Michael Laitman, On Quora: “If all wars end eventually, what event could end all wars in the world?“

The end of all wars will come about when we all aim at mutually complementing each other.

It cannot be a state where one ego will overpower another ego, but rather one where we mutually concede to the upper force of connection, love and mutual bestowal for the benefit of all people in the world.

In such a state, everyone will be directed at positively connecting above all egoistic and divisive drives.

Based on the Daily Kabbalah Lesson with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman on March 8, 2022. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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In the News (Forbes): Years ago, the anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. The student expected Mead to talk about clay pots, tools for hunting, grinding-stones, or religious artifacts.

But no. Mead said that the first evidence of civilization was a 15,000 years old fractured femur found in an archaeological site. A femur is the longest bone in the body, linking hip to knee. In societies without the benefits of modern medicine, it takes about six weeks of rest for a fractured femur to heal. This particular bone had been broken and had healed. …

A broken femur that has healed is evidence that another person has taken time to stay with the fallen, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended them through recovery. A healed femur indicates that someone has helped a fellow human, rather than abandoning them to save their own life.

My Response: This is mutual assistance.

Question: Mutual assistance, is this how civilization began? If we do not come to the point where civilization began, if we do not develop it today, does it turn out that we are moving backward from civilization?

Answer: Certainly. If we develop something, it is only in order to earn money. Today, if there were no desire, no thirst for money, would medicine and surgery develop? Nothing would have developed. We would live in a primitive society. You broke a leg? Well, so you broke it.

Comment: A small group of caring people managed to break through, to create a new civilization. Someone was nearby and put two sticks on his leg, for example. Is the breakthrough happening in a small group?

My Response: Of course. This is true, and it should be this way.

Question: And even during the Renaissance it was the same?

Answer: Yes, of course.

Question: And today, how will there be a breakthrough from indifference to connection? Will it be made by a small group of people?

Answer: It goes through the awareness of necessity anyway. If this happens then we will break through.

Question: Is there such a necessity today?

Answer: As far as I see it, the modern world is doing everything to eliminate this need for mutual assistance for survival.

Comment: You have been pessimistic about humanity lately.

My Response: I’m a realist. Egoism is growing exponentially, surprisingly fast, literally vertically upward, and we have nothing to oppose to it.

Question: But still it is flying to some kind of dead end?

Answer: No. It does not feel this impasse, and it is ready to fight with everyone who is against it.

Question: Where will a new, real civilization begin? At what point will it arise?

Answer: If not with an atomic war—general, serious and total—then there may be some huge volcanic eruptions where nature simply closes us together inside some kind of box. Then maybe we will sit in the dark and realize.

Question: So complete darkness is needed for this?

Answer: Yes. We must understand that there is nowhere else to go otherwise in order to create a certain contract between us, that we will relate to each other only for the benefit of the other, without taking ourselves into account. Such a revolution.

Question: This is a complete revolution of thinking. And then the darkness will vanish?

Answer: Yes.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 12/30/21

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Comment: According to Bloomberg’s Covid Resilience Ranking, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Bangladesh are among the most pandemic resilient countries. All of these countries have in common the fact that their prime ministers are female.

Some suggest that female leaders have qualities that give them advantages, especially in crisis situations, such as knowing how to listen, mediation skills, genuine pragmatism, resistance to conflicts, as well as knowing how to be economical. It is also suggested that women leaders work better in crisis situations than their male counterparts, and in this crisis, they prioritized healthcare over economics. Lately you have been talking more and more about the fact that a woman can drive the progress of humanity.

My Response: Yes, she can drive progress.

God is also masculine; He is afraid of women, like all men. 🙂

Question: “It is better not to mess with them.” Is this what He says?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Do women really have such special qualities?

Answer: They are capable. They are in conflict all their lives with people around them, with other women, with children, with husbands. They have to handle everything—the household, work…

A man leaves everything to a woman and goes somewhere into politics, to some job that nobody needs. These jobs are falling into decay and crises. For a woman, however, everything remains the way it was—work, home, children—besides these, she bears children, gives birth, and feeds.

Therefore a woman is really capable of giving birth to a new world. This is not a man’s job.

Question: So can we say the future belongs to women? If we understand this, will we advance?

Answer: Yes. It is written in the Torah that God said to Abraham, “Listen to what Sarah tells you.”

