My new article on Linkedin “The Cold Spell – Nature’s Cold Shoulder”

The extreme cold spell that the US is currently experiencing is truly historic. But then, so is everything these days. The American society has never been so divided, at least not since The Civil War, gaps between the haves and the have-nots have never been so wide, the Covid pandemic has forced historic closures on America that have not been implemented at least since the Spanish flu, and the level of violence, substance abuse, food insufficiency, and depression are all skyrocketing. In light of all that’s happening, and keeping in mind the historic fires that burned for months throughout the West and Mid-West all summer and fall, the cold spell, as bitter as it is, seems more like a natural continuation of the trend of extremism overtaking the US than an unexpected disaster. From the human level to the inanimate nature, everything is breaking records of intensity, and it is to no one’s favor.

If America wants to survive, it must reverse course. Just as it indoctrinated its people to overconsume, enshrine self-indulgence, become fanatic over privacy, individuality, and entitlement, now it must do the opposite. Now it must teach its people how to see each other—with their hearts, not with their eyes. It must teach its people that they are all dependent on each other, and that their fate is sealed unless they all work shoulder to shoulder to pull the nation out of the swamp.

The math is straightforward, the more extreme the egoism, the more extreme the climate—both social and environmental. America has put egoism on a pedestal, called it “individualism,” and enshrined it in its constitution. No country has put itself more at odds with nature than the US, and turned this approach into its core ideology.

Since America has turned itself into a role model of individualism, of going against the mutuality in nature, the harmony in it, the coexistence, nature, in turn, has made America an example of the consequences of inconsideration with nature’s most basic law of harmony, achieved through mutuality and balance. What you give to nature is what you get in return. When you give nature a cold shoulder, it gives one right back.

If America wants to survive, it must reverse course. Just as it indoctrinated its people to overconsume, enshrine self-indulgence, become fanatic over privacy, individuality, and entitlement, now it must do the opposite. Now it must teach its people how to see each other—with their hearts, not with their eyes. It must teach its people that they are all dependent on each other, and that their fate is sealed unless they all work shoulder to shoulder to pull the nation out of the swamp.

The menace that is Covid-19 is just the harbinger; many other perils will follow in its wake, and they will be far worse than their “little brother.” The only way America can “dodge the bullets” is if it unites as one nation fighting for its life.

But nature isn’t punishing America; it is merely balancing the extreme egoism America imposed on it. If America reverses course, so will nature, and all the storms will calm. Nature speaks the language of balance and harmony. The more we are like it, the more we understand it, and the better it relates to us. If America stops fighting and starts reciprocating with it, it will discover that it doesn’t need to conquer nature in order to build a good life for its people; nature itself will do it for them.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What do egoistic people have behind their ego? What do they do if someone breaks their ego and get into them?“

All people are egoistic. Egoism is part and parcel of human nature. That is, human nature is a desire to enjoy, and the ego is the intention to enjoy at the expense of others and nature.

Our desire to enjoy divides into individual desires for food, sex and family, in which our desire operates in order to preserve ourselves and the human species; and social desires for money, honor, control and knowledge, which is activated by our egoistic desires, where we want what others have. Our social desires bring about all kinds of individual, social and national developments. We also have a nucleus of a spiritual desire, which questions life’s meaning and purpose, and gives us the feeling that individual and social desires can no longer fulfill us. The appearance of each successive level of desire depends on the extent of our development.

It is common to think that the ego is the cause of our problems and crises, and that without the ego, our lives would be much more peaceful. However, there is a very good reason for the ego’s existence.

The ego is what separates us from the animal kingdom. It is the motor running behind everything we do. While it indeed brings about much harm, the ego has made us the most powerful and influential beings in the world. The problem with the ego is when we apply it incorrectly. On the contrary, when we use the ego positively, correctly and beneficially, then our lives become harmonious, balanced and peaceful.

What does it mean to use the ego positively, correctly and beneficially?

It depends first on discovering how we exist in an interconnected and interdependent nature, which is a single system of which we are its parts. When we feel ourselves as existing in a single system, then we feel ourselves as small parts of a much greater system. Feeling the magnitude of the greater system of nature outside of ourselves, we would then feel the need to think and act in ways that benefit this system. Then, similarly to how cells and organs take what they need in order to serve the whole organism of which they are parts, we would naturally start enjoying life via the calculation that we wish to benefit other people and nature through our existence here.

