We live in a world that is changing right before our eyes. Our whole life can be divided into two stages: before the coronavirus and after it.

Life flowed according to a certain routine, and the virus suddenly made a drastic change in it, bringing all of humanity to a new state, which is still perceived as a global crisis.

The crisis is growing and deepening and it is not clear where it will lead, but it is clear that it is leading us to a new world that we are not yet familiar with. This crisis is like a new birth. The very word “crisis” (Mashber) comes from the name of the stone on which women in ancient times gave birth to children. In other words, crisis is the place of new birth, and the current state, which we call a crisis, is the birth of a new world.

There have been many different crises in the history of mankind, but so far, none of them has changed the world so dramatically. There were only some changes in human society, in its form. But today’s crisis is the first real one, although it does not seem very serious yet because it is not a war, a meteorite falling, or mass destruction.

And yet, we can call it a crisis precisely because a new world is being born before our eyes. Soon we will see how human society, us, our families, and our attitude to the world have changed. The inner world of a person, his perception of reality will change, and we will see a new world.

We do not see it yet, just like a baby that is inside its mother and does not see the world. But even when it is born, it does not see anything at first either. Then it will develop hearing and vision, and it will begin to respond as it grows and becomes familiar with the world.

It is exactly how we adults need to be born and change our perception and vision to see a new world. It will happen soon.

Childbirth is a huge, incomparable pain, a feeling that the whole body is ready to explode. On one hand, this is a very serious, critical, life-threatening condition. But on the other hand, we see that there is no choice: nature obliges us to go through it.

However, the birth of a child is based on the natural desire of a woman to have children. In addition, there is the public opinion that motivates a woman to give birth to a child, and not only one. Nature gave the woman a lot of strength to endure labor pains; this is a difficult and dangerous state.

The entire humanity is in this coronavirus crisis, both men and women. Women always reproached men for not knowing labor pains. Well, now women can be satisfied: men will go through real, severe labor pains. They will feel that the crisis is suffocating them, not giving them the opportunity to resist it: you are all torn from within, but you can do nothing.

We will still be able to be born through prayer and efforts to unite. But it will be a very difficult and special birth because we are giving birth to ourselves in a new world. We cross the border to the spiritual world and are born in a new form.
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From KabTV’s “Women in the New World” 7/9/20

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Remark: You say that our path is the path of integration, the feeling of universal unity.

My Comment: This is inherent in the program of nature and there is no way to get away from it. The more we resist, the more we will get hit.

Question: Who is the integrator in this situation? There must be some driving force.

Answer: The virus itself. Once it circled around the globe, it showed us that we are all actually integrated, interconnected, and represent one unified society, which it is now infecting.

But the virus is not simply infecting; it is showing us that we are one whole. And we will not get away from it anywhere. It manifests itself anywhere, even on the distant islands of Oceania. And how it gets there, no one knows.
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Form KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 5/24/20

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What do you think about how the world at large can learn as a lesson from the Coronavirus? Can we expect unity?“

Until now, the pains that have befallen the world have led to no effective solutions or discernments.

People simply await its end so that they can get back to doing business as usual, thinking about how to minimize their losses, and even more so, how to profit off of the pandemic.

It comes as no surprise, since it is a mere expected outcome of our innate egoistic attitude to the world, which works on us involuntarily.

Therefore, the coronavirus is here to stay for a lot longer, since it has appeared in order to perform a serious change in the world.

Right now, we are going through a phase of trying to revive many businesses that we have no real need for, and give handouts for work that will be nonexistent in the future.

Authorities fail to understand the newness of the era that we have entered, that it is an era where we need to provide people with life’s essentials, and place all of our surplus focus on an upgraded form of education, which teaches us about this new interdependent world that is revealing itself to us, its laws, and how we can get along with each other in these new conditions. That is, it is a form of education that we need today, which we did not receive as we grew up.

Instead, we try to continue holding onto our past materialistic values, hoping that we will keep our shopping culture of boutiques, jewelry stores, expensive watches and cars.

Therefore, in relation to the change that nature demands from humanity today, the pandemic has not even started yet.

I thus hope that we will open our eyes and see that we are in a new, more interdependent and interconnected world, and living in this world requires making serious adjustments to how we used to live, which comes down to becoming more essentials-focused while engaging in learning of what is this new world, how we have developed to this point, and what we can do in order to survive and prosper in today’s new tighter interdependent conditions.

Above photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash.

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Our connection must become ten complete Sefirot of the soul, or the Third Temple. The temple is a structure, a network of connections between us.

Today’s coronavirus epidemic reveals to us the breaking, the destruction of the Temple, the transgression. It shows how egoistic our relationships are and how unable we are to connect, how indifferent we are to what happens to our neighbor: whether he lives or dies.

This is the disease—I am sick because I cannot even get close to anyone who is around. The coronavirus reveals our hatred and rejection of each other. This is the disease. The crown is placed on our head as super-egoism that dominates us.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 7/29/20, “Tishaa BeAv (Ninth of Av)”

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Medium published my new article “COVID-19 and the Futile Race for a Vaccine”

Throughout the world, companies are racing to find a vaccine for COVID-19. They are hoping to be able to abolish the pandemic, restore the capitalistic, over-consumerist way of life we’d had before the virus took over the world, and make billions of dollars in profit in the process. It is a hopeless pursuit. There will probably be no vaccine and no cure for the virus. Even if one is found, soon after, another, stronger pestilence will ravage humankind.

