Question: Smartphones are squeezing out everything else in a person’s life in the modern world. The University of Würzburg conducted a survey of 1,215 people and obtained some very interesting data.

37% of the respondents said that the smartphone means as much or more to them as friends. 29% value their smartphones as much as their parents. 21% believe that a smartphone is as important to them as a spouse or partner. 17% of the participants acknowledged that their smartphone is much closer to them than people.

Answer: It is obvious that a smartphone is necessary in daily life more than any other device. It protects us from too close contact with other people, and on the other hand, makes contact possible by compensating for the distance to another person.

It is very difficult for people to communicate directly because the ego keeps them apart from each other. So, with great pleasure, they communicate through the smartphone that contains all of the achievements of computer technology.

It will improve in the future and become so friendly to a person that it will replace every possible household device. A smartphone is also a television, radio, and even a device for telephone conversations. With its help, it will be possible to operate a washing machine or a microwave remotely, reserve lunch and dinner at a restaurant, buy tickets for various events, and so forth.

Question: This is understandable, but the questionnaire mentioned parents, friends, and husbands and wives.

Answer: All of these will exist only within the smartphone.

With it, it is possible to talk with parents, show them yourself and their grandchildren; everything is easy and good. This will lead to wider communication between people, and after that, it will be possible to fill it gradually with other, more meaningful content.

Question: Why do you emphasize the importance of physical encounters among students of Kabbalah? Why not make it possible to have smartphone circles?

Answer: First and foremost, the smartphone makes it possible to come in contact with each other from a distance.

This is to say, first, there is distancing between people, and after that, they will create contact remotely. The ego becomes relaxed because the person is distant from others.

Among the students of the wisdom of Kabbalah, it needn’t be that way. On the contrary, the student must be in close contact with others. This is work with the ego, so smartphones won’t help with this.
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From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 6/13/16

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New Life #577 – The Power Of A Kind Word
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Nitzah Mazoz

Summary

All of us know that words have power, so you should take a balanced line, a middle line between critical words and kind words.

The compliment exercise: A person who is complimented feels enormous satisfaction, his soul is filled directly. He feels like a baby whose mother lifts him by her hands and so he opens all lines of communication.

When a person makes an effort to flatter someone else, even artificially, it builds a true appreciation for the other. The person who compliments him, even though it is not true and is artificial, is very moved by the compliment.

Today our entire culture is filled with bad words, everyone makes fun of and embarrasses each other. The phenomenon of shaming on the Internet is rising and rising. To change this requires a revolution in perception. We must learn what our world needs to advance toward .

The wisdom of Kabbalah teaches us that we were created with an egoistic and evil nature so that we would develop a good and loving nature within us by ourselves. If we want a good life, we need to open good ties and relationships between us. We have to stop and say: Enough!

In the development of good relationships with others there are three levels: thought, speech, and action. If you don’t think good thoughts about me but you start to say good words about me, your attitude toward me will be changed.

A working exercise for home or anywhere else: select someone and everyone flatters him. He will get better! Even if you hate someone and begin to talk to him nicely or with kindness, your attitude toward him will change. And the other person, as a result your attitude attitude toward him, will truly change for the better.

More than the power of words, there is the power of thought. Good thoughts are the strongest power in the world. Try to think about people positively. What seems to me as bad about them is because of my ego. A thought like this will cause both him and me to improve because all of us are connected in one internal network.
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From KabTV’s “New Life #577 – The Power Of A Kind Word,” 5/28/15

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New Life #576 – Shaming on the Internet
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Nitzah Mazoz

Summary

A person who has been shamed on the Internet feels that he is in “hell” because our basic force is the ego and so we aspire to feel pride and fear being shamed. A person who has been shamed, feels that he has been erased, buried, and that he has nothing to live for.

Our self, the human being in us is everything for us, everything. If it is erased, we have nothing to live for. What is more, there is an internal spiritual point in us that doesn’t die, a spark of our soul that develops from one generation to the next.

