Comment: Throughout the history of mankind some people have tried to correct others, and there have always been penal colonies and prisons.

My Response: Prison is an invention of Pharaoh. We know from the Torah how Pharaoh threw Joseph into prison where he sat together with the cupbearer’s minister.

Judaism does not follow this because it is a clear imprint of Kabbalah. In no case should anyone be corrected. Just be patient and teach. No punishments!

There can be punishment only when you and the punished person know exactly what is happening and you work together on his egoism. He agrees that you are punishing him because otherwise his ego cannot be corrected, and he is grateful to you for this. For him, this is a correction. But this is not a correction in prison.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Prison” 8/16/11

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In Judaism, there are certain laws regarding kosher plants. For the first three years, you have no right to eat fruit from a newly planted tree. After that, you must separate a special part from them, such as the tenth, which a person separates from his earnings because the tithe (maaser) symbolizes the tenth part of the spiritual Partzuf Malchut.

There are also certain laws regarding the consumption of meat and milk, the right and left parts. After eating meat, you can eat dairy only after six hours, and after consuming milk, you can eat meat in half an hour or an hour. Why six hours? Because the Zeir Anpin includes six Sefirot: Hesed, Gevura, Tiferet, Netzach, Hod, and Yesod.

In general, all this comes from spiritual ideas. In our world, people fulfill these laws on the physical level although they have nothing to do with the correction of the soul. But when you do it, you start to think and ask: “What for?” And somehow you sort of connect with the spiritual.

And even if you do not ask, you are still in some kind of automatic state of communication, not definite, not explicit, not conscious, but there is some small glow somewhere. Therefore, it preserves a person for the future, and when he really begins to show interest in the upper, in the meaning of life, it kind of pulls him up.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Kosher Pork?” 7/16/11

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Comment: You said that when a person feels pain, he is deliberately hidden from the Creator so that he does not harm himself.

My Response: If a person feels pain, it means that he is opposite from the Creator, nature, the quality of bestowal. Then, in order not to harm his attitude to the general system of nature, he forgets that he is in it at all and just goes deeper into pain.

Comment: But the pain should not be very strong.

My Response: No, you do not know nature. The pain can be severe to such an extent that a person will beg for death and will not be able to die.

Question: And what kind of pain allows him to wake up after all?

Answer: If while working in a group to unite with his friends he sees that he is not moving forward to connect with them, then this causes him pain. Meaning, it is a purposeful pain coming from the right goal, the right movement forward, the right vector. Then this pain is useful. It is called suffering from love, not just suffering.

When you want to be connected with the whole of humanity in one single system and feel that you are not able to—your body, your desire, your egoistic qualities do not allow you to do this—then your suffering is correct because it leads you to the need to correct yourself.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Pain = Help From the System” 8/29/11

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Question: What kind of movie would you like to make, one that would really work? What should it lead to?

Answer: I have not seen a movie like that, that would change people and lead them to some serious internal changes.

Question: But would you like for such a movie to exist?

Answer: Of course! Who would not want that? Practically everyone wants a good future. But I do not know.

Question: Are you saying that if a movie would change a person, then you are for such a movie?

Answer: Yes.

Comment: You have said more than once that we are as if in a theater right now.

My Response: We see that this does not change us either.

Question: If so, the first condition is that a movie should change a person, then next is from whom to whom, from what to what?

Answer: From who one is now. Now, a person is just a beast that thinks only about oneself and cannot think about others. Or if he can think about others, then only in the form in which what he does to them will return to him.

That is, if a person is actually given absolute freedom, he will be completely indifferent to everything around him except to the extent that the immediate surroundings will be pleasant to his eye.

Comment: This is the man of today.

My Response: This is man.

Question: We are talking about correction. What should this beast come to?

Answer: To begin to understand that the most important thing is when your joy is in others. For this, it is necessary to change the nature of man.

Question: “Your joy is in others”—what do you mean by this?

Answer: It means that when others feel good, you feel good. But how can this be? It is the other way around. You can be happy, on the contrary, that you are better than others, that they are worse than you.

Question: I see. One way or another you always lower others so that they are lower than you, right?

Answer: Naturally. Instead, you should raise them above you.

Question: Is this the main change? If there were this kind of movie that directs a person in this way, are you for such a movie?

Answer: I am for such a movie, but it would not be successful.

Question: Financially?

Answer: It would not have any success. No one would be enthusiastic about it.

