Question: Today there is a massive denial of scientific knowledge, belief in something. The world is confused, people have to choose how and what to believe. We do not believe in the safety of vaccines. Coronavirus is fiction, and if not fiction, then science is powerless. We no longer believe in doctors, but in unofficial science, shamans, predictors.

Do you know how many methods to cure coronavirus are there? A huge number! A million views! Everywhere it is written: “I am cured”, “I am cured” …

What should we believe today?

Answer: I do not believe in anything. I do not feel that life obliges me to believe in something.

Question: What should an ordinary person begin to believe in?

Answer: The fact is that we live in a time when people abuse their egoism. They undermine self-confidence. If a doctor says to me: “I think that such a medicine is good for you, it is worth using it,” I might already think that he has connections with the pharmacy, that he makes money on it, that pharmaceutical companies pay him, etc.

Everything passes into egoism like through sand, and therefore we no longer believe in anyone and in anything.

This is the general picture of the world today when we have slaughtered all the “holy cows.” Absolutely nothing is sacred; we do not believe in anything: not in ourselves or in God, not in the devil, in anyone, or in anything. A person is really left without anything, like a small child stands and cries that he was forgotten. In this form.

Question: What is the Creator’s program here, to lead us to such a small state?

Answer: Of course! So that we turn out to be like this: here I stand in front of you as if naked.

Remark: I see that constant work is precisely to bring a person to this: like a bunny under a bush—I do not trust anyone, I do not know anything, I am afraid of everything.

My Comment: Yes, and there is no one to hope for—only a higher power, which he will gradually come to when he understands what it should be, that it is based absolutely on bestowal, absolutely on love, absolutely above his egoism.

When he understands what this higher power should be, and how he can turn to it, then enlightenment will come, and he will come to the truth.

Question: Will a man not need doctors then?

Answer: In principle, doctors are not needed. Doctors are needed only for the period of the Creator’s concealment. Then everything will fulfill the person’s connection with the Creator.

Remark: But this is a very distant future.

My Comment: I think it will happen very quickly.

Question: What is your advice? What is an ordinary person to believe in today? How can he live?

Answer: Do not believe in anything. He should simply understand that everything that has happened to us and is still happening is only so that we really feel the need for the real Creator and not for something invented by some grandmas and so on.

Now everyone is inventing God for themselves. There were many such deities. As it is written about Abraham, he destroyed these gods, i.e., all beliefs in different gods.

Question: “Different god”—does this mean a god that suits my egoism?

Answer: Yes. And if it is real, true, He can be only one—altruistic, built only on that which is higher than egoism.

Question: When I do not believe, when I feel bad, does it mean that here I need to search? My egoism is bad. Does that mean that the Creator is somewhere nearby, He is approaching me? Is He exactly the opposite of that?

Answer: Of course.

Question: And what are my actions at this moment?

Answer: Search. Seek and very clearly realize what He should be like after all. What should I be in order to find Him?
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 7/27/20

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New Life 1270 – The Collapse Of The Old World
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Yael Leshed-Harel

The old egoistic social systems are disappearing and, in their place, we are struggling to build one, new system in which everyone is equal, emotionally close, and interconnected with a good attitude. People have lost the taste for the old, luxurious form of life when we were preoccupied with cars and fashion.

Around the globe, we are witnessing social revolutions for solidarity and equality. These revolutions start within a person through changes in intellect, desire, and feeling. Society will subsequently determine laws that support connection between everyone. We need to ask ourselves, how can I do good to others? The coronavirus is helping us to learn to care for each other; we need to focus on not passing the virus to others out of concern for their wellbeing. In the new, good life, we will each understand that we do not exist in and of ourselves, but only as a result of everyone else.
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From KabTV’s “New Life 1270 – The Collapse Of The Old World,” 7/27/20

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Remark: NASA found that 98% of children are born creative geniuses. However schools makes them dull, average people.

In the course of the research, 1,600 children aged four to five years old were tested for genius. Unexpectedly it turned out that 98% of children could be called a genius.

Five years later, new tests were conducted with the same children, already at the age of ten, and they received the following result: instead of 98%, 30% remained. Five years later, they again conducted tests—only 12% of genius children remained.

