Question: Is cruelty and denying a person what he loves and what is very important to him egoistic if it is done for educational purposes?

Answer: It is very hard to give examples of using such educational measures. In order to educate others, you need to set an example.

A teacher of the wisdom of Kabbalah is someone who himself sets an example of discipline, persistence, etc. The only way to educate others is by personal example. In no other way: not with punishment, reward, encouragement, and persuasion. They can be used, but in a very limited way.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 9/16/18

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Question: Who, in your opinion, is responsible for raising children: family, school, the environment? What is the role of each of these factors?

Answer: The main role in raising children lies with their parents.

Parents are obliged to take care of the upbringing of children; it cannot be otherwise. No matter how many overseers and teachers the state puts in place, no one can replace the person who has instinctive love for the child.

Remark: But in modern conditions, a child has very little time at home. So a person is brought up by society, school, and work.

My Reply: We organized our world this way. This is what we have! Our egoism is set up so that we are ready to part with our children as soon as possible.

After 15-20 years, children know that they must leave home, and parents are already ready for their children to start an independent life. And they will continue to take care of themselves.

In other words, when we build a society, we are already laying the foundation for future social relations, including family relations.

Question: In the modern family, the child is taught to take everything he needs from this world, i.e., to be an egoist. On the other hand, society promotes through schools and mass media to be altruistic, kind, and to help everyone. And the children get conflicting messages. Who is right here?

Answer: No one is right. It is necessary, as they say, to go along the middle line: where necessary, there must be a certain rigidity, and where necessary, softness. A benevolent middle course of behavior should always prevail.
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From KabTV’s “The Post-Coronavirus Era” 5/21/20

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Question: Today, people don’t want to feel bound. They want to move freely around the world, to satisfy their monetary desires. The development of technology allows the artificial creation of children, so there is no need for marriage. Everyone can satisfy their economic and sexual needs outside of the family.

Can it be that the family as the basic foundation for the development of relations between people will disappear? Or will a person be forced to look for some additional values to support the family?

Answer: The fact is that in all generations the family has been based on necessity. In order to provide a person with a normal retirement, he had to have a family, children, so that later, when he became sick, a feeble old man, they would take care of him until death. This was what kept the family together since a person could not survive alone.

And with the emergence of such a high-tech, developed society as today, we seem to have no need for this. I can provide myself with anything, everything, and I need nothing. Therefore, I do not care about having a family, but about being able to buy all the necessary services. This is what we came to in the twentieth century.

Of course, this is not a good thing because it does not replace good relations with each other. But little remains of the past good relationships because we are busy developing our egoism.

This has affected the relationship between spouses and parents with children. Nursing homes and kindergartens appeared, anything to throw off the yoke of caring for children, parents, and the elderly.

Remark: Unfortunately, society does not teach us the correct relationships in the family, does not explain the difference between the sexes, or the purpose of the family. Therefore, it is very difficult to keep the family from falling apart.

My Comment: As a result, society gets back what it could not give in the upbringing of the young. We have entered a state where our egoism is in urgent need of reformation.
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From KabTV’s “The Post-Coronavirus Era” 5/21/20

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Medium published my new article “Schools Were Already Dead, and Covid Came to Bury Them”

On the one hand, we want children to go back to school so we can get back to work and return to normalcy. On the other hand, there is no doubt that schools will become places of mass infection since social distancing is completely unnatural for children. They will not be able to comply with such rules, and it is emotionally harmful for them to keep physically apart. The outcome of the clash between opening schools and boosting the economy, and closing schools and keeping the children and their families safe will be the permanent and long overdue breakdown of the education system.

What schools give in the way of knowledge, they will teach through online or recorded classes. For children today, online learning is as natural as physical learning is for us. In fact, it is physical learning and the compulsory classroom attendance that are unnatural for them.

School as we know it is a defunct system that’s been dead for decades. More than knowledge, it “teaches” children obnoxious behaviors, exposes them to drugs, extreme sexual promiscuity, bullying, violence, addiction to anything from computer games to hard drugs, and alienates them from their families.

Covid-19 did us all a big favor by closing down the “education” system, and will do us another favor when it stops us from reopening it. In the end, we will learn what social frameworks we do need to open and what kind of activities we want them to conduct, but it is up to us to decide how quickly we want that good end to come.

