My new article on Linkedin “When Old Values Die, New Ones Are Born”

Nothing was more important to us than stuff. By “stuff,” I don’t necessarily mean objects or accessories, but everything that distinguishes us from others, that makes us special, unique. When Covid came, it locked us up in our homes, made us virtually invisible, or rather, visible only virtually, and rendered almost all our “stuff” meaningless. But since we can’t live without values, because then we’re no different from animals, we’ve started to develop new ones. Now, gradually, as we are compelled to give up on the pleasure of getting respect and admiration as we learn to enjoy positive, reciprocal connections with others.

The atmosphere in the streets and in the media may be the complete opposite, but there are undercurrents paving the way to a new reality. The war on the outside marks the final breaths of the old world, where each one was for oneself.
The atmosphere in the streets and in the media may be the complete opposite, but there are undercurrents paving the way to a new reality. The war on the outside marks the final breaths of the old world, where each one was for oneself.

No beginning is easy, and certainly not the beginning of a new reality. But the sooner we realize that we cannot go back, not now and not ever, the quicker and easier will be the transition. The old values have brought us competition, corruption, exploitation, and pollution. They caused depression, obsession, alienation, and isolation. They also brought us the coronavirus, which is finally killing them one by one.

Suddenly, we must think of other people, and they of us. In the process, we are discovering how good it is to communicate rather than to compete, to give and receive rather than to take and give up, and to connect rather than to alienate.

Those who are currently fighting for their own rights will lose. Those who are fighting to unite everyone above all the differences and all the hardships will triumph. Perhaps not in person, but the way of connection will defeat the way of separation; it is simply that the time for it has come.

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They say that masks help not for avoiding getting infected yourself, but avoiding passing your germs to others—that is how nature unconsciously imposes the right relationships on us. Granted, they are unconscious and unaware, but this too is effective and will lead us to become aware of the reciprocity…
From Twitter, 11/1/20

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From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 10/31/20

To wear a mask, or not to wear a mask? That is the question! As the world grapples with the second (and sometimes third) wave of Covid-19, countries are debating if, where, and in what situations they should make mask-wearing mandatory. Authorities insist that masks are vital for preventing infection. This is true, but not for the reasons we naturally think about. Masks do not protect us from other people’s germs; they protect other people from our germs. For this reason, only if we all comply with mask-wearing regulations we will be cured from the virus. And in the process, we will be cured from the lack of mutual responsibility in our society.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), “Masks may help prevent people who have COVID-19 from spreading the virus to others.” Note the explanation that the CDC provides: “Masks are recommended as a simple barrier to help prevent respiratory droplets from traveling into the air and onto other people when the person wearing the mask coughs, sneezes, talks, or raises their voice.” In other words, the CDC is telling us that masks aren’t meant to protect us from others, but to protect others from us. Put simply, if we all behave as if we are infected, we will obliterate the pandemic in a matter of weeks. Interestingly, it turns out that wearing a mask is an act of kindness even if we only want to help ourselves.

Nature, in its subtle ways, teaches us that giving is good for the giver. It opens our minds to the fact that we are dependent on each other. It shows us that only if we think of one another, we ourselves will be safe, as well. Because we are reluctant to become giving or caring, and focus on helping ourselves, authorities encourage us to wear masks for our protection. They are correct; masks do protect us, but only if other people wear them. When we wear them, we protect others!

The more attentive we become to nature’s hints, the more quickly we will learn how to conduct ourselves in the new reality it has imposed on us. In this reality, we are dependent on each other and support each other. We cannot live, even physically, without each other, and we must therefore build our social systems to cater to the needs of all the people. In the new reality, there will be no exploitation, alienation, or oppression because they will cripple the aggressor. Every harm that people do to others will come back to haunt them like a boomerang.

It is still unclear that this is where nature is taking us, but its subtle clues are telling us where we are going. Nature treats us kindly; it leaves us with a choice: to learn quickly, cure our world, and usher humanity into a new era, or remain obstinate and learn the hard and painful way that we have to protect others in order to protect ourselves.

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Question: Now the next wave of coronavirus is beginning all over the world. Many countries are getting ready for the second lockdown and for Israel it is already a fact. Economies are collapsing, the world is renewing itself. How can people survive in the new world?

Answer: First, we have to understand that we really are living in a new world, which in the end will be drastically different from the previous one. After all, we are transferring from the physical world to the virtual world. There are technical, moral, ethical, and other prerequisites for this.

In the future, everything will depend on the moral efforts of people, how much they will understand and realize their good attitude toward each other. It may seem impossible, but this is exactly the world we must come to.

