Question: On one hand, all wars, as it were, reveal greater conflict between people, therefore hatred is manifested. For a long time after war people hated each other for hundreds of years. Is this against the direction of nature, which integrates us?

Answer: Yes, but it exacerbates, singles out, and reveals all the reasons that exist between peoples, and there is something to correct. In principle, in all primary sources, it is written that hatred is inherent in the design of creation, and when it manifests itself, it is good. This is already half a step toward correcting it. People just need to figure out how to do it.

Question: On the other hand, when people take part in hostilities, it brings them very close, they get a taste of unity. From this point of view does nature teach us in some way?

Answer: Yes, of course. Therefore, many people love the military.

Question: War is always associated with animal fear. Can this fear for oneself, for one’s body, for one’s life, and for one’s relatives be transformed into awe of a higher power?

Answer: Not directly, but it can. It can help us get out of animal fear and rise to human fear.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 3/1/22

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Question: War forms a special type of personality, a special type of psychology of a participant in combat. Do you think a person who was in a war is more predisposed to spiritual development?

Answer: It can be the other way around. He already understands what it is and he really does not want it, unlike some boy who is willing to try everything.

Comment: There is always a spirit of unity in war, and later people remember these states.

My Response: We can say that this is a by-product. It is necessary in order to win.

Comment: Nature moves us toward getting closer to each other, toward unity.

My Response: This is a completely different matter. There is cause and there is an effect. If the reason is that I am going to war to unite with others and create a certain common state, a community, then this is a different war. This is a war against ourselves, against egoism that is within us and does not give us the opportunity to unite.

However, if we go to kill or conquer someone, then our connection is egoistic and aimed at defeating someone. This is a completely different goal.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 3/1/22

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Question: If war manifests itself in matter, in the brute forces of nature, and not inside a person or humanity, does it mean that humanity has lost the internal war? Or is it not so clear cut?

Answer: There is a constant struggle at different levels. Sometimes it turns into a war and continues on.

Question: If a war breaks out, then, in principle, is it is no longer possible to prevent it with prayers?

Answer: Yes, as it is said: “Power was given to an evil angel, an evil inclination.”

Question: The worst thing is that nothing can be prevented. We see all the time that a person does not believe that something can happen and until the last moment thinks that everything will pass. And when everything starts, it is already too late, you cannot run away and prayers do not help. Only time will help.

Answer: Not only that. You still need to try to make a correction at a higher level. That is, to attach more participants to the correction, then it will be more powerful, and in some form it can even suppress the evil that is coming at the moment.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 3/1/22

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Question: What do you think the new economy should be like?

Answer: The new economy should be economical. A person should not extract everything out of the ground, out of the air, or out of the water. He should be guided by a more harmonious life and consume as much as he needs, and not steal and not plunder. Our planet is not bottomless. It will not let us continue to act like this.

Question: What will we come to then?

Answer: To the fact that there will be nothing left. It is like, for example, parents who leave their offspring a couple of million dollars, and he takes and squanders it in a year.
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From KabTV’s “Meetings with Kabbalah” 1/5/22

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Amnesty International are stating that Israel’s policy against Palestine is the equivalent to apartheid. Is this a gross distortion or an accurate reflection of the situation? What do you think?“

Instead of arguing whether the report is a gross distortion or accurate reflection of the situation, there are deeper factors at work in the “Israel as an apartheid state” narrative. While the report describes Israel as conducting apartheid policies toward Palestinians and also toward Israeli-Arabs, the negative views about Israel are in fact sourced in the egoistic relations among the Jewish people themselves.

Overtly, we find no reports about negative connections between Jews, but covertly, there is a deep-seeded feeling in the nations of the world that the Jewish people owe the world a method of correction of human relations up to a point of “love your neighbor as yourself,” and that the Jews are failing to provide this method. The feeling of the Jewish people failing to provide the world with a method for rising above divisive drives is then what ultimately forms as negative views that the nations of the world hold toward the people of Israel, and the “Israel as an apartheid state” narrative is one such consequence. It is as Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag (Baal HaSulam) writes in his “Writings of the Last Generation”:“It is a fact that Israel is hated by all the nations, whether for religious, racial, capitalist, communist, or for cosmopolitan reasons, etc. It is so because the hatred precedes all reasons, but each merely resolves its loathing according to its own psychology.”

