Question: Does a person have any freedom of choice?

Answer: No. The freedom of choice is only in moving toward the purpose that is designated for you, by your own efforts or in spite of them.

Question: How can a person feel free, even if there is no freedom of choice? How can I feel like that?

Answer: A person can feel free when he is in harmony with nature, swims along this current. If he feels this harmony, then there is no life and death for him but just one eternal movement.
[271981]
From KabTV’s “Kabbalah Express” 9/1/20

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Question: A study was conducted at Harvard for 80 years where scientists have tried to figure out the main factor for happiness in people’s lives. They concluded that relationships between people is most important.

On one hand, we really want to be happy, and we understand that the most important factor is relationships. We invest a lot of money in medicine, devote a lot of time to a healthy lifestyle even though we understand that the decisive factor even for human health is the relationship between people.

And still, no matter how much we invest, we cannot fully realize, even purely selfishly, that relationships between us are the most important thing. Why?

Answer: Because egoism is a helper against you. It does not just push you to do what is good for you. This is a very special assistant that leads you not to achieve the most comfortable animal state, but to achieve a higher state. Only in a special way.

Selfishness is built based on the fact that you abandon it and rise above it. It is constantly pushing for this, but in exactly the opposite way.

Therefore, in the material world there is no greater helper for our development than egoism although it constantly confronts us with ourselves. It constantly pushes us to struggle, to opposites, to contradictions, all in order to find out who we are, what we are, what we are for.
[272012]
From KabTV’s “Communication Skills” 7/30/20

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Confucius: “I am not bothered by the fact that I am not understood. I am bothered when I do not know others.”

If people do not understand me, I get upset because this is my second task, the second goal of my life, that people understand what I want to convey to them. The first goal is, of course, the Creator, but the second one is people.

Remark: It is truly important to you that people understand you.

My Comment: Certainly. Otherwise, what is my life worth? It is all about conveying something to people.

Question: Is it only possible to convey to them anything if you understand them?

Answer: No. It all depends only on the help from the Creator, the goodwill of the Creator, so that He opens their hearts, and I will tell them what to put there. The Creator cannot do it Himself. He needs intermediaries.

Question: So is almost your whole life aimed at being understood and heard?

Answer: Not me. What I want to convey. I as if build a channel, a kind of a pipe, and what I want to convey passes through it. It doesn’t even matter to me that it is going through me and how much I understand what is coming through. The main thing is that I bring it to them.

Question: Is it not important that they will say, “I received it through him”?

Answer: Absolutely not.

Remark: You have never made this a secret and always said that you even defended your doctoral dissertation so that maybe someone would say, “Oh, he has a Ph.D., I will listen to him.”

Answer: Of course! Otherwise, what for?

Remark: People defend their doctoral dissertations not only for that. They do it for salaries, for respect, for the academic degree, and for their resumes.

My Comment: I do not have any of it and I do not need it.

Question: Is everything directed to the fact that if it helps me to be heard, I will do it?

Answer: Of course. Only for this.

Question: If roughly speaking, now that you are known, people started talking on every corner: “Laitman! Laitman!” Would you say: “This is just in order to be heard”?

Answer: I think so, yes. Besides, I know that it will only be to the extent that the Creator needs it. To this extent, He will either raise me or lower me. I believe that what a person needs, he must experience. He must live through it, must endure it all, realize that it is for his benefit. There is no choice. Each performs one’s own function. Someone as if destroys, someone as if repairs, someone as if fills, someone empties, and so on.

Question: How did you know that it is your function to tell the world what it lives for, to disseminate the wisdom of Kabbalah? How did you know that this is your life?

Answer: I felt it although I was not really keen to do it. And later from my teacher Rabash, he directed me. Even more than that, he directed me not to the highest attainments, but to stay close to people, not to isolate myself from them, and to disseminate.
[272091]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 7/27/20

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Some say happiness is when you are understood, great happiness is when you are loved, and real happiness is when you yourself love.

The feeling of love—from the egoistic to the most absolute one.