Then the researchers abandoned this and conducted a test with adults. It turned out that only 2% of them met the test for genius. Scientists have concluded that the process of studying at school, university, and so on, which supposedly should add IQ, “kills” a child who is born a genius.

My Comment: Of course! I felt how school was breaking me down. Breaking in the full sense of the word! How they forced me to study exactly like this, and explain like this, and think like this. I feel it today. How parents were pressing me, how school was pressing me!

Remark: If I come to think about it, it turns out that we built the entire education system to our own detriment.

My Comment: Of course!

Question: Why?

Answer: Because this system is built to stick a small, fragile egoism in some framework and make out of it what we need.

That is, we break the child, instead of developing him freely. Why do we need to feed the child these patterns of thinking? We teach them to think this way and not the other way. Of course, we cripple them by this.

Question: How should we educate a child?

Answer: We should talk with them calmly, freely, even without any topics. Only in a free style, in conversation. It can even be a group of people of different ages. So that they would talk about different topics and learn from each other, developing new topics and new opportunities from within themselves.

When I listen to others, I begin to think, “What about me? How is this for me?” This is a completely different development. All you need is communication, simple communication between people.

Everything else is created artificially, egotistically, for our egoistic needs, which only raise us, as egoists, above each other.

Question: Do you think that school and university are just egoistic pressure on us?

Answer: In order to make money on each other. Both science and art, and everything there is, exist just to earn from each other: either in the form of some material things, money, or in the form of worship, approval, respect, pride, and so on.

Question: And if, as you say, we could just talk, just sit under a tree, just talk and develop from within, what would we come to?

Answer: Perhaps we would have found some new correct community. I do not think it would have been easy. Yet, if we could correctly analyze our inner egoistic impulses in communication between us, we would be able to somehow hold them and balance them.

Question: In other words, do you think there would have been arguments and hatred anyway?

Answer: Of course! Our egoistic nature does not disappear.

Question: How would we have balanced this?

Answer: Between us. We would explain to each other. If we were not entangled in all these notions, psychological, scientific, etc., then it would be easier for us. The most important thing is direct, open communication.

Question: Will we then require any technical innovations, all this technical progress?

Answer: Why? What does it give us?!

Remark: But even now you and I are talking virtually. I am in one studio, and you are in another.

My Comment: Well, what do we need this for? With this, we just have to make up for our separation somehow. We would be talking, but perhaps in a different way, through different capabilities.

Question: Internally, even without words?

Answer: Yes, different communication, on a different channel. Through the internal connection between us.

Everything comes to the point that we give up our past attitude to life, to the world, to ourselves, to progress.

I hope that the attitude toward oneself and others as egoistic little creatures will become more and more apparent, will be as if before the eyes of the person and he will have to change himself.

Question: Still, in what is the genius of a person?

Answer: In the integration. In absolute, complete internal and external integration.

Question: Do you call a person who can do this a genius by and large?

Answer: Yes. If all education were directed there, the genius of a person would be preserved and increased.
[269355]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 6/8/20

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Question: Do I understand correctly that death exists in order for a person to think about the meaning of life?

Answer: In general, yes. If there were some other forms of the continuation of life instead of death, then of course a person would feel completely differently. The presence of death determines our entire worldview.

Question: What can you say about clinical death? Are the processes experienced by a person an illusion? And why are the pictures and sensations in cases of clinical death similar in many people?

Answer: This is natural because we exist in similar animalistic bodies, and therefore the processes that occur in us during the extinction of certain workings of our biological systems are similar and give the same readings.

Question: Is clinical death an illusion?

Answer: Partly, because desire itself cannot die. Only the form of this desire, called the body, disappears.

Question: As water changes its form, it can be in a gaseous, liquid, and solid state. So does a person change the form of his existence?