We are talking about the correction of our egoism, about an aspiration of a person to be closer to others and act for the benefit of all. From the former divided world, humanity is moving toward becoming an integral, unified whole. Nature makes us that way. We must understand this tendency and correspond to it to some extent.
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From KabTV’s “Kabbalah Express” 9/27/20

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Nature is leading us to a new state. We are obligated to realize what is happening and bring ourselves into alignment with it. Until we do this, nothing will change. We cannot return children to schools and adults to work—we will sit at home until we understand that we have to behave in a new way.

Mutual closeness is able to disinfect the place where the virus lives, inside our hatred of each other. We’re separated by a mandatory distance beyond which we can’t come close to each other; this space is full of complaints and strife. This is a favorable environment for the virus

The coronavirus is a spiritual virus. It reacts to the spirit that dwells between people. It is nourished by hatred that exists between us. It develops and lives inside of it. The more animosity, conflict, and rejection there is between us, the more comfortable the virus feels multiplying in this nutritious environment.
From Twitter, 10/28/20

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Medium published my new article “A Ray of Light Out of the Pandemic”

A huge, thick grey cloud covers the planet and there is no sign of it going away any time soon. This is how people feel after so many months of Covid-19 impacting our lives. Humanity doesn’t see on the horizon a way out and begins to feel tired, drained, and stuck in negative thoughts about what might come next. Our perspectives on the future are uncertain, and bewilderment has become a breeding ground for despair and depression. All this darkness could quickly change if we could discover the source of lasting fulfillment which the current crisis is leading us to reveal.

Only when we connect positively with others will we dissipate the looming cloud dimming the current atmosphere and will transform the climate into a sunny and shiny reality.

The pandemic has caused critical disruptions in mental health services in 93% of countries worldwide as the demand for psychological support has dramatically increased, according to the World Health Organization. Meanwhile, scientists warn of what seems to be an imminent new wave of the coronavirus in the upcoming winter, combined with the flu season. We have started to understand that the lifestyle restrictions are going to stay with us for a long time, at least until a proven vaccine is released, and even then, there will be no absolute certainty about its effectiveness as new mutations of the virus may arise. Our situation is changing the way we perceive and approach our lives.

Some are trying to maintain some sense of normality, going to work — if they are still lucky enough to still have a job — and include in their daily schedules some exercise to stay fit and healthy. But deep inside, the joy and enthusiasm for life has faded. The internal distress caused by the crisis is triggering apathy and bitterness.

The pursuit of materialistic aspirations has lost much of the relevance it had in the past when we craved power, money, and status. Now, the madness of endless competition and the ongoing quest for pleasures have become secondary concerns. And since life no longer offers a clear purpose, people feel overpowered by fatigue. Some struggle to get out of bed, having fallen into depression and powerlessness, while others react with angry outbursts against the pandemic-related restrictions, lockdowns, and preventive measures.

These manifestations reflect a lack of perspective about the future where we fail to see any compensation for the suffering we face. Subconsciously, humanity asks, “Why do we have to endure this situation? For what purpose?” Nature is precisely pointing out what humanity needs to change. It is revealing to us that the way we have lived our lives until now, driven by our egoistic impulses and actions for self-benefit, is no longer possible. The world is increasingly being revealed as behaving like a complex and mechanistic system of cogwheels, where we can only guarantee its smooth functioning by taking into consideration how to mesh the complementary and correct gears of all its elements.

Therefore, we need to adapt to our new reality. We have no control over the virus, but we do have control over how we deal with its consequences as a human society. We must therefore help each other to stay afloat during the plague’s storm. It is imperative to find ways to battle the state of general despair and to organize support systems that will strengthen individuals to prevent them falling into helplessness. The more we invest in the general wellbeing now, the more we will be able to safeguard the mindfulness and good spirit of society. Every country in the world should make all the possible efforts toward making communities more cohesive, where no one is left alone, where everyone has group support as a safety-net, employment, and the option of engaging in physical and social activities such as group games, music, and sports.

We can achieve the desired cohesion in our societies through a fundamental shift in our values: from competitive, individualistic and egoistic to cooperative, connected and altruistic. When our desire to enjoy is redirected, when we stop aiming to fulfill ourselves individually and start aiming to fulfill others, we will find the key to boundless happiness because we will be free from our enslaving self-concern. Only when we connect positively with others will we dissipate the looming cloud dimming the current atmosphere and will transform the climate into a sunny and shiny reality.
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Medium published my new article “Covid-19 — the Next Stage”

We’re entering a new stage in our “relationship” with the coronavirus. We’re pretty much done with the denial stage and people are beginning to accept that it is here and there is nothing we can do to chase it away. Although we seem to be deep in the stage of anger, and it could still create a lot of damage, we are also beginning to tire of the war and give up. We don’t have much to look for. We search for the old ways to have some fun, to get something, make some profit, compete, but there is none of it. We’re just going aimlessly from day to day. This aimlessness is not as passive as it sounds. In some, it arouses anger and aggression; in others, it causes apathy.