Question: What is happiness for you?

Answer: Happiness for me is when I connect with the Creator through my teacher.
This is happiness.
[272041]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 7/27/20

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Preparation to the Lesson

Writings of Rabash, “What Are Torah and Work in the Way of the Creator?“

Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Study of the Ten Sefirot, Vol. 1, Part 1, Chapter 1, Item 3″

Selected Highlights

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Listen to an Audio Version of the Blog
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We have entered a new stage of understanding the pandemic —that it is here for the long-term and perhaps forever. There is an across-the-board fatigue from the coronavirus. People’s tempers are ready to snap. Here is where people might grow cognizant of the egoism that is sending them to their death, and the need to overcome it, even at the price of replacing care for oneself with care for others—as long as one gains the strength and motivation to move, to socialize, to live, and after that, perhaps people will see a completely different future…

From apathy people will reach the realization that there is no point in thinking about yourself. It’s rather by thinking of others that life will acquire new meaning. If everything is about others, then we get a new, spiritual world, one that is opposite to the previous one.

The most significant change in humanity is its disillusionment in life, apathy, the unwillingness to strive for anything. This will eventually lead to a re-evaluation of life, the need to find an aim higher than life. Then the will to achieve it will come back; life will acquire a higher meaning.

The main test is: what does a person aspire to, and how strong is his desire. A change of intention is like switching the car gear from forward to reverse, which determines whether I am moving forward toward the Creator and the creatures, or backward.
From Twitter, 10/25/20

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From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 10/25/20

A student told me he had heard, or perhaps read, the views of serious people recently, who had expressed fear that on November 4, right after the presidential election, a second civil war will break out in America. He said that those pundits also warned that it could spread beyond the borders of America and into Europe and other parts of the world.

In all honesty, I cannot say what will happen the day after the election. Legally, America has done a great deal to cope with racial segregation. Nevertheless, despite a century and a half of abolition of legal slavery and more than half a century after the abolition of the Jim Crow laws, interracial separation, suspicion, and hatred persist. People were not taught how to love one another, how to form solidarity, so the hatred and separation between them remain. In a county where “education” means acquisition of knowledge, where “knowledge is power,” people dedicate no time, effort, or money to learning how to care or sympathize. As a result, the whole country is falling apart and no amount of knowledge will stop it since people didn’t learn the one thing that matters: how to love each other.

There is no American nation. There are American people, but there is no “one nation under God.” In the absence of national unity, every side pulls its own way and the country disintegrates.

So is civil war after the election possible? Since they haven’t mended the problem that caused the first war, we can’t rule out another war. As long as the segregation de facto remains, anything’s possible.

As before, so now, the only remedy can come through education. However, this education should focus on connecting people’s hearts, not on stuffing them with information that does not change their attitudes to one another. If Americans somehow, miraculously, manage to calm things down after the election and launch such a reconciliation program, one that relies on bringing unity and pulling people’s hearts closer, then they can overcome anything. But if Americans maintain partisanship and cancellation of each other, America will fall apart.

Will a civil war in America migrate elsewhere? I doubt it. The racial problem in the US is endemic. There are minorities elsewhere, of course, but the situation that exists in the US between Black Americans and White Americans is unique, so I don’t believe that clashes on that background will cause a chain reaction elsewhere. Ripples, perhaps, but not a full blown chain reaction.

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All viruses are the result of our bad thoughts. But there are no instruments capable of measuring this connection because it is higher than ordinary material perception.

There are many laboratories and studies trying to grasp the connection between the spiritual and the material, but this is impossible. Our good or evil thoughts belong to the human level since they are based on our egoism, the evil principle.

Tell me, what device can be used to measure a person’s egoism, and where should it be connected? Of course, not to the material body because it is only a biological machine that carries out orders. To the heart? But the heart is just a pump that can be replaced with an artificial one. Maybe to the brain? Also no.

