Comment: True wisdom is simple and is directed at each of us. From the depths of time, profound thoughts come to us that have no expiration date. They are still relevant today.
Please comment on some of them.

“If I am not for myself, who is for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?”

My Response: A person must act. “If I am not for myself,” I need to know how to correct myself to be a helpful element of the world, and no one will do it for me. I must do this.

If I am not fulfilling my purpose for everyone, then who am I? If I do not do it now, when I have the opportunity, when will I be able to do it? No one knows what will happen after this moment.

All this calls for the correct, immediate fulfillment of one’s purpose.

Question: Which is?

Answer: To correct oneself, and thus correct the world through oneself. Because through every corrected element of our world, an upper, correcting force flows and is distributed throughout the world.

Question: What constitutes the correction?

Answer: The elements start to connect through me.

Question: Meaning I am the reason for connecting others?

Answer: Yes.

Comment: “Anyone who feels confident in this world is a stranger in heaven. And vice versa.”

My Response: Certainly. The fact is that egoism separates you from the world. You do not contribute anything to the world; on the contrary, you steal from it because you are an element of this world.

Therefore if you feel confident because you are an egoist (egoists feel self-confident), then you cannot bring the upper, correct, spiritual energy into this world to unite it. Conversely, if you feel that you are at the mercy of the upper force, you can transmit it into this world.

Question: So a person should feel insecure? And not be confident?

Answer: Yes. The only certainty should be that you are applying yourself to the upper force.

What can one be confident about? That is stupidity. How can you be self-confident if you do not know what will happen to you in the next moment, who you will become, and in general, what your actions will be? Nothing! It is just childish.

Comment: Nevertheless, the Internet is full of those who teach you how to be self-confident and how to live.

My Response: It is natural because everyone needs it. But no one has it, so everyone tries teaching each other.

Question: Does a person really feel confident only when he reaches out to the upper force and depends on it?

Answer: Yes, when a person is connected to the upper force, he has complete confidence because he sees what it all depends on, and he is at peace. Anyway, he will do whatever the upper force wants to do to him. He does it anyway, but now it will be done consciously.

Comment: “The one who publicly makes another turn pale with shame has no share in the world to come.”

My Response: Yes. It is very important to make yourself smaller than everyone else because this way you can channel the upper energy and upper force through yourself to them.

Comment: If a simple person hears this and asks, “How can I put myself below another?!” It is against human nature.

My Response: Precisely because it is against nature. There is nothing else here. The correction cannot happen any other way.

Comment: Even logically, I can only hear another if I become smaller than him, not bigger.

My Response: Of course! That is so in any case.

When I go out to the students every morning, do I not put myself below them? Am I not doing everything so they can learn, grow smarter and understand, unite, and get closer to the Creator?

Question: So when you go out to the students, must you lower yourself before them?

Answer: Of course! I am like a waiter: I bring and serve.

Comment: Ready to serve, as they say.

My Response: Yes. I do not feel above them. If I show such a state, it is only to give them an opportunity to somehow perk up and understand what they are dealing with.

Comment: There are methods, theories, and spiritual practices where the teacher ties students to himself. That is, where he is clearly above them.

My Response: Never in Kabbalah. Absolutely not! At any moment, a person should feel he can safely leave. Without saying goodbye! Just get up and leave. And how do they part? You see, it happens quietly.

Comment: Indeed. In an instant one is gone.

My Response: Sometimes they come back. There are those who come back. I do not treat them any differently. You see that.

Comment: I see, yes. A person walks in, sits down, you look at him and keep going. There is none of: “Oh! He is back!”

My Response: What for? It is none of my business. My job is to serve. Like in a restaurant: the customers come, and I am the waiter.

Comment: Setting the table.

My Response: Right. Absolutely so.

Comment: “Evil speech kills three people: the one who speaks, the one who believes the speaker, and the one spoken of.” It is written in the Talmud.

My Response: Yes, because in fact there is no one other than man except the Creator. Therefore if you speak ill of someone other than yourself, it absolutely clearly and unequivocally refers to the Creator.

Question: Does it mean slander is to speak poorly about the Creator?

Answer: Yes.

Comment: Even though you are cursing out someone else.

My Response: It does not matter. If it is work or home related, it is not considered slander. We are talking about ideological, internal, spiritual slander. This is what you cannot allow!

