Michael Laitman, On Quora: “How can I stay calm in difficult situations?“

Talk to your friends who have also gone through difficult situations. You will see how it will calm you down and balance you out. It will give you their thoughts and then you will think not only about yourself, but you will start comparing their situations to yours, which will dilute your sorrow.

It works according to the principle, “a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved,” which means that everyone goes through difficult situations and life goes on. If you are going through a difficult situation and you hear stories about certain difficulties that your friends went through, and they describe what they did in those situations, then even though it might have been tough, they lived through it, came out of it, and perhaps also have several tips that could help you. Moreover, once you have such a conversation with a friend, you gain strength to show them that you are balanced and know how to hold yourself together.

Also, more generally, it is worthwhile understanding that calmness comes from engaging in what you understand is important. If you are engaged in what you understand is important, then you progress toward inner balance.

Based on the video “How to Stay Calm in Difficult Situations” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.in difficult situations?”

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Comment: Alex writes: “I listened to you in the morning and went to work. But as soon as I drove away from home, I immediately encountered rudeness on the road. At work, they squeeze everything out of you just to make more profit. We never have enough; we are never satisfied. Everyone thinks they are right. Please tell me how to love this world?”

My Response: One can love this world only as rungs to the next world, and not in anyway or for anything is it possible to love it by itself.

Question: Do you mean it is like a step?

Answer: Of course. If you give yourself only to this world it is better not to be born.

Yet if you perceive it as an intermediate stage, then you appreciate it. It is because if you know exactly how to use it (as much as you can because it is not easy), then you can really achieve something.

Comment: But one needs to get to the point that there is another goal, and not just settle in this world.

My Response: If I say that this is an intermediate step and only the first stage, then yes. The main thing is to break away.

Question: Then what is the goal an ordinary person should aim for?

Answer: There is no ordinary person. There are those who are more lucky or less lucky in understanding this world and in making a rung out of it that raises them to the upper world. But in principle, everyone has this opportunity and everyone receives it at some time.

In short, this world is good only because it can be a prelude and a step, a springboard to the next state. We should not wait for the next state after death. The next state is the next degree when we reveal the next world while in this world.

Question: What is the next world like? What should I aim for?

Answer: The next world is such that you reveal that every minute every manifestation of all sorts of phenomena, actions, and forces is all just to bring you closer to the revelation of the truth.

The truth is to reveal the Creator.

Question: What is the “Creator” for me?

Answer: The Creator is the sum of all forces that manifest perfection.

Question: What do they mean by the phrase “perfect love“?

Answer: Perfect love is when you begin to attain a state where you see all mutually opposite forces as mutually complementing ones.

Question: Is it that forces are desires? Do all my desires, hatred, love, or anything else, as if complement each other? Is this called absolute love? Is this what can be called perfection?

Answer: Yes, but there are not just forces here, but an ascent above yourself, a mutual complementing of yourself and the other where you break away from yourself and integrate into the other. That is, this is not just force; these are sensations built on contradictions, and that is why they reveal so much.

But all the same, all this is relative to a person. If this is not relative to a person, then we do not understand and we do not know.

Comment: You keep saying “specifically opposite desires, specifically opposite forces.”

My Response: Otherwise we have nothing to talk about and we would not feel anything. If there are no opposites that are in some kind of state with each other, then we have nothing to say.
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From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 12/27/21

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What advice would you give a woman whose husband of twenty years left her without saying anything?”

I received the following letter from a lady who experienced such a situation: “I’m going through some very difficult times, and I need your help. I’ve been married for 20 years, and I have three beautiful children. My husband and I had a good marriage all these years, but lately his attitude toward me really changed, and a month ago, he just got up and left home without saying why. I feel that my life is in shambles. And my question is, how can a person do something like that, to leave me and our children? We have three kids. What can I do for him to come back home?”

Indeed, men go through an age where they get driven to run away from the family, to run away from home, and to do something with themselves. This is somewhere around the ages of 40 and 50.

All I can recommend is to stay in touch with him, through the kids and his relatives, so that he feels that he has a family and a home—a place to which he can return. If you do so patiently, he will come back.
Based on the video “Advice for a Woman Whose Husband Left Her” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Should I stockpile food in the case of shortages?“

I think that doing so is useless. Food shortages and famines do not happen in order for us to fill our storage, barns, kitchen drawers and whatnot. We rather need to understand how we can realistically make sure that the world will be abundant with everything that everyone needs. The reality that food shortages and famines could quickly spread throughout our modern world is in order for us to reach such a conclusion.