Where can a person’s thoughts be extracted from in order to pass them through the device and see which thoughts are good and which are not and need to be corrected? Is it possible? You can build a cardiogram, measure frequencies, electrical processes in the body, but it is impossible to assess their essence. After all, it does not belong to matter. Therefore, science is not able to approach this.

As a student, we had classes at the Human Brain Institute in St. Petersburg. Then I heard from the head of the department, who was a famous scientist, that we do not know where the thoughts and desires of a person are.

Scientists try to trace this connection, but it leads out of the brain into a sphere that we are not able to perceive. There, outside of man, are all our thoughts and desires. The human brain is a modem that connects the spiritual space, where all our thoughts soar, with human sensations.

In our world, it is customary to identify a person with his animal body. But by studying Kabbalah, we build a spiritual Partzuf, ascend to faith above knowledge. It is no longer material. The science of Kabbalah connects a person with his true essence as if separating him from the material body and attaching him to the soul. Therefore, the physical world disappears from our sensations because it is imaginary.

When we reach such a connection between us that we begin to reveal spiritual phenomena, then we will open the book The Study of the Ten Sefirot and we will be able to feel everything that is written there and read it like a musician reads a musical score.
[272565]
From KabTV’s “Writers Meeting” 10/15/20

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If I allow an unkind thought about others to come out and be expressed and heard, I give it an opportunity to manifest itself. As long as it is inside me, I can still suppress it, forbid these thoughts to come out of me, that is, make a restriction on my inherent egoistic nature.

A negative thought about our neighbor is like an action. But I can catch and stop a thought without letting it manifest and hurting others. A thought initiates an action even if it is not a material one. If I allow an unkind thought to flow and act freely without trying to control and suppress it, I am harming my neighbor and committing a bad action in the world.

We live in a world of thoughts. A thought is an action. Therefore, by allowing unkind thoughts to come out of me and believing that this is not bad, I act maliciously and thereby determine what is happening in reality. Our entire world, every person will have to check himself and find out how he influences others. This will require deep inner work and a lot of effort from everyone.

Man must change the direction of his thoughts about others from negative to positive. And then, in this positive attitude toward others, he will feel an additional force of nature that he did not feel before.

By changing our thoughts from negative to positive, we will save ourselves from the coronavirus and redeem the entire world from the epidemic and other problems. After all, this is how we bring ourselves in line with nature so that all its degrees: inanimate, vegetative, animate, and human will be in harmony, in good thoughts, mutually complementing each other.

All that prevents this is our evil nature, our egoism. Therefore, we need to turn this egoistic attitude toward others into a good one. To do this, we need to work in groups so that we attract the good force concealed in nature and make it reveal itself. We demand that this good force, good relations, and unity be manifested between us in the group.

If we allow our egoistic thoughts to rule over us and we do not connect, then the coronavirus will spread more and more. We will not have any remedy for this disease because the coronavirus is a display of our bad relations with each other. We just call it a virus.

There will be many more such “viruses” that appear as a result of our evil thoughts, and we will suffer a lot. Six months ago, there was still hope that the epidemic would gradually subside. Now, however, we see that it will only get worse and worse until we say: “Enough!”

Our corruption manifests itself in the form of a virus because the human body is filled with viruses. Viruses are information blocks that are in constant communication with each other at all levels of the body. We call them viruses, but in fact, we cannot exist without them. Each virus is a very complex entity, and we do not even understand a  millionth part of the way it works. We do not know how our body functions.

When such ruptures are revealed in the form of viruses, they can only be corrected by a force that is higher than them. And above the virus is thought. Viruses are carriers that transmit thoughts; they transmit data and information to different parts of the body and to the brain. Since our thoughts and desires operate at very high egoistic levels, they manifest themselves in such dangerous viruses.

If we want to calm them down and bring them into balance, there is the wisdom of Kabbalah for this. Balance is restored by restriction, screen, and reflected light. You need to balance all the forces that activate these viruses so that they fall under the restriction and screen. Then all the viruses that cause the disease today will turn into beneficial ones.
[272576]
From the Writers Meeting 10/15/20

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