Comment: “Love those who rebuke and hate those who praise, for the former will lead you to life in the world to come, while the latter will destroy you.”

My Response: That is right! Absolutely correct. A person should be paying those who beat him or scold him. And conversely, he should distance himself from or scold those who praise him.

Comment: But it is almost impossible.

My Response: If a person aims himself correctly at restriction and screen, this is exactly what he does.

Question: That is, if one is aimed at the Creator, then he thanks the one who rebukes him?

Answer: We do not really thank each other like that in life. But at the same time, a person experiences great help from the Creator in hearing anti-praises through someone.

Question: Even in Shamati (“I Heard”) it is written that it is good for a Kabbalist to be humiliated. Is it not masochistic to feel good when humiliated?

Answer: No, one does not enjoy it. He enjoys the fact that with the help of such seeming humiliation he can bring himself closer to the Creator. It is a great help when egoism is belittled. But usually a completely different picture is shown on the outside.

That is, if he is a real Kabbalist, he may be indignant and object.

Question: Be angry, but internally grateful?

Answer: Of course.

Comment: “When your enemy is rattled, do not rejoice, and when he stumbles, do not let your heart cheer.”

My Response: The fact is that you must think of the general correction, so this is exactly the right attitude.

Question: When an enemy falls, do not rejoice?

Answer: No. After all, he acted this way to bring you closer to correction. So do not be happy about his failures. On the contrary, the more strength he has and the more pressure he puts on you, the better off you will be.

Question: “To fear sin is to be afraid to sin, not of punishment.” What does it mean? Should we be afraid of punishment, or should we be afraid of sin?

Answer: One should be afraid of an action called sin, not punishment for that action because otherwise you are afraid of being punished. If there were no punishment, would you do it or not?

Comment: This is very deep.

My Response: Therefore it is the action you must fear.

Question: While a person is mostly afraid of punishment?

Answer: Of course. If I wouldn’t get caught…

Question: I would take everything. Meaning I would steal if not for getting caught?

Answer: Of course I would steal.

Comment: If man knew there would be no consequence, there would be total chaos.

My Response: The Creator’s governance still keeps us within a certain framework until we choose our path voluntarily.

Comment: The famous saying of King Solomon: “What has been, will be. What happened will happen; there is nothing new under the sun.”

My Response: Yes, and everything goes back to normal because all this is just one pure universal egoism that is constantly undergoing stages after stages of its correction. Cycles.

Question: What is in it for a person? He says, “What has been, will be. What happened will happen, and there is nothing new under the sun.”

Answer: This means there are no new laws. Of course there are new actions. Circumstances are changing, the Earth is changing, everything is changing; but it all follows the same laws, and flows in the same direction.

Question: Is King Solomon saying there is actually one law?

Answer: One, to bring egoism to absolute bestowal.

Question: Does this mean for a person to become a giver and a lover? Is this the purpose of life, and is this where everything is headed?

Answer: Yes, above one’s ego, precisely because of it.
[258487]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 12/28/19

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Question: Every 40 seconds a suicide occurs somewhere in the world. More than a million people take their own lives each year. Many of them are young people between the ages of 15 and 30.

They do not die in wars, although the grief from the loss of life is no less. Just look at how much of it there is today. This is not death from hunger or disease. Here a person who outwardly appears well-off and successful ends their life. What is this?

Answer: Emptiness. Emptiness—there is nothing. And such emptiness that it crushes you, tears you apart, and keeps you from sleeping. You cannot push it away, not even with drugs. And a person simply has no other way out.

We need to look at life correctly. We must take up the task of proper upbringing.

Question: What should a person come to?

Answer: To the meaning of life. And the meaning of life is understood when you cross the border between life and death. Only then can you truly weigh what is worth living for, when life itself means less to you than what it stands for. That is when you can rise above your egoism, above your own life.

Question: So when I do not cling to it, do not hold on to every desire?

Answer: No! Not just not holding on, you live by rejecting your egoism every moment and rising above it.

Every moment, you are above death, as if experiencing it. This is what it means to detach from our world and enter the upper world.

Comment: That is very difficult.

My Response: It is not difficult; it is a happy opportunity for all of us.

Question: So should I not value my egoistic life?

Answer: No! By no means! What is there to value?

