Remark: As you know, in China people are very disciplined. They were told to sit in closed apartments and they sat. They were told to wear masks, so they did. Everything is very precise there. Therefore, the virus began to decline and China is returning to normal.

But there is a different question. People sat indoors together for a prolonged period of time. Husband with wife and so on. Now a flurry of divorce proceedings has begun in China.

The city of Fuzhou even introduced a limit of only 10 divorces per day. These are consequences of the virus: the collapse of families, the breakdown of relations between people.

My Comment: People in China are different in general . They worked 15-hour days. Suddenly they are together for these 15 hours. You can go crazy! They did not know each other.

They knew each other only when they interacted at home. That is all. Suddenly they saw: Is this my wife? It was not enough just to ask: What is your name? This is the extent to which many people currently do not interact with each other.

If they do interact, then it is not with each other. What about the kitchen? What are we going to eat? What is here and what is there? That is, outside of myself. Outside of you and outside of me. Something between us.

Question: Doesn’t it seem that the virus turned out to be a test of family relationships for people?

Answer: Yes, they did not have family relationships. They were forced to start a family, get married. They ended up together. Even though they had been living together for 20 years, this was not called life. Now it turns out that this is called life and family. No one agrees.

Question: You are known as an adversary of divorces. You always say that it is the last resort. The most extreme because the family has children and so on.

Still, how do people coexist? Now many are in this state—together in enclosed spaces, and suddenly they begin to notice each other, as you say. How can they not break up their life together?

Answer: First, we must accept a priori that we all are not angels. All of us are twisted by fate, by the upper force. None of us are holy. Naturally, we do not even know each other. We do not know ourselves. Therefore, you can change many, many times in your life. But when you have children you are responsible for them.

It does not matter what your relationship with your wife or husband is, you carry a responsibility for the children you gave birth to. You cannot buy it off with money. You must participate in their formation, growth, and education.

So, you can give millions to your children, but still, they will not consider you a father if you are not with them. On the contrary, you and your whole family may be starving, but if you are with them, they will consider you a father and will not blame you for leaving them.

Therefore, divorce is the most final, I would even say, beyond-final, foreign state. If there are children, I would not allow divorces. If there are no children, then this is another matter.

Talk to many, mostly to the fathers who left their children, and ask them how do the children relate to them? You will hear (I heard it many times in my life) that the children never approved of the father because he left them. He left them! He did not leave the mother, but left them! They perceive this as a betrayal. You cannot pay it off with money. Not with anything!

Remark: See what the virus has done. Still, a person should ask himself these questions.

My Comment: This is because there is no proper education. This is why they see family as such. The virus is doing us justice by gradually showing us, by exposing our entire system as completely unacceptable for the existence of the human race.

Education is what humanity needs. All resources, everything that is now being freed up, except for those necessary for existence, must be used toward education.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 3/18/20

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From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 5/10/20

We’re seeing the emergence of the expected escalation: The virus is infecting children. In Spain, the UK, and in the US, children are beginning to get sick and die. At the same time, we’re “reopening the economy.” Stuck between the rock and the hard place, we have to start thinking outside the box. We have to start looking at the countless studies that prove that positive social connections produce a stronger immune system.

Today, when we are all interconnected, when, as Andrew Cuomo put it, “An outbreak anywhere is an outbreak everywhere,” we have to look out for each other. We have to understand that if we don’t, we will start losing not only our parents, but our children, too.

Granted, we can’t shut down the economy indefinitely, but we can and must learn how to open our hearts to one another. We must, because our lives depend on it. We must, because the lives of our children depend on this. We must learn how to think of one another because in a world of hatred, apathy, and alienation, there cannot be life.

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Question: Can the point in the heart awaken during childhood, when someone passes away?

Answer: Yes, such questions often come up at a young age. Then, we usually forget about them and the point in the heart can awaken at a more mature age. Therefore, we do not need to teach children the wisdom of Kabbalah. It is better to wait until they grow up and start when they are at least teenagers.

Question: Usually, children often ask: “Why do people die?”

Answer: Everyone has such questions. But it does not mean that this is a question about the meaning of life. These are simply ordinary childish questions. We need to answer them somehow, soothe the children, but nothing more than that.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 2/9/20

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Remark: We know that the age of mass consumption has passed.

My Comment: Yes, humanity has already realized that endless purchases do not satisfy them.

