Question: If we cannot interfere with nature, then should we let it do whatever it wants? Should you resign yourself, give up?

Answer: First, there is nothing to oppose to nature. This is completely illogical, unreasonable.

Nature is the entire cosmos. These are such inner levels that I do not know at all. Who am I? Just a product of nature. A little bug against her. I cannot even imagine who I am dealing with. Why argue like a small child trying to fight windmills? What is this quixotism?

We should simply understand that we are in a huge, multi-level system, but we do not know where, in what, and how. Therefore, by the measure of our development, we should try to automatically integrate into it.

If we were an inanimate, vegetative, or animate part of nature, we would automatically abide in it as its integral element. But since we belong to the level of Man, besides the fact that we are in nature, we also have an element of egoism that pushes us out of it: I want to be special!

By that, a person is different from animals. It turns out that with his egoism, he is pushing himself out of nature and is suffering as a result.

But the egoism in us is constantly growing, forcing us to be opposite to each other and to the surrounding inanimate, vegetative, and animate nature. In general, this is our evil, our problem, which is called: the evil beginning of man.

It was created so that we recognize evil and correct it into good. Then we can understand the whole depth of nature, how to become integrally connected with it and participate in all its actions.

Therefore, egoism was not given to us so that we oppose nature and put ourselves against it, but that it is with its help that we get in touch with nature, feel ourselves distant from it, draw into it, and interact correctly with it in mutual influence on each other. Then man will become truly on a level with all nature, which means with the Creator. Because nature is the Creator.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 4/19/19

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What are your thoughts on the Minneapolis riots and the governmental response to them?“

The riots in Minneapolis and other US cities in the past week show a clear example of how elusive love is in American society right now, and how divisive drives are overpowering the social atmosphere.

What does it mean to develop love among human society?

It means nurturing and articulating the nuances of our rich diversity in a common effort to strengthen that which holds us together as a society.

Instead of acting as if there are no (or should not be any) differences between us, we would be wiser to use our differences in order to invigorate that which connects us all.

The problem with acknowledging our differences is that we can fall into the trap of thinking of ourselves as better in one way or another to others, i.e., we can mistakenly be led by our divisive drives to feel a false sense of pride and self-esteem due to certain inborn features and characteristics.

Therefore, we need to be aware of our divisive drives, the ego concealed within each and every one of us, as an opposite form of love, which has the power to envelop all of our divisions.

It is written about this, “Love will cover all transgressions” (Proverbs 10:12). In other words, transgressions—our divisive urges—are needed in order for love to blossom, like the dirt that’s needed in order for a plant to grow. Likewise, the more hatred and division is felt underneath the love, the more fertile and voluminous the soil is for love to flourish upon it.

At the moment, however, we have no view of what is above the ground. We are still immersed in the darkness of our hatred and divisiveness, like a worm digging its way through a dark world inside a radish, unknowing that there is a completely different bright world full of light when it finds its way outside.

However, precisely due to our immersion in social division, and its destructive expression in the riots, America has what it takes to make a great overcoming, to rise above the divisions and build loving and caring relations among all American society.

The American Dream is infused with many examples of individuals beating the odds and achieving success in the conditions that the country provides. In the current crisis, the only difference in achieving the American Dream is that the success is not individual, but of society at large. As a result of overcoming hatred with love, the American society, with its major influence on the world, would pioneer a positive example that the world would be inspired to follow.

Yet, in order to cultivate love upon our differences, we first need to acknowledge our nature-given differences. That is, our skin color or other inborn characteristics are neither worthy of pride or shame, since they required no participation on our behalf.

We can be proud when we indeed participate in our development, building an atmosphere of love, mutual understanding, consideration, encouragement and support that fills society, upon the innate differences that we each have. Such a peaceful and harmonious atmosphere would then truly be our creation, worthy of pride.

While it seems impossible for a message of love to be heard among such divisive and destructive times, at one point or another, it will have to be heard, and even realized, in society.

If love fails to cover the hatred and division boiling throughout American society, then we can expect more riots, murders, destruction and suffering, until we will become completely helpless and desperate.

At that point, then maybe we will be ready to implement love above the divisions, but until then, the message of love above division will be like a message in a bottle floating around turbulent seas, waiting for someone to find it and put it to use.

Above photo by Mike Von on Unsplash.