We search for the old ways to have some fun, to get something, make some profit, compete, but there is none of it. We’re just going aimlessly from day to day. This aimlessness is not as passive as it sounds. In some, it arouses anger and aggression; in others, it causes apathy.

Worse yet, the frustration and hopelessness can stream from the personal level to the social level and lead to social disorders, revolutions, and disintegration of societies and countries. From there, the hopelessness can spread to the international level and lead to clashes between countries, which, seeing no future for themselves or the world, might lead to an all-out world war where they will strive not to win, but to destroy one another. If matters come to this, it will be a nuclear world war, humanity’s worst nightmare.

It’s not as if our lives were so meaningful before Covid-19, but prior to the pandemic, we could camouflage our emptiness with trips, shopping, careers, frequent relocation, frequent change of partners, and Netflix. Now all we have is Netflix. But with the dying movie industry, even Netflix seems more like a monument to a past life than a nice pastime in the present. It’s as if the virus has choked our previous ways of enjoyment and left us gasping for air, seeking desperately for a new way to find vitality, to find a reason to live.

When we are at that stage, we can really start building something new. Only when we give up entirely on finding ways to please ourselves, we will begin to look more favorably at pleasing others. This is where Covid is leading us, because when it comes to pleasing others, there is no end to what we can do, and what others can do for us.

Humanity is heading toward mutuality of a kind we’ve never known. Until now, we were used to thinking of society, friends, and even family as sources of benefit and pleasure for ourselves. The coronavirus is making us invert our attitude to the people around us and begin to see them as opportunities for giving, and in the giving itself find new meanings to our lives, new sources of pleasure and enjoyment, new vitality and energy as we engage in reciprocity rather than in self-absorption.

The transformation will not happen overnight. We are still at the very beginning. The plague is very “young,” only a few months old, but we can already see the trend. Little by little, the virus will make us similar to the rest of nature: giving and receiving, balanced and harmonious. It will make us conscious individuals who feel as part of a great and grand design that nature has created and that manifests in the reality around us. Instead of constant emptiness from seeking pleasures, we will celebrate life. Instead of draining and depleting our social and natural environment, we will become like open faucets, springs that always satiate yet never run dry.

In striving to give instead of receive, we will find more than a reason to live; we will find the meaning of life! We will discover that true joy and satisfaction exist in creating life, not in extinguishing it. In the process, we will unearth the integral nature of reality, where everything is connected and evolving. We will feel as parts of the common reality rather than as distinct units whose existence ends as soon as their physical life expires.

By robbing us of our past-life toys, Covid-19 isn’t punishing us. It is rather making us raise our heads and see where real pleasure lies. Had it not taken away our former lives, it would have taken us decades of human suffering, wars, and mutual annihilation to finally look up and see where real pleasure lies. Despite the toll, Covid is the least painful means that nature could employ in order to show us the way to a happy and sustainable existence. The sooner we follow its lead, the less we will have to ache before we find happiness and meaning in life.
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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What causes coronavirus?“

The cause of the coronavirus is fundamentally the human ego, i.e., the desire to enjoy at the expense of others, and our lack of desire to rise above the ego and positively connect with others.

What are viruses? Viruses are units of information that communicate with each other in the body, and the human body contains a lot of them. Although we name them “viruses,” we need them to survive. Every virus is intricately complex, and we lack a lot of knowledge about how viruses and the human body function.

Our suffering from viruses can ultimately be healed by a force above them—the force of thought. Viruses are carriers that transmit thoughts, data and information throughout the human body. Specifically today, since our thoughts are inflated with an overblown ego, we find ourselves dealing with serious viruses such as COVID-19.

Viruses and other negative phenomena surface primarily due to our ego-based negative thoughts about each other, and we will be unable to solve this problem until we improve our thoughts—from egoistic, divisive and hatreful to altruistic, positively connected and considerate.

Moreover, by letting our negative thoughts surface in words and actions, we commit negative acts—we try to bring down other people, and by doing so, situate ourselves in a reality that is abundant with negative phenomena.

Our failure to elevate positive values of unification and mutual consideration above our abounding egoistic-negative thoughts and actions gives rise to myriad problems in our lives, the coronavirus among them. In other words, at its foundation, the coronavirus is an outcome of our negative ego-based connections to each other.