Remark: The time of clothing rentals is coming. Both designers and fashion houses are now developing a tendency to rent designer items. Instead of paying a few hundred pounds for owning a thing, you can pay 50-60 pounds and rent it. Thus, you can consider your wardrobe as a source of income.

My Comment: Then no one will buy anything at all. Nobody needs anything. How many rags do you need? People will go and buy something for themselves “on the go” and that is it. And they will not make a big deal out of it. It all goes away.

Humanity is changing from the inside. Once upon a time, a king would wear something, and he was considered a king. We judged a person by his clothes.

Today, this is no longer the case. That time has passed.

Question: You say that humanity is now striving to change from within. What is inner beauty?

Answer: It is our desire. It gradually transforms by various external conditions.

Strength—see how all kinds of active programs for physical education and other things are developing today. This is still not something we are doing; it is all being done to us in order to somehow sell something.

So it is everywhere. But it will not help. Another 10, another 20 years. All the same, humanity is moving to new states, to new, more internal desires. And they will not pay attention to appearance. They will pay attention to beauty; it will disappear last. But in the end, it does not determine anything.

Question: And what is this inner desire that you are talking about?

Answer: It is to embellish yourself—an inner desire to embellish oneself externally. After all, inner beauty is invisible. So, I will embellish myself externally, and everyone will think: “Look at how smart he is! Look at the special glasses he has on!” We want to pass off the external as internal, so we mock ourselves and others in this way.

We need to reach the point where we value the inner beauty in a person: kindness, participation, sympathy, and separation from oneself toward others. We neither feel nor value this, but it is what we need. It would be a completely different matter if we had the fashion for this.

Question: And how can we make that inner beauty you talk about noticeable and popular?

Answer: Education. There is no other way. It is so that I would look at a girl in class and evaluate her according to her correct attitude to everyone. A man should choose his wife similarly and not according to the length of her legs.

Remark: You say that beauty will be the last to depart.

My Comment: That is, it will leave our attention. When we stop giving it attention, it will be the last to leave. I will appreciate a person for a different reason. I will not see this ugliness; I will see inner beauty.

This, of course, is not easy and not yet within this world, which constantly attunes us to external evaluations. But I am sure that at the pace we are moving, with all these operations to remake faces, figures, and everything else, it is all a matter of the very near future.

The fashion of the future will be directed only toward a beautiful manifestation of the inner world. And there is no need to create any enterprises that exchange rags among themselves.

Question: And what will this beautiful society be like?

Answer: A beautiful society thinks only about the inner content of a person and lives by it. Everyone in it understands and feels the warmth of one toward the other. This is what people will be valued for. It will happen soon.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 12/10/19

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The Times of Israel published my new article “Syrian Father Who Went Viral Teaching His Daughter to Laugh at Falling Rockets”

Boom! Peels of belly laughter roll from a little girl in her father’s arms. Boom!

Now zoom out on the scene to place the radiant moment of joy in its heartbreaking context:

Abdullah Al-Mohammad teaches his 3-year-old daughter Salwa to laugh at the sound of every shell that falls and explodes nearby.

As a Syrian trying to survive war and with no place to run, what is left for him to do? In order to reduce or eliminate the trauma of rockets falling, he teaches little Salwa that the sound of falling rockets is funny and that the noise of the shelling is merely a game. Life is beautiful (almost).

Abdullah’s poignant video went viral on social media and made him an instant Internet hero, earning him more than two million likes and positive comments, including proposals to adopt the method to help the children in Gaza.

In the chaotic reality of war-torn Syria, this father’s desperate tactics are an understandable attempt to provide his child with psychological protection against the onslaughts of traumatizing bombardment. He hasn’t the time or luxury to research the optimal educational intervention to take when shells fall in the yard. Clearly, there is no good solution or best practice model to calm the terror, only first aid.

What form of teaching would be most helpful for such tragic situations?

The education needs to be directed toward every member of society, parents and children alike, and must be designed to target the root cause of problems in order to provide a lasting cure.

Every member of society needs to understand, according to their level of maturity, that if we want to stop the wars once and for all, we need to try and connect to each other according to the unifying laws of nature.

While teaching children to laugh at threats and danger might help them get through immediate frightening situations more comfortably, it holds no long-term benefit because such learning can cause psychoneurotic maladjustments and misperceptions of reality. Such an out-of-place connection between peril and reaction sets up an incorrect relationship in the brain between threat and response. Thus, at times when vigilance is warranted, the amount of concern and caution is inappropriately reduced leaving them vulnerable to harm.