Our inborn sensation of life is to prioritize our personal benefit over others. We thus require a new kind of education—integral education—which guides our understanding and feeling of the interconnectedness and interdependence of nature. That is the key to creating a harmonious world of happy and confident individuals, a world free from all the problems caused by letting our egos unabatedly exploit, abuse and manipulate each other and nature.

Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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Question: If we speak about the awareness of the evil of the egoistic nature of man, do we proceed from the postulate that our nature is evil?

Evil relates to some kind of standard. The standard is the Creator or the upper force, the property of which is bestowal. We, as a creature, are the opposite of this force, so our nature is evil in relation to it. Can you say that?

Answer: Usually, this is not how we arrive at it. In principle, we do not consider our nature to be either evil or good. We just see that throughout life, from generation to generation, people waste their time. They try to fill themselves with some small pleasures, but neither we nor our children or our grandchildren have real pleasure from life.

Life is short. Moreover, it is flawed, unhappy, and empty. Therefore, an empty, short life is not of any kind of value.

From generation to generation, it begins to be felt by us more and more not as a gift, but as a misfortune, like something pressing on us, some kind of evil fate that has imposed this existence on us. No wonder it is said that the happy are those who were not born compared to those who were born.

But all this comes from the fact that we do not see the world as we actually could arrange it. Based on that, various theories appear that tell us what to do with ourselves and with our lives.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 5/13/19

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Question: The wisdom of Kabbalah destroys the balance of our egoistic nature. It would be interesting to know, how this can end for human nature?

Answer: This may end up in quite a predictable way, and I hope a solution is close.

It all will end with the fact that egoism, as the negative part of nature, will be balanced by altruism, the positive part of nature, and both parts will work in harmony with each other. And we will be between them.

We should use both egoism and altruism. Everything should be in moderation and in balance. And a person will have both of these forces.
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From KabTV’s “Ask a Kabbalist” 3/20/19

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Question: How does one explain loneliness, when a person cannot even find mutual sympathy? Now there are a lot of people like this. Does this mean that they have no soul mates and are alone in life, forever?

Answer: Egoism is constantly developing in us, from the beginning of creation to our day, and will continue to develop further and further.

As personal egoism develops, each person will feel more and more distant from other people. It will be increasingly difficult for him to find his soul mate, and generally to get together with friends.

If humanity does not begin to correct itself, then its future, of course, is very unfortunate. People will live in their pencil cases, and this will be their lot.

Comment: But this is great suffering.

My Response: They will get used to it, they will take drugs or something else. And what can you do against selfishness? Either fix it, or leave it as it is, and quietly muffle it.
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From KabTV’s “Ask a Kabbalist” 3/20/19

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Question: Psychologists believe that a person always looks back, agonizes over his past, and cannot break free of this. People dwell on their mistakes and what they should have done differently. They feel the pain of it over and over again and are unable to break free from this vicious cycle.

We have a letter from a lonely, elderly woman who writes about how frightening and lonely it is to live particularly in this pandemic. She is home alone unable to escape the thoughts of her past: her divorce and two abortions, one because of her career and the other when she decided she was too old to give birth. She writes, “And here I am alone; it is cold outside my window, cold inside, and I feel terribly cold in my heart, and the thoughts of my sins and mistakes, there’s no escaping them.”

What can we say to her, after all she is constantly looking back to the past and lives in this past? Why are we given all this suffering?

Answer: The fact that a person agonizes over the past, this too is a correction. Don’t worry, there was nothing personal about it.

Question: How can a person understand this?

Answer: It is impossible. Here you need to work on yourself. It is practically impossible for an ordinary person to agree with the Creator.

Comment: But it will make my life easier if I understand that this was not done by me, that I was led this way.

My Response: You cannot just do it, turn on some kind of switch.

Comment: True, you cannot.

My Response: This is given to her on purpose. These are not her thoughts, not her feelings. All these sensations must pass through her system, through her body. And in this is her redemption, in a way.

Question: Is this given to a person for correction? One must go through it, relive one’s life again, come back, and realize that he’s made many mistakes. Although it wasn’t him who made them.

Answer: It was not him who made them, and neither is it him who is now trying to condemn or justify all this with his consciousness. None of it is him! Never mind. But it all goes through him, so let it happen.