Answer: The point is that the process of life and death is expressed in relation to a person. Nothing really happens. It is only with regard to people that desire goes through such forms of transformation when it seems to us that it lives, dies, is born, and so on. There is a circuit of desire in nature.
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From KabTV’s “The Post-Coronavirus Era” 5/14/20

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Lesson Preparation

Lesson on the Topic of “The Law of the Arvut (Mutual Guarantee)” 

Lesson on the Topic of  “Love Covers All Transgressions” 

Lesson on the Topic of “The Obligation of Bnei Baruch to Humanity in the Last Generation”

Selected Highlights

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Listen to an Audio Version of the Blog
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Despite the modern means of communication, people feel increasingly more lonely, the new communication lacks feelings, a heart-felt connection. It does not fill the emptiness, it has no empathy… We are about to reveal an enormous emptiness… a black hole…
From Twitter, 8/25/20

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Medium published my new article “Relocation: Change Your Place, Change Your Luck”

American society is on the move. More than one in five US adults, 22% of the population, has relocated or knows someone likely to do so as a consequence of Covid-19’s socioeconomic impact, according to a recent study. Silicon Valley companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter and others have sent their employees to work from home, making their physical proximity to the workplace irrelevant. High rents and safety concerns are the main reasons for considering relocation in many communities, marking a trend to abandon the city for rural areas. Does this indicate a step backward? No, simple life is moving forward.

A wonderful unexpected outcome from the pandemic on our way of living will be an open door to a simpler, happier, and more fulfilling life.

Mobility is a US characteristic. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, on average, Americans change their place of residence no less than 11 times during their lives, mainly pursuing better job opportunities. But relocation due to the pandemic has a peculiar characteristic — it is a true move back to basics. Residents in urban areas are increasingly abandoning the stressful and expensive big cities to settle in the quiet and pastoral countryside, a noticeable trend in America and Europe.

Decades ago, people flocked from farms and villages to the big cities expecting to fulfill their dreams of progress and upward mobility. Today, businesses are closing and those still employed are changing their work patterns from activities in the physical workplace to remote engagement. So, what now is the benefit of living in the urban areas? None. The pandemic is transforming our lifestyle for good. We will realize more and more how adapting to a more virtual environment is a positive thing.

When the population is more scattered and evenly dispersed, everyone benefits — the ecology and humans. Conversely, overcrowded, high-density cities add stress to surrounding environments and pose challenges in the efficient use of natural resources such as water, energy, and food. On the personal level, life outside the urban areas is more manageable, affordable, and healthy.

The Babylonian Talmud says meshane makom, meshane mazal, which means that by changing our place we change our destiny, literally. In fact, our external conditions influence our priorities and focus in life. This also refers to an inner transformation that takes place. A shift to a quiet, simple lifestyle will make us feel better, calmer, and more balanced. And because of this, we will get along with each other more easily. Being rooted to the land with plenty of space for a home vegetable garden and a children’s playground will alleviate the stressful burden of the polluted and noisy concrete jungle.

We all feel secure with the familiar, even if it is far from ideal; this is why people resist change. But the pandemic is ushering us swiftly forward to a profound transformation from one reality to another. Little by little, we are realizing that there is no going back, only forward to a more global world where the boundaries between us are vanishing.

We have the whole world at our fingertips. From work to interpersonal communications and purchases, all is within easy reach within a matter of seconds. Someone can call for any service from America and reach a customer care representative in India without the slightest feeling of distance. We have truly become one global village.

Metropolitan areas will remain as centers for entertainment, culture, tourist attractions and more. Large factories that are indispensable for supplying society’s needs will also continue in big cities, but the population will disperse in different directions. A wonderful unexpected outcome from the pandemic on our way of living will be an open door to a simpler, happier, and more fulfilling life.
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Medium published my new article “Nothing Wrong with Egoism (If Used Right)”

When we talk about egoism being the bane of our generation, we need to understand what it means. After all, where would we be without it? We wouldn’t have industry, modern medicine, or communication. We wouldn’t be able to travel, explore, or lead a pleasant and easy life compared to our forefathers. Moreover, the ego is not man’s creation; it is inherent in our nature. So when we praise nature, how can we condemn the ego, nature’s own creation?

Today, America, which has cultivated the ego culture more than any other country, is reeling with the pain of resisting nature’s pull. But thankfully, there is no need to suffer. If we understand that we do not need to kill our egos but simply use them correctly, share with others and strengthen our communities, we too will evolve, our lives will be safe, and our consciousness will encompass all of humanity and all of reality.