Medically and scientifically, crying and laughing cause the same shock response in the nervous system. So, while the emotion associated with laughter might feel more pleasant, the effect on the body is no healthier than that of crying.

Both crying and laughing are a reaction of excitement that exceeds the extent of a person’s ability to absorb at a given moment. Therefore, we do need to calm reactions to fears, and only afterward clearly explain the situation and why it is happening.

Step by step over time, children need to understand that wars and destruction take place because society has received no education to develop positive relations, and that there is no concern in society to learn how to positively connect above each person’s innate divisive drives.

They need to know that in order to stop the wars once and for all, we need to try and connect to each other correctly, and in accordance with the unifying laws of nature.

If children understood this principle, they would not laugh, and not even smirk. On the contrary, they would tell us straight to our faces, in their naïve style: Parents, fix your thoughts and behaviors, and improve your relationships with each other!

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From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 2/19/20

If we used to caution our kids about talking to strangers and walking in side alleys, today they sit at home with their mobile devices and all the dangers are at their fingertips.

The latest dangerous viral trend, the Tripping Jump Challenge (a.k.a. Skull Breaker Challenge), distributed on the social app, Tik Tok, has already led to death and injury.

In the challenge, three people line up and jump at once. The participant in the middle is unaware of the prank, told that they are simply recording a slow-motion video of the jump. After the jump, the two on the sides proceed to trip the unsuspecting participant in the middle, while they are in the air, so that they fall backwards.

The “best-case scenario,” if you could call it that, is shock and taunting of the one who got pranked. This is also why the participant who gets pranked is often also not a friend of the pranksters, but a victim of bullying.

The worst-case scenario, however, is much worse: death and severe injury.

The tragic nature of this phenomenon shows us how we are incapable of controlling ourselves as a society.

It is not the first viral challenge that has led to harming and killing its participants. Also, once again, it has taken death and injury for us to wake up to the problem and try to apply a patchwork solution, until the next case comes along.

We have the means at our disposal to restrict the Internet so that such negative phenomena stay away from our children and teenagers.

We can demand that international organizations oversee the Internet, determining and monitoring what is allowed and disallowed.

Also, we can do so not only when it comes to the question of harsh violence and porn, but upon everything contemptuous and slanderous.

We could raise youth awareness to be better equipped in dealing with the freedom they have on the Internet.

But we don’t.

Moreover, if we wanted to, we could impact a revolution by instigating a new form of education spanning the education system as we know it, in addition to media and cultural influences that shape our values—connection-enriching education that aims to clarify how a positive future depends on actively developing positive social connections.

Since most of the complaints about the harm caused from such incidents come from concerned parents, then this appeal is primarily to the parents: With your common concern for your children, unite and together break the social consensus that everything is permissible. Otherwise, tomorrow your child could very well be the next victim.

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Recent times has seen waves of tragic events around the world. One of the saddest tendencies is mass shootings in the US, many of which have been carried out by the young generation.

What makes a person kill at such an early age?

We live in an information society. While parents work hard 24/7 to run for the recent innovations, children are left home alone with their phones and dozens of informational channels constantly influencing them. However, all these channels don’t give them a real sensation of being here and now, being loved, being taken care of. Therefore, first, antisocial behavior is the way to attract attention to themselves, to be seen.

However, if we look closer, we’ll see that the problem is rooted much deeper. According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, today, humanity in general reaches a point where it needs to start developing greater awareness of the nature enveloping it: the force of love and bestowal.

The younger generation, especially teenagers, feel this necessity the most. It is expressed in such questions as: “What is the meaning of life?” “How can I turn my useless existence into something great and valuable?” “How can I become needed by my parents /friends/society?” Children ask these questions and, unfortunately, don’t get answers. They are not stupid, they are not criminals, this is just how the inner pressure affects them, and they have no method of how to deal with it.

Therefore, in order to prevent today’s youth from supporting different kinds of antisocial behavior, society itself must teach them how to exit the false paradigm of this world, how to understand reality, deal with influences of the information society, and uncover the meaning of life – the entrance to the upper world and higher existence.

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From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 1/27/20

Stanford University professor Hank Greely thinks that in 20-30 years people will be choosing children from a laboratory.

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KabNet published my new article: “How Parents Can Prevent Their Children Cutting Them Off”

When my late mother lived alone in her older years in Canada, I did everything I could to find her the best place to live.

My son, who also lives in Canada, would send me pictures and videos of her, as he was well aware of my concern for her, and regularly updated how she was getting along and felt. This continued until the very day he sadly informed me of her passing.

