Question: You once said that our entire life unfolds between love and hatred. But how are these two feelings connected?

Answer: If there were no hatred, there would not be love either. If I did not desire something and feel fulfilled by it, then how could I feel that I love it?

The measure, quality, and depth of love always depend on the measure, quality, and depth of hatred.

Hatred is when I either reject something and want to push it away from me, or I suffer deeply because I do not have it. Within this spectrum lies the whole range of our relationships. In truth, everything in life is divided only into what I hate and what I love.

We are created from the desire to enjoy. Therefore, there are things that I hate and want to distance myself from since they negatively affect my desire to enjoy and there are things that I love and want to draw closer to because they positively affect my desire for pleasure. My entire life is woven between these two poles, between what is good for me, and what is bad for me, between hatred of what feels bad and the love for what feels good.

Yet perhaps we should re-educate ourselves to reconsider what is good and what is bad, what is worthy of enjoyment and what is not. Education, in this sense, means reshaping our attitude toward what appears attractive and pleasant, and toward what appears unpleasant or harmful.

This shift allows us to move beyond the simple question of what to love or what to hate, and instead to ask: what is true and what is false? After all, some things that I love turn out to be deceptive and damaging, while some things that I instinctively reject are true, and ultimately beneficial. I should pay attention to them, draw closer to them, and I will discover that they genuinely lead me to goodness.

In other words, I should not live according to my instinctive or culturally-acquired sense of good and evil—what I love and what I hate—but add a rational inquiry to it: What is truly good and what is truly bad? Not from the perspective of what feels pleasant or unpleasant, but from the higher perspective of what is worth experiencing as good or bad. Thus, I will no longer define good and evil by my personal tastes or by natural attraction or repulsion, but by absolute good and absolute evil—above my instincts.

This is possible because the human being is a social creature. We can determine what is good or bad not only by our personal sensations, but also by the influence of the environment. After all, we need those around us: they can respect us or, on the contrary, shame us. Because we are subject to the influence of the environment, we can completely change our values by learning to hate what we once loved.

Take, for example, a person who once behaved carelessly, as he pleased. Then, under the influence of his surroundings, he suddenly realizes that others do not respect him, even scorn him, for his sloppiness or poor manners.

He feels he has no choice but to change, to correct himself because society’s influence is powerful and felt sharply as either positive or negative. He begins to see his neglect of others as harmful to himself, and so he puts effort into correcting his behavior and attitude. In doing so, he reshapes his values.

This is how we can transform what we love and what we hate.
[180094]
From KabTV’s New Life 692 – What Is Love? 2/16/16

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Question: Love, everyone wants to love, to be loved, to work at a job they love, to visit places they love. Within us there is an enormous drive toward love. Personally, I feel that all our life we are searching for love, wanting to be loved.

Why do we chase after love, why are we so drawn to this powerful feeling?

Answer: Because we are nothing more than created beings, and our nature is the desire to enjoy. What fulfills this desire is the pleasure we feel. Depending on what each person strives for, where they feel emptiness, and what fills them, toward that they experience love.

I love fish, I love my mother, I love my children, I love the sun, coolness, warmth, it doesn’t matter what. If I am filled with what I strive for, if I fill my desire, I call that love for what presently delights me.

There are things I know in advance that I love either by habit or by nature because that’s how I was made. And there are things I accustomed myself to, and then I also love them.

In the end, what we call love in our lives is fulfillment by the pleasure I strive for, because it fills my desire. And the sensation that my desire is being fulfilled is what we call love.

For example, I love fish. That means I want to eat it and can fill myself with the fish lying in front of me on the plate.

Question: And still, we strive more toward human love than material love…

Answer: Love has many levels depending on what we love, meaning what fulfills us. A person has needs for fulfillment, which the science of Kabbalah divides according to a ladder of desires and aspirations. This ladder begins with desires for food, sex, and family. Then follow desires for wealth, honor, and knowledge.