Question: Why is it considered prohibited to look back to the past?

Answer: Because there is no sense in it.

Question: Can people convince themselves that there is no sense in looking back to their past and stop doing it?

Answer: You will still look back until you correct yourself. Until when? Until one fully agrees with the Creator! And this is complete adhesion with the Creator, for everything: for the past, for the good and bad, for absolutely everything. When one justifies the Creator absolutely in everything, this is the final correction of a person.

Question: You mean a person must come to this truth? To fully justify?

Answer: Yes. To completely agree.

Question: With what has happened and what is happening now?

Answer: Yes. This is called the “complete correction of one’s egoism.”

A person should not look back. He should not agonize or reproach himself for something he did, and at the same time, not praise himself for anything. In other words, one should not keep account of when he did something well or of times when he did not do so well.

Question: So my life was either of a hero or of a sinner?

Answer: My life is not mine. And now, finally, I can say that what I have lived was not lived by me. It went through me. But it wasn’t me. That’s how I was led. My life, this is how I saw it in my dreams. It wasn’t me, it all passed like a dream. Therefore, we have to agree with it; nothing else is required. Only to agree.

And this too doesn’t matter either. Whatever is done to a person is done. And what he feels during it is what he feels. It is not him who feels it, but what is felt for him, in a way.

Question: Then tell me, please, in conclusion: what is our life?

Answer: Our life is a form of existence of protein matter. 🙂

Question: Really?

Answer: We still take from this life its Reshimot — memories, impressions. And we keep going. A great number of small grains of egoism, that is, corrupted desire that the Creator created, gradually go through purification, correction, and unification.

Question: So these little egoisms, the 7 to 8 billion that are out there, they live their lives precisely in order to come to this?

Answer: Hell, purgatory, and paradise, like Dante’s.

Hell is a feeling, a recognition of one’s egoism, its insignificance. And everything else that we can add here.

Purgatory is when a person tries to correct it, to purify it. And paradise is when one turns one’s egoism to work in the service of others.

These are the three stages we have to go through.

Question: So with all our lifetimes we are approaching this last, third stage?

Answer: Yes. Therefore, if people understand what these three stages are: hell, purgatory and paradise, that is, the comprehension of egoism, its correction, and its proper usage, then everything is fine. We will keep trying.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 12/14/20

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Question: Sociologist Igor Eydman wrote on his Facebook page: “All mass murders in world history were fighting for the sake of ‘high ideals’: religion, ‘national interests,’ ideology. Terror and violence will cease only when the highest value for people will become not gods, leaders, ideologies and other artificially created entities, but their own individual ones: life, health, freedom, creativity, security, life comfort. And not only in Muslim, but also in Christian, Jewish, Chinese and other societies.

How do you like such a simple, trivial idea that if a person only cares about himself, he will not get involved in all these conflicts?

Answer: Yes, it is good, of course, to speak, but egoism will wear us out, wither us, squeeze all the juices out of us, and will not let go until we wish only one thing: to rise above it. And to exist in it in some comfortable, warm corner will not work.

Question: Will it still lead us out of this corner?

Answer: Yes. It is specially created to be constantly evolving. All the time its evil, green, poisonous juices wander around. It will not let us live in peace.

Egoism is growing in us all the time. Our natural desire is to somehow get along with it because we seem to have no other way.

And so we invent all sorts of theories of appeasement for ourselves with it, between us, and so on. “Well, can’t we? We are all human. There are republicans, there are leftists, all kinds of socialists. It doesn’t matter, we must somehow live together.” It will not work! We will arm ourselves and everyone will sit at home with machine guns in every window.

We will have to understand that only adopting the middle line of our joint coexistence will give us access to the next human level when it is neither you, nor me, but precisely because we use our mutual hatred, rejection. We are using it! We do not suppress it, we do not extinguish it, but on the contrary, we use both the left and right lines correctly in order to raise the middle line above them. And then we can build ourselves.

But this is a very serious design. A person will understand what he is building, what he is building it for, what he is doing. All in serious internal stress. And by this, he will rise above his nature. Because the two lines that exist in nature—the right and the left—are being animated in us more and more in order for us to call the middle line. The Creator is the source from which these two lines, right and left, arise in us.