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Question: You always say that we do not need and cannot neutralize our egoism, level it. It is enough just to balance it with some positive force of nature. What is this positive force? Where does it come from?

Answer: This is the spiritual force.

In our world, we are at the level of inanimate, vegetative, and animate nature. Man is like an animal here. If he has any kind of anti-social actions, they can be balanced only if we bring him to the next level, the level of spiritual interaction, “love your neighbor.”

And then we will see the correct integral picture of all of nature and ourselves within it. Humanity will understand that it can exist without any problems, even without death.

Question: How can we evoke the force that neutralizes our egoism and balances it?

Answer: In nature, in addition to egoism, there is also a kind, altruistic force that can give, bestow, and think not about itself, but only about others. We lack this force opposite to our egoistic force, which in no way takes into account the desires of others, and even vice versa: The more it opposes the desires of others, the more it enjoys and is filled. We must balance these two forces.

Question: Do you mean balancing this good force is caused by some good deeds and the fact that we talk about it?

Answer: Yes. It must be developed when you are in the right environment, in the right group. It is caused by both thoughts and actions because actions are followed by thoughts.
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From KabTV’s “The Post-Coronavirus Era” 4/23/20

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Question: What does self-realization mean for most people? What potential do they have for moral, cultural, and spiritual development? What can really be done?

Answer: First, we must understand that if we do not work with a man, he again turns into an animal because labor has made man out of a monkey. This is actually so.

But in our time, we are going, as it were , on the way back. Therefore, we need to create conditions for a person so that one can develop not in manufacturing new material objects to sell, buy, and do something with, but in the production of a spiritual complement to one’s limited, material life.

For this, it is necessary to organize all of humanity into groups in which we will teach them and they will develop not only in culture, music, and literature, but in attaining ourselves and building a society, i.e., human psychology and human society: how we can improve ourselves, what is the best condition for us, and so on.

Besides this, if people are interested in some exact sciences, then let them study this as well. Therefore, training should be our main occupation.
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From KabTV’s “Unemployment Post-Coronavirus,” 5/30/20

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Question: What should society be like? Should it be communist?

Answer: Yes, but not the kind of communism that was once in the former Soviet Union or that we read about from Karl Marx. It is a society of equal free people.

Nature demands us to be similar to the Creator. We cannot achieve similarity with the Creator by any other type of connection besides the one we call communism. But we are not talking about the kind of communism that was propagated in the Soviet Union, but of a totally different society of free, correctly interconnected people.

The most important thing is education. A lot was said about it in the Soviet Russia back in the day, but nobody did anything about it, it was all done for show. So, we, the global community, must organize education in a way that is congruent with nature. Not because it is good or bad, but because this is the only way we can protect ourselves from natural disasters and blows caused by our unreasonable behavior.

It is not that we pollute the environment. We see how quickly nature has begun to recover, even in the few weeks that we have shied a little from our reckless production and overproduction.

The most important thing is that nature will still force us to treat each other correctly, i.e., to feel like one common human community, not animal, but human. We cannot escape it.

I am sure that this virus will not just go away, although now they are saying that it is about to disappear. I do not believe so. I am telling you directly It seems to me that it will be months before we can start a normal life and return to normal in all the ways. Therefore, we have to think about how to achieve the right interaction. This is our only problem.

All of nature is an integral, enclosed system. As long as we, the people, do not correlate to it with our qualities or connections, nature will keep bringing us blow after blow, squeezing everything possible out of us. After all, the more advanced we are, the more it mocks us and forces us to react correctly to it and create kind, mutual human relations between us.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 4/12/20

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Medium published my new article “A Civilization in the Remaking”

We thought we could beat COVID-19 by staying at home for a couple of months and practicing social distancing. We were very, very wrong. As soon as we rolled back the lockdown, the virus returned with a strain “nearly 10 times more infectious,” according to scientists at the Scripps Research in Florida. It will not let up until we understand its message: It’s time to remake human civilization.

To make sure that people get the information required to live in a civilization of connection, authorities will have to stipulate reception of all benefits on participation in learning how to live in this new society.

Here is a partial list of where the number of confirmed cases is on the rise once more: United States, Russia, France, Israel, Argentina, Brazil (which never really went into lockdown), Italy, Germany, and South Korea (previously the gold standard of success). Wherever you look, the tactic of “stay home until it goes away” is failing miserably, and the new strain guarantees that it will continue to fail. This leaves us only one option: restructure our countries so that everyone gets their basic sustenance while learning what in the world is going on. Any country that does not employ this tactic is bound to undergo complete social, political, and economic meltdown.