Some people don’t care about anything, while others are very sensitive to the issue of shame and pride, and others’ negative opinions can lead to great emotional stress.

We are like gears in a single system, dependent on each other. Sometimes embarrassing pictures of people are publicized on the net and it hurts the person’s pride to such an extent that the only resort he feels he has is to commit suicide. It doesn’t help to hide in order to protect oneself from shame. Instead a person should ascend to a higher level.

If a person goes into a chicken coop, for example, and all the chickens yell at him, he is not ashamed because he is higher than them. A person who raises himself morally understands that the others are still behaving like small children. The ascent is in spiritual values, in the values of love of others through which one reaches connection to the upper force.

Sometimes a great person is humiliated from above, as has happened to great Kabbalists throughout history, but they realize where this stems from and why the upper force has such an account with them.
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From KabTV’s “New Life #576 – Shaming On the Network,” 5/28/15

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In the News (ria.ru): “Friendship on the Internet may not be strong, because human emotions can not be replaced by symbols, but communication in the Internet has the right to exist as a communication method, according to Russian experts …

“Online friendship, especially when the sides do not know each other personally, is dangerous with its impersonality.

“‘Such a dialogue is always associated with the temptation to substitute real life with a virtual one. The interlocutor is no longer perceived as a living person and becomes a character set. Like in a computer game, we are not afraid to shoot and kill, and on the Internet, we are not afraid to say bad things, bad things that would never be used in a real conversation.’…

“”Friendship – it’s like a family, there is joy, there are sorrows, good and bad temper, quarrels and reconciliation. And when you’re dealing with a person without seeing or knowing him at all, you are not interested in his personal life. I do not think that that on the Internet someone will complain about his partner or job; typically correspondence comes down to “Hi, how are you?.”’

“Meanwhile psychologist Tatiana Popova of the Charitable Foundation “Family and Childhood” is sure socializing with friends on the Internet has a right to exist.

“‘This is a modern form of communication, just like in real life, relationships may be real and relationships on the Internet can be a substitution; in reality there is a certain ratio of these friends and acquaintances, as well and on the Internet…’ – she said.

“Sein said that the desire to have many friends on the social networks is more like a competition. ‘If a person has a lot of friends in the social media, he is popular. This is neither friendship nor even simple communication.’

“According to Alder ,.. ‘We need to clearly understand how many of these people you actually know, how many are ready to help you, and how many of them will help you in a difficult situation,’ – the expert emphasizes.

“Sein said …’Even communicating on the phone is better than the Internet. With verbal communication, when you hear the intonations, it is more intimate contact than correspondence on the Internet. …

“Alder asserts that removing your social media accounts can be a wonderful tool to understand who your real friends are and who are virtual. …

“According to Seynova, the uniqueness of Internet communication is that it provides an opportunity to speak out. ‘But this does not stem from friendship, but the effect of the possibility to be insincere, knowing that they they will never see each other. …’”.

Answer: Humanity is undergoing a period of recognizing the evil in its egoistic nature so that it will be able to hate it and to totally give it up. Our whole social evolution has been only for the sake of our ascent to the next level, to the full mutual connection between all the people, in which the upper world and its plan is felt, which means reaching the level of the Creator.

The development of communication in social media accelerates the process and brings us to the recognition of how vital it is to feel one another directly, without effort, as one body.
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In the News (aeon): “The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence that can flip elections and manipulate everything we say, think and do. …

“For example, it uses short messages that tell us what to do which appear for a moment and we are unconscious of them. …

“Guided by social science, marketers were quickly learning how to play upon people’s insecurities, frailties, unconscious fears, aggressive feelings and sexual desires to alter their thinking, emotions and behaviour without any awareness that they were being manipulated. …

“Relaxing music in supermarkets obligates us to move slowly and buy more products. …

“Most of the meaningless thoughts and feelings are chosen by experts in the areas of marketing, fashion and entertainment. …

“To understand how the new forms of mind control work, we need to start by looking at the search engine – one in particular: the biggest and best of them all, namely Google. The Google search engine is so good and so popular that the company’s name is now a commonly used verb in languages around the world. To ‘Google’ something is to look it up on the Google search engine, and that, in fact, is how most computer users worldwide get most of their information about just about everything these days. They Google it. Google has become the main gateway to virtually all knowledge, mainly because the search engine is so good at giving us exactly the information we are looking for, almost instantly and almost always in the first position of the list it shows us after we launch our search – the list of ‘search results.’

