Medium published my new article “Covid-19, Light at the End of the Tunnel”

People’s will to weather the coronavirus storm and get back to normal life has vied with the surge of record-breaking infection rates around the globe. People are tired of hearing about the pandemic but it grips and does not let go, spreading and striking. Yet, we can find the stamina to navigate the crisis when we realize that the solution is in our hands.

If we help each other take on the mindset of the good of all, our hearts will be cleansed of egoistic and alienating attitudes and all the parts of nature will recover balance. The common concern for the well-being of others will create solutions for every possible situation, building a shield that will protect us from all predicaments.

“For the first time in history, nearly every scientist in the world is focused on the same problem… this is starting to pay real dividends,” say academics from Harvard who highlight the new era of cooperation we have entered to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on every realm of our lives: the economy, health, education, culture. Millions of people worldwide are stressed out over the variables that predict what awaits us in the future. What will happen in the upcoming winter in terms of COVID cases? How many more people will be unemployed?

The uncertainty shapes our collective consciousness and prepares it for a sharp turn. Precisely this kind of change of perspective — from a narrow-minded, egoistic perspective to a comprehensive, broad approach to solving our common challenges — is what will help us to reach a solution to the crisis at the deepest root of the problem: our dysfunctional human relations, rather than approaching it only from a scientific, economic or political perspective.

The Silver Lining Is Between Us

From a world where a person sees only himself, we need to transition to a world where people consider one another. From a world where we no longer stop to consider whether or not to wear a mask or keep social distance to avoid the transmission of a harmful virus to those near us, we need to attain a reality in which we consciously do whatever it takes to protect others, in the same way as we would like others to take care of the health of our children.

Our current sense of helplessness is making us more sensitive to the relationships between us. Without improving our human relations, we will be unable to secure a good future. Instead, we will only waste precious energy and resources on wars and conflicts of interest. Even if a cure for COVID-19 is found, it will not cure the social phenomenon of excessive egoism, the state that causes people not to feel the needs of others but only their own selfish demands.

The ultimate vaccine against all pathogens targets the healing of the hearts, neutralizes venomous criticism and corrects our exploitative attitude towards others. Nature is not blind and nothing happens by chance. The engine of evolution produces what we perceive as negative events so we will react and make connections that move us in the opposite direction toward alignment with nature. This is the formula for the evolution of life, and the times require everyone to realize this. The world we have built is completely interconnected, but our hearts remain far apart. This incompatibility is exactly what we are required to fix so we will function as an integral system in mutual consideration and harmony.

If we help each other take on the mindset of the good of all, our hearts will be cleansed of egoistic and alienating attitudes and all the parts of nature will recover balance. The common concern for the well-being of others will create solutions for every possible situation, building a shield that will protect us from all predicaments. Then we will discover that there is nothing threatening in nature, and that the coronavirus was just the means for curing the world from hatred and excessive consumerism.

The bottom line of this formula for security and prosperity is simple: without connection of the hearts we will all suffer, but mutual support will build a sensation of paradise. We are like a family stuck together in a tunnel. We will be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel only with the power of love.
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Comment: Even at the level of the corporeal world, we can see how everything is interconnected, how events in one part of the world strongly influence events in another part of the world, and how the unrest that started in Minneapolis has spread around the world.

Not only in America, but also in Europe, Israel, and other countries people are starting to take to the streets to protest and demand. This is where you need to find the right words and those who will say them. Otherwise, nothing will work.

My Response: I don’t see how I can reach out to people yet. There are no necessary conditions yet. There is no such amount of conscious suffering through which you can reach out to everyone and ask, “Isn’t it enough?”

You don’t have to go to the rich. They hope that everything will return and new billions will be added to their accounts every day. You can’t go to the poor because they don’t have time for it and they don’t understand what’s going on here. The intellectuals are busy with their own inventions.

So my hands are tied, I have no one to turn to and nothing to say. I can explain it in more detail, but I don’t see to whom. We still need to give the virus time to act.

