At some point in one’s life, a person begins to feel it as small, insignificant, and temporary that brings nothing to him and others. Indeed, what is in it apart from ordinary individuals?

What does he leave to his children and grandchildren, and what do they leave? Nothing! Everything is aimless—stupidity! We play games in this life like kids who constantly compete with each other. But basically it is all some kind of a game of nature that seemingly mocks us.

A person suddenly begins to feel that he needs to unravel this mystery of nature. It can’t be that nature created everything in vain: a cluster of stars, large galaxies and us—so small on this Earth! We feel as if we are on a small boat in an ocean of darkness. How do we understand what’s going on? I want to know! I want to control my own destiny!

When a person has this question, he begins to search, and gradually comes to Kabbalah.

In principle, it may take a few lives until he reaches the correct methodology through his developed desire: how to unveil the meaning of existence, its essence, and its mystery.

Kabbalah answers this very simply. Do you want to open your eyes? It isn’t difficult. The eyes should be directed outward and not inward. When you really open them, you won’t see the world you see in front of you now, because you see it within yourself! It is in your mind!

In order to open your eyes to the real world that exists outside of you, you need a special external influence—the Upper Light. You have to fight with yourself to stop looking inward seeing only yourself and all the rest through yourself.

Ahead is darkness, the crossing of the Red Sea, but you gradually will get out of the old vision of the world and with inner sight, will start looking outward, outside of yourself. At the same time, your physical body remains with you, but it will become completely extrinsic because you already exist in a new vision, in a new comprehension of the world, and there everything is different—other forces, and other objects.

Now you are not within your “box” that constantly deceives you and shows you illusory images, but you see forces and universes.
The transition from the bourgeois, ordinary state to the state of disclosing the eternal, perfect world, the huge system above the stars, above everything you observe now is called “coming to Hanukkah.”

This first step from the material you to the spiritual you is called a step toward the battle with your inner egoistic haters who constantly shoving on you more and more of the new pictures, annoy you, and do with you anything they want.

But if you win this fight, you come to a state of Hanukkah that is an intermediate state in the spiritual work, as a stopover on the path, a break, a short vacation.

Then comes the next stage of development, the next span from Hanukkah to Purim, which is an attainment of the upper world, its real revelation, when you take possession of it and begin to clearly use, manage, and own it.

The complete attainment of the upper world is Purim, that is not just a stopover like Hanukkah, but the final station—a great revelation of the entire universe to a person, where he gets all the answers, attainments, eternal, perfect conditions.

Thus, Hanukkah is the first and only stop on the road halfway to perfection, and it is very important. We celebrate it as a completely spiritual stop, because it is a complete separation from the previous egoistic state, but not yet an approach to the spiritual state. This is why it is so airy, suspended, like in a child, when you still do not possess the world, in which you appeared.
[199439]
From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 12/19/16

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Question: How can we tell if a person has a question about the meaning of life?

Answer: A person has to answer this question: “Can I live without looking for the meaning of life or not?” If he can replace this question with some kind of hobby and not think about it anymore, it means that he doesn’t have this desire yet, although nature pushes us toward it.

We see what is happening in the world, so we are nearing a point when masses of people will despair from this world and finding fulfillment in it and will eventually reach needing to discover the plan of creation.
[198289]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 9/18/16

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In the News (Psychology Today): “Getting what we want brings us happiness, right? Wrong! We believe this and go in search of happiness as if it were something that could be ‘found’ or ‘obtained’ but it is actually something that we can and do; manufacture internally. 

“Dan Gilbert, a Harvard psychologist has run a series of workshops which explore the idea that whatever happens to us, we have the ability to synthesize (i.e. manufacture) happiness; it is not something we ‘find.’ …

“We are all able to manufacture our own happiness, to some extent and if we obsess too much about whether or not we are happy we may miss out on the experiences of living and relating to others that are likely to bring us pleasure and contentment. Happiness is not an end-goal, rather it is a by-product of a well-lived life where we love and connect to others.  So, instead of looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, start enjoying the rainbow instead.” 

My Comment: This is incorrect; this is purely Harvard University psychology. The fact is that happiness is in the effort, when people are already starting to feel the following excellent state.