It is because He created everything in this way. Listen to the corrected egoism.

Comment: This already is a Kabbalistic concept.

My Response: This is very serious. Listen not to yourself, but to corrected egoism. In principle, at our everyday level a woman is much more practical, much more sober, and much more balanced than men.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 12/20/21

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Comment: If we consider the system of punishment that exists today, it has, as it were, two principles. One principle is more humane where the attempt is to instill some moral norms through forced physical labor.

The other principle only involves punishment for all misdeeds. This system has no so-called middle line or correction.

My Response: But it cannot be here because it is not demanded by society itself. If you ask ordinary people or even the same lawyers, they have a lot of theories and philosophies, but in principle they don’t even know what they want to build in general.

What society would they like to see? What kind of person should be in it?

They do everything not from practice or from a plan that is aimed at educating a person, at changing society, and at a vision of the future, but only from what interests them at the moment. What should we do to earn money for ourselves, to become famous, and to rise above others and show off how we work?

Everything is aimed at justifying their appointment as their source of sustenance and success. As long as the system is selfish, it will continue to exist.
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From KabTV’s “Close-Up. Presumption of Innocence” 3/10/10

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Question: Due to the spread of the virus, people have been closed in at home, they are not able to participate in society. There have been a lot of divorces and domestic violence. Children do not want to study and go back to school. People do not want to go back to work.

In America, the government decided to help the people socially by printing money and distributing it to people. Now there is a lot of unemployment and no one wants to work, everyone sits and waits for government money. It seems that here in America they want to build a particular socialism. Or is capitalism slowly coming to an end?

Answer: Indeed, capitalism is coming to an end because this is not the final phase of human development, and it will not end there. But the question is: What can the state do with the limited opportunities it has?

Comment: Not to encourage people to stay home and live for free. They print money, but there is no gold reserve, and money is only a piece of paper. It somehow starts to resemble the Soviet Union.

My Response: What can you do? It doesn’t matter if it is America or the Soviet Union. The laws of economics, the laws of shifting between classes, between society and people are the same everywhere—human! Not socialist, not communist, not capitalist, these are general laws of nature. But no one wants to know and observe them. That is what is happening.
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From KabTV’s “Meetings with Kabbalah” 1/5/22

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My new article on Linkedin “The Chinese Leopard Has Leaped Down from the Tree”

China often conducts itself like a leopard that is sitting in a tree, waiting for the right moment to leap down on its prey. In the tug-of-war between Russia and the US over Russia’s invasion into Ukraine, China did not take sides. Until recently, when it announced that it will not join the sanctions against Russia, and has promoted “the biggest-ever natural gas supply deal” with Russian gas exporter Gazprom.

At the same time, China directly threatened the US regarding America’s attempts to embolden Taiwan. On two occasions, China sent offensive, almost vulgar warnings to the US. On the first occasion, they said, “We must sternly warn the United States that whoever plays with fire will burn himself. If it plays the ‘salami-slicing’ tactics on the Taiwan question, it is their fingers [sic] that will be cut off.” On the second occasion, a Chinese official stated, “If the US wants to embolden the ‘Taiwan independence’ … the US will pay a heavy price for its adventurist act. If the US tries to intimidate and pressure China … the so-called military deterrence [American army] will be reduced to scrap iron.”

On the face of it, China seems to have indeed chosen sides. But I would not draw conclusions prematurely. Like a leopard, they are very clever. In my opinion, they have joined the side they actually want to weaken.

Despite its audacious proclamations, the Chinese government has no interest in fighting against America. China is too dependent on American purchasing power to risk going to war with it. They would go to great lengths to avoid a military conflict with the US.

With Russia, the situation is different. China has its eyes set on the vast, ore and oil rich, and nearly empty lands stretching from Siberia to the Ural Mountains—an area several times bigger than China itself. With Russia’s current strength, China cannot conquer it. However, if Russia were to become weak and exhausted, it would be much easier for China to take over the land without much resistance. The longer it continues, the weaker Russia will become, and the easier it will be for China to bite off chunks of Siberia for itself.

Wars bring about changes. Big wars bring about big changes. World War I led to the creation of the United Nations and the Treaty of Versailles, which helped seat Hitler at the helm of Germany. World War II created the communist bloc under the Warsaw Pact, and the Western bloc under the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which set off the Cold War.