In short, connection is a law of nature and the people of Israel were established as a conduit through which to pass the connection in nature’s deeper levels to humanity. The solution to the increasing negative views about the people of Israel is thus for them to realize their role in the world, i.e. to implement the method that leads to “love your neighbor as yourself.” As such, they become “a light unto the nations,” i.e. a conduit for the tendency of “love your neighbor as yourself” to spread worldwide. On the contrary, their failure to realize this method holds back such a tendency from spreading around the world, and the world increasingly feels that the people of Israel are a source of darkness, up to a point where the world would feel that there is no right for this nation’s existence.

We thus have no choice but to start increasing our positive connections to each other up to a peak of love. By doing so, we would invert evil to good, and see peace and harmony throughout the world. Likewise, we would find that the world would invert its attitude to us from negative to positive.

Based on the video “Why Does the ‘Israel as an Apartheid State’ Narrative Gain Increasing Attention?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi.
Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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Question: One ancient parable says that God molded a man from clay and he had an unused piece left. “What else can I mold for you?” God asked. “Mold me happiness,” the man replied. God did not answer, and only put the remaining piece of clay in the man’s palm.

Where is that remaining piece of clay that a person can use to stop being an animal and experience oneself in perfection and eternity?

Answer: It is right here. It just needs to be seen.

Question: Where is this line? Where is this point?

Answer: I think that this is the central Kabbalistic book The Book of Zohar. All other Kabbalistic materials gather around it. It reveals how to reach happiness to us.

From the next level, the level of the Creator, we must attract the force that created us, led us through all metamorphoses through the all of history to our present state, and manifested itself in us and caused this question from within, so that we now attract this force to ourselves and begin to raise ourselves to its level.

But man himself must make the jump from the animal level to the level of the Creator. On all other levels—inanimate, vegetative, and animal—we rose automatically. Nature has constantly moved us and evolved. And now we must raise ourselves.

This is why Kabbalah is revealed. It is the instrument with which we must enter the new dimension. To become equal to the Creator is our goal; therefore a person is called “Adam,” that is, similar to the Creator. Only by achieving this will we fill all our voids and become truly happy.

That piece of “clay” that the Creator put on our palms is Kabbalah as a method of achieving happiness.

Question: In principle, can one say that the whole development of a person and his whole life is aimed at realizing the futility and insignificance of his desires?

Answer: But all these desires are correct. On the contrary, they lead us forward. Nothing needs to be cleaned up. Everything that is inside us and outside is specially created so that we can use it correctly and realize it in order to achieve the highest goal.

And then we will find that in each of us there is not a single bad quality, not one evil quality. The Creator kneaded “clay” in us with all sorts of little things inside so that everyone would occupy the most perfect state for themselves.
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From KabTV’s “Close-Up, Summing Up” 4/7/10

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Preparation to the Lesson

Lesson on the Topic “Pesach (Passover)” 

Writings of Baal HaSulam “Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot” 

Selected Highlights

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Medium published my new article “Here Comes Another Wave”

While the media is busy covering the war in Ukraine, Covid has returned to haunt humanity. In China, more than fifty million people are on tight lockdown; in Hong Kong, the number of dead is rising; in Israel, the reproduction number (R) is climbing fast and is now well beyond the spreading mark of 1. If we thought Omicron was contagious, the new strain, BA.2, is 30 percent more so, and hybrid variants like the Deltacron are emerging, too. New strains and new waves will keep appearing until we learn all that we need to learn from the virus.

The virus is not here to teach us about itself; it is here to teach us about us. We think of these waves as waves of Covid-19, but they are not. The original strain is virtually gone; we are dealing with a different virus because we ourselves are different. This is why the vaccines that defeated the original strain are no longer effective.

As I said from the first appearance of the virus in early 2020, this virus, or its “relatives,” is here to stay. It needs to teach us how to live more peacefully and harmoniously with each other and with nature, and it will not leave until we learn.

We may not have noticed it, but the virus has already done a great deal of teaching. Our career aspirations have changed dramatically. Suddenly, everyone is talking about The Great Resignation and the fact that so many people now prefer to work from home.

Many people have also become content with less money in return for more peace of mind. The movement toward a four-day workweek is also gaining momentum around the world. Even in Asia, known for its workaholism, big corporations such as Panasonic and others have switched, or are in the process of switching to a four-day workweek.