A person who wants to attain true existence must despise life as it is in itself and value it only as the foundation, the base upon which to build a higher life. And a higher life is one that is beyond death—when at every moment you die in an animalistic sense and grow in a spiritual one.

Spiritual growth happens when you live outside yourself. Not for yourself, but beyond yourself. Whether for the Creator, for the system, for humanity, it does not matter. The main thing is to break free from your “self.”
[341518]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 6/12/18

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The Creator stands behind your hater, the enemy stands behind him. If you want to turn to the Creator, you must somehow break through the heart of your enemy with your attitude.

Comment: But this is an unbearable condition.

My Response: This is an unbearable condition, which means, we will die, from century to century.

Question: Do you think this is the main condition?

Answer: Yes! It should become something that I must see in everyone, my beloved people. Moreover, there are particles of the Creator, His messengers, representatives.

If I treat everything around me in this way, I will suddenly see that the Creator is clothed in them. He is in them, fills them, and in general, it is all Him. Everything!

Question: The person hears you, and everything turns inside out. He says: “It is not just impossible!” What should he do, the way he is?

Answer: Turn over. Roll over!

Question: And here too, should I ask the Creator: “Give me the opportunity to turn over”?

Answer: Of course! And who am I? Some kind of selfish little part that is not capable of anything.

Question: So I am able only if I turn to the Creator, that I want to turn over and approach my enemy, and embrace him, and raise a prayer with him?

Answer: I ask the Creator to allow me to do this, to show me, to teach, to push, and that my opponent would also want the same thing, would agree with me. Because I see both myself and my opponent as an act of the Creator. That the Creator is pointing us at each other like this, pushing horns against each other, inciting us.

And that is why I ask the Creator to bring us closer, to open arms instead of fists, so that we gradually show our love for each other. Right down to love.

Comment: If the world could hear you…

My Response: If people want to, that is the problem. And the Creator is ready for it if people want to. If they want to, it depends on the suffering they feel.
[340890]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 3/3/22

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Comment: According to Dr. Robert Lustig, professor emeritus at University of California, San Francisco, happiness and pleasure are not really the same.

He asserts that pleasure is short-lived and visceral and happiness is long-lived and ethereal. Pleasure is taking, while happiness is giving. Pleasure is usually experienced alone, while happiness is usually social. 

My Response: Indeed pleasure is an animate state in which my body enjoys. Happiness, on the other hand, is eternal and complete. It requires stepping out of oneself and rising above oneself. It is connected with a higher purpose, eternity, and true achievement.

Can both be combined? Yes, if I elevate all my pleasures to the level of happiness. Then by rising above my body, I will bring all the best to others, and in this I will find true pleasure and true happiness for myself.
[223252]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 9/12/24

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Comment: Scientists surveyed over 1,300 people aged 21 and above. Those who had a clear understanding of the meaning of life were happier and healthier than those still searching for it. In other words, those looking for the meaning of life aren’t well.

My Response: The main thing is to find your natural point in which you are already living. Or it might even be in development, but you are within it, and are not floundering without knowing where.

Comment: But you keep saying that searching for the meaning of life is good.

My Response: I am not saying that a person doesn’t understand the meaning of life. One should determine what that meaning is and pursue it. Moving toward the meaning of life, where you understand and know how and what, gives you immense satisfaction, delight, and tranquility, along with great dissatisfaction and internal imbalance.

Comment: Ups and downs.

My Response: Yes! But you derive immense pleasure from all of it. You enjoy the process. It is a “storm petrel.”

Question: And if you experience descent and despair and you wonder if you have chosen the right path?

Answer: But that is better than being an inanimate element. Work in an office and stay at home watching football? Or not? It depends on each person’s values.

Question: So you believe in the studies you have experienced and tested yourself?

Answer: First of all, I do not believe anyone in the world. Because there is no one to believe. We see what is happening in the world. Therefore I trust only myself, my experiments, my universities.

Question: And they say that you find the meaning of life after long searches, adhering to your teacher, and proceeding? Through ups and downs.

Answer: Only in this way.

Comment: I remember you saying that you had such descents that you could not even get out of bed.

My Response: That is natural. But that is the path of searching. You cannot escape it.

Question: And do you call that a happy path?

Answer: Absolutely! Of course! “Exultation in battle,” in the fall.

Question: What would you wish for people embarking on the path of searching for the meaning of life?

