Remark: Perhaps in the future, scientists will be able to discover the gene that exists precisely in the Jewish people that is responsible for connection primarily between themselves and then with other people. In principle, today they are already discovering that genes are responsible even for political views.
My Reply: For everything that is related to our world. And we are talking about unity that is above our world. It is quite possible that somewhere, in something, some consequences will be revealed on the material level. But in principle, I do not think so because spiritual properties are too detached from the earthly ones.
Question: Today, we are witnessing the greatest disconnection within the State of Israel as well as between the Jews of America and the Jews of Israel. What can this lead to?
Answer: To disaster. Or to the opposite. We are at a critical turning point that can lead either to one development of events or the other.
Either we will bring ourselves to a state where the whole world will take up arms against us and there will really be a threat of destruction, or the world and the Jews will be able to grasp the problem that exists both in the world and in the Jews and will understand how they must work together to raise themselves with the help of the purpose of creation, which is in the Kabbalists, not in ordinary Jews.
We must place the purpose of creation at the forefront of human development and thereby reach the next, highest level of development. [265562] From KabTV’s “Systematic Analysis of the Development of the People of Israel,” 7/29/19
Question: If we cannot interfere with nature, then should we let it do whatever it wants? Should you resign yourself, give up?
Answer: First, there is nothing to oppose to nature. This is completely illogical, unreasonable.
Nature is the entire cosmos. These are such inner levels that I do not know at all. Who am I? Just a product of nature. A little bug against her. I cannot even imagine who I am dealing with. Why argue like a small child trying to fight windmills? What is this quixotism?
We should simply understand that we are in a huge, multi-level system, but we do not know where, in what, and how. Therefore, by the measure of our development, we should try to automatically integrate into it.
If we were an inanimate, vegetative, or animate part of nature, we would automatically abide in it as its integral element. But since we belong to the level of Man, besides the fact that we are in nature, we also have an element of egoism that pushes us out of it: I want to be special!
By that, a person is different from animals. It turns out that with his egoism, he is pushing himself out of nature and is suffering as a result.
But the egoism in us is constantly growing, forcing us to be opposite to each other and to the surrounding inanimate, vegetative, and animate nature. In general, this is our evil, our problem, which is called: the evil beginning of man.
It was created so that we recognize evil and correct it into good. Then we can understand the whole depth of nature, how to become integrally connected with it and participate in all its actions.
Therefore, egoism was not given to us so that we oppose nature and put ourselves against it, but that it is with its help that we get in touch with nature, feel ourselves distant from it, draw into it, and interact correctly with it in mutual influence on each other. Then man will become truly on a level with all nature, which means with the Creator. Because nature is the Creator. [265435] From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 4/19/19
Question: Why, in the process of studying Kabbalah, at first, I feel complete enthusiasm, everything is clear and understandable, I want to sing. Then there comes a moment when you cease to understand the material, there is doubt, discontent in everything and the thoughts:” Do I need it?”
Answer: This is true. This is exactly what happens in Kabbalah. For some, this occurs very quickly, after a year or two, and for others after five to ten years.
The fact is that there comes a period when a person approaches the revelation of the Creator, attainment of his connection with the Creator. This connection is determined by the ability to rise above one’s egoism.
This is where a stupor occurs. He pushes it away from himself. When everything was fine and with the help of his egoistic desires, he strove to attain the Creator, it seemed to him that he was ready to break through the Machsom, to do everything to reveal the Creator.
When the time comes to sacrifice yourself, your egoism, to start working with it and transform it to reveal the Creator, then a very complex, very difficult stage begins because you have to put pressure on yourself, rise above yourself, turn your egoism into altruism, i.e., to produce all kinds of anti-egoistic actions. So, people when reaching such states usually leave.
Here is the main point after which a person begins to reveal the Creator. It must be overcome. This is a psychological barrier where egoism is overcome and revelation begins. [265616] From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 4/26/20
New Life 1235 – From Technological Innovation To Social Innovation
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi
The innovation that the coronavirus era is requiring of humanity is not technological but social; we need to build new, positive, interdependent relations between us. We live in a system of laws that includes the relations between people. Changes in these relations affect the whole system.
First, we need to feel that we are all connected to each other around the globe, that we belong to one integral system like one family.
Second, our bright future depends on our positive attitude toward each other, regardless of any differences in our nationalities or origins.
Third, we need to learn these laws and implement them in the connection between us. Innovation in the field of happiness will occur when a person feels happy because everyone around him is happy.
Innovation in the field of self-fulfillment will happen when each one feels responsible for the whole world from his unique vantage point. If there is mutual guarantee between us, we will discover enough natural resources to sustain everyone and provide for their well-being. No one will fear anything. If we relate to people and to nature correctly, we will solve all of our health problems from the root. Beyond our health, social innovation will also help us to rise above this life and attain the essence of our existence. [264601] From KabTV’s “New Life 1235 – From Technological Innovation To Social Innovation,” 5/8/20
The protests around the US that George Floyd’s killing have prompted are showing our true colors.
