Question: Why do we need a world history of ages of suffering and endless daily suffering of billions of people on the way to spiritual happiness?

Answer: We have to choose the way to ascend above our present situation by ourselves. We have to develop gradually, slowly, and consciously on each level in the egoistic state we are in, to begin to transform the egoistic state to the opposite altruistic state. Therefore, all the states we have been through until today during our whole egoistic development were essential. It is just like a small child who has to grow for 15-20 years before he becomes an adult and can manage independently.

You may ask why he needs that. It could have been much better if we were born wise, mature, and not in our egoism but in altruism, in love and bestowal, permanently connected between each other. If that were the case, people could not attain anything. We have already been through the phase in our development, called, Adam HaRishon (First Man), which means that it is the full schema of the connection between us in the best possible way called the Garden of Eden (Paradise).

What we call “Man” already existed in that state, which means that we were all connected and united. The point is that in that state we couldn’t discover anything except for our unconscious existence in the system of Adam HaRishon, who is therefore called an angel.

An angel is a beastly state, a spiritual beastly state. And we have to attain more, to reach similarity with the Creator. This means that we have to ascend from the level of an angel to the level of Man. Man, “Adam,” stems from the word “Domeh” (to resemble), to resemble the Creator, which is the level we have to ascend to.

We need to have the same thoughts and feelings as the Creator’s, which means that we have to overcome the gap between these two levels beast and man by ourselves. This is the reason we develop very slowly and painfully.  This is the level of development we are faced with.
[193783]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 6/19/16

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Question: Where is it possible to find a solution to the conflicts that people of our time have? Is the solution found in the spiritual world?

Answer: In our world we cannot minimize, mollify, or be sure of resolving conflicts and quarrels in any way because they are all come from clashes of the ego.

While only egoism exists in each one of us, the conflict resolution is as only “knocking down” each other.

Because the ego is constantly growing, it is impossible to crush. Moreover, we see throughout history those who oppress others ultimately find themselves in a worse position like Europe, which oppressed Africa, India, and other colonies.

Everything came back to haunt them, as with the Romans who in their time conquered Europe and England. And where are the Italians now, or the Spaniards who plundered America?

The story is played in full. Nature strongly answers us according to what we deserve. Therefore Russia suffers today from the inhabitants of the lands it conquered in the past.

In other words, there is no solution within egoism; the solution is only through the integration of egoism with altruism. The altruistic force is found above us, and that is precisely what we must discover and draw upon in order to solve our problems, even our earthly problems.

Question: Does this mean that in order to change something in this world we need to rise above it?

Answer: There is no alternative; the present crisis is happening so that we will be forced to begin engaging with the wisdom of Kabbalah and discovering the higher system that brings the positive force into our world, otherwise we will not survive.
[183031]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 2/28/16

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Question: It is not by chance that the human level is called “speaking” in Kabbalah, since speech is what distinguishes humans from animals. We can talk, express our desires and thoughts. However, it turns out that animals, and especially monkeys, also have their own language. How is it different from human language?

Answer: Animals have their own languages within the framework required for their lives. They don’t feel any need for anything more.

Animal language passes between each other all the information relevant for their lives, existence, and the maintenance of relationships between them. Whereas for the people, the most important thing is to convey information to each other about our development.

This is why human language must be very rich and complemented by pictures, drawings, writing, all sorts of characters, singing, and the transfer of information through written letters and other types of memory.

Our development obligates us to this. An animal is attached to the current moment in which it presently lives. A human, however, feels the connection with the past and the future, and therefore he requires some kind of addition to his memory that will help him store the information and pass it on from one generation to another and within a few generations. This is the only way he can advance.

Although this is not the most important thing in a human. We haven’t yet touched the main difference between a human and an animal, which is his special and high destiny. So far we are discussing only things that distinguish us from animals in this material life: language, culture, education, building human society and government with all its systems.

All this was developed by people and organized naturally, and it is present in different cultures: in South America, China, Africa, and Oceania.

But the special destiny of human is reaching the human level that is called Adam (Man). This is not an animal that is just a little more developed. All human life that raises him above the animal level is to know the source of his life, its cause and purpose.