Answer: I wish people would enjoy the metamorphoses happening within them. Everything that occurs, everything that boils inside—that is life! Don’t grow old prematurely. Try not to, at least internally.
I cannot climb mountains; I cannot fight the waves of a raging sea. No. But all of that exists inside me, and all of that gives the feeling of life.

Question: So you mean that a person stays young regardless of one’s age?

Answer: Of course!
[340926]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 12/23/19

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We must create ourselves into a people that will exist in the mutual property of love and complete connection with each other. In this way we will resemble, not the nature of our world, but the nature of the upper world, which will be able to pass through us and pour into our world.

Then all the nations of the world—and subsequently all of nature: animal, vegetative, and inanimate—will receive this upper vitalizing force.

Without it the world will simply wither away until it explodes and disappears. This is true according to the true, spiritual laws of nature. By spiritual, I mean based not on egoism, but on the quality of bestowal. This is what we must pass to the world. If we do not do it, the world will instinctively demand it of us.

We cannot continue to exist in our current form. This is a people unable even to think that it must change. As the saying goes, “a stiff-necked people,” so it is.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, awakens the Jews. The nations of the world yes, but the Jews no.
Herein, perhaps, lies a certain chance for salvation through the nations of the world in a good and swift way, maybe they will still compel the people of Israel to think about their mission.

Then this will be a serious point of our correct reckoning with the Creator. We have no one to rely on but only our connection with Him. And we will have to establish this connection correctly.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 10/24/19

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I wish absolute mutual love for all of us. Nothing else is needed! Love. Just love each other. For no reason. Simply because we are all human beings.

Question: Is it possible to live as you just said?

Answer: Yes, it is possible.

Question: What should be done in order to simply love a person, people?

Answer: Understand that there is nothing greater in nature than this feeling, this relationship, and the whole of nature is built upon love. Everything that is hidden from us in nature, in the higher nature, is only love.

Question: Can we, if we all will desire, take and draw the force of nature?

Answer: Yes, nature is waiting just for this. Love is the highest, most powerful, most central feeling and force in nature.

Question: Is it possible to just transition from hatred to love? Right now I hate, I clearly hate. And then suddenly, bam, some time passes, let’s say a year, and we transition to love? Could this happen, or is it a fantasy?

Answer: We can do this. We are in such extreme states, opposite to this feeling, that we are able to do this.

Question: It is very strange. You said because we are in opposite states, we can do this.

Answer: Yes, because we see where we are heading to, where all our efforts, all our achievements disappear, everything falls out of our hands, and we are unable to accomplish anything. We are like blind, foolish puppies. That is how we live. It is horrible! I have no words!

But if we ask nature to change us, we will receive such a change of forces, feelings, and qualities that we don’t even expect, because the Creator is love.
[341420]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 1/1/23

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Question: What is the purpose of being born?

Answer: The purpose of being born? In principle, is unclear to a person. And so one sees neither a beginning nor an end. People perceive themselves only on an animalistic level: the birth of the physical body, the suffering of the physical body, some pleasures of the physical body, and the death of the physical body. Nothing more.

If we cannot rise above this, then we do not understand the meaning.

Question: So if we cannot rise above it, then this is the entire history of humanity: people are born, suffer, and die. But if we can or want to rise higher, then what does the history of humanity become?

Answer: Then we must detach from the physical body, rise above it, and not live by its desires and aspirations. Only then do we begin to feel what our spiritual body demands of us.

Question: So what does this formula turn into? If being born means rising above egoism, then what does suffering turn into?

Answer: It becomes separation from egoism, an ascent above it, and a perception of reality in a different way through bestowal, love, connection, and mutuality. Not through reception, as in the physical body, but through bestowal, as in the spiritual body.

Comment: It is very bitter for me that our earthly formula is “born, suffer, and die.”

My Response: And without this, there would be no other one. We would not be able to reach an eternal form through our own efforts and capabilities.

Question: So there must be an initial formula for us to realize it and want to break free from?

Answer: Yes.

Comment: But this has been going on for millennia! Millennia upon millennia we write volumes of history!

My Response: These are souls! What are history and books in comparison? They are nothing!

Question: So in the end, a person is born to live eternally. Is that right?

Answer: Of course. I believe we are gradually coming to this realization.