They display our negative connection to each other.
If we fail to improve our connections, we will end up enduring much worse blows than attacks on our small businesses by rioters and looters.
What will it take to improve our connections?
First, it will require acknowledging that we think negatively of each other, i.e., that our selfish human nature dictates our view of ourselves on a pedestal over others in various ways, and prioritizes self-benefit over benefiting others.
Therefore, according to human nature, which enjoys viewing others in a worse state than ourselves, we have no real desire for a solution to the social lacerations that become revealed.
Our egoistic nature is like a motor that never stops running within us, making us compare ourselves, our possessions and our success, to others.
It seeks how to justify us as being in a better place than others, and if it finds that others are at a higher level in one way or another, then it becomes restless, needing to do something to bridge that gap.
On one hand, the ego’s modus operandi leads us to self-improvement, for instance, by making us learn from others’ expertise and developing ourselves accordingly.
But on the other hand, the ego also often leads to destruction, when it becomes venomous jealousy that puts down others and tries to eliminate them in order to make ourselves feel at rest.
The ego’s latter destructive quality increasingly tears away at our social fabric, and will continue doing so until we rise above it in a common effort to positively connect to each other.
Therefore, there is a deeper purpose to the protests currently underway in the US, in the way nature gradually unravels itself to us: it flares up the negative attitudes that constantly dwell between us.
We will need to recognize just how negatively we relate to each other as a stepping stone toward positively connecting above our negative thoughts and attitudes.
The protests help guide us to realize our wicked nature.
When we become aware that we are egoists out to justify ourselves as better off than others, then we can start directing ourselves at self-transformation—to positively connect above our conflicting egos, and establish qualities of love, care, support and encouragement as more prevalent values than the negativity that instinctively surfaces to bring each other down.
While reaching a positive connection with ties of love and mutual consideration between us might seem like a utopian fantasy, it is indeed doable if we prioritize its importance throughout society, adjusting our educational and cultural influences to guide our improving social connection.
The riots in Minneapolis and other US cities in the past week show a clear example of how elusive love is in American society right now, and how divisive drives are overpowering the social atmosphere.
What does it mean to develop love among human society?
It means nurturing and articulating the nuances of our rich diversity in a common effort to strengthen that which holds us together as a society.
Instead of acting as if there are no (or should not be any) differences between us, we would be wiser to use our differences in order to invigorate that which connects us all.
The problem with acknowledging our differences is that we can fall into the trap of thinking of ourselves as better in one way or another to others, i.e., we can mistakenly be led by our divisive drives to feel a false sense of pride and self-esteem due to certain inborn features and characteristics.
Therefore, we need to be aware of our divisive drives, the ego concealed within each and every one of us, as an opposite form of love, which has the power to envelop all of our divisions.
It is written about this, “Love will cover all transgressions” (Proverbs 10:12). In other words, transgressions—our divisive urges—are needed in order for love to blossom, like the dirt that’s needed in order for a plant to grow. Likewise, the more hatred and division is felt underneath the love, the more fertile and voluminous the soil is for love to flourish upon it.
At the moment, however, we have no view of what is above the ground. We are still immersed in the darkness of our hatred and divisiveness, like a worm digging its way through a dark world inside a radish, unknowing that there is a completely different bright world full of light when it finds its way outside.
However, precisely due to our immersion in social division, and its destructive expression in the riots, America has what it takes to make a great overcoming, to rise above the divisions and build loving and caring relations among all American society.
The American Dream is infused with many examples of individuals beating the odds and achieving success in the conditions that the country provides. In the current crisis, the only difference in achieving the American Dream is that the success is not individual, but of society at large. As a result of overcoming hatred with love, the American society, with its major influence on the world, would pioneer a positive example that the world would be inspired to follow.
Yet, in order to cultivate love upon our differences, we first need to acknowledge our nature-given differences. That is, our skin color or other inborn characteristics are neither worthy of pride or shame, since they required no participation on our behalf.
We can be proud when we indeed participate in our development, building an atmosphere of love, mutual understanding, consideration, encouragement and support that fills society, upon the innate differences that we each have. Such a peaceful and harmonious atmosphere would then truly be our creation, worthy of pride.
While it seems impossible for a message of love to be heard among such divisive and destructive times, at one point or another, it will have to be heard, and even realized, in society.
If love fails to cover the hatred and division boiling throughout American society, then we can expect more riots, murders, destruction and suffering, until we will become completely helpless and desperate.
At that point, then maybe we will be ready to implement love above the divisions, but until then, the message of love above division will be like a message in a bottle floating around turbulent seas, waiting for someone to find it and put it to use.