We must contrapose them in such a way that we understand how to connect them together so that a middle line appears. And we will learn and see where we come from, where it all descended from in us.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 11/9/20

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The Creator turned Himself inside out—and thus created what is opposite to Him—egoism. We have to make ourselves, who are opposite to the Creator—similar to Him. This is how the Creator helps us, bringing forth qualities in us that are opposite to Him (the Ego) in the order of their proper, gradual correction.
From Twitter, 12/29/20

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The wisdom of Kabbalah is revealed to humanity gradually. The first Kabbalist to attain it was Adam, a Kabbalist who lived 5,579 years ago. But it was revealed more explicitly through Abraham, about 3,600 years ago.

Today the wisdom of Kabbalah is going through a very interesting phase of becoming familiar to humanity.

In the past, it was known only to a few Kabbalists who were secluded and apart from the rest of society, but today it begins to gradually spread all over the world. This is the reason we also participate in and are witnesses to a unique phenomenon in which the essence of the world we live in, the cause and effect of our existence, and the plan of human evolution are gradually revealed to humanity.

People are divided into five levels (just like the general desire to receive) according to the level of their development and the level of their participation in life.

There are people who are not concerned about anything other than themselves. There are those who care about their family, the society they live in, etc. Those, on the next level, are concerned with the Earth, the planets, and space. At the same time, they are not interested in breaking through the frameworks of this world. There are those who want to reveal and to know what happened in the past and what will happen in the future.

However, there are people who are interested in the general system of creation, the extent to which we participate in it, and the extent to which the creation exits by itself, where it stems from, what happens to it, and how. They aspire to understand the general picture of mutual cooperation between all the parts of creation.

It is actually the principle of the global, integral connection of all of nature that they find most interesting of all. They want to know how everything is connected, why, for what purpose, and how one component responds and manages another and impacts all the other parts. They have such a big desire that they want to know and to attain the general system, the general schema, the general structure, of everything there is, not only in our world, but also beyond this world, and they cannot find peace in ordinary life.

By trying to resemble others, they try to engage in all sorts of corporeal problems, but this does not last long. The first chance that fate brings an opportunity their way, they immediately fly somewhere, which means that they cannot engage in daily problems.

They are more concerned with problems that are not even on a cosmic scale, but above that (which means with problems that the word “everything” incorporates). It is not space, not our world, but something whole. Such people who do not settle for a general idea—they find it troubling and it gnaws them from the inside—reach the wisdom of Kabbalah.

This question does not necessarily reach its maximum level in each and every one of them, but it is still a bit higher than our world. There are questions of a lower order, when people are interested in knowing what determines things like their health and their fate. They are fond of mysticism or start practicing folk medicine, etc.

Thus, we begin to revolve around the wisdom of Kabbalah from below, from the lowest beastly level, all the way to the highest level in which a person feels the need to sense and to attain the whole creation, the whole system and its leadership.

There are different upgrades of desires, and therefore many reach the wisdom of Kabbalah, but once they hear that it is about the highest levels, they understand that it is not for them because they are more interested in the corporal implementation of both mankind and of the wisdom of Kabbalah. They accumulate some knowledge and move to their level.

This is actually how it has to be. This is the reason that we never force anyone to stay, those who come, or those who leave, since it is their private business. Each one should find his balance in this system, on all the levels of the attainment of creation and according to the demand of one’s soul, which means of one’s internal, original, personal desire.

This is how we exist.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 2/5/19

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Question: What are the signs of a healthy growth of the ego in corporeality and spirituality?

Answer: Healthy growth of the ego takes place when I ascend above it and perform spiritual actions. By doing so, I force the ego to grow to my level.

Suppose I perform a certain spiritual action. As soon as I ascend to its level, my ego also ascends to its level. I yearn to advance, perform the next spiritual action, and ascend to the next level, and my ego ascends further from that level too. This means that to the extent that I grow in spirituality, my ego also grows.

This is how they follow each other, as it says: “He who is greater than his friend, his desire is greater.” It turns out that when you grow to be a good Kabbalist, you become a great egoist.

But then the ego is controlled by the spiritual attribute that you have acquired, which means that you work with the intention in order to bestow, and you push your spirit, your spiritual state, which in its turn pushes your ego upward.

Thus, our spiritual level actually grows thanks to the ego, because everything that the Creator has created is basically the ego, and everything else is its derivatives.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 11/11/18

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