In essence, all of our aspirations and fulfillments can be included in these six types of desires. If I strive for some kind of fulfillment, that means I love it. Moreover, I not only love the fulfillment itself, but also its source, which becomes important to me since it gives me pleasure.

That is how we build our lives. And our entire life takes place between hatred and love.
[180090]
From KabTV’s New Life 692 – What Is Love?, 2/16/16

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Question: Smartphones today are conquering the world; everyone is looking at their mobile phones. But there is also another way of looking at smartphones—parents’ attention to their children has diminished as a result.

How much attention should a parent give to a child, and does the child feel that the parent’s heart is not with him?

Answer: What can modern parents give their children? The fact is that we are sinking into ever greater egoism. We lack feelings for the child and even more so for each other. So it is better that we do not impose ourselves on children. We only need to invent good games, all kinds of useful programs for children. There are not many of them yet.

Question: What will it come to? What kind of children will we raise?

Answer: Children are already growing up in a virtual space; they are no longer particularly interested in our world. The next generation will be in this space all the time, shopping through the virtual world, learning through the virtual world, everything through the virtual world. There will be a human being and a screen.

I believe that such action of nature is absolutely justified; we cannot criticize nature. We can only think about how to correctly use what is emerging in us in each period of existence.

Question: What is now emerging in children?

Answer: The possibility to build a world for themselves is emerging in them. The world! Their own! That is, a person is gradually moving from the world imposed on him by his animalistic body to the world that he will create for himself with his spiritual body, and in it he will exist. And this world will include absolutely everything.

We only have to observe how nature develops us. And it develops us in a very interesting way, by gradually giving us the opportunity to create a new reality for ourselves, and to exist within it.

Question: What will the child want to see and feel in this reality?

Answer: The child will subconsciously feel an attraction to this, a movement toward it, an impulse. And his movements toward the new reality will gradually compel him to acquire new qualities.

The next stage will be such that the child will want to exist in this, not because of some program, but because he himself will be changing. For now, we are only going through an intermediate stage.

But since nature leads us forward and causes all these movements, impulses, and urges in us, the next stages will be such that through the construction of a new virtual world, through the computer, we will suddenly feel that we ourselves have to change in order to enter directly into this nature. Behind what we have drawn, behind what we have created, there actually exists another world that has not been drawn for us.

For this, there is no need to install new programs on my supercomputer. I need to reprogram myself a little bit, and then I will indeed exist in the new world.

That is where we will come to. But perhaps not even in this generation yet.
[232756]

From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman,” 11/14/24

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Question: When speaking about the relationship between man and woman, you described the “mirror principle,” according to which I see a reflection of myself in my partner since I radiate my egoism onto him. What does this mean? If it seems to me that my husband does not value me, does it mean that I do not value myself?

Answer: Why do you demand more recognition from him? In essence, it is your egoism that requires this fulfillment. And what do we gain if we rise above egoism and do not make such demands?

First, by doing so we will not suffer from feeling undervalued by our partner. Second, we thereby acquire a new quality. The demand for respect and power reveals its opposite: by overcoming a certain egoistic quality and beginning to rise above it, I receive a quality opposite to it. This allows me to gain a new tool, a new attitude toward the world.

For example, if earlier I demanded attention and respect from my partner, now I become more modest in my claims. After all, I already understand that if I look objectively, he treats me quite normally, it was simply that my egoism inflated the bar of expectations. So let us concede, let us reduce our egoistic demands.

I want my partner to be attentive, considerate, and to keep promises, I want to stop his endless “offenses” in everything concerning household matters, neglect of my interests, lack of signs of love and care. After all, with the years the husband calls his wife less and less to ask how she is doing, takes less and less care of her. And so, if I lessen my complaints, if I do not keep count of grievances and work hard on myself—because for me this is still very important—then I annul the former, spoiled connection between us.

