Question: You talk all the time about raising a person. Everyone considers themselves to be good and well-mannered. How will a person understand that he needs education and change?

Answer: Only through the blows. How else? If people consider themselves to be so good, why is the world so bad?

Comment: Others are bad, therefore, the world is bad. This is how a person thinks.

My Response: And we will continue in this way until something so heavy falls on our heads that no one will think about anything anymore.

Question: Can we say that by doing this, we are inviting trouble even upon ourselves?

Answer: Of course. Instead of correcting ourselves, trying to do something, we calm ourselves down. This is leading the world to disaster.

Question: Does real education mean that I start looking at what I am like?

Answer: Yes, when I look at myself, what I am. When I look at what I have to do for others, when I am the only one who is not corrected, that is everything that exists is in me: a liar, a thief, a deceiver, a hater. I do not know what other epithets to come up with. It is all me.

And all the others are not. All the others do not exist at all. All the others are my various reflections that I see around me. That is, I look around me at a lot of people, each of them portrays a negative me. In this form and in that and also in this.

There are eight billion people in the world, and each of them represents some negative quality of mine. Eight billion! This is me. This is how our world is designed. And that is how I see it.

Question: What do I do when I see evil, an evil person?

Answer: If I correct myself, I begin to see the world more connected, more aspiring for bestowal, for love, for unity. As a result, I understand that all this is one system, this is one person, called Adam. And this Adam is me because I assembled him in this way by my deeds, actions, thoughts, and all sorts of corrections.

Question: Does it mean that I am absorbing the world in myself? Do I become this single soul, Adam?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Is this the truth?

Answer: This is the truth.

Question: And what we see is a lie?

Answer: No, we also see the truth, but it is a partial truth, torn apart by our internal egoism.

Question: Does it mean that here we as if do not pass it through egoism? We do not look through egoism.

Answer: Yes. If I gather them all together into one single image, then this is me.

This is our task—to gather the whole world and say, “This is me,” and this world depends on me.

Question: Am I responsible for everybody and for everything?

Answer: Absolutely for everything that is here.

Question: Is every person, the simplest, most ordinary person, responsible for the world, for everything that happens in this terrible world?

Answer: Yes, to the extent that he finds himself in this world.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 12/28/20

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Question: The meaning of life disappears when I think that I need to merge with all people into some common consciousness. Yes, I want to interact with people, but I do not want to lose myself and my individuality. Is there something wrong with me? After all, I feel comfortable without interacting with people.

Answer: This all will pass. You have nothing to lose in yourself and in your comfort. You have no idea what comfort you get when you connect with everyone and begin to feel an infinite, perfect world, above time, motion, and space.

And you, like a child, hold on to a small toy and are afraid of losing it.

Question: Does it mean that it is still worth getting closer to people, toward them?

Answer: Of course.
[276644]
From KabTV’s “Ask a Kabbalist” 12/31/18

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Question: What is the significance of the recognition of a Kabbalah teacher by the general public? What does society understand about that?

Answer: Today this is really rather meaningless, but 2,000 years ago when there were quite a few Kabbalists and groups of people who could acknowledge a certain Kabbalist or not, it was meaningful.

As Baal HaSulam says, for King Solomon to be acknowledged as wise, he had to stand before the Kabbalists of the great Knesset (assembly) because other people could not verify it since they were not on such a high level.

Today, however, when people don’t know about the wisdom of Kabbalah, and moreover, they deride it, people may say that someone is a Kabbalist only according to their judgment, according to who they choose to celebrate, and so it is quite meaningless.

Everything is determined by what the teacher teaches you. If he teaches you not to be connected to him, but to the primary sources and through the group to the Creator so that you will see the meaning only in that, then his teachings are correct.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 12/2/18

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Question: How does one explain loneliness, when a person cannot even find mutual sympathy? Now there are a lot of people like this. Does this mean that they have no soul mates and are alone in life, forever?

Answer: Egoism is constantly developing in us, from the beginning of creation to our day, and will continue to develop further and further.

As personal egoism develops, each person will feel more and more distant from other people. It will be increasingly difficult for him to find his soul mate, and generally to get together with friends.

If humanity does not begin to correct itself, then its future, of course, is very unfortunate. People will live in their pencil cases, and this will be their lot.