These are the questions that separate man from any animal, including the chimpanzee. A monkey doesn’t ask itself about the meaning of its life and therefore it doesn’t develop. And the human does, and this question forces him to create religions, beliefs, contact with the hidden forces, to look for something that exists outside of this world, life on the other planets, and to think what will happen to him after death.

A person is extremely concerned with these questions. That is, he is not attached to the current moment only, to this physical, material life. On the contrary, he is ready to dedicate his entire life to find out with whom he is really connected. Who is he? Who controls and obligates him? What is he living for? What is this program that constantly pushes him to develop and makes him ask about the purpose of life and its meaning?

This part of a person develops more and more and demands an answer.
[194171]
From KabTV’s “A New Life” 9/6/16

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The ultimate goal of evolution, its program, remains hidden from a person. Everyone naively believes that he knows where he is going, or simply doesn’t want to know. People are already disappointed in all of this life and prefer to go with the flow passively—today is the same as yesterday, until life ends.

We give birth to the next generation without thinking about its meaning, but simply fulfilling the program embedded in us. Nobody can answer why we need this life that isn’t easy, and why all this race? No answer, we prefer not to think about it.

The protective force of the body suppresses this question and doesn’t allow us to ask too much. After all, this question reduces us to the degree that is lower than animals. Animals don’t have this question; they act automatically according to their natural program. But people can’t live like this, they ask, and can’t find an answer.

That is why this question is very depressing to us; it shows us our own insignificance and worthlessness. Animals don’t ask questions, they simply live. Humans, however, try to find out what force enlivens us and why we are the way we are? We don’t know the answer, and yet we have to continue living and realize someone’s program.

This is a very humiliating form of life that brings us a lot of suffering. If we compare ourselves with a monkey, we see that it is much higher than a human. After all, a human knows that his life is meaningless and nevertheless continues to live. He fulfills the program of nature that is imposed on him. A monkey, however, knows nothing about this and therefore lives in harmony with nature. With every action that I perform at the order of nature, I confirm that I am worse than a monkey, since I don’t understand, but nevertheless act.

Therefore, nowadays a person runs out of patience and asks, “How much longer will it continue like this? Why? What is this suffering for?” If I hadn’t suffered, I would live my life somehow. But the problem is that we suffer all the time, from birth to death, and today this suffering increases more and more.

It seems that we have everything, but the question about the meaning of life awakens more and more forcing us into a deep depression. Poor, pathetic people, they are smaller than ants because all the creatures act instinctively, without asking, in full agreement with nature.

And in us nature left a question, as if mocking us. It makes us obey it fully, and it laughs and says, “Look what I am doing with you, and you have nowhere to escape!” It turns out that we simply must answer the question about the meaning of life.

One percent of the genetic difference between a human and monkey are just the external differences. The question about the meaning of life isn’t in this one percent. Animals also differ from each other genetically, so this is not the reason at all. The reason is that this question lives in the human and it evokes in him a great need to know what is the basis of life, the cause of it, and the purpose for which we live? We just have to find the answer.
[194171]
From KabTV’s “A New Life” 9/6/16

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Question: The genetic difference between a human and a monkey is very small, a little more than one percent. In other words, a human is ninety-nine percent chimpanzee. How could such a tiny change in a genome lead to a completely different stage of development? What is this one percent that separates a human from a monkey?

Answer: Human and monkey are two completely different worlds. If we talk about the physical body, man developed through all the levels: still, vegetative, animate, and human, and the monkey is an intermediate stage between animal and human. But this is only if we are comparing bodies.

There is nothing special in the physical body of a human. And although it is different because it doesn’t have fur like monkeys, the arms and legs develop differently, and the attitude to life is different, the main difference is not in this. The human is distinguished by the fact that he develops, acquires wisdom, and changes his environment.

Although animals also change their environment: construct houses for themselves underwater or on trees, it is purely instinctive according to the call of nature and doesn’t change from generation to generation. They live the way they were born according to their nature.

Hence, animals are an inseparable part of nature. They have no desire to change their environment or their society, to build some special artificial systems of relations that were not inherited from their ancestors and known before.

On the contrary, a new mind and senses develop in the human from generation to generation that oblige him to change the world. We can’t discover the source of this radical difference. We only see the consequences of it. Indeed, a person changes the environment, changes the world, and wants an upgrade.

He doesn’t agree to live like the chimpanzee that today lives the same way it did 100,000 years ago. Although the chimpanzee has an excellent memory and mental abilities, they don’t push it to develop.