The current conflict is not a world war, at least not yet, but its impact is nevertheless profound. The war in Ukraine is exposing the futility of ego-wars, and in the end, every war is an ego-war. The crisis in Ukraine proves that if we want to coexist peacefully, we must learn how to rise above our egos on the personal, social, political, and international levels.

Now, after millennia of serving our egos, we are on the verge of realizing that the only thing that is bad in our world is our own ego. The ego has promised us the world, but it has destroyed it. We must counter it with an equal force of positivity, or it will end us all.

This realization will have a profound impact on society. Until now, all our institutions catered to our egos. They attempted to moderate and streamline the interests of countries in a way that enabled them to coexist. Now that egoism has reached such levels where it cannot accept the existence or independence of others, we have no choice but to add another force: a positive force to counter the power and intensity of the ego.

In the coming years, we will witness the establishment of new institutions of a new nature. Their focus will not be on catering to the ego, or even on securing food and water supply. Rather, they will focus on creating social cohesion and solidarity. They will work from the understanding that if people are united, they care for one another and see to each other’s needs.

Instead of treating symptoms of alienation, these new organizations will work to eliminate it and create connection, bonding, and a sense of mutual responsibility. We are just beginning the transition, but the fact that the old world is falling apart means that we must hurry, so the new order is not born through more pain than necessary. The sooner we realize that in today’s reality we cannot let the ego set the tone, and we must balance it with caring, the easier and smoother will be the transition.
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My new article on Linkedin “A Sensitive Spot in Humanity”

The conflict in Ukraine is not a regular conflict between two nations. It is a very deep crisis that originates from a very special place in the common human soul. It is a sensitive spot in humanity, and we can see how powerfully it impacts all of us.

We will not resolve this crisis through diplomatic measures. At best, we will calm it down for a while, but it will only erupt more violently afterwards. We will also not end the conflict if one side completely overruns the other; no one will capitulate here, and the fire will continue to burn underneath until it explodes again.

There is only one thing we need to do in order to resolve the crisis: increase the importance of complementarity, the importance of the necessity to unite the hearts of the members of the rivaling nations above the enmity. To be clear, simply wanting the war to end will not end it; we need to want the separation between us to end. We need to want to feel each other’s hearts, and this, among many other benefits, will also silence the roaring guns.

We are in a very difficult, very treacherous situation. We should not blur things or try to cover them up. Tactics and political artifice will not resolve the crisis.

The only solution is to make an effort to bring people’s hearts closer above, and despite the hatred that has erupted among them. Otherwise, there will be no solution to the conflict, it will only escalate and drag more countries into it, and we all know what that means.

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Medium published my new article “Why We Cannot Work in Synchrony”

The war in Ukraine, the inability of the world to sanction Russia effectively, the uneven distribution of medications, the uneven distribution of wealth, staples, education, wherever you look, there are growing gaps and growing instability in human society. Now let us look at nature. In nature, everything is balanced and harmonious, synchronized to the last detail.

There is a famous natural phenomenon called “spontaneous synchronization” that causes bodies in close proximity to synchronize their movements. Metronomes, for example, spontaneously synchronize their beats even if you deliberately start them at different times.

But spontaneous synchronization applies not only to pacemakers; it applies to all levels of reality. This is how award winning Professor of Applied Mathematics at Cornell University Steven Strogatz explains the phenomenon (Min 10:09–10:37): “One of the things that I find most appealing about it is how universal it is, that it occurs at every scale of nature, from subatomic to cosmic. It uses every communication channel that nature has ever devised, from gravitational interactions, electrical interactions, chemical, mechanical, I mean you name it. Anyway that two things can influence each other, nature uses that to get things in sync.”

It seems like the only element in reality that “escapes” spontaneous synchronization is humanity. It is as if the rules that apply to all of nature do not apply to us.

To an extent, this is true. In addition to belonging to the animate level of life, we are also sentient beings, and our actions are determined by willful decisions. In order to synchronize our actions, we need to want it to happen.

Otherwise, if we leave it to nature to decide, human nature, which is inherently self-centered, will override the system-centered nature of the rest of reality, and we will remain deeply discordant, and as a result, profoundly antagonistic to each other.

Over the past few years, the level of our alienation from each other has increased to a level that makes the possibility of another world war a realistic scenario. The only way to avoid it is to consciously and willfully adopt synchrony among us. What nature does spontaneously, we must do consciously and voluntarily.