Comment: But this is great suffering.

My Response: They will get used to it, they will take drugs or something else. And what can you do against selfishness? Either fix it, or leave it as it is, and quietly muffle it.
[276762]
From KabTV’s “Ask a Kabbalist” 3/20/19

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Preparation to the Lesson

Lesson on the Topic of “Breaking the Barriers to Spirituality”

Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Study of the Ten Sefirot,” ‘Histaklut Pnimit,” Vol. 1, Part 4, Chapter 1, Item 6

Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Matan Torah (The Giving of the Torah)”

Selected Highlights

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Listen to an Audio Version of the Blog
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My new article on Linkedin “Being an “Objective” Jew in the Biden Administration”

While many Jewish media outlets hail the proliferation of Jews in the Biden administration, I don’t see this as something to be proud of. For American Jewry, it is no reason for optimism, and from Israel’s perspective, this is not good news.

American Jewry has worked very hard to get to where it is. Currently, it holds key positions not only in the new administration. It has been holding key positions in both Democratic and Republican administrations for many years now, though not as conspicuously as in this one. American Jewry holds key positions not only in politics, but also in business, high tech, traditional media and social media, including of course the big tech companies currently under fire by Republicans for their purportedly biased treatment of Donald Trump and his supporters. American Jews are prominent in culture, entertainment, science, academia, finance, and in the justice system. Indeed, they are at their zenith.

And as always with the Jews, after the zenith comes the nadir. Antisemitism has been rising all over the world at least since the turn of the century, and the US is not trailing behind the rest of the nations. The heydays of Jews were the 80s of the 90s of the previous century, but those days are gone and they will not return. From here on, it’ll be a long and painful downward slide.

As for the State of Israel, the presence of so many Jews promises nothing. If anything, it portends troubles. When a Jew is at the helm, it usually spells trouble for Israel. Even if a Jew is pro Israel, he or she will be hesitant to show it for fear of being accused of dual loyalty. Worse yet, Jews in key political positions tend to promote anti-Israel policies and decisions in order to prove their “objectivity” with regard to Israel.

Moreover, it is a sad truth that most American Jews are hostile toward the State of Israel. Over the years, the chasm between American Jewry, the State of Israel, and the Israelis, has deepened on many levels. Israelis and American Jews disagree on key issues such as Mid-East politics, religion, and even on the definition of Jewishness and Judaism. For this reason, placing a Jew in a key political position is most likely bad news for Israel. When there are more than a dozen Jews in such positions, as is the case with the incoming administration, the bad news is dozen-fold.

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We do not have our own forces: neither positive nor negative, neither the right line nor the left. We receive everything from above, and we must therefore constantly keep in touch with the upper force. Everything that I have comes from it, and I must keep to the middle line, that is, keep my devotion to it.

This means that I attribute everything to the upper force, I receive both forces of the left and the right from it, as well as all the knowledge and advice that allow me to combine these two forces so that they intertwine in me and begin to form a person, Adam, out of me.

We receive the egoistic forces and the intention to bestow from the Creator as well as a technique that allows us to dress one on top of the other and build out of us the likeness of the Creator called man, Adam.

The main thing for this is to nullify ourselves in order to receive forces and intentions from the higher source, from the Creator, and by combining the material (the desire to enjoy) with the form of the material (the intention to bestow), shape from this power of reception and power of bestowal the middle line, reception for the sake of bestowal, man, Adam.

We will have the force of reception within us, which the Creator created us with and gradually adds more and more. And we need to give this material the form of bestowal, which we also receive from the Creator.

The correct work is to ask the Creator for both forces, the force of reception and the force of bestowal, and to accelerate time, which is called sanctifying it. And then we will advance in the middle line, correcting ourselves and turning to the Creator even before He turns to us.

By correctly combining the two opposite forces, the forces of bestowal and reception, not allowing one to outweigh the other, but creating their optimal combination in the middle line, we mold ourselves in the form of bestowal. And according to this accepted image, we get closer and closer to the Creator with our inner properties, we identify ourselves with Him and are included in Him, we come to embrace and unity, boundless merging.

And all this is due to the devotion of the soul because we do not feel that we have even a bit of ourselves, nothing, free from the authority of the Creator. We want to be in His complete power because this is the truth. But it is hidden from us, and we strive to reveal it.