This is the question: Why does a human have an ability to grow and desire to develop from generation to generation and within each generation? Why is this development different from person to person and from nation to nation?

We collect the experience and pass on all our achievements in culture, education, and science. We build an environment for ourselves, human society, government, and social systems. You can compare the modern world created by man with the one that existed a few hundred years ago.

All this came from the inner impulses of man, which is hidden from us. Why are we given such a desire, for what? After all, if we stopped developing, we would live like monkeys. But in every single human and in all of us together, every moment and at all times, lives the desire to advance.

In other words, there is a special program within us that demands its implementation from us. Therefore people develop in a mandatory manner. We see it in children who never get tired of playing with and have a burning interest in all the gadgets.

Each age has its own games. A child demands it from parents, and when he grows up he will certainly overtake them and will be even more advanced than they are. Nothing like this happens with any animal.

Here all we have to do is to ask: For what are we given this? After all, we can’t say that it makes us happier. Perhaps it would be better to freeze all our development at some stage in order to lead a carefree life? Nevertheless, we develop and build ourselves more and more. This inner aspiration is called the human in us. However, where it is leading us is still a mystery to humanity.
[194086]
From KabTV’s “A New Life” 9/6/16

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In the News (Le Monde): “The number two of the Brussels Commission writes in his book Fraternity: ‘This is the first time in my conscious experience of European cooperation, I think the project could actually fail.’ In Italy, where he participated in early September at the Ambrosetti Forum of reflection on Europe, the Dutch Social Democratic Frans Timmermans has certainly qualified his remarks, but the evidence is there, implacable: the European Union (EU ) confronts so many simultaneous crises that it might not recover.

“‘Is Europe under threat? Yes, or worse … With the economic crisis that persists, that of refugees, terrorism, Brexit, this disaster has undermined the very idea of the project, the situation is unprecedented,’ said Enrico Letta, former Italian Prime Minister, now dean of the School of international Affairs from Sciences Po Paris and President of Jacques Delors-Institute. Questioned by Le Monde, he paints a darker conclusion yet: ‘My biggest fear is that we remain in the status quo, we expect the results of the elections to be held in Germany and France in particular, and that the end there are no longer Europe … ‘

“This specialist [Mario Monti, former European Commissioner for Competition] in European policy believes that the EU can still get out of the rut? ‘I always considered that it is through crises that Europe has progressed.But for the first time, I expressed [in 2015] doubts about the fact that we could still be beneficial. What has changed is that the mechanism is broken. Crises seem to generate more new political energies, able to make us move forward.’

“The preservation of social models may well be, in any case, one of the great issues of the forthcoming years. ..

“The ambition of Europe, however, must also be strategic, insists Enrico Letta. Facing the challenges of migration, terrorism, destabilization of its neighbors, it can not simply condemn or limit the damage. ‘It’s the fact that the EU did not want to solve the Syrian issue that put Britain out of the EU, he stressed. What determined the behavior of voters, this is not the question of immigration from Eastern Europe, but the daily images of the chaos in Greece, in Lampedusa or Calais.’”

My Comment: On one hand, egoism ceases to grow and push us to develop further, and on the other hand, it takes on a form of an integral system that is connected, unified, and closed. Consequently we cannot manage ourselves, the family, society, the country, and the world. This is the uniqueness of the current crisis. It can be corrected only by changing man himself. We have to change ourselves in order to resemble the network we are in.
[193822]

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Question: Do you believe that a person can be happy in this world?

Answer: It is impossible. You can close your eyes; you can even get drunk or take drugs; you can limit yourself in certain frameworks and not think about anything else, but if a person really discovers himself, if he develops all the time and really wants to understand, to feel, to know, and to attain everything, it is impossible to be happy in our world.

Question: Does this mean that this world was given to us in order to direct us to true happiness?

Answer: This world is given to us as the starting point of our development. We cannot develop any other way in this world. This is the reason that everything that we do in our world is absolutely useless. This means that true life begins from the spiritual ascent, while our world remains as a point. Everything we have done throughout history is only the starting point.

Question: What about all the scientific and cultural achievements?

Answer: All our scientific and cultural achievements are the achievements of our egoism. Nothing is left of all these great achievements and ideas. The whole human history is a history on the animate level.