Florida, which tried to open its school system, exemplifies the cost of insistence on opening schools. The Florida Department of Health reported an increase of 9,000 confirmed cases in children in just 15 days since schools reopened in the state. It is absurd to think that it could happen otherwise. The very development of kids depends on their close contact with each other. Touching, playing together, exchanging objects, sharing and befriending are necessary for their growth. Kids need close contact with friends and peers in order to establish themselves as social beings. For them, it is as vital as food.

Even worse, the message that we send them by telling them to stay apart and obey the (anti)social distancing regulation is likely to scar them for good. We are alienating them from one another. Our healthy parental instincts make us encourage our kids to socialize, make friends, be nice to people, and be careful of bad people, since we want them to grow up to be accomplished individuals. But with the coronavirus restrictions, we have to tell them the opposite: “Stay away from everyone! Stay in your own corner; don’t give anything to anyone, and don’t take anything from anyone. Anyone can give you the virus; stay away from them!” What kind of people do we expect to grow out of such imperatives?

Under such conditions, it is better to keep kids at home and teach them online, where communication between them is monitored and minimal. The connections they will develop with peers online will be much more positive and less stressful than the social pressure they endure in class, and they will complete their need for social contacts with family and with a few close friends where they feel comfortable and safe, and where they minimize the risk of infection.

What schools give in the way of knowledge, they will teach through online or recorded classes. For children today, online learning is as natural as physical learning is for us. In fact, it is physical learning and the compulsory classroom attendance that are unnatural for them.

Children’s presence at home will not come without a cost. A grownup will have to be with them at home during their “school” hours. In households with two parents, one will have to stay with the children, see that they get food and break time, and that they are actually learning during their classes. And if it seems tough to get by on one salary, it will be much tougher on single parent households. But here, too, some arrangement will have to be found, either with government assistance, NGOs, or through another arrangement. After all, when schools are hubs of mass infection, it’s not a question of whether children should stay home, but of how it can be done. The more quickly we acknowledge the necessity to adapt ourselves to reality, the more easily we’ll go through the transition.

When I wrote months ago that people’s hopes for returning to the pre-Covid days were unrealistic, people couldn’t accept it. Now I hope they can already see that this is so, since the sooner we adapt our policies and institutions to the fact that the virus isn’t leaving, the better we’ll be able to adapt our education, economy, and all other aspects of our lives to the new world that has emerged seemingly overnight.
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Question: Nature has given us a natural love for children, otherwise we would not be able to create families and raise offspring.

Do you think that some organization or state can take on the role of raising children? What would be the result?

Answer: Firstly, we have such examples in history, beginning with the Spartan upbringing in Ancient Greece and upbringing in special institutions in Ancient Rome, which literally spoiled children.

In addition, they practiced early conscription into the army from the age of ten to fifteen, where they did whatever they wanted with the children. They grew up very cruel, tough people, who could not create normal families. They lacked a sense of empathy to others, and without this, society cannot be created.

Question: That is, society cannot replace the skills that the family provides?

Answer: No. Up to the present day, we see that people who were not brought up in normal families are different from others. No matter how much they want to start a family, they cannot. After all, we always create a family in some way similar to the one we came from.
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From KabTV’s “The Post-Coronavirus Era” 5/21/20

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Comment: American psychologist Abraham Maslow, author of the well-known hierarchy of human needs, asserted that a teacher or culture does not create a person or instill the ability to love or be loved, to philosophize, create symbols, or create. But they do provide an opportunity, and helps, what exists in the embryo to become real and actual.

Answer: Indeed, the acceleration of personality development depends on the environment.

The importance of the environment is very great because if we choose the right environment and connect with it, this will radically change our destiny. Through communication with the environment, we determine the methods and speed of passage of various states.

Question: Signs of personal growth, as psychologists write, are an increase in the ability to analyze, see the connections of events and phenomena, and understand other people. This is inner freedom and independence, a manifestation of responsibility.

How else can you identify these signs?

Answer: Signs of personal growth are manifested in a person as he or she realizes the importance of the environment. This is most important. In addition to what we have and develop in a natural way, the only parameter that we can change by ourselves is the environment.

Question: Consciousness of responsibility for one’s life is one of the main signs of personal growth. When should a person say that only he or she is responsible for what is happening to him or her and when to transfer his or her responsibility to nature, to higher forces?