“That ordered list is so good, in fact, that about 50 per cent of our clicks go to the top two items, and more than 90 per cent of our clicks go to the 10 items listed on the first page of results; few people look at other results pages, even though they often number in the thousands, which means they probably contain lots of good information. Google decides which of the billions of web pages it is going to include in our search results, and it also decides how to rank them. How it decides these things is a deep, dark secret – one of the best-kept secrets in the world, like the formula for Coca-Cola.”

My Comment: This is not the only method that is manipulating us. But does it matter? After all, according to Kabbalah we have no freedom except to yearn for each other; see the terms for free will. So we must see how much a person is captive and how through using the wisdom of Kabbalah he will become totally free.
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In the News (BBC): “The ‘wisdom of crowds’ doesn’t always apply – sometimes group-think nudges people to make wrong-headed decisions.

“The decisions people make as a group tend to be more prejudiced and less intelligent than the ones they make individually. ‘When people interact, they end up agreeing, and they make worse decisions,’ he [Daniel Richardson] says. ‘They don’t share information, they share biases. We’re trying to figure out why that is, and how we can make collective decisions better.’

“Richardson’s work on conformity follows a tradition in experimental psychology that goes back more than six decades. In the 1950s, the Harvard psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated that people frequently adopt the view of the majority even when it is obviously wrong, and even when they have to deny their own senses. …

“Group conformity stands in marked contrast to the “wisdom of crowds” effect, whereby aggregating the opinions of large numbers of people gives answers or predictions more accurate than those of any individual. This happens only when members of a crowd make their judgements independently of each other, and it is most effective when a crowd is diverse. In cohesive groups, on the other hand, where members share an identity, the urge for unity overrides all. ..

“’We think of the internet as an information superhighway. It’s not, it’s a bias superhighway. Twitter and Facebook are wonderful ways of sharing information, but it may be that because we’re sharing our prejudices, they’re making us dumber.’”

My Comment: The connection between opinions, which brings capability and not stupidity, is realized only in the connection of the ten principles. It is not the addition of opinions; on the contrary, there is a connection of denial of independent opinions. The members of the group aspire to annul their personal opinions and to unite efforts in creating one desire that is capable of receiving the idea from a higher level of nature.  Only in this manner can we rise about ourselves, and grasp the plan of nature, our goal, and follow it, remaining in a reasonable and comfortable condition.
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Research (from UBC): “A new study by Sauder School of Business Professor Izak Benbasat and his collaborators shows that envy is a key motivator behind Facebook posts and that contributes to a decrease in mental well-being among users.

“Creating a vicious cycle of jealousy and self-importance, the researchers say Facebook leads users to feel their lives are unfulfilling by comparison, and react by creating posts that portray their best selves. …

“Benbasat says the functionality of social networks encourages envy-inducing behaviour, and that’s unlikely to change.”

My Comment: At the heart of human nature is a desire to enjoy fulfillment through: food, sex, family, wealth, honor, and knowledge. Nature (the Creator) wanting to develop creations, awakens selfish internal development (natural) and external, a feeling of envy in them.

As we develop, the importance of external influence increases. So we quickly come to a feeling of emptiness —the lack of fulfillment from our world as a whole and a need to search for content outside of it. Therefore, the social networks are booming.
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New Life #512 – Virtual Life on the Way Toward Unity
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Yael Leshed-Harel

Summary

We are living in a transitional period in which all of our lives are entering the computer. The world of the future will be entirely digital; the new generation wants to experience the world only through the screen.