I rise above the inflated demands and relate to my partner with love, like a mother to a child. Even if on his side there still remains “crime,” despite my efforts, I hold to the principle: “Love will cover all crimes.”

How do I thereby help my partner, considering that he also has joined into the framework of our course? I give him an example, and also awaken a readiness for the same reciprocal relation in him. Thus, here lies an invitation to a new life. In essence, I open myself in order to receive a new attitude from my partner. And I check this attitude not egoistically; on the contrary, what matters here is that we both mutually develop our relationship above egoism and support each other.

By my example I help my partner to rise above egoism. I make efforts, I speak with him about how good life will be if we rise above our natural, base, egoistic impulses. And as a result, mutual example and mutual support lead us upward.

Moreover, each of us now looks at the world correctly, sanely, with readiness to yield. Again and again, I see the world in comparison with myself as something perfect. The new outlook allows me to see it as perfect nature. It is no longer only about my partner, the whole world becomes my mirror.

This is a kind of psychological training, a psychological method of the highest order, which allows a person to ascend to a new perception of reality, of the world, of family, and of relations with the partner; it is a perception that we did not have before.

Of course we must first practice this in the family, and in the end, we will build a new world, new relationships. And here mutuality is necessary. We both must understand that we represent something like a small “laboratory” in which two egoists strive to use the egoism that has developed in them correctly. In our generation it has grown to such an extent that it destroys everything, and we want to use it as a lever and build healthy relations above it that will allow life to continue. Otherwise, only ruin awaits us.
[83478]
From the 32^nd conversation New Life 32 – New Kind Of Relationships, 7/11/12

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A child should grow up free. That is, he should sit and listen to his elders, but it should be interesting to him. And he should spend more time with his friends, with friends and teachers together. Go out into the fields, tinker with some small and big machines, and something else like that. That is, we must raise a child according to his ways.

Question: Do you think this is more important than, say, making him learn physics or algebra?

Answer: That does not accomplish anything. Only a few struggle through this, and only because they want to be above others.

Question: So you are least concerned with knowledge?

Answer: Indeed. We do not need it.

Question: So what you just suggested, what does it accomplish? Does it liberate him, what does it give a child?

Answer: What I propose develops a child in the natural flow of his activities. In that case, he will invent anything, not some helicopters or planes, but spaceships based on completely different principles, the ones we think those who visit us sometimes probably have, etc.

That is, liberation will give freedom to ideas, as we still do not know what potential lies in a child. Entire worlds are inside him.

Question: You are talking about freedom. What is the principle of this freedom for a child?

Answer: The principles of this freedom are free contact with nature, discussions, conclusions, arguments with adults and with their peers. All this is vital for the proper development of people. Otherwise, you just put them in some kind of square, I do not know, in a cube, and they cannot break free of it for the rest of their lives. You make their thinking formal.

Question: By doing so, are you stopping this whole progress? But in fact, this progress could have been out of this world?

Answer: Yes.

Question: What does this require of teachers?

Answer: This requires teachers to become different from the teachers we have today. We need to redo everything over a number of years. But we will come to very different results.

Question: Realizing this, will we ever come to realize we need to “jump off a cliff?”

Answer: Through a great revolution.

Question: What needs to be changed? The Ministry of Education, you know, everything is tangled up in here, the whole bureaucratic system.

Answer: All of it!

Comment: They would not want to…

My Response: I am not talking about whether they want to or not, whether we should fight for it or not. I am not calling for anything.

Question: So how will this happen?

Answer: I do not know. I am just stating the truth.

Question: Can our thinking be changed from above?

Answer: Anything can be done from above. By “from above,” I do not mean the government.

Question: So the upper force can turn our thinking around?

Answer: Yes.

Question: In what case will this happen?

Answer: I cannot say for sure, but it seems to me that when we are completely discouraged with what we have.
[348226]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman,” 9/14/25

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Question: What does love give to a person?