What is spirituality? Spirituality is an opposite altruistic quality to our egoistic human nature.
The human ego—the desire to enjoy—is behind every thought and desire we have, and behind every action that we do.
Therefore, we perceive what we want to see according to the ego, i.e., whether we can enjoy something, or whether something comes to threaten our enjoyment.
This is why if we want to discover spirituality, i.e., to find out what surrounds us that is imperceptible to our egoistic perception, we thus need to recreate ourselves, and in the process of recreating ourselves, our environment holds primary importance.
In other words, since altruism is imperceptible and opposite to egoism, we thus need help from our surroundings to inspire, prod and motivate us to want to reach an opposite quality to our egoism.
When we make the shift from egoism to altruism, corporeality to spirituality, we will sense a new world that has always surrounded us, but which we could not perceive.
In the wisdom of Kabbalah, that new world is called “the spiritual world” or “the upper world.”
Our current worldviews are perceptions that have formulated upon our egos in order to comfort and shield ourselves in various ways.
“Truth” then becomes what coincides with our ego-based opinions.
We seek support for our opinions and repel what counters them. As such, we ultimately do not want to change ourselves.
How, then, do we reach a desire to change ourselves and discover spirituality?
If we fail to do so of our own accord, through positive means, i.e., by surrounding ourselves with an environment that supports the shift from egoism to altruism, then suffering will enter our lives more and more in order to show us that the purely egoistic direction we head in is problematic and that something needs to change.
However, suffering itself won’t lead us to change, but to a desire to change, where we will seek out different environments and influences than our current ones, in order to develop ourselves spiritually.
The real news is that the media publicizes and broadcasts the news in accordance with its owners’ funding sources’ agendas, i.e., it is all ultimately fake news.
When subscribers were the primary source of news media funding, then the media was indebted to them, i.e., to the people buying, reading and watching the news on offer.
However, when media proprietors became the primary source of news media funding, with the media relying on advertisers for its sustenance, then the media serves owner and advertiser interests, blurring any authenticity that once existed in news coverage.
Today, there is widespread awareness of fake news reporting. More and more people are questioning the genuineness and the interests behind the media they consume, yet out of a lack of options, continue consuming the news from the same sources.
Yet, instead of finger-pointing at media corruption for fake news, we would be wiser if we took a moment to examine ourselves, each and every one of us that makes up society.
The media is no more corrupt than its enveloping society, which we all make up. It is, rather, a product of society’s values, influences and behaviors.
Fake news awareness is thus insufficient to reach a stage where we will have real news.
Reaching real news depends on undergoing serious introspection and realizing first that the media is no better or worse than the society it resides within—a society driven by individuals each prioritizing personal well-being over the well-being of society.
Fake news and corrupt media then become viewed as reflections of who we really are—self-centered beings who each try to benefit ourselves in life as best as we can—and such self-analysis should lead us to a pressing question:
Is this the society we really want to live in?
If it is, then fake news and media corruption should not concern us.
However, if we aspire to a society that blossoms with happiness, kindness, support, encouragement and a generally positive atmosphere, then we would need to reset our social values—to prioritize benefiting others in society over benefiting ourselves.
Such a change is easier said than done, but it is indeed doable.
It requires regularly learning about our interdependence, how we are all interconnected and dependent on each other.
We would do well to understand our interdependence from many different angles, until it starts becoming a tangible sensation, where we feel that any move we make has an impact on others’ lives.
The coronavirus exemplified our interdependence in terms of our health, how one person’s health depends on the other person following health department orders, such as the maintenance of personal hygiene, keeping a certain distance from others and wearing masks in public.
According to our interdependence, one person’s indifference, lack of concern, divisive attitudes and antipathy spreads negatively to others, sparking a harmful chain reaction that negatively affects society.
However, if we each feel our interdependence, as if we are all parts of a greater whole, then our care for our common possession would let us refrain from harming it, and instead, we would each seek how to make it prosper and grow as much as possible.
Understanding that fake news and media corruption stem from the way we each prioritize self-benefit over benefiting others in society, we can then see that nothing effective comes from blaming the news and those directly behind it for being fake.
On the contrary, if we want to change the media, we need to change ourselves and make ourselves first want to benefit society over our personal benefit.
If we continue letting ourselves be held back from improving our relations, then we can expect more fake news and media corruption emerging together with myriad other problems filling our society.
Moreover, we would see no solution in sight.
Real news would thus come as a result of self-examination and improvement of human relations.
Negative exploitative attitudes are like viruses that we infect each other with on a daily basis.
Positive change thus requires a common effort to build a positively-connected society by developing mutually considerate and responsible relations.
If we make that slight calibration in our thinking, then we will experience a completely new and upgraded world.
Unity Above Our World
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