At each level that we attain, we discover that the Creator rules over us. As a result of our own efforts, it is revealed that the Creator fills us without leaving any degree of freedom. All this is the result of the devotion of the soul to the extent I am called human.

In order to establish the correct relationship with the Creator, which is called the devotion of the soul, we must first do the same exercises in the ten toward the friends.

The Creator created this laboratory for us so that we can practically feel it and realize it, through receiving support and critical assessment from others as to how we are progressing in achieving the devotion of the soul. Seeing what I lack to be devoted to the upper ten, I can understand what I lack to be devoted to the Creator.

There are different stages of devotion, which will become the rungs of the spiritual ladder. The understanding of the Creator occurs in the measure of the devotion of the soul that we manage to achieve in relation to Him.

If we strive for the devotion of the soul, then it correctly attunes us to the Creator and sets the exact direction like the North Star or a compass needle always pointing to the north where we should always move and check ourselves against.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/18/21, “Devotion”

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From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 1/24/21

Joe Biden hasn’t even been inaugurated but we already hear that he wants to resume the nuclear agreement with Iran. The New York Times wrote as early as November 17 that Biden “has promised to move quickly to rejoin the nuclear deal with Iran,” and The Times of Israel wrote on January 16 that according to a report, “Officials in the incoming Biden administration have already begun holding quiet talks with Iran on a return to the 2015 nuclear deal.”

For four years, Donald Trump did his very best to stymie Iran’s nuclear plans to build an atom bomb. His success was very limited, but it did slightly hinder their progress. Now Biden wants to return to the 2015 agreement that Obama signed. This means that the Iranians will return to full speed development, if they haven’t already got a bomb, and the monitoring of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) will be as “efficient” as it was before Trump scolded them for their inaction and withdrew from the agreement. Now, the new administration will let the fox guard the henhouse once again.

I’m not optimistic about this because I don’t see that Iran has any interest in making peace or even lowering the flames with Israel. In fact, their struggle is not with Israel as such, but with the rest of the Arab world. Israel, in this case, is just a means to an end, and the aggressive extremism serves the Ayatollahs very well. They have no other country against which to show off their devotion to Islam so they use the Arab-Israeli conflict as a pretext to show off their orthodoxy.

They also don’t care about their own people—whether they suffer from the sanctions or even from bombs, as long as they can maintain their prominence and clout in the Arab world. So, because their hatred for Israel is not the issue, but the internal struggle in the Arab world, there is really nothing that Israel can do to mitigate the conflict. All it can do is protect itself militarily.

We’ll see what happens in the future, but for the time being, this is yet another issue that doesn’t look promising as we begin the new year with a new administration.

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From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 24/1/21

In November 2014, I spent a few days in LA to shoot several interesting TV shows. Some of the shoots took place in the studio of Jewish Life TV, where I was interviewed for a new series. A more unusual shoot was a meeting with students from UCLA, whose inquisitiveness I found refreshing, especially the young Muslim student who kept asking about the essence of the wisdom of Kabbalah. However, the most memorable event on that tour was the meeting with Larry King (RIP).

Considering his professional record of interviewing the most high profile personalities in America and the world over for decades, I expected to find at least some measure of conceit and impatience. But when we met, I was delighted to find a warm-hearted, attentive host who asked poignant questions and listened carefully to my answers. It was a joy to speak with him.

The longer the shoot continued, the warmer Larry became. Even though we talked about painful topics such as the growing antisemitism in the US, and even though I told him it would grow worse because of our internal division, he did not scoff or jeer at my prediction. He was inquisitive and genuinely sought answers to the problems that already plagued the US.

The thing that struck me most was that when I told him that the only solution to antisemitism was unity of the Jews among themselves, he did not seem surprised. Perhaps it was his life’s experience, perhaps his sensitivity to people’s hearts, being such a veteran interviewer, or perhaps it was his search for remedies to his own pains, but the idea of unity of the Jews as the solution to our problems seemed to resonate with him.

In the break between the two parts of the show, he said, half to himself, half to his crew: “Wonderful guest!” When the show was over, we talked some more and the embrace he gave me as we parted felt warm and genuine.

May you rest in peace, Larry King, may Jews find unity and peace among themselves, and may the whole world find unity and peace in our troubled times.

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