Answer: Love gives a person an inner radiance that enlivens him. Life.

But the problem is that love is a much deeper relationship that we must reveal between us.

It is not about those feelings that arise according to a person’s inner inclinations, which are instilled in him by nature or acquired through upbringing. We must first reveal the proper values—to understand what is truly called love, to what extent we exist within the nature of mutual hatred and mutual rejection, and if that is so, then what must be done in order to attain love, since the source of life is love.

Question: Must we reveal what love is?

Answer: We must reveal the secret of life. This secret is connected with love. For without it, there is no continuation.

If there were no attraction between plus and minus on the still level, no joining and separating between molecules on the vegetative level, if there were no such calculations between living bodies, when one hates or loves another depending on the level of development, if there were no feeling of a mother’s love for her child on the animate and human level, then without this, nature would not develop, not even the simplest cell would exist.

Everything exists according to love and hatred, according to the force of attraction and repulsion. These two forces must be balanced.

Therefore, it is not by chance that it is written in the wisdom of Kabbalah: “Love will cover all crimes.” These two fundamental forces, located at the center of creation, must be balanced with one another, and then between them there will be proper, gradual development until such a degree that both love and hatred will develop to infinite proportions. And in this way we will attain the world of infinity, the world of truth, which is the goal of our development.

Therefore we still have to reveal how to come to the clarification of what love truly is—for it is the source of life.
[180108]
From the conversation “New Life 692 – What Is Love?”, 2/16/2016

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Comment: Empathy is the ability to feel emotions that correspond to the emotions of another person and compassion is the sympathy for someone else’s suffering.

My Response: It is as if you relocate into another person and feel their experiences.

Question: How can one develop this within oneself? As I understand it, if this feeling were cultivated, we would live differently.

Answer: Yes, then we would educate people accordingly. I believe this is possible. We simply do not engage in this. In general, from the age of 13 to 14, people are already capable of deeply sensing another person’s suffering. And they need to be educated for this.

Comment: This would absolutely, completely change the world.

My Response: Of course, without a doubt.

Question: So compassion can be cultivated in a person?

Answer: One can cultivate the understanding of compassion for another person and give a person the ability to comprehend how to perceive it to the point where in their compassion, a person will be able to share in another’s suffering, partially take it upon themselves, and thereby neutralize the suffering of the other.

Question: And will you not burn out from doing that?

Answer: No, because by neutralizing their suffering through your participation, through your empathy, and through your compassion, you gradually divide their suffering into many smaller parts, and in this way, the person calms down. And in doing so, you can lead the entire world to balance, to an inner state that can already be called bliss.

Question: So if compassion were shared equally among all the inhabitants of Earth, would it bring bliss to the world?

Answer: Yes, this is precisely what we must achieve in our unity. Because, in principle, we are certainly facing very serious problems ahead. After all, egoism is growing, and the upper light is being revealed more and more in relation to our egoism. That is, related to our egoism, we will feel increasing pressures to such an extent that if we cannot unite and share it all among ourselves, we will not be able to endure it.

Question: Now I understand the essence of what you always say: “Unity, connection, good thoughts, and good relationships.” The foundation of all this is compassion, is it not?

Answer: Yes, but it is practically not even compassion. It is the sharing of the enormous suffering: the opposition between the enormous desire and the enormous light that is meant to fill that desire, and the lack of intention “not for oneself,” which would allow the light to fill the desire.

Question: So fulfillment is only possible if it is for the sake of others?

Answer: Yes, that is why we need balance here. This can only happen through understanding how to learn compassion, how to share the opposition between absolute fulfillment and absolute emptiness among everyone.

Naturally, it will turn out neither less nor worse. But if we want it to be shared in this way, then the contradiction itself disappears. This is the special property of unity.

Question: And then, this bliss comes?