Question: Do you think that it can really encourage people to think about it and try to find a different answer? Not through a vaccine or medication?

Answer: No! The vaccine is an empty hope. No vaccine will help! If this virus goes away, there will be another one—even worse, of a different type, more sophisticated. We can’t get away from this!

Question: Was all this predicted in the books of the sages? And in what form?

Answer: The vaccine was not predicted, although there is a general opinion that the virus is from the word “Avirot,” “transgressions.” But that it will be in this form, no. I believe that this is a very soft landing of humanity “on its bum,” so that it feels where it is growing from and where it belongs. We will be forced to bow our heads and feel who we are.
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From KabTV’s “Today’s International Situation” 6/18/20

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My article in Newsmax: “Hate Causes Viruses”

We really don’t understand why COVID struck. People blame it on China, blame it on the Jews, blame it on bats, minks, deforestation, corrupt pharmaceutical companies, and so on and so forth. But no one blames himself. No one blames the eruption of COVID-19 on our own mistreatment of everything and everyone around us.

It’s understandable; we don’t see the overall system. Although scientists have known for at least a century that the world is interconnected and that all things are built from the same few particles, we don’t experience it in our daily lives so we behave as though it isn’t true. But behaving as though we’re unrelated to each other is just as responsible as drinking water that we’re told is contaminated with listeria, but not believing it because we can’t see the bacteria. By the time the symptoms show, it’s much harder and more painful to recover.

Not only are all parts of reality connected, they are connected correctly. The mineral, flora, and fauna in our world function according to the natural laws imprinted in them and have no freedom of choice. Wolves are not bad because they eat other animals, and deer are not good because they feed on plants and not on other animals. In fact, were it not for carnivores, herbivores would become unhealthy, overpopulate, deplete the plants they live on, and eventually suffer and die out since nature would find another way to balance their population. When you look at nature, you realize it keeps a perfect balance where every element guarantees the integrity of the entire system.

There is only one exception in all of nature: man. Humans are the only element in nature that can behave as though it’s unrelated to anything and get away with it, for a while. Until now, we have fought against nature, grew in strength, and for the past two centuries or so, we thought we almost beat it. Worse yet, we fought against each other, and our hatred for each other made us ruin nature even more in our race to mine, pump and cut off nature’s treasures in order to outdo human competitors.

COVID-19 stopped us in our tracks, stymied the economy on Our hatred and desire to exploit, rule, and humiliate have caused such harm to nature that it generated a natural remedy for human nature: the novel coronavirus. all its branches, stopped the arms race and much of the hostilities that countries were executing or planning to execute against each other, and even distanced us from other people so we wouldn’t have to tolerate the tensions of hostile workplaces or competitive schooling.

But because we don’t see the system, we think it’s not our hatred that caused the virus to appear; we think it’s something or someone else — whom we hate — that caused its emergence. We are wrong. It’s our own attitude to one another that has generated this, and other soon-to-come pestilences that will strike if we don’t reverse course.

E pur si muove (“And yet it moves”) said Galileo Galilei when he was forced to recant his claim that the Earth moves around the sun. Today we know that he was right. But when it comes to truths that concern our hatred for each other, we are as ignorant and obstinate as Galilei’s tormentors. It is a shame, since Earth’s orbit around the sun is important, but not as important as the fact that hate creates diseases. Ignorance of the former fact is a shame; ignorance of the latter fact can cost us our lives.
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My new article on BIZCATALYST “What Does it Take to Build a Successful Startup in these Uncertain Times?”

At the outset, we need to grasp the extent to which the world has shifted to a new program over the past few months. Today, we live in a completely different world. It is as if aliens visited us and implanted a new chip into our reality, changing our surrounding conditions, our behaviors, and our ways of thinking.

Still, we are in a transition phase, and likewise, many people continue trying to operate according to the outdated program of our pre-coronavirus world, a program that prioritizes values of self-benefit over benefiting others.

