill-will toward each other, we would change the world.

How many times have our parents told us to be nice to others, to play nice, to be kind? And how many times were we actually good because they told us to? Just as children often hold on to their toys and do not share them with anyone, we are becoming increasingly child-like egoists in our behavior.

We were not always that selfish. Previously, people from the same family, and even from the same village, truly felt that they belonged to one another. There may have been struggles over social statuses, but there was no desire to humiliate for the sake of degrading others. Today, even siblings often take pleasure in humiliating one another.

The human race is constantly evolving. The more it develops, the more people are learning that they are governed by egoism, and that it is driving us all into a chasm. On the one hand, everyone wants to live in a nice neighborhood with nice and quiet people around. On the other hand, our own nature is creating an environment where we cannot trust our co-workers, our friends, or even our families.

The good news in all this negativity is that now that it is out in the open, we are realizing who we really are, and this is the first step toward correction. We have come to a state that people cannot stand the existence of people they dislike, for whatever reason, so they pick up arms and shoot them.

And what is true of people, is also true of nations—between nations and within nations. They want to control each other, oppress each other, and dominate each other.

But we are in a different time now. What worked before will not work now on any level—individual, social, national, or international. Today, only those who want to help and support others will succeed. Nations and people who oppress, bully, and violate others will fail and fall.

These days, those who want to succeed must learn that our mutual dependence requires that we become considerate of others. Even if we do not like others, the simple realization that if I am inconsiderate, it will hurt me, should be enough to change our behavior toward others. Following our actions, our hearts will change, as well, but we should not expect this from the very beginning. If not today, then tomorrow we will all learn that we need not be considerate or caring because we actually feel this way, but because we want to survive.

Once we adopt a considerate behavior, we will realize that its benefits far outweigh its flaws. When people are considerate, they create an atmosphere of consideration which reflects back on those who embed it in the society. Just as inconsideration hurts the inconsiderate, consideration rewards the considerate.

Interdependence means that whatever you inject in the system, this is what the system gives you in return, but many times over. If you inject negativity, it will destroy you because the society will “throw” your own negativity back at you, but many times stronger. If you inject positivity in the form of consideration, care, support, and mutual responsibility, these positive impacts will reflect back on you, but again, many times stronger than you injected into the society. This is how every closed system works: the feedback amplifies the input many times over.

Therefore, if we want an end to such hate-filled violence as the Buffalo massacre, if we want to end senseless wars raging around the world, we must learn to act as one, interdependent society. It may not be easy to convince ourselves, but reality has its painful ways of persuasion. I think we would all prefer a more peaceful, mindful way of changing.

Photo Caption:
A man is detained following a mass shooting in the parking lot of TOPS supermarket, in a still image from a social media video in Buffalo, New York, U.S. May 14, 2022. Courtesy of BigDawg/ via REUTERS

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