There is a good reason for this. When we choose to follow a certain path, we do so after examining and evaluating all the options for and against it. If we behaved a certain way because we only followed our instincts, we would be animals not people. The difference between us and animals is that we think, debate, and question until we finally decide. As a result, the picture we see is more complete and deeper than any being in nature.

Yet, the price we pay for being sentient is often far too high. If we want to live in a peaceful world where people are wise and kind, we must make it happen. We must choose synchrony and harmony over friction and dissention. To do that, we must consciously raise the importance of synchrony in all of humanity.

Harmony and synchrony will not make us the same or even similar. Rather, they will make us harmonious and complementary. They will make us enjoy contributing our skills and abilities for the greater good, and together we will build a strong and solid society whose members are safe, healthy, and above all, happy.
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There is only one way to win the internal war: it is to cover all crimes with love and to rise above arguing who is right and who is wrong. Then the corporeal war, which was a consequence of the internal one, will also end.

If the war does not end with victory, first of all in the spiritual sense, then corporeal victory will not help. The battle may subside for a while, but it will certainly resume.

Therefore, we must fight in order to cover all crimes with love, not try to figure out on whose side the truth is in this conflict and confrontation, but to rise above both poles. This is possible only if we understand that all the forces of confrontation come from the Creator and that only by rising up to Him can we reconcile them by ascending to their source.

The conflict is arranged by the Creator, there is none else besides Him. Only by combining two opposing forces can we win, not by choosing which of the two lines is right, but by walking in the middle line. The Creator started the war and is waging it, and therefore, only by appealing to Him with a demand to reconcile this dispute can it be ended. As it is written: “He Who makes peace in His heavens, may He make peace for us.”

We did not make timely corrections, and therefore the corruptions accumulated and have exploded as an exacerbation of a neglected disease. And that is what is happening now. For tens and even hundreds of years these problems have been hiding in humanity, breaking out here and there as symptoms of an internal disease.

We must understand that if a problem has been revealed, then it has already existed before. Now, when it has manifested, we have the opportunity to correct it and reach the end of correction.

The Creator arranged the shattering for us. It is not our fault that we received a shattered world in which the egoistic force rules. We only need to reveal this and ask the Creator to make a correction because through it we adhere to the Creator.

He does everything—not us. We just need to turn to Him above all the revealed problems. We understand that all this was arranged by Him and done on purpose so that we would ask Him for corrections. This is called: “My sons defeated Me.”
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/1/22, “Winning the War (Against the Evil Inclination)”

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KabNet published my new article: “Toward Worldwide Shortage of Staples”

The war in Ukraine poses many threats not only to Ukraine, but to the entire world. The sanctions against Russia are extreme if not unprecedented.

However, we should not believe that this will come at no cost to the world. Already, the prices of wheat and oil are skyrocketing, but it is still not the worst of it. The worst will come when there is none of them, when supermarket shelves in Europe and the US are empty because of the war in Ukraine. The most important lesson we can (and should) already learn from this war is that the world is one, interdependent global village, and that when you hurt someone else, you hurt yourself.

Even before the war broke out, the strain on supply chains was driving up prices, and inflation was breaking records in the US and elsewhere. But now, for some products, the supply chains will collapse altogether.

We should not deal with this crisis only on the superficial level. We should not settle for looking for substitutes for the missing products. If we do, the substitutes will fail us, too.

Instead, we need to use the opportunity to correct the reason for the broken supply chains: our broken connections. The sanctions against Russia, with their implications to both Russia and the West, should make us realize that we cannot build our relationships on mutual exploitation. Our relations will be sustainable only if we establish them on trust and mutual complementation.

It is clear that in every transaction, each party has its own interest in mind; there is nothing wrong with that. However, when parties seek not only to profit from their deals, but to extort the other parties, to take from them more than they are willing to give, either by deceit or by force, this will not work for long. We must change our attitude from using our resources to impose our will, into sharing our resources for the greater good.

It is not as though we should suddenly love each other, at least not yet. But even if we cannot stand each other, we all have goods that others need but do not have, and others have goods that we need but do not have. Therefore, even if we cannot stand each other, we must share with one another. But for the chain to remain open, we must work with mutual respect and decency.

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