For the people of our world, the rule “love your neighbor as yourself” is so disgusting, boring, already tried, and does not attract anyone.

In reality, love your neighbor implies a state where we unite together like small dots, small elements of the universe, into one single mosaic, into one single picture, gathered into one system, and we start working with each other in it like cells in a common body.

And then, from a dead organism that we are today in separation, we turn into a living organism.

If you cut off pieces from the body and divide it into elements, it dies. Therefore, you must collect them. To the extent that you try to do this, the Creator breathes into you the light of life, the spirit of life.

It turns out that we need to yearn for each other, for a universal mutual connection. We will thus restore our common body, our common soul, by connecting with each other.

Question: How do we yearn for this?

Answer: On one hand, we are driven by evil, emptiness, disappointment in this existence, fear of what will happen tomorrow, and disappointment with the kind of world we leave to our children.

On the other hand, from this emptiness inside, an aspiration for something appears. A person begins to feel: “I have been pulled toward something! There is a vector in me that works that looks for something.”

This was not the case before. This is happening right now, in our generation. Together with emptiness, with general depression, there is also a quest, an aspiration for something. A person begins to realize that all this is not as it is and that there is something, somewhere, waiting especially for me.

Our current state has been specially adjusted for us so that we can get out of it and move on. Therefore, our generation is a transition.
[281998]
From KabTV’s “The Power of The Book of Zohar” #13

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Comment: “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why,” said Mark Twain.

My Response: In general, yes. The first day is natural or else there is no one to turn to. And the second day is when a man is born out of you.

Question: And when did you understand why?

Answer: I think it was several years after I came to Rabash. It is not simple.

If we are talking about a conscious understanding of what man was created for—not about what it seems to him, but a clearly defined goal—then this, of course, will take many years. Five or six years.

Question: After you came to your teacher?

Answer: Yes.

Question: What did you understand?

Answer: I understood that I must realize myself absolutely and completely because He is waiting for it.

Question: And did you then realize what would happen today: so many students, so many spectators will listen and turn to you?

Answer: I do not see it now because I do not take it into account. Even if the whole world now gathers, turns on a means of communication and hears our lesson. What else can I tell them beside this? Only the method of bringing people closer to the Creator.

Comment: And it does not even occur to you: “Look, the whole world is listening, I have been working for this for so long! And my teacher wanted it so much!”

Answer: No.

Question: What is your attitude toward those people who listen to you, see you, and want to hear you?

Answer: I wish for their success so much, it makes my heart hurt.  This is important. And to each I would give up my place if it is closer to the Creator than his. Absolutely! I would just give everything right away!

Question: When there were 10 of us, did you feel that so many people would come?

Answer: Yes. But then we set ourselves this task and wanted it to be so.

Today I have no desire for there to be a lot. Today I have a desire more for the quality of our communication. So that all the students would connect with each other into one system and the Creator would begin to reveal more and more in it. And the rest will catch up. Today the work is on the quality of the central group.
[282329]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 4/8/21

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The lower the soul of a person,
the higher the nose  [turns] up.
He stretches his nose to where the soul has not grown.
(Omar Khayyam)

We see this in real life even with a naked eye. And everyone can see that it is so.

Comment: A person displays himself, he becomes a great politician, a great businessman.

My Response: He has to hold himself up somehow. If others do not hold him by appreciating him and respecting him, then he raises himself in this way. Look at all the politicians.

Question: That is, “he stretches his nose to where the soul has not grown”? Where does the soul stretch, rise up to what?

Answer: The soul stretches to the Creator, that is if a person understands this. And if his soul does not grow to such a state, then at least he wants to raise himself to such a level that he is respected.

Question: Does he put pressure on others?

Answer: Of course!

Question: And if the soul grows, then it raises him?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Why is man given individuality? After all, he is still growing, he wants to grow!

Answer: Everyone is very individual. To the extent that a person wants to realize himself in closeness with the Creator, in likeness to the Creator, and he shows himself more through these actions, all his correct properties become prominent.

Although it seems that if he wants to become like the Creator, he nullifies himself. No!

Question: Why is man given talents, individuality?

Answer: Only for this. So that he becomes like the Creator in each of its special properties.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 11/2/20

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Comment: An article “America decriminalizes heroin: the war on drugs is lost” in EADaily.com contends that the 1971 war on drugs declared by Nixon seems to be completely lost.

In America, marijuana is legal almost everywhere. And in the state of Oregon, a law partially allowing the use of hard drugs has been passed. They claim the advantages of this are huge.  “In FY2020, marijuana tax revenues to the Oregon treasury increased 30% from the previous year to $ 133 million, up 545% from the 2016 cannabis tax collection.

Interestingly, opinions are divided. Opponents claim that the health threat to young Americans cannot be justified by any commercial gain.