Answer: Being completely within a certain environment and giving yourself to it, we begin to feel through this connection what we receive through our efforts with respect to the environment, and what the environment gives us without our efforts. This is how we begin to share the impact on ourselves.
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From KabTV’s “Management Skills” 6/25/20

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Remark: The fetus in the mother’s womb, as a rule, is under her care, love, and constantly in this environment. However, genetic scientists have found that it not only grows in love, but it itself also loves.

Scientists say, “If the mother suddenly gets sick and something happens to her, some kind of hormone is developed in the fetus, which it sends to cure the mother.” There is such a process of love.

My Comment: If they care, if they depend on each other, then naturally there is feedback.

The fetus is always trying to do everything in its power to annul itself before the mother, and by this it helps her to control it. On the other hand, the mother and the fetus send signals to each other every minute about how much they are in mutual love, consent, support, and how much they need each other. All the time! This circulation of feelings between them gives strength to the development of the fetus.

Question: Does it mean that the mother is constantly being renewed and the fetus is growing? The renewal of a woman during pregnancy—is this mutual love, the energy that enters?

Answer: Yes. The fact is that the fetus gives her so much upper, spiritual forces that almost everything is renewed because of the spiritual structure in which she exists like the Creator in regards to the creation.

Question: Is the play of the fetus in the mother and the mother like the Creator and creation?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Can we reach such a state when we are inside the Creator?

Answer: We have to do this!

Question: What is it to be inside the Creator?

Answer: To be inside the Creator means to feel not yourself, but Him. That is, I annul myself completely. In the fact that I annul myself, in every parameter of my annulment, I feel His attitude to me.

Question: When you say, “I annul myself,” does this mean that my thoughts, my actions, and my behavior are in Him? He leads and I kind of give myself to Him, “Lead me.”

Answer: Yes. Absolutely. I do not even check anything in any way, I completely annul myself in advance.

Question: Can a person reach such a state?

Answer: Everyone must do it. The coronavirus will help us in this.

Question: What does it lead us to now from this point of view?

Answer: To annulling ourselves. Only if I annul myself before society, and so each of us, then society can recover and not infect each other. Through this we will come.

Question: So, do I not dispute anything? I am told to stay at home—I stay at home, to wear masks—I wear a mask, and so on.

Answer: Moreover, I think that by doing this, I do not infect others. I follow all the instructions to avoid infecting others. I think about them.

Imagine doing that. See how much the world will change. This is a different intention.

Question: Does it mean that the main idea is that I do not infect others? Does this mean that you already are quietly within the Creator?

Answer: You are not yet part of Him, but you are no longer opposite to Him. It is like Hillel said, “Do not do unto others what is hateful to you.” Then “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This is already the next stage.

Question: What in this case will be “Love your neighbor as yourself”?

Answer: Make sure that he is healthy. Imagine that you are healthy and he is sick, and you give him blood, everything he needs.

Question: Do you give him everything you have? Is this “love thy neighbor as yourself”? At this moment, do you not think about yourself at all?

Answer: In no way. Then you are cured and he is cured.

Question: Don’t I even ask for his smile or some kind of “thank you”?

Answer: What are you talking about?! This is already a reward!

Question: No reward at all?

Answer: No. Nothing.

Question: Can a person reach this point?

Answer: A person can reach this and be grateful that he has this opportunity.

Question: Not to ask anything for myself and just to give everything?

Answer: Yes. It is not that far away; we can understand that.

Question: We can understand. But can we do this or not?

Answer: Slowly. Gradually, with the support of society.

Question: Do you think that is what the virus came for, to move us closer to this?

Answer: Precisely for this. Look what it is doing. This is the first blow to all of humanity in our time.

Remark: Is this the way to “Do not do unto others what is hateful to you,” then to “Love your neighbor as yourself,” and then one single whole?

Answer: Yes. One humanity with one Creator. It all will be fast.

Question: Will you and I see this?

Answer: I think so, yes. I even have confidence.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 7/6/20

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Question: The family is a natural system that also exists in the animal world.

Some animals have male and female parts for reproduction in the same body.

But the more developed animals are, the more there is a division of the male and female parts, which are naturally opposite and exist in separate individuals. This is where an interesting principle appears: in order to give birth to a new body, it is necessary to combine two opposites.