Answer: Yes, at that point, the sensation of opposition, impossibility, and inner cry transforms into satiation, into something higher, into pleasure. There is no longer any difference between enormous pain and enormous pleasure. They merge into one.

Question: And what, then, does pain become in this case?

Answer: It turns into pleasure because you have balanced them with one another.

Comment: That is something truly elevated.

My Response: That is how it happens, on a higher level.

Question: So pain is given to us in order to turn it into pleasure?

Answer: Yes, of course.

Question: And the greatest pain ultimately becomes the greatest pleasure?

Answer: Yes, if you know how to reconcile these opposites, you receive pleasure.
[347365]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman,” 8/15/25

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Comment: Elon Musk once said: “I want to be part of what changes the world. Making mistakes is not scary. The main thing is to make new mistakes each time.” I would like you to comment on this.

My Response: That is correct.

Question: So we make mistakes all the time?

Answer: Without that, it is impossible.

Question: It has always been said: “We learn from mistakes.” Do we really learn from them?

Answer: Not everyone does, but mistakes come precisely so that we may learn from them.
[302847]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman,” 6/30/22

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Comment: “School doesn’t teach you to be happy.” That is what an eleven-year-old boy wrote.

My Response: That’s right! In school today they simply demonstrate that dullness, obedience, and the suppression of happiness are normal conditions.

Question: But in principle, the slogan of the school should be: “We must teach children to be happy”?

Answer: Yes, we must raise people who are happy.

We need a school that teaches the correct attitude toward the world, toward life, toward friends, toward teachers, and toward parents, and this does not require grades that someone else gives you, but rather that when you are taught, you yourself give yourself the grade.

Question: Can make such demands even of a little child?

Answer: That is what we must aim for. Explain this so that they themselves can grade subjects, textbooks, their instructors, and so on.

Comment: So the child can say: “Today I was not in shape. I should have read this, and worked on that a bit.”

My Response: That is good.

Question: There is a fear of making mistakes. School doesn’t teach that it’s possible and necessary to make mistakes. By the way, that is what the eleven-year-old boy says. Do you think one should make mistakes?

Answer: I agree with him.

Question: So is a mistake an important thing? And one must make mistakes?

Answer: It is inevitable.

Question: And what if I make a mistake?

Answer: It is okay. I’ll fix it, I’ll learn from it even more than from something I did without a mistake.

Question: So it is even more important than if you move forward flawlessly?

Answer: We constantly make mistakes and correct ourselves, make mistakes and correct ourselves.

Comment: Trolling, classmates’ mockery in this often the fault of teachers who expose children to ridicule.

My Response: To live in such a society, a child must be taught how to relate correctly to society, to the environment, that this is possible, that this is and will exist until we correct our nature. That it is the nature of man that compels him to be above others at any cost.

Question: And the fact that they put me down now, is that just human nature?

Answer: Yes, that is their nature, nothing can be done. But I must understand their nature and somehow, in some way, forgive them, accept them as they are. And maybe even correct them in this way.

Question: And I should feel that this is also my nature; it is the same, and I can do the same?

Answer: Naturally, yes.

Question: So, you would like to introduce the words “human nature,” “human egoism” almost from the first grade, so that a child would feel it?

Answer: Even earlier.

Comment: The amount of homework. “I think homework does not affect children’s performance and education,” says the eleven-year-old boy.

My Response: I think homework causes disgust, hatred toward school. And therefore, it is not needed. What is needed is simply that a child goes there (whatever they teach him and however they teach, better or worse, more or less interesting), but he comes back from there, and he doesn’t have this homework hanging over him.

Question: So that he doesn’t have this burden, that “I urgently need to do this, how will I go to school tomorrow!” And instead of homework what should there be?

Answer: Instead of homework there should be absolutely free time, somewhat structured, but felt as free, what he himself would like to occupy himself with.

Question: Himself? So that he finds his own niche?

Answer: Yes, everyone in something. We had a lot of clubs back then. I don’t know they probably do not now.