“But in response to all the arguments presented, the advocates of legalization say that they regret the stupid choice that compatriots can make in favor of drugs, but free will and the goals of profitability should prevail in this matter.”

My Response: Humanity has had a craving for drugs throughout its history. Humanity needs to invent something that would make its existence easier. Otherwise, it is hard to live.

With our brains today we have developed to the extent that everyone begins to ask themselves: “Why is all of this? And what is all this for? Do I need it?”

This is called the last generation. The time has come when such questions begin to be raised, they are our inner desires and people demand an answer to them.

Question: And when there is no answer, then a person wants to forget himself?

Answer: Then you have to do something. Drunkenness and, of course, drug abuse will rise.

Question: Is there any way out of this? Will prohibition help?

Answer: No bans will help. If it comes from man’s needs, he will drink, smoke, sniff, and swallow anything anyway.

Question: Even if there are laws to imprison, to execute?

Answer: They will bypass these laws. As a result, these laws will be canceled because you cannot jail everyone. Everyone you put in jail costs the state a lot of money.

Question: So where are we going and where should we end up? What would you say about this?

Answer: I would say that people should be educated and given the opportunity to reveal the meaning of life, the meaning of existence. Then a person will not have to run away anywhere. He will, on the contrary, strive to replace running away from life with striving for a different life.

Question: That is, then he will even be afraid to escape into something that will divert him or put him to sleep?

Answer: Of course, because he is losing eternity.

We are moving toward the fact that people are starting to ask themselves about this and they will eventually move from such questions to reality.

A person will fully reveal this question: “What do I live for?” And one will be able to find the answer to it in this life, in this world.

Proceeding from this life, from this world, he will find the answer. He will reveal the real, true world that stands behind our world, that controls it and fills it. And then he will somehow connect with the system that controls our world. He will begin to understand that everything that he is experiencing now leads him to a truly high goal. He will then understand why he was led in this way, what he was led to, and he will justify it.

Question: What will fill a person? How will he feel it?

Answer: His desire is to find meaning in his existence. And he will discover this meaning. And then he will understand why this desire has been ripening in him for so long, for so many years, maybe hundreds of years, gradually, step by step in the cycles of life, and he will justify all this.

Question: Will he feel that he is standing in front of absolute warmth, love, and kindness?

Answer: Yes. And truth. There is something we receive in the mind and something we receive in the heart. Therefore, there must be a filling in both of them.

We live in a time when we can approach this.

Question: But do you have the acute feeling that we are approaching this?

Answer: Absolutely! But I would like it to happen as soon as possible.
[279963]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 2/22/21

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The coronavirus pandemic has made such drastic changes in the world that it has thrown it in disarray. And we will see how governments, leaders, and all kinds of organizations cannot find ways to work with people. The need for the science of Kabbalah, for the method of connection between us and the Creator, will be revealed more and more.

Divinity is only those souls, those desires, directed to the Creator. The souls who have awakened to the Creator are called Divinity, and the Creator begins to reveal Himself in them according to their efforts to awaken themselves to connection with Him.

In the end, everyone must join the common soul, each according to his own level. Do not think that souls that awaken later are smaller. On the contrary, souls awaken starting from the lightest to increasingly heavier ones. The light corrections are done first, which then help us make larger and more complex corrections.

Therefore, those souls who must rise after us are heavier and more important. And the souls that are awakening now, which are called Israel, i.e., those who strive “straight to the Creator” are not so difficult to correct compared to those who will come after them.

Generation after generation the desire grows, and the ability to be smarter and more inventive, grows accordingly. We will see how after the pandemic, the Creator will perform other exercises with us to awaken the understanding of how to get closer to the spiritual. He will act on our entire generation so that everyone feels the need to approach Him and connect with Him.

The whole world will feel that the main thing in life is not the coronavirus, not material success, and not the illusory values with which we filled our lives. The Creator will begin to shine a little deeper into the thickness of our material and will illuminate our inner darkness. We will discover such desires in ourselves that we did not even know about.

Blow by blow, people will gradually begin to discover how much they lack the meaning of life.
[281949]
From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/2/21, “Chasing the Shechina“

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The Two Forces of Nature, Male and Female

Our whole world, the still, vegetative, animate, and mainly the human levels are one big ego.

All the elements of nature and their unification into living organisms, whether on the levels of the still, vegetative, or the animal level, operate according to one principle only: to swallow as much of what is beneficial for them and to extract as much of what is not necessary for them, what is not right or good for them. This is the pure ego, the plan of creation, of nature, which is inside us and manages us.