We are positioning ourselves against the whole of existence, claiming entitlement that we are not entitled to claim, and feel deprived when we don’t get what we weren’t supposed to get in the first place.

If we want to cure the coronavirus, we have to do it where it begins. The appearance of the virus is itself a symptom; it is not the illness. The illness is our bad relations with each other. Our relationships with one another are sick, and that sickness manifests in various ways, such as divorce rates, depression rates, substance abuse, obesity, violence, and recently, a pandemic.

We cannot treat the virus as a stand-alone crisis because everything in reality is tied and connected to everything else. We already know that about the rest of nature, and even about our own bodies, but we conveniently exclude our psyches from the rule. We shouldn’t; it is destroying our lives, our livelihoods, and now our entire civilization.

In fact, it makes no sense to think that our ill spiritual state, namely our ill-will toward each other, has no bearing on our bodies. If we can treat depression with antidepressants, or take pills that make us feel friendly, why do we think that a bad disposition will not have a negative impact on our health?

Moreover, since our bodies, minds, and spirits are one system, and since we are a part of all of nature, our ill-spirit negatively affects all of nature, again, because it is all one system. And when all of humanity suffers from ill spirits, the impact on the rest of the world becomes massive.

Wherever you look at nature, it is a balanced and harmonious system. On the mineral, plant, and animal levels, animals and plants feed on one another and thereby preserve the health and balance of the ecosystem. Within our bodies, too, homeostasis is maintained as the body continually generates new and robust cells and kills old and weak ones. This keeps us healthy and strong.

The only part where nature does not run on autopilot is our psyche. Our spirits are free to choose whether to be united as one system or run solo. So far, we have chosen to go solo, but we see the costs. We are positioning ourselves against the whole of existence, claiming entitlement that we are not entitled to claim, and feel deprived when we don’t get what we weren’t supposed to get in the first place.

If we want to be healthy, strong, and happy, we first need to learn how all of nature works. We need to recognize that the whole system is integral and interconnected, that all parts support one another in an interdependent network of pieces that promote each other’s well-being. The apparent competition in nature is only a misinterpretation of our self-centered mindsets. Species support one another and strengthen one another since they are all interdependent.

Once we know that, we will understand how we can become similar to nature, and therefore truly happy. We will realize that people who hold different views are not our foes, since without them we wouldn’t be able to define ourselves, our views, our thoughts. It is exactly the conflicts and contradictions in our lives, the things we disagree with, that make us think, grow, articulate, and become more complete human beings.

In the end, the human ecosystem should resemble the rest of nature, create a network of different and opposing views, colors, races, religions, nations, personalities, and cultures that together make a beautiful whole, as diverse as nature itself. We all love and appreciate nature’s diversity, so why not love and appreciate our own? Just as we love nature because all the pieces in it make a beautiful whole, we should learn to love humanity because all the different pieces of us make a beautiful whole, of which we are all equally important parts.

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Question: We can find many examples in the world today of people sacrificing themselves to save others. Doctors are saving patients by working around the clock, sometimes without any protection. Many celebrities are declaring to the whole world that they are ready to sacrifice themselves and their capital.

You also say that we need to change and sacrifice our egoism. Is this freewill?

Answer: No, it’s a little different. Although I welcome such motives, this is not the corrected state of humanity.

The point is that humanity needs to correct its attitude toward each other, its attitude to egoism and altruism, not in a limited capacity like in caring for the sick or something else.

There are people who, out of their selfishness, are ready to kill others so that they do not destroy, for example, green spaces or pollute the environment. We see these movements for green ecology and clean air are absolutely selfish. And so much so that people with ardent egoism are ready to harm the life of another person who, unlike them, has a different understanding of what is good.

Question: Do you think that helping in extreme situations such as a pandemic or economic crisis is natural and that this is not called correction?

Answer: Yes. We just need to realize how much our nature pushes us against each other and to correctly characterize human actions.

If it is difficult for me to look at a sick patient so I give money for his treatment, then in the end, I do not cure him but only alleviate my sorrow for him.

In Kabbalah, we are talking about a fundamental correction of our nature.

Question: That is, I should do good things not because I empathize with the sick, but beyond that. Even if I have nothing to do with them, I still have to do it for some higher purpose?

Answer: That’s exactly the reason.
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From KabTV’s “The Post-Coronavirus Era” 4/30/20

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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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Question: What is the evil eye? What is the mechanism of its influence? How does one counteract it?

Answer: The evil eye is the power of thought. Each of us has internal forces, and when we think badly about someone, as a result, a lot of bad thoughts about him have their effect on him. This is the impact of one person on another or even the whole society.

There are people who can look at someone and let’s say their temperature rises. I have seen such phenomena many times.

We influence each other because we are all in the same system, in the same desire. All of humanity is considered one. Therefore, our impact on one another is not so improbable. Being in the unified system already indicates the possibility of such influence.

Question: So it’s not something supernatural?

Answer: No, it’s just that people don’t have such special abilities right now. Once they were more pronounced, but people did not use them.

Question: Can you develop them within yourself?

Answer: Sure. But for this you need to go into reconnaissance, into certain circles. 🙂

Question: Can you resist the evil eye?

Answer: That is also taught there.
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From KabTV’s “The Post-Coronavirus Era” 5/7/20

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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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