Comment: So, you do not want to dream, you are going back to reality.

My Response: For a long time I cannot dream, I am not young anymore, to put it mildly.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 5/18/23

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What comes before thought?“

The foundation for everything, the only matter that was created, is desire.

Desire is thus primary, and thought is an upshot of the desire.

However, in order to obtain what we desire, the mind develops alongside the desire, in correspondence with it.

No matter how much we might resist the idea that desire precedes thought, nonetheless the mind—and thus, thought—is the desire’s servant, developing solely for the sake of serving the desire.

We can thus never make our minds objective and independent of our desires. But we can change our desires under the influence of the environment (see the article “The Freedom” by Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag [Baal HaSulam]), i.e., under the influence of social, cultural and other educational impetus that surround us. In other words, we can observe examples in our environment that promote the importance of fulfilling one desire over another, and by doing so, we can change what we desire.

Understanding this principle and the vast importance of the environment’s influence over us, then under the influence of an environment that leads us to the ultimate goal of our lives—to a harmonious connection where we reveal the positive force hidden in nature—we can constantly develop both our desires and our minds in harmony.

Moreover, if we have big desires but our mind is undeveloped to actualize them, we could then lose our ability to sensibly control ourselves.

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Preparation to the Lesson

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1st part of the Lesson — Writings of Rabash, Article 19, “Why Is the Torah Called “Middle Line” in the Work?-2”

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2nd part of the Lesson — Lesson on the Topic of “The Ruin as an Opportunity for Correction

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All the laws of Judaism are based on corrections that occur in the soul because there are 613 desires in the soul that we must correct to altruistic ones, to love one’s neighbor.

In our world, there are 613 actions called Mitzvot that you can perform automatically, without any intentions. But at the same time you seem to be in some kind of mechanical, closed, and artificially created space. It is holding you.

The people of Israel kept this everyday life for 2,000 years until our time. And now it is starting to change, specifically fading into the background. Over the past 200 years, people have become less and less religious in order to be able to accept the Kabbalistic point of view.
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From KabTV’s “I Got A Phone Call. Kosher pork?” 8/17/11

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Question: If the Creator completely governs everything and a person supposedly has freewill, then why does He lead us through violence and suffering?

Answer: The Creator governs us by the laws of nature. The Creator is the general force of nature in which two forces emanating from Him are opposed: bestowal and reception. A person is between them, and both properties affect him.

The question arises: how does a person develop under their influence? What is he doing? What is his freewill? How does he accumulate these two forces in himself? How does he correlate them in himself? How does he build himself out of them?

This is the entire wisdom of Kabbalah: how to receive these two forces in the right form and with their help shape yourself so as to become similar to the Creator, rise up, reach Him, and adhere to Him. The fact that He gave us the opportunity to control with the help of these two forces is our freewill!

How can we act if we do not have it? Who will we be then? Just the ones who are controlled?

Until now, we have been just the controlled ones. What does it mean? The Creator adds a little bit of egoism as if He gives you a drop of injection and releases the egoism in you a little more, and you take something upon yourself, do this and that, twist and turn. So does everyone else. He squeezes the syringe a little bit more and so on all the time until He squeezes the whole injection into you.

Right now you are filled to the limit with egoism. No more. This is why you have nowhere to escape. Where to go? What to do?

Moreover, egoism has closed and become global and integral. In the beginning we felt good because we reached egoistic global connections in the world and thought that everything would be fine. But when these connections began to depend on everyone, we turned out to be the opposite of nature. And here we have a problem: what to do about it?
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Is the Creator a pervert?” 8/2/11

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Question: How do I stick to the feeling that everything I do not like about other people is actually positive?

Answer: Only through your inner correction. This must be corrected internally. There is no other way.

You cannot destroy qualities you do not like. Of course you can force people not to use them, to cover them up, and suppress them. But at the same time, you suppress a person’s ability to realize himself. You lose because of this.

Question: Is all the suppression and attempts to correct a person the same prison, and everything else is just useless?

Answer: According to Judaism, prison is generally prohibited. It does not correct anyone. In America, prisons are called correction centers. But what kind of correction is there?

We see that well-trained thieves, swindlers, robbers, murderers, and rapists of an even higher class come out of there. A prisoner graduated from “school,” the second imprisonment is “university,” the third one a “Ph.D.”, and so on. Why do we need this? Instead, we need to correct ourselves.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Positive qualities of a maniac” 8/18/11

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