The world is indeed at risk of a prolonged period of famine. It is written in the Torah that we will reach states where mothers will eat their babies, their own children. It could indeed become that severe, where we would be reduced to the level of animals.

We should thus use such knowledge in order to help us avoid looming food shortages and famines. We would then see that the sole cause of such terrible phenomena is our imbalance at the human level, that we are not doing what we should.

What, then, should we be doing?

We need to reach a mutual understanding among each other—to establish such connections among us that would help us reach balance. But we fail to do so. On the contrary, we regress, as if we want the boat we are on to head straight into a rock. And as a result, the world is indeed headed toward periods of shortages, famine and destruction.

The reason that today we hear about such impending doom scenarios is in order to frighten us so that we would change ourselves in order to change the world. The only reason we can reach such states and know about them in advance is to change ourselves. And the essence of the transformation we need to undergo is in our values: that we shift to prioritizing the benefit of others over self-benefit.

In terms of how this change will play out, together with the suffering, there will also be people who discuss connection and how to overcome the suffering. The change depends on listening to such people, and suffering will help people become readier to listen.

After certain periods of suffering, people will change. They will have a different attitude to life and to its values. They will understand that survival and the reason for survival is of utmost importance.

Moreover, even though humanity has undergone great suffering and famines in the past, today is different because we are ready to realize the true evil behind such suffering: the human ego that wishes to benefit itself at the expense of anything and anyone. It takes enormous suffering to sense, define, attain and draw conclusions from such evil.

However, we are coming closer to a state of recognizing that evil. Some signs that we are moving toward it is that we no longer hide behind all sorts of slogans, and we no longer believe in abstract values. Instead, we are becoming interested in what is most important: whether or not there is a meaning of life. And even if we assume that there is no meaning of life, we can still see how to live optimal lives on the animal level—by realizing the evil in our desire to benefit ourselves at the expense of others, the tremendous suffering it brings, and moving to re-prioritize the benefit of others over self-benefit.

Based on the video “Should We Stockpile Food in Case of Shortages and Famine?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Semion Vinokur. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Why do we have a nature that rejects what is harmful and absorbs what is beneficial?“

Human nature is the desire to receive pleasure, which wants to receive what is beneficial and push away what is harmful. Such is the essence of our nature, and everything else in our lives is built upon it. We thus instinctively first make sure to reject what harms us, and afterward, when we are certain that we somehow protect ourselves from harm, then we look into how we can enjoy, acquire and draw closer to whatever brings us pleasure.

It is how we behave and we are not in control. A smarter system decides on what gets pushed away and what we can leave. The system operates in four stages: still, vegetative, animate and human. That is, there are phenomena that we do not control, which are only parts of our bodies. Our body is built such that, if it is healthy, then it knows what is good and bad for it. Afterward, there is an emotional system, which also knows what is good and bad for it, and it functions instinctively and relatively. From the emotional system, we move to the mind, and from the mind to the intellect, and so on. That is, systems over systems interact, and they function by receiving the beneficial and rejecting the harmful.

In every single thought, desire and action in our lives, we thus operate by trying to move away from pain and move toward pleasure.

Based on the video “Why Does Our Nature Move Away from Pain and Move Toward Pleasure?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “How can Israel have more condemnations from the UN human rights council than all other countries combined?“

It is because Israel is responsible for everything that happens in the world, everything bad and good. We determine the attitude of the upper force of nature in terms of how it relates to everyone.

The UN singles out Israel because we are indeed special. We cannot get rid of our uniqueness and be normal ordinary people that are judged by the same standard as everyone else. Why? It is because we cannot escape being Jewish. I have written and spoken extensively about the role of the Jewish people, how our nation is unique in that we share no biological foundation but an ideological one, that we attained a state of positive connection (“love your neighbor as yourself”) above division (”love will cover all crimes”) and today, the world needs such a tendency to emerge in order to transition to a harmonious and peaceful state.

Everything that unfolds in the world is a result of the relations inside of Israel and nothing will help unless we positively connect with each other. Only through our positive connection will we bring about a major shift in the world, an inversion of the myriad increases of crises and suffering to a state of calm, tranquility and love. It is indeed in our hands to do, and the disproportionate hatred toward us is in order to tell us that we have such a role, which we are not yet carrying out.