If we understood nature’s evolutionary tendency to guide all of its parts to perfect connection and interdependence, then we would see how today’s changes are for our ultimate benefit: they come to bring us closer to each other, not necessarily physically, but to a more heartfelt closeness.

And when we feel closer to each other, we feel happier, more confident, safer, and healthier.

Therefore, what we need more than anything else today is an environment that can support, encourage and guide our connection, so that we can balance our relationships with our new program of development—conditions that demand increased cooperation and care for each other.

If we fail to upgrade our attitudes to each other in order to match the mutual dependence and responsibility required by today’s new program, then we will feel an increasingly heavier weight on our shoulders the more we plod on from one day to the next.

Nature, by means of the coronavirus, has placed us into new conditions precisely in order to transform us.

Today’s startups thus need to take that into consideration.

If our past startups ended up in a marketplace that pitted them up against each other, now everything needs to change. We will still need to compete, but our competition needs to shift from egoistic, where we try to reap as much of the market for our business as we can, to a competition where we each aim to contribute as much as value as possible to humanity.

And what does “value” mean today? It means caring that everyone’s needs are met, as well as helping everyone genuinely become happy, safe, and healthy via upgrading the quality of human relations.

Therefore, anyone bold enough to initiate a startup in this period should first be equipped with sufficient knowledge and an environment to understand the transition the world is in, and then create tools that help people feel closer to each other.

For instance, there is plenty of room for technology to develop means by which we can feel ourselves together in one room, and even more so, as parts of a single whole where our every breath and contact is sensed by everyone.

In other words, as we head toward the discovery of our tight interdependence, we can develop technologies that help us sense what it means to feel as one with others, and which will thus help guide our fateful transition much more positively and harmoniously.

We thus need startups that authentically fill the human need for connection, which will serve to smoothen our transition from our current degree to greater mutual support and consideration.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “When will the coronavirus end? Are there any vaccines nearing release?“

Despite the high anticipation for COVID-19’s demise, it is here to stay for a while.

The coronavirus emerged in order to change the way we think, and it will remain with us until we complete this transformation.

Since humanity is a massive diverse aggregate of different people, it will take some time for us to adapt to a much more interdependent world than what we were accustomed to in pre-coronavirus times.

Similar to how people get used to living with chronic diseases, so too we as a humanity will get used to the coronavirus.

It will simply become an integral part of our lives.

As any onset of a disease is felt severely as a shock to the body’s systems, likewise we are currently undergoing the initial pangs of the coronavirus’ “injection” into humanity.

However, this transition phase will settle and human society will assume a new, more independent form.

Even much of the engagement that the coronavirus has brought upon us has acted to exemplify our dependence on each other, i.e., how we depend on each other to wear masks, keep good personal hygiene, maintain our distance from each other and quarantine ourselves if we knowingly contact people with the virus.

We thus see how a small virus has helped us start seeing a more connected world, which operates on everyone and where everyone holds mutual influence, and it will continue to “teach” us such wisdom the more it stays with us.

We would thus be wise to internalize how we are all parts of a single system that is developing toward a new state of balance with nature.

That is, as nature is interdependent and interconnected, so we also discover more and more of nature’s and our own interconnectedness the more we develop.

Also, the more this process of increasing interdependence reveals itself to us, the more we will find ourselves at new sets of crossroads, stage after stage: We either agree to our increasing interdependence and accept more responsibility and consideration for each other, or we oppose it, and thus feel our tightening connection as an increasingly ugly and painful situation.

However, either way, nature presses us to connect more and more, like a steamroller of evolution that flattens our egoistic and harmful attitudes to each other. It squashes our egos like a lemon skin against a lemon squeezer, and will continue doing so until all of our egoistic juices become extracted.

At that stage, we will find a new kind of fulfillment in such qualities that currently seem less important or even ugly to us, like kindness, altruism, giving and consideration of others.