Can we manage it? Actually, we cannot. In our state we are puppets on a string and we are operated on. In each of us the egoistic program by which we operate is seemingly imprinted. We think that we operate independently, but in fact it is the force of nature that manages us. It turns us from left to right and from right to left, wherever it feels like and whichever way it feels like, according to different vectors, and we execute this plan without even imagining that we are controlled by it. It is actually in this egoistic nature that we exist as elements that are totally managed by it.

When the question of “what am I living for” emerges in a person, it is seemingly an error in the program of nature, some malfunction. How can it be that a person who is absolutely managed suddenly asks: “What am I? What am I living for and how?”

But it is nature itself that awakens us and summons this question in us, and which gives us some kind of freewill so that we will begin to ask ourselves about our fate.

It is not a simple matter. Such questions emerge in very few people, but in the process of our egoistic development more and more people ask this question.

Basically, this is the only question that nature awakens in us so that we will be interested in the plan of our actions and of our development, of our life: “What for? Why? What are we doing?

Do we do everything instinctively or can we somehow change our actions or at least assess them in a critical manner as to where such thoughts stem from?”

From that moment onward a person becomes a human being. Later he advances toward understanding that he is managed, that he doesn’t want that, and that the guidance that nature has designated for him is bad and harmful and that he needs to do something about it. Generally speaking, a person’s spiritual development actually begins from the question: “What is the meaning of my life? What am I living for?”

It seems like a depressing question, but it is in fact crucial, since it is actually from this state that a person begins to explore: “What manages me? For what purpose? Do I agree with it or not? I want to understand the source of my control. I don’t agree with it and I want to act differently, to live differently. I want to ascend above the source of my control, above that force. I don’t agree with being enslaved to it.”

When a person begins to explore himself, he reaches the right books. Generally speaking, it is the wisdom of Kabbalah. Sometimes he may find psychology books first, but if he continues to dig he certainly arrives at the wisdom of Kabbalah.

Then it becomes clear to him that he is controlled by a higher force, nature or the Creator, which is actually the same thing. He wants to find out where the Creator is leading him, what he lives for, and how this force manages him.

A person begins to understand that he is managed seemingly by two forces, the positive force and the negative force, while he is actually neutral. Even his typical egoism, the desire to enjoy, is not his, but guidance from above.

This means that he is a totally neutral body, which is influenced by an egoistic force, on the one hand, which forces him to act in a certain way, and on the other hand, there can also be an altruistic force that is constantly in contrast to it.

In general, a person begins to explore himself.

The negative egoistic force that exists in every object in nature, including man, the force that absorbs, sucks  everything into itself, consumes, and receives, we call the female force. While the positive force that bestows, gives, and fills is called the male force, the Creator. So it turns out that nature divides us into two parts.

But this has nothing to do with men and women in our world. Here we are totally identical in the egoistic sense. In fact, only the negative force operates in us and the positive force is necessary only in order to develop the negative force in us even more.

Question: Is the question about the meaning of life which we arrive at, the female question in us?

Answer: No. when the emptiness a person feels reaches a certain point and he understands that his whole life is totally useless, that it has no value and is merely different mechanical actions on his part, he already begins to ask: “Why and what for?” Although this action stems from the negative force, it already belongs to the positive force.

A particle of the Creator begins to speak in a person, a particle of the attribute of bestowal, and in it there is already the resistance between the two forces.
[247105]
From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 3/3/19

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Question: Do you think that today many people are asking the question about the meaning of life?

Answer: Yes. Even within our organization, there are already millions of them from all over the world.

On the other hand, we can see from the level of depression, divorce, terrorism, and drug addiction that this is an escape from life, and only because a person cannot find an answer to the question about the meaning of life.

Drugs and depression are the main scourges in the world. And there is nothing we can do about it. In Northern Europe, suicide accounts for a huge percentage of all incidents.

Comment: It turns out that the more developed people are, the more prone they are to depression.

My Response: They have everything, and they have nothing. This is what our development and our relations should bring us to.

It would seem that there is nothing wrong with us. We have everything: refrigerators, washing machines, television, radio, Internet, computers, dishwashers, mixers, anything you want. What else does a person need? You can rest, and work less. Why do you have to work so hard? There are many unemployed people, right? We can divide the working day between several people and rest the second half of the day. But what will a person do then? He cannot fulfill himself, he will feel completely lost.

I remember when I was at school, the teacher told us how happy we would be when we grow up: “Today people work eight hours. You will work for four hours, and the rest of the time you will rest, play sports, walk in the forest or by the river, and so on.”

I grew up, and it turned out that it is better not to walk in the forest or by the river because they are full of nitrates and acids. Even at the sea, I swim only in certain places, and then after that, I need to wash thoroughly. And we are now working not for eight, but for twelve hours. People come home only to get enough sleep and run to work again.

So what have we come to? Where is this freedom of a person?

Comment: Today a person can no longer even be with himself without being busy with something.