What is the purpose of this principle? Today, this issue is particularly relevant because in some countries and societies there are artificial attempts to level these opposites, in particular gender.

Answer: It is impossible. The more developed nature is, the more it includes all sorts of opposites, which drift apart from each other in infinite variations.

We see that primitive organisms exist practically in the same body. There are those who become the female part and there are those who become the male part. Their gender identity changes. They can be completely free to combine, interbreed, and separate by gender with a minimum separation of one individual from another.

Over the course of evolution, individuals became more and more distant from each other on psychological, physiological, and sexual principles. Therefore, they need a very serious combination with each other, and this is not easy.

In animals, this is extremely rare, but in humans, the correct combination of the male and female parts is necessary in order to raise offspring, ensure their normal existence, and guarantee serious development up to 15 to 20 years of life, which is necessary for a person to get on his feet and start providing for oneself, reproduce one’s own offspring, and take care of them.

Nature has created us so that the more developed we are, the greater the separation between us.

Then, when we become social units, there is a huge division between us in the pursuit of science, art, anything. Look at how many specialties there are in the world, how many opportunities each person has to develop. In this, no one is like the other.

It is not just about gender, but the fact that internally we are all very different. Therefore, it is simply impossible to talk about combining all this in one body.

Remark: In principle, the psychological and physiological combination of two opposite objects that makes it possible for a more perfect existence is a principle of nature.

My Comment: Yes. This makes it possible to vary and do anything you want. For example, in our time, there are many new professions that did not exist 100 or 200 years ago.
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From KabTV’s “The Post-Coronavirus Era” 5/21/20

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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.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 6/8/20

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Medium published my new article “A Generational Catastrophe in Education”

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that we’re experiencing a “generational catastrophe” in education because of school closures during the coronavirus pandemic. On the one hand, I understand why this is sad. On the other hand, if we look at how people turn out after spending their entire childhood and adolescence in the educational system, I’m not so sure we should regret its closure. In my opinion, it is actually the disconnection from the old system that will allow us to examine it from aside, criticize it, and build a new and better one.

The correct education system should put the emphasis on human connection, not on inculcation of information. It should teach children that people with different views are not enemies.

The violence on the streets and within homes, the crime rate, substance abuse, prostitution, depression rates, suicides, all those are results of the education we give to our children. So one can lament the closure of the education system, but judging by the results, it hasn’t been a success story.

The deterioration hasn’t started with the emergence of Covid-19. It has been going on for decades.
The educational system was built during the Industrial Revolution, and its purpose was to give farmers who had migrated into cities the required knowledge to become machine operators. Over time, we added more and more fields of knowledge to the schooling system but we didn’t change the basic principle: Memorize the material your teachers tell you and that’s all you need in order to do a good job.

Somewhere along the way, we have forgotten that schooling gives children knowledge but does not improve them as human beings. That part, the one that teaches them how to communicate with other people, how to care for one another, how to be a positive element in society, has been forgotten altogether. Parents no longer teach it since the children aren’t at home, and schools don’t teach it since they weren’t made for it in the first place, so the result is that eighteen years after they are born, the sweet children on whom we pinned our hopes have become fully grown, incorrigible savages. This is why it is just as well that the schools have closed; it is yet another benefit of Covid-19 to society.

The correct education system should put the emphasis on human connection, not on inculcation of information. It should teach children that people with different views are not enemies. On the contrary, they show us perspectives that we might have otherwise missed. Even if we disagree with other people, we would not know why we think what we think were it not for the need to articulate our views.

Moreover, in a world so full of opposites, it is easy to see that just as nothing in nature is complete without its opposite, so it is with people. When we hold different views, it may feel like we are arguing over whose opinion is correct, but in truth, we are advancing the whole world to a higher level of existence.

Similarly, when we look at our feet as we walk, it seems as though they are competing. But we, who see them from above, know that the apparent competition is really an advancement of the whole body toward the next place we want to go. Were it not for the apparent competition, we wouldn’t advance at all, we would be standing still.

But children do not learn all that at school; they only memorize. This is why I am so happy that we’ve finally come to a point where we can truly educate ourselves, become human beings, not human computers. Now, perhaps, there is hope for our species.
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