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

Related Material:
What Is Love after All?
Love Without Conditions
Love Always Rises Above Hate

Filed under: Children, Education, Man and Woman - No Comments →

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

Related Material:
What Is Love after All?
Love Without Conditions
There Are No Two Loves That Are Alike

Filed under: Children, Education, Man and Woman - No Comments →

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

Related Material:
Education Of Parents – Guaranteed Benefit For Children
Why Has It Become Difficult To Raise Children?
Adult Education Under The Conditions Of Globalization

Filed under: Children, Education, Internet, News - No Comments →

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

Related Material:
A Look At The Family From The Height Of Global Nature
The Revival Of The Family
The Secret Of An Integral Family

Filed under: Children, Education, Man and Woman - No Comments →

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

Related Material:
Ten Reasons Children Do Not Want To Go To School
There Should Be No Schools
How Genius Children Lose Their Abilities

Filed under: Children, Education, News - No Comments →

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

Related Material:
Life Means Getting Closer To Love
Kabbalah Is The Science Of Love
True Love from the Perspective of Kabbalah

Filed under: Children, Education, Man and Woman - No Comments →

Question: In addition to looking ahead, a person sometimes glances back. This gives rise to a certain piercing feeling called nostalgia. Is there a spiritual root to this feeling?

Answer: Yes, a person is drawn to the past first because it is familiar. And what is familiar is already perceived as pleasant and easy since it carries no element of threat. That is why we love the past. There are people who very much enjoy old, naive movies, books, and so on.

Personally, I believe that one must look forward so that the future will become familiar to us and will attract us with goodness and shine for us. One must not turn back; otherwise, we become like Lot’s wife, a pillar of salt. We must move only forward! By looking back at the past, we are as though preserving ourselves.
[244925]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian, 1/13/19

Related Material:
Burning The Bridges Behind Me
Don’t Dwell Upon The Past
Don’t Look Back…

Filed under: Education, Kabbalah Study, Spiritual Work - No Comments →

Question: In order to cling to the Creator with my desire, do I need to imagine Him as the best source of pleasure and the solution to all problems even in an egoistic way?

Answer: You need to imagine Him simply as the only source. Even what you are now thinking about, deciding, and feeling yourself as existing, this too comes from the Creator.

Question: And do evil deeds also come from the Creator: murders and wars?

Answer: Absolutely everything! And the fact that it seems to us that these are evil, harmful, terrible actions, is only because we have not corrected our perception of these actions.

If we evaluate them differently—in the quality of bestowal—then we will see them as bestowing, as good.
[257575]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian, 1/12/2019

Related Material:
The Creator Is The Source Of Everything
The Great Mystery Of The Creator
Who Is The Creator?

Filed under: Education, Kabbalah Study, Spiritual Work - No Comments →

Question: What’s wrong with the fact that egoism drives us to constant development? After all, it’s natural.

Answer: Yes, it is natural, but egoism does not let us enjoy life. It does not allow us to build a normal present or future.

Comment: But some people who use others do enjoy themselves.

Answer: No, that is not enjoyment. That is an unnatural state because you are only thinking about how to be above others.

If you take any person in the world, not a single one is truly happy. Even millionaires or very famous people are still far from happiness. And the greatest misfortune lies in the fact that, aside from the problems of this life that we are constantly running from, our entire existence is a race toward death. Therefore, all of one’s previous life is, in principle, absolutely meaningless.

Question: Millionaires are unhappy. And are Kabbalists happy and not running away from death?

Answer: Kabbalists have a completely different axis of values. The meaning of their life lies in the revelation of the Creator and in belonging to this eternal, perfect quality. It is precisely this that they strive for, and this pursuit practically has no end. But at every moment it gives the Kabbalist inexpressible, indescribable states of perfection.

Question: Are you saying that along the way he is also happy?

Answer: Yes, there is absolutely no end. You are simply happy. Of course, one could say: “Stop a moment, you are beautiful!” But in principle, in every moment of your history, of your movement, you are still in contact with the eternal, perfect force.

This is an entirely different perception that completely changes a person’s philosophy. Now he acts not out of fear, not out of deficiency, not out of the state of having to quickly achieve something, but out of a state of fulfillment, of perfection.
[233155]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian, 6/3/2018

Related Material:
Happiness For A Kabbalist
Happiness Is Connection with Eternity
Attainment That Brings Happiness

Filed under: Education, Kabbalah Study, Spiritual Work - No Comments →

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

Related Material:
Admitting Your Mistakes
Work On The Mistakes
Why Do People Make Mistakes?

Filed under: Children, Crisis, Education, Globalization, News - No Comments →