In the future the Internet will link us so we will feel connected and mutually dependent, as if we were sitting together in one living room. The developmental trend is to bring us to an integral link between everyone, as if we were a single family.

The traditional family unit is crumbling, each one is immersed in his screen. We will yet see that the future conceals within it a different form of connection. We are standing before a fundamental change in our lives. The screens will be part of our body and we will see the world through them. People will build new connections between them; they will learn a new language, the language of connection.
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From KabTV’s “New Life #512 -Virtual Life on the Way Toward Unity” 1/27/15

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From the News (BBC news): “A social networking CEO is subjected to racist attacks on her own website. A cartoonist’s life is trashed by trolls. Women get rape and death threats. There’s a case to be made that online, 2015 was a year of increased hate.

Those of us who watch social media for a living – or who are long-time users of sites like Facebook and Twitter – realize that nastiness has always been a part of life online. But over the course of the past year or so, it seemed to some of us at BBC Trending that the steady background beat of online anger gradually turned into a pounding 24-7 drumbeat of angst, impossible to ignore.

“So we set out to see if levels of hate speech did rise on social media this year. …

“A recent analysis by the think tank Demos found that on average around 480,000 racial slurs are tweeted every month. Compare that figure to just 10,000 three years ago. The researchers admit that the vast majority of those uses won’t amount to hate crimes. But the numbers are still significant.

“‘A 4800 per cent increase is astonishing – far greater than the general increase in tweets over that time,’ wrote Demos research director Carl Miller. …

“Other experts agree – something has definitely happened over the past year.

“‘2015 saw a greater normalisation of hate speech in society than in previous years,’ says Andre Oboler, chief executive of the Australia-based Online Hate Prevention Institute. ‘Where previously a person might make a vague negative allusion to race, religion, gender or sexuality, by the end of 2015 the comments on social media were blatant and overt.’ …

“Oboler warns that young people will be turned off from social networks if abuse continues to increase. …”

My Comment: There is no doubt the Internet will rise above the period of bullying and will throw the bullies out. But this could take more than a decade naturally because its hosted merchants sell sensationalism and hatred.

The salvation will come from another side, not from the individual and society, but from the side of nature that develops the ego within us, and the new ego will prevail over new middle-class hatred, so that arrogant and hateful reactions will stop being interesting, and all these scoops will disappear by themselves, meaning they won’t have a buyer.
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Question: We have gotten so used to living with the Internet, and it has only been around for a total of 25 years. It was created in 1990, designed for the employees of the secret European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), and then it began to spread throughout the world.

Why did it develop so rapidly and how has this already encompassed the whole world?

Answer: First, this is a very convenient communications system between people that doesn’t obligate anyone to anything; this is the most important thing: to nobody and for nothing!

Second is the speed. The moment I press a button and send you a letter, you receive it and can respond immediately. I remember when I corresponded with my parents in Canada, it was a problem to write a letter, wait for an answer, and so forth. But now this  just takes a few minutes.

In addition, the Internet is with both audio and video, an illusion of direct communication, while you and I are at two ends of the Earth we see each other, talk, we only don’t smell each other. All forms of communication between us already exist; we send each other all kinds of contracts, lectures, decrees, orders, photographs, films, anything possible.

Today we cannot get along without this means of communication. Our world is always a reflection of the system of relationships that manifests in people, and at present we have achieved an integral, connected world.

Question: Does this mean that an inner demand has appeared in us?

Answer: Certainly! Necessarily! This is an inner demand of a person! This is necessary and imperative for us.

The Internet was established to show people that they have a means for direct communication with everyone, but they don’t know how to communicate correctly. This is the biggest problem, and the Internet reveals it. Look at what it is filled with and what it does.

It externally reveals all of the dirt of the inner states of a person so we can see who we are! We gradually accumulate this “garbage” and sometimes we look at it, are shocked, and decide that it is necessary to do something about it; it is necessary to clean our “stables.”
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From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 12/23/15

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