For example, a person is going to get married in a month: He has a lovely fiancé; everything is wonderful; they are not only dreaming about getting married, but are implementing their plans and preparing for the festive day. Is the month before the wedding any less pleasant than the month after the wedding? No. The expectation of happiness is even greater because it is unlimited. After all, when a person expects happiness, it gives the person a huge frame, and when I receive it, the frame is sharply narrowed.

The expectation of happiness depends only on us, and only we dictate the scope of future happiness! It can inflate, expand, and be enjoyed all the time, and thus a person’s state can be limitless. So it is possible to create endless happiness and live within it.

But when I get it, it enters into a box and I begin to feel it within me. What was outside (Makif – surrounding) me, becomes internal (Pnimi). I limit it by myself within my emotions and in this way I distort it.

In my senses it is discovered a bit more here and a bit less there; there is separation, detachment, and so forth and this leads to its end. Happiness exists in movement toward what is desired.
[196781]
From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 10/31/16

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Question: What is the most powerful fulfillment that you can offer to a person instead of spending time shopping?

Answer: First of all it is necessary to understand that the purpose of life is not in filling the wardrobe with dresses and shoes and the house with furniture. It gives us pleasure only because we are accustomed to it.

Today people prefer other types of entertainment: traveling and visiting new places. Tourism today is the most developed industry in the world. People want to understand, feel, and get acquainted with other countries and other people. This already is some kind of advancement and not such a primitive life like running from home to work, from work to the store and back home.

Gradually some distancing from the material world happens. Today, while traveling around the world, people pay less attention to the clothes. Everyone dresses the way it is comfortable and enjoyable for him. Externality fades to the background because we are looking for more internal fulfillment.

We live in the era of mobile phones, computers, various gadgets that create unusual images and sounds for us. However, I think that to the extent that humanity will sink into depression and seek new fillings, comes the next step: the desire not to buy material things, but to acquire the meaning of life. A person will feel that this is the commodity that belongs to eternity and gives eternal fulfillment.

Today we try to rise above the material world with the help of 3-D glasses that take us to a virtual reality. Humanity still materializes spirituality, but in the end, a person will be able to rise above the boundaries of life. Humanity aspires exactly to this, and we are right on the threshold of this ascent.

Question: What does the ascent above the boundaries of life mean?

Answer: It means that I want to receive pleasure from knowing and seeing the fact that I rose above life and death. I don’t want to feel limited.

Question: When people wander through the malls, they feel very lonely. There are crowds around you, but you feel cold and rejected. And how will a person feel in the less material reality?

Answer: There we will be required to get acquainted with each other and to connect. After all, if we want to rise above our life and attain our eternal purpose, then this is only possible through our connection when we rise above egoism and achieve the sense of freedom.

Egoism keeps us in slavery all the time, dictating to us about shopping and everything else and making black not only Black Friday, but also the rest of our lives. Therefore, we will have to rise above it in order to reveal the eternal world before us and to acquire it!

Question: Wouldn’t a person feel himself too small to acquire the upper world?

Answer: On the contrary, a person will match the upper world and fill it. Moreover, he will feel that he reveals the world inside himself, inside the new desire that he developed above his egoism by connecting with others. Within his connection with others, he will reveal the ability to rise above himself and to feel infinite reality. This is the best shopping!

This is the best and eternal acquisition that we can do in our world during this life. I open my shop for all who wish to buy this commodity: eternal life, the sense of infinite and boundless life. As it is written in The Book of Zohar, “Everyone who wants to buy him may come and buy.”
[197819]
From KabTV’s “A New Life” 11/24/16

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Question: I am a normal person and only want to receive for myself. What does “reception in order to bestow” mean?

Answer: Indeed, a normal person receives only for himself. But the wisdom of Kabbalah says that at as a result of our evolutionary development receiving for one’s own sake does not work.

Today the world is in such a state that simply receiving for oneself is no longer possible because we are becoming rounded. We understand that when we deteriorate to the level of the “beast,” we steal from ourselves.

We cannot attain the meaning of life that is found outside the boundaries of our physical existence.

In this life we play with all kinds of technological “toys,” fashion, and all those things that human society produces to fill its existence somehow, but, in fact, it is completely empty. If a person were to calculate the amount of pleasure he got in life compared to the energy, strength, and suffering that he spent on them, he will of course realize that it would have been preferable not to live.