My Response: Yes, he is afraid to be alone with himself. This is why he keeps himself busy with work.

Question: Do you think that the desire of a woman to make a career is also an escape from her nature, from herself?

Answer: This is an attempt to somehow fulfill what her family, husband, and children cannot give her. No more than that. In fact, a woman does not need a career, after all, it is all artificial, unnatural, and even harmful. We will see the proof for that later. The same is true about a man.

A person should not work for twelve hours a day, or for ten, or for eight. We should work not on the basis of how much I can earn in a day, but on the basis of how much I need in order to exist normally.

We should not violate nature, suck it dry, pollute it, because in the end, we find ourselves in a world where we now have to work in order to somehow correct our mistakes.
[280774]
From KabTV’s “Close-Up. Common Law Marriage” 8/11/09

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My new article on Linkedin “Who Comes to Study”

People often ask me who is the most likely person to become a Kabbalah student, and why some people take interest in it, and some do not, or even reject it. Well, the first thing I mention are the known words of Baal HaSulam, the author of the Sulam [Ladder] commentary on The Book of Zohar, who wrote that Kabbalah is for anyone who asks about the meaning of life. However, many people ask about the meaning of life but don’t end up studying Kabbalah, so while most everyone who comes to study Kabbalah had frequently asked about the meaning of life, not everyone who has asked about the meaning of life end up studying Kabbalah.

Especially today, when the ego is destroying every part of human society, and every person individually, it is especially important to know how we can rein the ego and use it constructively.

Covid has increased the level of people’s anxiety dramatically. Many of them even started to ask about the meaning of life. However, this in itself is not enough to become a serious Kabbalah student. People have gone through all kinds of states during the pandemic: They’ve suffered blows for no apparent reason, felt powerless to deal with them, were forced into an endless struggle for survival, and often had very little support from friends, family, or authorities. Such circumstances can easily drive a person to ask why they deserve the punishment, what is wrong with this life, and how come others are happy and they are not.

However, people entangled in the midst of a crisis are (usually) not the best candidates for studying Kabbalah. Kabbalah is a long process that requires commitment on the part of the student. Therefore, I would say that the best candidates for Kabbalah studies are those who are not in the midst of a crisis, but have experienced one (or more) before, and have since stabilized their lives. Nevertheless, the question about life’s meaning does not let up. When this happens, it is a sign that the question is deep enough to make a person a serious and committed student.

When a person begins to study Kabbalah, new horizons open up. The expanded perception of reality transcends the familiar norms and boundaries that the student was accustomed to or grew up on. This takes away much of the burdens of life, and many “guilt trips” that we all have are lifted because the realization of how things work reveals that we are all ego-driven and therefore cannot really help being selfish.

At the same time, it does not make a student reckless because the wisdom of Kabbalah also teaches how we can become masters of our egos. We do not destroy it or suppress it, but rather harness its powers for positive purposes and make it work for the common good. This is why Kabbalah students are on the one hand very individual, but on the other hand are highly committed to society and collaborate enthusiastically for everyone’s success.

Especially today, when the ego is destroying every part of human society, and every person individually, it is especially important to know how we can rein the ego and use it constructively. Therefore, those who are ready and willing to learn Kabbalah seriously have much to gain from their studies, and society will gain from their learning even more than they themselves will gain.
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Question: Four sons are mentioned In the Passover story: one loves to ask questions, the other is a villain, the third is naive, a simpleton, and so on. What do they represent in us, in society?

Answer: They exist in every person. When a person begins to search for his spiritual path, these four sons appear in him: one is smart, one is stupid. But the most important is the one who does not know how to ask questions.

Everyone else has some questions from this world, they can formulate them, but this one cannot say anything. He wants something, but he does not know what exactly. And so he is bursting with a question with no answer. It is about him that it is said: “And the one who does not know how to ask, to him you shall open.” Open what? It does not say. It says: “To him you shall open.”

Question: Reveal what?

Answer: If there is a question, then it is possible to talk.

Question: What would you wish for the whole nation and all people in general?

Answer: Revelation of this question. First, to ask it beautifully, correctly, so that it hurts, so that we really want to get out of our nature that intoxicates us during our short and unhappy life.

And so that with the help of this inner quality—that we want something but what exactly we cannot say—to get an answer to it and reveal it. The answer did not come, but the path opened. So it is said: “to him you shall open.” Not answer it—open it.

Question: And what will he realize?

Answer: This is only if you ask the right question. When it fully bursts from within, then the same pressure from within will reveal the way.

Question: And this will be the beginning of the exodus from Egypt?

Answer: Yes. This is the real way out of Egypt. Therefore, the Passover story speaks precisely about the one who cannot even ask.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 4/12/19

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “In six words, what is the meaning of life?“

To attain the meaning of life.

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