Today, there is a phenomenon where adult children cut off their parents. Sometimes it is due to physical or emotional abuse they suffered in childhood, but it is also often related simply to money. The older children feel that their parents fail to provide them with the money they wanted or expected, and so the children scrap the parents from their lives, cutting them off from their grandchildren as well, sometimes to such extremes where they even tell their children that their grandparents are dead.

“It is our duty to our children to sustain a parallel relationship of being both their friends and their teachers.”

Over the years, I have closely observed how my wife raises our children. She made it clear to them that they could get everything they needed from us. Every cent we earned was for them, and this is also how it is today when they are grownups with families. Also, we have organized our savings and assets to be handed over to them when we leave the world. They are well aware of our investment in them, and how much we sacrifice for them, and they also discuss it openly among themselves.

At the same time, they have never been spoiled. It has always been made clear to them that they had to pay for everything they received in one way or another. For instance, we paid for their university studies monetarily, and they had to “pay” for those same studies with their full investment and focus.

It is very likely that this is an outcome of the culture we were raised in. Nevertheless, however, it is a healthy and correct approach. Both of my daughters completed their national service, and each served the full two years. My point is that my children have always received my full support, but also a deliberate hand, which demands accountability, responsibility and effort.

It is our duty to our children to sustain a parallel relationship of being both their friends and their teachers. With such an approach, we prevent an attitude forming toward us as being something to use and discard of, i.e., where they perceive their parents as a mere ATM machine and a kitchen.

This is why it is beneficial for parents to spend time with their children: to talk with them, listen to them, and do the things that they enjoy doing together, i.e., becoming friends to a certain extent. Also, the children need to have a certain extent of fear in losing their parents’ positive attitude toward them if the children display contempt and laziness.

Such a relationship prevents any desire for children to cut their parents out of their lives. Why would anyone want to abandon anything that provides a sensation of confidence, security, safety, empowerment and warmth in their lives, especially in today’s turbulent times?

Our parents can be the closest people in our lives. Even today, I see my wife behaving similarly with our grandchildren. They get along very well, openly and honestly discussing everything together.

Education is conducted not by words, but by sensation. When children are impressed by a genuine person-to-person relationship, it is recorded in their hearts, and they naturally emulate it in their relationships with others.

The examples we receive at home as we grow up later affect our every relationship in life. The general principle is as follows:

• the way that you relate to your parents is the way that your children will relate to you,
• the way that you relate to your siblings is the way that your children will relate to each other, and
• the way that you relate to your children is the way that they will relate to their children.

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Question: Damaged relationships spoil people’s entire life, they can be confusing because of little misunderstandings. What is the right thing to do to prevent resentment, damaged relationships, and to improve them?

Psychologists give the following recommendations: Try to understand the point of view of the colleague. The result of an action is not always intentional. The difficulty with some micro-manifestations is that we all apply different standards to their assessment.

Answer: Where are the standards? The standard is mine—how I see others and compare myself with them or how I see myself and compare them with me. This is completely wrong. It is like taking a dress and putting it on. If I wear it, my stomach and my thin arms and legs will stick out, and the dress will look ugly to me.

There are no common standards. There can be only one standard—for the benefit of one’s neighbor. That’s all. I perceive no one in any way, neither myself nor anyone else. I am only interested in one thing: if some situations occur, whether they occur for the benefit of man.

By man I mean all of humanity, the general image of a person. In no way do I consider anyone specific or I most definitely will be lost.

Question: How can we understand correctly the point of view of the other person, whether it is right or not?

Answer: I cannot understand another person. How can I understand him? How can I exit myself in order to understand the other?

No, we simply need to act in a way that is good for the other person, for anyone. That is, except for my survival necessities, in everything else that depends on me, I must act for the sake of others.

This is natural. Very often we, as a result of our habits, make some movements, gestures, or utter some words, phrases that might seem even offensive to others.

We might not even feel and understand that. It is necessary to tune the heart. The heart should be adjusted to kindness toward others. All the rest will not work at all.

If a person is cordially attuned to the other, then it will be interpreted correctly. Even if he said something wrong, somehow could not express himself, the other person will feel that.

Aim the heart toward the other person, toward all people, toward the good. We need to get used to it. We need to educate ourselves for this. It is necessary that the same attitude be maintained by the environment and the surrounding society. Everything will then be good.
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From Kab TV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman,” 7/14/19

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