We must understand that in life there are completely different calculations, that we were not created to live against our will. If we discover its meaning, we will see that we can even be happy in this life and also live infinitely outside of its boundaries.

The method for attaining this happiness is called the wisdom of Kabbalah, the wisdom of how to achieve true pleasure, not only from our temporary earthly life, as long as our body exists, but also beyond the body, in eternal life, which we can attain while still in this world. This is what is called receiving in order to bestow. In this state, I continue to exist outside of my body.
[197476]
From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 11/9/16

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Question: Why has the wisdom of Kabbalah become more popular today?

Answer: The wisdom of Kabbalah is a wisdom that has to be revealed in our days to all the people in the world. I have been engaging in it for over 40 years. During this time it has really become more popular and sought after in our world, not because we advertise it but because the world needs it.

The wisdom of Kabbalah tells a person what he is living for and how he can ascend from our world to a state of eternity and perfection.

More and more people today feel the need to reveal the meaning of life because in spite of our broad perspective of our world where we look around and see everything from the top down, all the way to the horizon and beyond the horizon, we don’t know what the meaning of our life is on this small planet at the end of the galaxy. People don’t know what we are living for.

They say that when you look at Earth from space you begin to understand a little. Let’s ascend a bit and look at our small planet and at what we engage in, where we are running, and what we are doing. Stop and look. Our perpetual motion steals the main things from us.

We don’t engage in the most important thing that musts be done in our world, which is getting out of its boundaries. The next world exists, and today it is open for everyone. We are in our world like inside a small room, running around like kids, playing and jumping from one corner to another, but if we just open the door and come out, we will see a huge world before us.

The wisdom of Kabbalah enables us to do so. People feel that it is time. Such desires emerge in them. This is the reason that the wisdom of Kabbalah, which speaks about the fulfillment of these desires, is very popular today, and I offer it to you.
[197538]
From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 11/9/16

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Question: Why is a woman never satisfied with anything? What can we do so that a woman would be satisfied and calm?

Answer: A woman in our world has very few resources with which to be filled.

She receives filling mainly from her husband, from the family, from her children, from the attention she receives, but she isn’t always satisfied with that. Sometimes she is satisfied with her husband and sometimes with her children. As long as she cares about them, this care fills her, but being satisfied with the family isn’t only a family problem because many external factors affect the family. So a woman in our world is much more susceptible to feelings of shortage, lack, and anxiety than men. This is due to Malchut, which always feels a deficiency.

It seems that there is nothing simpler than providing a woman with a filling—a little attention from her husband and the children, a feeling of a the right connection would fully satisfy her, but although she needs so little, it is still impossible to achieve.

Question: Why is it impossible to give a woman this feeling?

Answer: Because this is actually what creation is based upon. The ego cannot be filled in its initial uncorrected state, and the woman is the embodiment of this state. The majority who yearn for the wisdom of Kabbalah are women.

They have a great need for the meaning of life. Although it isn’t on a level as high as the men, they are the ones who actually feel dissatisfied with life.

Rabash used to say that it is enough for a man to watch a soccer game, to see a pretty woman, to have a beer in the bar with some friends, and feel his life is successful.

On the other hand, a woman needs so many fillings and none of them depend on her. A man has many pleasures in life. Everything was created for him. And what was created for a woman: only her dependence on everyone.

Therefore, we should understand her nature.

Question: Do we have to understand her and to be more aware of her needs?

Answer: The problem is that it will not help. Of course we have to ease a woman’s suffering in this world as much as possible by understanding where it comes from, but eventually a woman will be able to calm down only if we Kabbalists attain, by the unity among us, a state in which she will feel the Light that comes from us. This is the only thing that will fill her.
[195851]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 6/9/16

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Question: Soon it will be possible to give birth to children without the participation of an ovum. Experiments like this are being conducted on mice. According to research published in the journal Nature Communications, they have already succeeded in giving birth to healthy mice this way by “persuading” the sperm that it is fertilizing a regular ovum.

One of the possibilities for the future is that normal cells from the human body combined with sperm cells can create a fetus. In other words, parents can be two men or one man from whom they take the cell and the sperm.

Where will experiments like this lead?

Answer: This will lead us to an understanding that our existence is from protein, a very primitive animal.

