In the News (cursorinfo.co.il): “On April 12^th, the World Health Organization released a report on the number of people in the world suffering from depression. According to the report, one in ten is depressed one way or another. …

“Even today in the United States, depression is the second ‘most common’ reason given for hospitalization, in Sweden – the first.

“It is projected that by 2020 depression will be the number one killer. WHO notes that today 45 to 60% of all suicides in the world make depressed patients.”

My Comment: We are a desire for pleasure. Moreover, this desire, egoism, is constantly growing within us. It compels us to advance and pressures us through dissatisfaction. In our time it is becoming more and more difficult to find enjoyment. So depression and dissatisfaction continue to grow.

In the future, pleasure will disappear and we will be unable to fulfill ourselves with anything. Then there will be the recognition that we need to change our nature: enjoyment through bestowal rather than reception. The wisdom of Kabbalah is designed for this.
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Question: An unprecedented medical case was recorded in Poland. A woman who had brain cancer died during the 17^th week of her pregnancy. Her brain ceased to function, but her heart kept on beating.

The doctors did not dare perform a Caesarian section because they feared the embryo wouldn’t survive outside of the mother’s body. They decided to support the mother’s internal organs so that the heart would continue beating, and she remained alive. And the child was born.

The child’s father was by the mother’s side the entire time and read fairy tales to his unborn child.

Answer: This is a very touching story with a special attitude toward life. The father probably really wanted a child from this woman, and that affected the outcome because the developing embryo feels how his parents care for him and convey to him everything that they can. Such powers strongly influence the embryo’s development.

The doctors also acted in a very humane way because a fetus at 17 weeks of development in the womb is already considered a human, and therefore must be saved.

They used quite an unusual method to keep the mother’s body alive for the sake of the child, but we can assume that if they could have asked the mother, she would have agreed because the maternal instinct makes a mother do everything for the sake of her child.

I don’t know if she had consented to that, but judging by the father’s behavior, it seems that the doctors did the correct humane thing. Let’s hope that the child will be raised accordingly and will grow up to be a special, good-hearted person who will be a benefit to society.
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From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 4/21/16

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In the News (Science Daily): “An international team of researchers led by the University of Granada (UGR) has demonstrated, for the first time, that depression is more than a mental disorder: it causes important alterations of the oxidative stress, so it should be considered a systemic disease, since it affects the whole organism.

“The results of this work could explain the significant association that depression has with cardiovascular diseases and cancer, and why people suffering from depression die younger. At the same time, this research may help finding new therapeutic targets for the prevention and treatment of depression.”

My Comment: Of course, the entire body is affected because the body, as well as the whole of creation, is a complete system, ten Sefirot, according to the general rule, “There is no partial in spirituality.”

The more that research of this type will become known to us, perhaps people will understand more rapidly that depression is clear sign of the demand by the body to attain fulfillment of the desire for pleasure in any way. In our day, fulfillment of the desire for pleasure is possible only through discovering the meaning of life. This is possible only by discovering our next level of development, which is the revelation of the upper world with the help of the wisdom of Kabbalah.
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New Life #592 – The Vegan Revolution
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Nitzah Mazoz

Summary

When we see something is growing stronger, it is worthwhile checking who is interested in its success, who is promoting it. And now food is being made into an interesting ritual. Once a kitchen was two meters, today it is the size of a living room.

There is a drastic difference between the meat that is sold to us and the meat of an animal that grows naturally. Today food is altogether processed, and in the future they will print food with three-dimensional printers. Today vegetables may not be healthier than meat due to all the material added to the soil.

Every species exists for the species above it. The still is for the vegetative, the vegetative for the animate, and the animate for the human. How does one use the animate, vegetative, and still correctly? Laws were given to us. That is how a person sanctifies them.

It is not good to fight and prove to others the justification for veganism. Let everyone eat the food that is good for him. We are found within nature; it is a closed system. Any change in our habits has an influence on the rest of creation.

In nature, every species uses the species that is below it. If we stop doing this, we will insert a distortion into all of nature. This will cause a distortion of the laws of physics and chemistry, climate change, and various natural outbreaks.

The highest level in nature is the Divine. A person who ascends to it, elevates everything that he ate with him. Therefore one must not pressure others to become vegans or vegetarians. Whoever this is good for, to your good health!
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From KabTV’s “New Life #592 – The Vegan Revolution,” 7/2/15

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Comment: Scientists from Oxford University have calculated the benefit that would come from the transition of humanity to vegetarianism. According to their model, if the population of the world were to agree to switch to vegetarianism, close to 8 million people would be saved. In addition, they will preserve nature, the trees, forests, and more.

Answer: Clearly this is a fantasy. I have travelled throughout the world and everywhere people eat everything: seafood, snakes, lizards, frogs, dogs, sheep, cattle, birds, and more.

It is impossible to stop humanity from eating meat. This is not merely an ancient habit or custom, a person is born this way, he exists in this state. Likewise, it is still necessary to prove that a person can exist without eating meat; in my opinion nothing will replace meat.

A human being is an animal. He is not an animal that eats grass, but an animal that eats everything, and there is nothing bad or good about that. That is how he is directed by nature and this is not considered to be destructive.

If we remove the need for animals from our diet, we are forced not to eat their products, like eggs, fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. We would not manufacture leather products from animals and things like that.

So then we would move to nutrition from plants. And on what basis we can absorb it, perhaps a plant has feelings?! After all, even a stone feels. So we would be compelled to reject even them. So where will we go then? We don’t have enough studies that show that we could survive without the proper consumption of a normal and varied diet coming from nature.