If only we could see that there is a very clear line from our current reality to a new, unified and perfect one, that nature has a state of perfection in store for us and carefully guides us there, then we would encounter everything in our lives more confidently, with a sense of purpose.

Now, we are divided in our attitudes to each other, and more than anything else, this division causes all of our pains. Our division is expressed as each of us being primarily concerned with self-benefit over benefiting others, which is opposite to nature’s holistic characteristic. Suffering is the differential we feel between our state and nature’s, and it operates on us to make us connect.

The more we make strides to connect with each other, the more balanced we will become with nature, and we will thus experience an inversion of our pains and sorrows to pleasures and joy.

We need only agree to connect above our divisive drives that constantly pull in the other direction, and when we reach such an agreement, we will likewise experience its benefits.

Thus, viewing humanity as a single organism and nature as its superior, we can see how nature vaccinated humanity with the coronavirus in order to heal us from our divisive attitudes to each other.

We can thus expect to exit the coronavirus pandemic as a stronger humanity, with healthier attitudes dwelling within, among peoples and nations. Therefore, while we are forced to keep our distance from each other, while doing so, we would be wise to think how we can become more internally connected.

What, then, would it take for the coronavirus to end?

By understanding that it is much more than a mere physical disease, but that it has come to bring upon a change to our thinking—from divided to connected, egoistic to altruistic, and individualistic to interdependent—then by adjusting our attitudes accordingly, we would truly put a stop to the pandemic, since nature would no longer need to use it to teach us a lesson.

Therefore, we should look out for each other, consider how we can prevent viruses of any kind to pass to others, from physical diseases to any kinds of harmful thoughts, and by exercising this mutual responsibility and consideration, the coronavirus will disappear from our lives.

Above photo by Fusion Medical Animation on Unsplash.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Is the world going to change forever because of the coronavirus?“

The coronavirus is inviting us to make a significant change.

It is up to us, however, whether we will experience the impending change as positive or negative.

What is the major change that the coronavirus comes to spark in us?

It is that we change our attitudes to each other, to think positively about each other in order to build a new society that is better connected and balanced with nature’s interconnectedness and interdependence.

If we saw nature’s tendency to develop us to become increasingly connected, with ties of mutual responsibility and consideration, then we would see that we need only implement more care and consideration for each other in order to positively realize our transition.

Failing to take any initiative to improve our connections would generate more suffering. That is, if we fail to upgrade our attitudes to each other, then we will feel the growing distance between the level of dependence nature requires of us and what we ourselves implement as various pains and complications. Vaccines and other medicines would then be of no use, as the coronavirus operates on a whole new level that we have yet to recognize.

It likely seems far-fetched that the coronavirus requires a change in our attitudes to each other more than anything else, and that we will fail to defeat it with mere physical means, but longer term effects of the coronavirus will urge our discovery of upgraded attitudes to each other out of a lack of other options.

In other words, through the coronavirus, nature has given us new conditions by which we undergo fateful changes. For example, if we want to teach our children a new language, mere explanations of that new language are insufficient in order for them to absorb it. But if we place them in conditions where they encounter the language more and more, such as posting words on post-it notes on various furniture and devices around the home, as well as holding regular times when we speak the new language together, then the practical change of conditions teaches the new language more than any explanations.

Therefore, through the new tighter interdependent conditions that the coronavirus pandemic has revealed to us, we would be wise to try and develop our attitudes, to match our new interdependence accordingly.

One exercise we can conduct in this direction involves masks. As health departments around the world have requested wearing masks in public places, we can check our attitude to such a condition: Do we wear the masks, or ignore the guideline? And if we wear the masks, is it because we don’t want to get infected by others, or is it because we don’t want to infect others in case we are asymptomatic carriers of the virus?

The latter discernment is definitely the most altruistic and closest to nature’s attitude to us.

That is just one exercise where we can check our attitude to others, and seek how to upgrade our attitude to such a level where benefiting others becomes as important, if not more important, than serving our narrow self-interests.