Based on the video “Why Israel Has More Condemnations from the UN Human Rights Council Than the Other Countries Combined?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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Question: Déjà vu is a state when a person clearly feels that he has seen or heard something somewhere before. How does this happen?

Answer: The fact is that when the brain begins to compare different things, it seems to a person that this has definitely already happened, and this, and that, and one begins to embed one video fragment into another, one picture into another. So it turns into “déjà vu.”

But, on the other hand, there is also premonition, foresight, when a person (thanks to one’s intellect or sense of being in the system of nature) feels that such and such an action should happen now. He begins to feel the thoughts of others or to anticipate some waves coming to him. And all this is because we are in one unified system of nature and can guess the next event by some preliminary signs.

There are people who have developed this feeling, like Messing or Bedouins in the desert. The sense of nature in them was developed very strongly, particularly in Messing, for years ahead. He could simply predict because he felt that such events would happen. But that does not mean he could change anything.

And Kabbalah allows us to mitigate the upcoming events. They will happen anyway but in a milder form. It depends on whether we will unite between us, whether we will treat each other and our progress kindly, or leave the whole matter to our egoism, which naturally will torment us.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call, What is Déjà Vu?” 5/19/13

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What are the biggest problems faced by humanity, and how do we go about solving them?“

Following a string of heatwaves, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres stated at the Petersberg Climate Dialogue in Berlin that “We have a choice. Collective action or collective suicide. It is in our hands.”

The problem is that we simply cannot act together even facing such stark choices. Our egos do not let us unite. From the inside, we simply cannot act even in the face of imminent catastrophes. We host a quality that disallows our connection to others, even in a state where we could die without connection.

There is a vicious animal inside us that we are starting to recognize: our egoistic nature that wants to enjoy at the expense of others. It does not let us take others into consideration. It is a barrier that we cannot leap over.

Human beings are nature’s most ignorant creatures because in the worst possible state, we still seek how to take advantage of others.

We have to finally acknowledge how unbounded our ego really is. Such awareness is the beginning of our healing. Then, the healing will come from above. We have to acknowledge that it is in our ability to ask and pray for our connection. And then, by our connection, all of nature’s forces will reach balance.

Nature created us with the ego so we would rise above it toward the force of love, bestowal and connection. We will see how we are going to finish off our entire civilization and our lives until we understand that we have no other choice but to connect, and then we will be willing to connect.

Based on the video “Collective Action OR Collective Suicide: Is Humanity Smart Enough to Survive?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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Comment: You said that drama makes a person go through all the experiences himself, but comedy does not.

My Response: But in comedy you can go through more states than in a drama. In a drama, you stand still, freeze, and kind of stop. In humor, on the contrary, you roll forward and can go through a great number of states. We think humor is light and drama is deep, but it depends on your point of view.

Why is everyone really afraid of comedians and satirists? Because humor can be very deep. This is the deepest digging of human nature or all kinds of social phenomena.

The humor I have in mind is very deep. It is a certain attitude to our flaws. But they can be opened in such a way that we simultaneously understand how they can be corrected.

Tragedies, however, suck you in. You become petrified, cemented in this very phenomenon, and in the experience when you sit and just devour yourself. This is silly.

I think humor is smarter than tragedy, not humor such as all sorts of stupid jokes, but real subtle serious humor designed for connoisseurs, for smart people. It is always kind.

These are not some tricks and hints, but very deep expressions of our secret, subconscious feelings and thoughts. In general, a very useful thing.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Comedy or Drama?” 5/22/13

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What advice would you give to someone who just won the lottery?“

To build something good for children and the elderly.

Children and the elderly are always in need of support, so giving the money in that direction should give the lottery winner a feeling of satisfaction that they contributed positively to people’s lives, and that they made meaningful use of the prize money.

We derive a lot more fulfillment and happiness from helping other people than from pleasing ourselves, indulging in luxuries.

Why? It is because what we give others lives on in them.

Whatever we receive for ourselves, we immediately bury in the spiritual graveyard, whereas what we give to others passes from us into the ever-expansive collective soul, the collective consciousness, which increasingly advances in a state of eternity, wholeness and perfection.

The key to happiness is to live outside one’s self-aimed desires, in the desires of others.

Based on the video “A Kabbalist’s Advice for Lottery Winners” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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