We need to consume everything; the world was created so that the person would use everything found on a lower level. Humans have risen to the top of the pyramid, and it exists entirely for him, for his proper nourishment both physically and spiritually.

The whole world was created with the goal that we would justify this existence and not alter it.
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From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 3/28/16

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Question: Israeli Deputy Minister of Health Jacob Litzman called the people of Israel to cut down on the consumption of fast food and even wanted to ban the McDonald’s fast food chain restaurant. He suggested teaching children to avoid unhealthy food. He emphasized that the goal of the health ministry has changed and that now it will focus on curbing the popularity of fast food.

Answer: The Americans already have realized that they should give up fast food since it is only beneficial for those who produce it.

But people still must grab something on the way and have no idea, for example, what a hot dog is made of, and they don’t really care as long as it fills them up. A person eats a hotdog, drinks a coke, and feels good. The fact that he later must spend his wages on doctors and medications doesn’t matter, he doesn’t see the connection here.

I am for removing all the junk food and sweets, of course. They are merely the product of our latest technologies. If you told a person 150 years ago that you have candies, he would not understand what you are saying. Candies, just like sugar, do not exist in nature. There are, on the other hand, fruits, honey, nuts, and so on.

Question: But the body craves it.

Answer: This is because it is easy for the body to receive an immediate supply of fats and carbohydrates. The body gets used to such foods very quickly and becomes too lazy to get it any other way. This is very harmful, so such foods should be forbidden in children’s institutions and on every street corner. It is better to consume foods like falafel because it is a vegetable product. If you don’t fry it in oil, it is certainly healthy.

Question: Should we ban such foods?

Answer: Of course I would love to keep all of the sweets and junk foods far away from our children. See how the French live. They live longer because everything that they consume is natural. They don’t consume hot dogs and cokes. I believe that we should not adopt the worst there is in humanity. I support the health minister’s proposal.
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From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 4/14/16

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Question: I work in a hospital and I see people suffering everyday and can only help them physically. How do I deal with it internally? Sometimes I cannot detach myself from these sights and think about them for days and days.

Answer: This is very hard of course. I cannot imagine how one can be indifferent when seeing sick people suffer even from a Kabbalistic perspective. At the same time, however, you should understand that the sufferings these people feel are the circumstances that push them to the Creator.

This is not a penance or a payment for anything. If a person relates to the sufferings correctly, which means that he uses them for his spiritual advancement, the sufferings are justified. We have to help people determine as quickly as possible that sufferings are given to us only in order to push us to the revelation of the Creator.
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 2/14/16

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In the News (newsroom.ucla): “After exploring the areas of the brain that fuel our empathetic impulses — and temporarily disabling other regions that oppose those impulses — two UCLA neuroscientists are coming down on the optimistic side of human nature.

“’Our altruism may be more hard-wired than previously thought,’ said Leonardo Christov-Moore, a postdoctoral fellow at UCLA’s Semel Institute of Neuroscience and Human Behavior.

“The findings, reported in two recent studies, also point to a possible way to make people behave in less selfish and more altruistic ways, said senior author Marco Iacoboni, a UCLA psychiatry professor.

“’This is potentially groundbreaking,’ he said.”

My Comment: Baal HaSulam writes that in every generation 10% are born as altruists, and their actions are already determined by this innate quality that is realized by them in various social relationships.
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In the News (sciencedaily.com): “Scientists have discovered how parts of organs grow differently when body size changes.

“…The study entitled, ‘Differential scaling within an insect compound eye,’ reveals how different parts of a single organ in the body can change sizes at different rates. …

“Dr Jeremy Niven, of the University of Sussex said: ‘Scientists have been trying to understand how organs reach the right size in our bodies since the beginning of the last century.

“’Scaling within organs still remains poorly understood — but our results show for the first time that when the size of our bodies change, the different regions and cells within our organs respond in more diverse ways than previously thought.’”

My Comment: According to Kabbalah, every cell in our body has its own mind. The smallest part of the body contains a microcosm. The part and the whole are equal. This is based on the absolutely closed integral connection of all the parts of the universe into one perfect whole. All discoveries are discoveries of the reality with regard to us.
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Research (The Washington Post): “Hell might actually be other people — at least if you’re really smart.

“That’s the implication of fascinating new research published last month in the British Journal of Psychology. Evolutionary psychologists Satoshi Kanazawa of the London School of Economics and Norman Li of Singapore Management University dig in to the question of what makes a life well-lived. While traditionally the domain of priests, philosophers and novelists, in recent years survey researchers, economists, biologists and scientists have been tackling that question. …

“They use what they call ‘the savanna theory of happiness’ to explain two main findings from an analysis of a large national survey (15,000 respondents) of adults aged 18 to 28.

“First, they find that people who live in more densely populated areas tend to report less satisfaction with their life overall. ‘The higher the population density of the immediate environment, the less happy’ the survey respondents said they were. Second, they find that the more social interactions with close friends a person has, the greater their self-reported happiness.

“But there was one big exception. For more intelligent people, these correlations were diminished or even reversed.

“’The effect of population density on life satisfaction was therefore more than twice as large for low-IQ individuals than for high-IQ individuals,’ they found. And ‘more intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently.’

“Let me repeat that last one: When smart people spend more time with their friends, it makes them less happy.”

Question: How is it possible to unite people who have a high IQ?

Answer: People with a high IQ cannot be combined because they are united only in their respective fields and only in their narrow interests.

But a common platform can appear among different people with different levels of IQ, through the knowledge of the possibility of establishing a new level of perception, with the union of a higher purpose—and the rise to the next level of perception of nature and life.
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