We will not be able to reopen businesses and shopping centers since they will become contagion hubs. According to Bloomberg, “One third of U.S. job losses [are] at risk of turning permanent.” I think Bloomberg is far too optimistic. Since the virus will not allow the reopening of businesses, they will simply shut down, along with all the businesses dependent on them. In the near future, nearly half of America will remain without income, and without any possibility of finding one. Over time, the percentage of incomeless Americans will only grow, “as companies from manufacturers to retailers adapt to a post-virus world, cutting off even more people from secure work,” according to the Bloomberg Economics research. And considering that the virus isn’t even gone, the impact on the job market will be even more devastating than predicted.

Therefore, every government and municipal authority must take immediate steps to prevent the systems’ collapse that will follow such a massive layoff nightmare. In such a state of uncertainty, people’s most basic fear will be hunger and shelter. The government, for its part, must implement immediate measures to provide water, food, power, and housing to everyone. If people are left hungry or on the street, there will be mayhem that will dwarf what we have seen with the recent George Floyd protests.

Next, the government and local authorities will need to inform everyone that the situation has changed and their lives will not return to what they were before March 2020. People will have to be briefed on what it means to live in a world where very few people work, and those who do, provide for everyone else’s sustenance. The rest of the people will be doing what we should have started doing long ago: communicating with one another.

Once people’s provision is guaranteed by the new structure that the authorities will establish, the rest of the people will spend their abundance of free time simply socializing. After all, this is what being human is about. There will be no reason to compete over jobs, no cause for business rivalries, and all that people will need to do is talk to one another and discover how great it is to simply be together — all races, all colors, all people. Instead of fighting, people will find their new meaning in life in connecting to other people rather than in racing against everyone to get to the top, exhausted, scarred, and alone.

To make sure that people get the information required to live in a civilization of connection, authorities will have to stipulate reception of all benefits on participation in learning how to live in this new society. In this way, people will get their physical, intellectual, and emotional needs satisfied through the system. Faster than we think, a new society will emerge, where bigotry and hatred have no place, and people’s primary occupation is making friends.

And if these words sound like fantasy, consider what you thought about life in February, and what you think about it now…
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The life we see outside the window is a reflection of our inner connection with one another. Violent demonstrations in American cities protesting against racism and a new wave of coronavirus around the world, is all due to our inaction and our unwillingness to correct our attitudes toward each other.

The coronavirus burst into our lives and declares, “You are all in an integral connection. You are standing together in front of Mount Sinai. If you do not unite with each other and do not ask the higher power to correct you, then this will be the place of your burial.”

The coronavirus is designed to show us how much we depend on one another. This dependence is called “mutual guarantee” which means that I should not think about how to protect myself from the coronavirus, but how to protect others from illness due to my kind and correct attitude toward them.

And what is happening now? Now, as a genuine egoist, I say that am tired of sitting at home in quarantine, I want to go outside and have fun, go to a restaurant, cafe, park, and the seashore. I want this! And I do not think about others; there is absolutely no mutual guarantee between us. Others are not considered by me at all; I do what is best for me.

If I was sure that everyone else were healthy and that I was the only sick one, I would carelessly walk around everyone with my infection. I would know that no one would infect me and I would let others become infected; what do I care about them? And this is exactly what is happening in human society in America, in Israel, in Europe, and everywhere. Everyone thinks only of himself; there is no sense of responsibility for one another.

We will begin to take the right path only when we sit at home without sticking our noses out because we are afraid of infecting others and are not thinking about ourselves. The coronavirus will lead us to such change and will not disappear until the change happens. The virus will make us think about how not to harm our neighbor. I will be afraid to harm others and therefore will prefer to stay at home.

The coronavirus should give us the feeling that we are living in an integral world where you can be healthy only under the condition of mutual guarantee. This is not everything, but it is the very first and necessary thing to start the correction.

And then I will no longer need any restrictions like closed borders between countries, a mandatory distance of two meters, or a mask; no one will have to be obligated to do anything. After all, everyone will take care of others and try to do everything so that others would remain healthy.

We need to look deeper into the essence of this virus because it reveals to us, not the biological disease in us, but our spiritual condition: the relationships between us and the lack of guarantee for one another. And in order to maintain such a guarantee and mutual care, we need the upper light.