The problem isn’t with the ego; it is with how, how much, and when we use it. In a sense, the ego is everywhere. It is what maintains the shape of atoms and does not let them disintegrate. Nevertheless, in order for atoms to develop, they “relinquish” exclusivity of one or more of their electrons and “share” them with other atoms to create molecules, which is the next stage of their own evolution. As molecules “relinquish” some of their exclusivity and “share” parts of themselves with other molecules, they create molecular structures that in the end become cells, which begin to divide and multiply, and before you know it, you have life.

In other words, life consists of “selfish” elements that “relinquish” exclusivity of parts of themselves and share them with other elements. But by doing so, atoms, molecules, and cells don’t extinguish themselves; on the contrary, they guarantee their survival because now their existence is vital to someone else besides themselves. Moreover, by partaking in the evolution of a more complex system, they themselves evolve. All of creation follows the same evolutionary principle, and this is how our universe was built, with humankind within it.

We, too, are subject to the same laws of development. Socially, we evolved from clans to villages, from villages to towns, from towns to counties, from counties to countries, and now into a global village. But while our societies evolved, our psyches have remained uncared for; now it is their turn. They are the last element in creation that has not been touched, and now it is their turn.

We are at the dawn of an era where we will learn to relinquish parts of ourselves and share them with others in order to create true bonding. We will become one entity not only as communities of individuals, but people will feel each other as parts of themselves. It is a level of connection that we have never experienced, but which our egos are afraid to try thinking that this will be their end.

Indeed, the only thing that stands in the way of this final stage of evolution is our ego. It does not want to relinquish anything regardless of the cost. Like cancer, it is willing to die along with its host, as long as it does not share anything with anyone. But nature will not stop evolving until it brings all of reality into its highest level of development, where all parts both share and sustain one another, and thereby expand their consciousness to encompass the entire system of existence.

Those who resist the process will suffer along the way, but they, too, will reach it. Today, America, which has cultivated the ego culture more than any other country, is reeling with the pain of resisting nature’s pull. But thankfully, there is no need to suffer. If we understand that we do not need to kill our egos but simply use them correctly, share with others and strengthen our communities, we too will evolve, our lives will be safe, and our consciousness will encompass all of humanity and all of reality.

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My new article on Linkedin “Humor, Not Mockery”

Talk show after talk show, comedian after comedian, everyone’s trying to be funny, to make us laugh. But they really needn’t go a long way to do that. All they have to do is find a topical issue, invite a guess or talk about a certain person, and drag their names through the mud until they have lost all speck of respect in the eyes of the audience.

With humor, the rule of thumb is this: When it brings people closer and increases affection, it is good. When it sets us apart and increases derision, it is bad and we must push it away.

More than anything, the media’s humor is a mark of disgrace for our society. And the soaring rating they get only proves that we are growing worse. The truth is very simple: If I find someone else’s pain funny then I am not a good person. It may not be easy to acknowledge, but unless we know the truth, we will never change.

Mockery is not humor; it is venting our venom into the atmosphere and poisoning the air with our ill-will. Later, we shouldn’t be surprised that we can’t trust anyone, that we’re afraid of everyone, and that we feel alone and depressed. We helped build this exact atmosphere with our own foul minds.

Media that presents sneering “entertainment” is not our friend, either. These shows indoctrinate us to be cynical, mean, and unsympathetic—the exact opposite of what we need to build a happy life. We shouldn’t give these shows the rating that they get, and we certainly shouldn’t idolize talk show hosts or comedians who deride their guests. They are not our friends and they do not have our interest in mind. The crueler they make us be toward each other, the more they profit, and the more unhappy we become.

True humor is a gift. When you look at a pet doing funny things, or when your baby does baby stuff, it’s very funny and it’s good humor because it stems from our love for them and even increases it. Also, when humor helps us cope with hardships, it is a true gift.

We can even use humor for constructive criticism, but first we must make certain that we love the person we will criticize, and then use humor as the most inoffensive way to make suggestions. However, here we must be very careful since our ill-will rejoices in opportunities to “offer sound advice,” when in fact it strives to patronize and reprimand.

With humor, the rule of thumb is this: When it brings people closer and increases affection, it is good. When it sets us apart and increases derision, it is bad and we must push it away.

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