When we begin to look at ourselves from the side, we realize that the root of all our actions is egoism. It is the cause of all our instincts; it drives us to write poems, novels, music, and other works of art. Therefore, there are no upper attributes, states, or achievements of any kind in any of this!

Our whole history, everything that we experience and all our values we have accumulated throughout our history are only one tiny black point compared to the rest of our development. But when we attain spirituality, we don’t feel sorry about all that because then we truly begin our interstellar journey.
[193778]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 6/19/16

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An animal lives according to its nature and doesn’t change. It obeys instincts embedded in its cells and chromosomes, and executes them automatically. An animal doesn’t develop itself or the environment but only realizes its internal program.

However, humans are creatures that have a developing program within them. We came from the animate degree as apes, and apes evolved into humans. By the way, Kabbalistic books spoke about this thousands of years before Darwin’s theory.

Humans differ from the apes radically, in other words, our development is qualitatively new. There is a force within us called the Creator that creates a new creation from us. This force lives within us and develops us.

There is no such force of development in any other level. Inanimate matter doesn’t change at all. Plants change slightly depending on the time of year. Animals multiply and develop slightly, but only according to their internal program, while a human develops through the development of this program itself!

After all, a human develops continuously. He is completely new from one year to another. Every generation is like a new humanity. How is it possible to compare the human who lived a thousand years ago with the one of today? Modern people have a different culture, education, view of the world, perception of reality, mutual relations, and environment. Where did such changes come from? It is from the hidden force within us called the Creator.

This force unconditionally created plants from inanimate matter, the animal from the plant, and people from animals. The same force now acts in us all the time, revealing its development in us. Otherwise, even today, we would have been the same as we were 10,000 to 100,000 years ago.

But we are not the same; we are completely different people. Perhaps we haven’t changed much externally, but internally we are very different from the primitive people in our perception of reality and understanding. The force that is called the new creation is constantly updated in us, and this makes us more special than all of the others.

Therefore, we shouldn’t waste our time on the development of the inanimate, vegetative, and animate, in other words, in building special houses or even developing distinctive cultures, particularly the family, which is on the animate level. Let’s begin to develop and reveal in ourselves this force that develops us!

Perhaps then, we will be able to manage it, use it, and direct it to various new forms. Let’s examine it, and then we will find out to what form we should develop and will promote exactly this development.

Kabbalists have recommend this direction of development to us, and any other development always leads us into crises, disappointment, and a dead end.
[193344]
From KabTV’s “A New Life” 8/30/16

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New Life 767 – The Next Level
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Tal Mandelbaum ben Moshe

Today, humanity has reached a unique state, the previous level of development has ended. On the one hand, we have immense abilities, and on the other hand, everything that we have developed works to our detriment. As a result of this, people are in despair and give up.This stage of our development is called the “recognition of evil.”

The wisdom of Kabbalah teaches why we are alive and where we must go. Our next form is the form of a “circle,” everyone living in equality, in connection, “as one person with one heart.” What we are missing today is the understanding of the goal of life, what we are living for. Later we will discover that we need to rise above the egoism toward “And you shall love your friend as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18).

When people will truly be connected with each other, each one will feel a higher, spiritual level of life. Nature didn’t create us connected from the start so that it would be possible for us to develop spiritually independently. When people are connected, their attitude toward others is as it is toward themselves, all are equal and love each other.

For thousands of years people have spoken about the general rule, “And you shall love your friend as yourself.” The wisdom of Kabbalah offers a unique method for its realization.
[193317]
From KabTV’s “New Life 767 – The Next Level,” 9/6/16

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New Life 766 – What Differentiates A Human From An Animal?
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Tal Mandelbaum ben Moshe

The essential difference between an ape and a human is that a human has a drive toward development, to change himself and his environment. We have a special program in us that requires development. The question is why does it exist in us? The truth is that we don’t know what we are living for. This question requires a solution today.

Animals have language sufficient for them, whereas human language is richer because we must transmit information about our development. Human existence above that of a beast is expressed by his discovery of the origin of his life, its reason, its goal, and the purpose of his life, and nature obliges us to investigate where we come from and where we are going.
[192768]
From KabTV’s “New Life 766 – What Differentiates A Human From An Animal?” 9/6/16

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