We can thus expect to suffer from many viruses and other problems as a result of our negative egoistic connections.

I understand that this is an unconventional view since there are no instruments available for measuring a virus’ connection to our egoistic thoughts. When I was a university student, we had classes at the Institute of the Human Brain in St. Petersburg, and the head of the department, who was a renowned scientist, emphasized how scientists had not discovered the location of human thought.

Many scientists try to decipher human thought, but the fact is that thoughts are not in the human brain. Rather, they stream out into a sphere that is imperceptible to our current senses. Our thoughts exist outside of us, and the human brain is a computation device that connects between this thought-filled environment and our sensations. By connecting to it egoistically, trying to enjoy for personal benefit alone, we situate ourselves in opposition to it and experience negative consequences. However, if we rise above our narrow egoistic approach and aim to benefit others, we enter into balance with this field and thus feel its influence as positive.

We have entered a period where we will have to undergo an introspection and discover the way we influence each other at the level of our thoughts. Ultimately, we will need to transform our thoughts about each other from negative to positive, and in our positive attitude toward one another, we will sense an additional force of nature that we currently do not feel.

Transforming our thoughts from negative to positive will save us from the coronavirus as well as from myriad other problems. As the human parts of nature, the negative-to-positive shift at the level of our thoughts will enable our balance with nature, and we will then complement nature by fulfilling the human being’s role in nature at the level of thought.

Therefore, to solve the coronavirus and many other problems in society, we need to revise our social and educational influences, to see the extent by which we are currently influenced to think and act egoistically and divisively, and to impact a shift in these influences so that we instead become motivated to think and act altruistically, responsibly and considerately toward each other. Even a tiny shift in a more unifying direction above our ego will attract a positive force dwelling in nature, which will in turn act to heal us from the coronavirus and many other troubles we face.

Photo by CDC on Unsplash.

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Question: Earlier this year several news sources reported on a Carleton University School of Journalism survey in which almost half of the 2,000 Canadians reported believing in coronavirus conspiracy theories ranging from it being an engineered bioweapon to a 5G cover-up.

Who is behind the pandemic from your point of view?

Answer: It is human egoism that does not want to rise above itself and be in good connection with other people. With everyone! Just to be in a good connection without all kinds of conspiracy theories and without the dominance of someone over someone.

The unwillingness to treat each other well leads to the fact that viruses are awakening between us. We will not get away from this until we correct our attitude.
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From KabTV’s “Kabbalah Express” 9/27/20

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If a Klipa (egoistic desire) exists between us, that is where viruses can enter. But if there’s a space for holiness between us, a good connection to one another, then no harmful virus will be able to enter inside. That would be against nature’s law.

We must establish a connection between us around the entire globe. This will protect us, fill us with confidence and joy, and raise our immunity against the #Coronavirus and all other #diseases. No harmful agent will be able to get close to us, for everything depends solely on our connections.

We are born in this world, the worst of all the worlds. Let us rise to a better state! The Creator wants us to be in joy, so that, through unity, we would achieve absolute good, the upper world that is full of light and devoid of evil. The Creator draws closer when the group is brimming with joy and good connections.

We shouldn’t fear being distant or disconnected from the Creator. Even now we are in adhesion with Him, inside the Creator. So now, out of this state, let us build on the sensation of being close with the Creator, the desire to cling to Him with our hearts and minds, with all our thoughts. Nothing changes except for one’s conscious awareness.

We shouldn’t try to fight our desire—we’re never going to succeed in opposing it. We need only to ask the Creator, and everything will work out. We want the Creator to open within us the quality of bestowal, that is to reveal Himself. Then man will become like the Creator.

When the ego (desire) dies, I stop demanding for myself and become free. My eyes open, as well as sensations I hadn’t felt before, which were blocked, and I begin to sense the upper world. We need to rise above the ego through our unity, and ask the Creator to give us the force of bestowal to be in adhesion with Him.

We are eternal creatures! But we don’t feel it, as we’re locked in a tight cage that is this world. In all the universe, there is no place worse than the world we live in. Let us not be content with it. Let us awaken and look up! We must escape the authority of the ego—which aims to devour more and more—and reveal the true life.

When we find ourselves in the flow of the light of faith, it wraps us from all sides and transports us from state to state. We see other dimensions in the light of faith: not three dimensional coordinates, but an infinite number of dimensions. A round, integral world that has no end, above time and space.

There exists a spiritual reality above our world. We don’t feel it, don’t know it, don’t want to come to it. In our world, everything happens between egos-desires, with each pulling toward itself. In the upper, spiritual world, everything is the opposite: each tries to act for the benefit of the other. This is the antiworld.
From Twitter, 10/26/20

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