Therefore, the coronavirus has come to us from above and has awakened us so that we will turn our attention upward and ask for the upper light that will correct us and give us a sense of responsibility for one another, which we do not have. Then I will worry about others so as not to harm them, but rather to be useful to them.

Mutual guarantee is the most difficult of all efforts because it is our main correction. I have to think about others, get involved in their lives, take care of them, feel their desires, and understand how to help them get closer to adhering to the Creator, how to merge with the upper force.

These are very high concepts related to the correction of the broken soul of Adam HaRishon. But we are approaching them day by day in understanding and in feeling.

The health of people depends on their unity and mutual guarantee. Everyone is the guarantor of their neighbor’s health and ensures that everyone is healthy. In this way, we will get rid of the coronavirus because, by doing this, we will act toward unification, mutual guarantee, and the construction of a common integral vessel.

We will take such a step when everyone will worry, not about getting infected with the virus themselves, but about not transmitting the virus to others. That is, the direction of thought should be the other way around and the reasoning should be opposite as well.

Mutual guarantee means that I cannot think about myself because everyone else thinks about me. And I would have to think about them, about the ten. And so we will all be in mutual guarantee, gradually expanding it to the whole world, and the Creator will be between us and correct us.

The guarantee is accepted together, now and forever. A guarantee, by its nature, cannot exist if there are restrictions because it is based on love. And love is not compatible with limitations.

Our well-being depends on mutual guarantee because this is the basic law of the corrected system. In order to be healthy, a person needs to be in a body whose parts are correctly connected to one another. And the correct connection between all parts of human society is mutual guarantee in which everyone thinks about everyone and does good to everyone. And so we need to collect all of our broken parts and connect them into one healthy body.

And when a kind connection and guarantee between all the organs arises in this perfect body, we will feel life in this body, not today’s sick existence where the whole body is cut and fragmented, but real life where the upper light circulates throughout our body and fills every part of us. This means we must attain correction as well as eternal and perfect life.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 5/30/20

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Question: Is unification the balance between giving and receiving in society? Is the unification process  a balance between how much I get from society and how much I give to society?

Answer: Yes. This is a process of unification. But the fact is that it is not clear to anyone. There are many economic, political, social, and all other theories, but still no one knows what to do with them. There are as many opinions as there are people. Because all this relates to man, and man for us is terra incognita (unknown territory.)

Question: How do I know how much I can receive and how much I can give?

Answer: You can’t know that because your egoism knocks you out of the system. While animals have an understanding of hierarchy, the need to unite, and a clear idea of what the right pack is, the human pack does not have such a law. It turns out that, unfortunately, we are worse than animals. We don’t have any restraining principles.

Question: So what does nature want from the human level? If everything works automatically and instinctively at all levels, what is required of the “human” level?

Answer: Nature requires a person to realize that he is above its inanimate, vegetative, and animate levels, that he does not belong to animate nature, and that he cannot automatically create such a structure in his society as animals.

Therefore, he must study who he is and how he can come to a beautiful, correct, dynamic balance, following his continuous development. Nature demands all this from man.

He must understand the general law of nature and then apply it to human society. He must create such an association between people that would reflect, on the one hand, the fact that they are not animals, but egotistically developing people who want to subjugate everything and everyone all the time.

On the other hand, he still has to bring himself to the right balance and create such a system of interaction between people and the other levels of nature, so that this system would work in absolute harmony, in integration with itself.

This condition is not understood by the person. He can’t even create his own little society. I’m not even talking about how he treats inanimate, vegetative, and animate nature and only destroys everything. This is his only problem, in principle, this is his egoism.

We need to find out how we can ride this egoism, begin to manage it, limit it intelligently, and understand how, after all, we should behave toward ourselves and among ourselves.
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From KabTV’s “The Post-Coronavirus Era” 4/16/20

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Everything we see in front of us comes from above. The explosive situation in America suggests that the Creator wants to show us the problem in society, in the common soul of Adam HaRishon. How can it be fixed?

In America today there is everything, the whole world: socialists, communists, capitalists, people who are dying of hunger and do not have a roof over their heads, and billionaires who have fabulous fortunes. This is a country with huge stratification in society.

And now the coronavirus and the anti-racism riots, and more, and more are added to it. If I were in Trump’s position, I would not be in a hurry to run for president for a new term with all these problems.