Above photo by Macau Photo Agency on Unsplash

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Question: We talk about many problems and catastrophes and the possibility of even greater misfortunes that may befall the world. What can you say that is kind and optimistic to people who follow what you do, listen to what you say, and read what you write?

Answer: I would advise all people to pay attention to what nature is doing to us.

Nature is a living entity that generates and incorporates all of us. It is higher than us in degree, so there is nothing in us that does not happen from nature. So we need to pay attention to what exactly it requires of us.

Do not treat it with contempt, as something inanimate or at most vegetative and animate, but as a higher being, understanding that it acts reasonably, selectively, consciously, in order to bring us to the next level.

Nature has developed us from nothing, from zero, brought us to our present state, and leads us further. Let’s not assume that we have already completed our evolution. We must come to its very last state, to complete interaction with each other and with nature itself. This is a step we must take now.

This step we can take either under the influence of brute force of nature, or intelligently, consciously. I think we’ve come to that. Now everything depends on how we explain this possibility to all people and lead them after us.

Question: It means, not only does humanity have a chance, but you believe that it will take advantage of this chance and be able to find the right decisions and right actions?

Answer: Of course.
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From KabTV’s “Today’s International Situation” 6/18/20

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Question: Now everyone is talking about the emergence of online professions, in particular, a digital transformation. Everyone learned how to use Zoom. In general, a large-scale digitization took place in two months.

How can one remain a full-fledged member of society if, in online professions, you will constantly interact with a computer, with numbers?

Answer: I do not see any problems here. Many of my friends, despite the coronavirus, continue to work from home. Most of them love it. And the enterprises themselves like it too because this is a big budget saver.

I think that the majority of enterprises will develop in this direction. A person will work from home.

I also switched to such a job. Previously, up to 500 or 600 people gathered in our center every morning, not counting those in different parts of the world who connected to our broadcasts. And for the last few months I have only been teaching online, and I must say that the number of people is only constantly increasing, and everyone is happy with it.

Question: Do you think that the severing of social ties due to online communication will not happen?

Answer: I think, on the contrary, new, correct, good social connections will appear. And breaking past ties is only for our benefit.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 5/24/20

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Question: Why are good, righteous, pure people given a heavy lot in life, hardships related to coronavirus and all similar events, yet what’s happening in the world does not affect bad people at all?

Answer: Our egoistic world is so distorted that to think that good people should get only good things in it and bad people, bad, is absolutely incorrect.

If good people, who seem to strive for good, sometimes get an evil fate, the blows of fate—this is quite natural. After all, our world is all egoistic and evil. And that is why, there is nothing good to expect from it, especially now, when we are beginning to enter the last stage of our correction, accompanied by a pandemic.

Now there will be such turns that will teach us constantly how to change ourselves correctly in order to be in line with the increasingly manifested integral world.

Question: But can we somehow prepare for this, make some kind of prophylaxis?

Answer: “Prophylaxis” is a good word. I will tell you one thing: We are engaged in this prevention.

The point is that a person must adapt to the future world that is now being born. For this, we must become less egoistic. Therefore, the current virus will shake us and make completely different people. Moreover, by any means, both rough and delicate, depending on how we will succumb to it. This is  first.

Secondly, we need to learn how to unite above our egoism, despite it. It is very difficult.

Everything begins attaining our nature as evil along with the yearning to reach a correct, good relationship between us.

We are entering such a state now when the forces of nature will educate us very seriously.
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From KabTV’s “Together about Important Things” 7/14/20

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Comment: You write: “People are looking for connections incorrectly. The connection between us is possible, but through the Creator.”

My Response: Yes. The Creator is nature around us. Only through this connection with nature, the Creator, can we truly reach the next level of existence, begin to feel eternally alive, connect to the eternal source, and become like It.

We will feel ourselves existing not in this mortal temporary body, but in the soul, that is, in the spirit between us. And all this is possible. I hope we get there pretty quickly.
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From KabTV’s “Today’s International Situation” 6/18/20

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