Traditional education is also falling from grace. “Until 2019, the number of homeschooled students had been growing by between 2% to 8% each year. From 2019 to the fall of 2020, the percentage of homeschooled students changed from 3.4% to 9%.” According to the National Home Education Research Institute, “there were about 3.7 million homeschool students in 2020–2021 in grades K-12 in the United States (roughly 6% to 7% of school-age children).”

These are not minor changes. Fewer working people means more modest consumption, less congestion on the roads, especially if people are working from home, and more family time. Likewise, homeschooled children require a parent to stay home and tend to the education and occupation of the children. This, again, affects many other aspects of society.

This is why I think that Covid is not a punishment but a correction. The only reason that we feel this correction as painful is that we resent the change, so nature imposes it on us.

At our current level of narcissism, without restraint from the outside, we might destroy ourselves and the world with us. The war in Ukraine is only an example of what pride and power-hunger can inflict. Therefore, I think we should be grateful to Covid’s restraints. We are counting its victims, but we have no idea what catastrophes its appearance has prevented.

That said, I do not think we should continue to suffer its restraints. Since nature imposes corrections on us, and we have no choice but to obey, as is clearly the case, we can impose these corrections on ourselves instead of inviting nasty bugs to do it for us.

All we need to correct is our egoistic behavior. To do that, we need to be aware that in a world that has become totally interconnected, thinking that we can take all that we want regardless of others and enjoy other people’s pain is not only reckless, but destructive to everyone, including to ourselves.

We need to understand that if we want to subjugate other people, even in thought, much less in action, we are harming ourselves and our environment. No other being but humans have such evil, narcissistic thoughts. If we annihilate them from within us, we will put an end to war, hunger, exploitation, abuse, tyranny, and everything else that plagues our world. If we are reluctant to learn, the viruses will clear out these plagues from humanity.
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Medium published my new article “Man’s Insatiable Hunger for Power”

Since the dawn of time, man has craved power. Since the dawn of time, power struggles have disrupted people’s peaceful lives. Today, too, the hunger for power is wreaking havoc and destroying countless lives. Power turns people into bullies. We cannot kill it but we can use it positively. Unless we learn how to do it, it will destroy us all.

You could say that the hunger for power is man’s primary trait. We want to control everything around us. This is true not only of pitiless rulers, but of every human being.

Power-hunger exists within us from the moment we are born. Look at how babies grab everything their hand can grip. That, too, is a desire to control, to keep. It is the fundamental state of being of our desire: to want to own and control everything I see, to bring it under my governance, so that I am in control and everything else is subordinate to me.

In other words, the hunger for power begins from the most basic needs and increases to levels where people lose their ability to judge correctly because of their obsession with power. The initial desire is natural, but in humans, it evolves into a disastrous monster.

The problem is not that we want something, but that our desires grow beyond the level where we can balance them. Eventually, they become desires not only to get what we want, but mainly to prevent others from getting what they want, and to have them at my mercy.

There are two fundamental forces in existence: attraction and rejection. They manifest on every level, physical, biological, emotional, and moral. In all of nature, the opposites balance each other out. In humans, the pulling force grows from generation to generation, and keeps growing throughout our lives until it grows out of balance and out of control. In order to maintain the balance that the rest of nature maintains naturally, we must learn how to do it.

From early on in life, we must teach children about human nature, how we can keep it in check, what goals we should set for ourselves, and how to achieve them in constructive ways for ourselves and for society. We need to show children which social environments are good for them and which are not, and why, and show them the harm that reckless egoism can inflict.

Once people have acquired control over their ego, they can use it positively and constructively. If such people have a desire to rule, once they have learned how to rule their ego, they can become great rulers. They will be able to resist the intensification and inflation of the ego, and instead of saying l’état, c’est moi (the state is I), as did Louis XIV, they will feel humbled by the privilege that the public has bestowed upon them to lead it wisely.

Indeed, a leader must have an inherent feeling of unworthiness. Unless a leader feels that other people know better, are more capable, or have more experience and wisdom, nothing will stop him or her from becoming a tyrant. However, humility and a certain sense of inferiority curb the ego and allow the leader to remain attentive, appreciative, and, above all, caring.
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