Comment: I don’t think so. There were Pioneers Houses, clubs.

My Response: There was such a huge House of Pioneers! And there were a huge number of clubs, and all were free. You went, signed up wherever you wanted. Even in several if you liked! And went, studied.

Comment: Do you remember the modeling club, radio.

My Response: Yes, and you didn’t pay for anything. I went, among other things, to a photo club. Photographic paper, chemicals, everything was free. Absolutely everything free! That is so amazing!

Comment: And how warmly the club teachers treated the children!

My Response: Yes, people with a character like that worked there.

Question: Where did it all vanish? What was so bad about it?

Answer: The time! The time is not the same. We fell into such a bad streak.

Comment: “We fell into it, ”that should be the name of this story.

My Response: Yes.

Comment: “School doesn’t prepare you for adult life,” this boy thinks.

My Response: I actually think that nothing can prepare you for adult life. We just plunge into it, like into a whirlpool. And that’s it. And then each swims out in his own way.

Question: What is preparation for adult life, if we’re speaking about it?

Answer: Here it is necessary to create special, absolutely clear, realistic pictures from life.

Question: In school? Right for the children so they learn to get out of them, to deal with them, and so on?

Answer: Yes, to discuss and so on. On the other hand, to give them some patterns, but realistic ones. For example: “How would you act if you…” and you give them a story.

Comment: You know, this boy’s conclusion is very interesting. He says: “I think that the main subject in school could be a subject where we are taught to understand one another. After all, the ability to communicate is the most important thing.”

My Response: That’s exactly right!

Comment: It’s as if he’s listening to you.

My Response: Make him Minister of Education. And that’s it. ☺

Comment: No knowledge is needed, only such conclusions.

My Response: And put all these ministers into school.

Comment: Exactly!
[347172]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman,” 8/13/25

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Question: How should we work with insults? Children do not help their parents; they have practically abandoned them. Someone truly betrayed someone else, someone sold out a friend, and so on. How should we work with these offenses?

Answer: I think we need to reach a level of development at which we will understand that all the people around us are puppets controlled by the Creator so that we can properly correct ourselves in relation to these people, justify them, and wish them well.

Question: Is that possible?

Answer: Generally, yes. Not always and not immediately, but still…

Question: It is a long process, but that is the direction we should go in?

Answer: Yes! Otherwise, you are slandering the Creator. And that is a completely different matter. There the calculation is entirely different—it is a matter of how you perceive the universe: whether it exists on its own, or whether you govern it. If everything comes from above, then we have no other choice but to make ourselves absolutely submissive, agreeable, and capable of changing to resemble this upper force.

Comment: That is beautiful. I would cautiously suggest that our whole world is a world of sinners. We all exist in a state of hatred and constant offense.

My Response: Like little children in a sandbox.

Comment: And we respond, and respond; we keep responding. Look at all the diplomatic corps, how they clash: “You expelled my diplomats…”

My Response: Stop joking! Just stop. This is all…

Question: Then why are we being joked with like this?

Answer: So that we eventually become truly disappointed. Not in how the Creator made us this way, but in how foolish we were not to realize why He made us this way. And the answer is right in front of a person, but he does not want to see it. But all this is so that it accumulates, breaks through, bursts out, and explodes.

Question: If people begin to follow this direction little by little, what will our world become?

Answer: Our world will transform from today’s madhouse into a world where people are engaged in self-research, self-healing, and self-building.

Question: And through that, do they, as it were, bring the Creator into this world?

Answer: Yes, to the extent that this happens, the Creator is revealed within them.

Question: And what do you mean by “the revelation of the Creator in a person”? What does that mean?

Answer: The quality of bestowal, of love, which elevates us to an entirely different level of perceiving the world.

Question: Are you certain that there is only one path, and no other?

Answer: No, there can be no other path.
[346610]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 7/24/25

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