The problems that manifest themselves in American society today can only be solved by love that covers all crimes. We appeal for love not because we are naive idealists, but simply because it is a law of nature.

We will have to think about how to get closer to nature because it will otherwise force us to do so with very harsh measures: world war and outbreaks of pandemics. Therefore, we should approach the terms that nature sets for us on our own.

We are not socialists, capitalists, or fighters for someone’s rights, we are just researchers of nature, and therefore, we want to talk about what it wants from us. Whether we like it or not, we will have to meet its requirements, nature will still win. So it’s better to do it by ourselves. America needs to unite; otherwise, the country will fall apart. The whole country is divided into camps, one against the other, so unity is the salvation of the country.

Winning an election and gaining power over an opponent for four years is not a solution. We must look for ways to replenish each other. Who needs all these picturesque poses with kneeling, it still won’t help. Hatred remains hatred, separation remains separation.

Hatred can only be cured by love, which covers all transgressions. And there is no love, it is something new, but we have the opportunity to attract this force. Let’s try it! We will have to learn to love, there is no choice; if there are Europeans, African Americans, Latin Americans, many different nationalities living in the same country, this is a real Babylon. How else can we come to a mutual agreement?

Remember Ancient Babylon; today in America there is the same Babylonian pandemonium. In order to fix it, we need the same Abraham again who will be accepted by whites, blacks, and Latin Americans, recognized by all. The original method of Abraham is that love covers all transgressions, love for your neighbor as yourself. And there is an upper force that will teach us to love like that. Let’s use it, otherwise we are lost.

For now, we are only talking about compensation for the former enslavement of some by others. But there is only one compensation: All crimes are covered by love. And then white will remain white, black will remain black, yellow will remain yellow, and red will remain red, but love will rule above everything. Only this one power is able to conciliate everyone.

And to do this, modern Babylon needs the technique of Abraham, the wisdom of Kabbalah. We must summon together all those who seek unity and work with them, just as Abraham did three and a half thousand years ago.

All the old systems are collapsing, and in this empty space it is necessary to build a correct unity between all with the power of love. To do this, we need to learn how to connect with each other. And without this, everything will fall apart, leaving nothing of our civilization until after the third world war we come to the decision that there is no way out and we need to correct ourselves.

If we don’t draw the right conclusions even then, there will be a fourth world war. According to the program of nature, there can be four world wars. Therefore, we have no way out, we should have started the correction process a long time ago, and we are already very late.
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From the 3^d part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 6/7/20, Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Peace in the World”

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Question: Without the scientific and technical revolution, people in the 19th century worked for 16 – 18 hours daily, just in order to feed themselves. If there were no technical revolution, where would the opportunity to work for 2 – 3 hours and have everything you need come from now?

Answer: I am not saying that I am against the development of technology and all the sciences. I am saying that what a person creates becomes what controls him. From an owner he becomes a slave.

Look at what have become of our banks and financial institutions. They have enslaved a person. One doesn’t have to work that much.

You bring me the nineteenth century as an example, and I will bring you the twenty-first century as an example. What has happened to a person today? Does one work fewer hours? No. Feel freer? No.

And what has happened to his performance? It is specially used to enslave man more and more, and to throw the products of his labor into the sea. Otherwise, if he wouldn’t work, what would he do?

He will have a lot of free time! It is dangerous. Freethinking will begin, all sorts of meetings that would be inappropriate or objectionable for the authorities would start, new trends will appear, and so on. We don’t need this!

Let people work 15 to 20 hours a day, or at least 10. But if a person works 10 hours, we will give them another two hours to get to work and two hours from work on top, and it will work out fine. He would come home, have dinner, watch half an hour of TV, and plop into bed. And this would happen all the time.

We’ll book him a holiday somewhere far away. So he will spin, and we will inundate him with advertising: You haven’t seen this yet, you haven’t bought that yet, etc. So he will work like this for the rest of his life. Man was a slave in the nineteenth century, and will be a slave in the twenty-first century.

But there is a problem here: This is what our owners would like, but nature does not agree with this. And so there are all sorts of coronaviruses and other things.

We have entered a state called the “last generation” when we must achieve an integral, correct, friendly dependence and mutual understanding among ourselves. If this does not happen, we will be punished not only with viruses, but with whatever else.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 4/12/20

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