It is possible to conduct experiments, but I don’t think that humanity will need to give birth this way because we could make our lives simpler, more successful and orderly without the investment of many resources in biological robotics.

One way or another, the question about the meaning of life will arise for a person: What is he existing for? Is it to maintain particular roles and functions?

Although it would be possible to create a society divided into different classes, from workers to the highest levels, transforming some people into servants, others into soldiers, and another group into cleaners,etc. What is the benefit from this? Will the class, which decides who will be created and how to dispose of those created by them, derive a benefit?

I don’t believe that the program of creation will be able to advance this way because nature has its own program that we have not developed. Rather, it is what develops us!

In any case we must realize the program of creation and attaining a unique, mutual, integral environment for all of humanity, and in this way discover the characteristic called the Creator. In this case, we can rise to the next level in which our bodies will no longer exist.

There is no reason for performing experiments with cells. On the next level there will be other experiments on higher matter with higher properties, not on living matter. A state of infinite wholeness will be found there.

I think we will reach this much more quickly than the partial success of biological experiments.

Question: How can we bring everyone to the new state as quickly as possible?

Answer: Only suffering will push humanity toward solving the problem.

In the meantime, we are preparing the method. When people will ask themselves: “What is the benefit from this life? What is its meaning?” The fact that it was plagued by physical or mental suffering, due to their lack of inner fulfillment, they will turn to our method, which will have already been developed and can be offered in a comfortable form for every user.
[194459]
From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 9/14/16

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In the News (Science Daily): “‘You missed out.’ Is there another sentence that could strike such anxiety in the hearts of young people? … It’s true, though, and we need to talk about fear of missing out. Known as FOMO in millennial-speak, fear of missing out is quickly taking a toll on Generation Y — and it’s probably causing damage to your own life. …

“The average college student spends eight to 10 hours killing time on their cellphone each day, and when we consistently believe we are ‘missing out,’ anxiety and depression may set in. It’s no surprise then that anti-depressant use is very high and grows each year.”

Question: How do you relate to that?

Answer: In the past, before I discovered the wisdom of Kabbalah, I also suffered from this fear to a certain degree. In my time there was no Internet, and I scoured all the magazines, libraries, practically everywhere because I feared missing something important in the world about myself, about life, and I feared missing an opportunity to fulfill myself. This fear is rooted in the fact that a person wants something meaningful in his life, to attain something, not to miss what’s important, to know the meaning of life. But eventually a person runs around until he grows tired and accepts the fact he will somehow arrive to the end of his life.

Question: Does this mean that suddenly a positive fear of not living his life in vain arises in a person?

Answer: Of course, a person wants to leave his mark, do something meaningful, so that people will know about him, will appreciate and remember him.

But a person who reaches the level of the wisdom of Kabbalah begins to understand that the most important thing for him is that people should change for the better, and this is what he invests his efforts in. It is like taking care of children: it makes no difference to a person what his children may think about him. What’s important to him is that they should succeed and think correctly about their children.

A Kabbalist only thinks about how to fulfill himself by educating others so that they will advance without having to follow him all the time. This is the main thing, and his reward is the fact that people should follow the right way to fulfill themselves by resembling nature, without even knowing about him. In other words, the fear of a Kabbalist is that he will not be able to fulfill himself as an integral part of all nature. This has to be his attitude and the fulfillment of his attitude to everyone else.

Question: Do you have any fears?

Answer: I don’t have any fears, but I do aspire to fulfill my mission, which is the feeling that I have to justify what I have been given by my teacher, and I feel his pressure on me even at the moment. It isn’t fear but a feeling of responsibility. What fear can there be in a world where the Creator manages everything? I feel responsible for revealing the legacy of the great Kabbalists to people so that every human being will have the chance to totally fulfill himself by using this knowledge.
[193639]
From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 8/31/16

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Question: Why do we live such a hectic life, swallowing life without feeling its taste? How can we find the right balance?

Answer: Everything depends on the pace of life to which a person calibrates himself.

If you think about your spiritual ascents, the pace of your life will not seem tiresome, frustrating, or obligating.

You should make sure that your continuous work is concerned with your spiritual advancement. Everything else will come along, but only according to what you really need, which means that it cannot be ignored. And everything will seem very simple.
[194604]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 6/19/16

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