Comment: You seem more optimistic today. Do you really see that we…

My Response: No, my optimism comes from absolute pessimism about our world. I believe humanity will awaken and realize that this life alone is not worth living for.
[341374]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 10/5/23

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Comment: Special studies show that people feel happy when a country has a high average income level, low unemployment, significant economic freedom, and a relatively open labor market.

At the same time, generous social welfare benefits and low inequality do not contribute to the sense of happiness. For example, Norway has one of the highest suicide rates. Happiness is determined by life expectancy, access to education, GDP per capita, and purchasing power, among other factors.

Scientists attempt to define happiness externally. Yet, a person is not happy.

My Response: Happiness is connection with eternity, with a purpose that one seeks to grasp. Yet, as one approaches it, it continuously recedes, and one keeps striving toward it. It is an infinite process.

The aspiration toward an eternal goal and its gradual attainment is called the sweet suffering of love. That is, the simultaneous feeling of suffering and love creates the sensation of happiness.

For example, people may have yearned for each other for many years—suffering, moving toward one another, dreaming—and now they have finally met. At that moment, all past sufferings, all impulses toward closeness and mutual perception merge with the feeling of actual unity in the meeting.

The more these two opposing forces continuously increase and sustain one another, the more they create a sense of happiness in a person.

There can be no happiness without suffering. And suffering must inevitably lead to happiness. This is why it is called the “suffering of love,” as the feeling of love cannot arise without the prior experience of longing, suffering, and lack.

These desires emerge precisely in the search, in the movement toward love, and form what is known as a vessel for the perception of happiness. And once I reach happiness and become fulfilled, this feeling quickly fades. Therefore, I must once again restore a sense of some distance.

Even if I physically remain with my beloved, I must immediately think about how to arm myself with even greater desires for them, greater aspirations despite their presence. And then, it will seem as though they are not so near, not so close anymore. And I will begin striving toward them once again.

We must understand that the feeling of happiness is possible only in the middle line, between the left and the right, where the left line is the constant revelation of striving, longing, and emptiness and the right line is connection, love, and fulfillment.

The middle line provides a strong link between the continuous growth of desire and its constant fulfillment. Then a person feels as if they exist in a state of eternity and perfection, not shifting from one state to another, not swinging between the left and right lines, but existing in both simultaneously.

We cannot give a person any other explanation, because developing such perceptual tools requires internal work that they do not yet possess. This is precisely the purpose of the science of Kabbalah, which in translation means “the science of reception.”

Comment: As far as I understand, happiness does not exist in this world, and there is nothing to search for.

My Response: In this world—that is, within a single egoistic desire—happiness cannot exist. And within a single altruistic desire, it cannot exist either. Only on the basis of both desires, if resistance is introduced between them—negative, positive, and in between them resistance (our effort)—only then, upon this resistance can we experience constant happiness, eternal and perfect life.

Comment: It seems that we have already mastered the egoistic desire and are beginning to understand what it is.

Answer: No, it has not yet been mastered. We will be able to master it only in accordance with the emergence of an altruistic desire within us. Then we will begin to perceive a completely different kind of egoism. Right now, we experience only a very limited, animate-level egoism.

We must begin to perceive egoism that desires to work together with the quality of bestowal and love, that understands it must act in harmony with it as one half of the whole system of the world.
[193802]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 5/12/22

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Comment: A Malaysian woman committed suicide after posting a request on Instagram asking her followers to help her decide whether to choose life or death. 69% voted for death.

My Response: Many people would die if it could be done easily. I take a pill, fall asleep, and that is it. So why suffer? If this life does not offer you fulfillment, inspiration, or achievement of a dream, it is unhappy. We end up dying anyway.

Society and the state are doing the right thing by not allowing this to develop. As the Torah says: “Choose Life.” But you have to choose that. We must try, strive, and seek this.

Kabbalah offers this, but to do so, one must come to it and find an eternal, perfect life.

Question: What is the goal of the upper governance in bringing a person to such a state?

Answer: So man can be convinced that life has a meaning. Just not the one he lives by. He lives an animal life, but he needs to rise to another level.

Question: Are you in favor of attracting people with pleasure, or pushing them with suffering?

Answer: Attracting with pleasure.

Question: In other words, to show this world is worth living?

Answer: The upper world. Sure.

Comment: World above egoism, as you keep saying.

My Response: Yes, absolutely. That is precisely what it is for.
[340858]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 6/4/19

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