Question: Why did the Creator make such a gap between Himself and the creation and cause the creation to feel so distant?

Answer: The Creator did to us what we do with our children. We let them first move forward by helping them from behind and we want them to continue walking. This is all reflected in our nature.

The Creator did this out of absolute love. Despite our inclination to be engaged only in using and eating one another in our egoistic world, the force of mutuality, participation, empathy, and love at the various levels of nature suddenly appears. This is why the possibility of life exists here.

The egoistic force alone would not be able to exist independently. When it has the egoism of two kinds, then the possibility of existence at the minimal level comes. With this approach you can do some kind of approximations, imagining what it would be like if I selflessly loved or wished something for another. In other words, there is a place here for the expression of moral conceptions for imagination. Although it is also egoistic, it still exists.

Some interesting combinations between the egoism and the property of bestowal occurred as a result of the shattering of desires in the upper world and their descent down to our world. Everyone wants only to receive, but still a small property of bestowal appears in them. This property is under a person’s control and one feels a special egoistic pleasure in it.

For example, when people give to each other, they enjoy it. Love between them is an egoistic pleasure, but with it a person gives something to the other one and thus fulfills himself with receiving pleasure. Ultimately, it is the same egoism, but egoism already mediated through movement away from oneself.

This is a very interesting system on its own. Scientists have not researched it in a deep way. They cannot figure it out yet, and I think in general they will not have time and will not be able to get to it. After all, we will begin to reveal the upper world and through it we will begin to know our world rather than from our poking on Earth. This is a very intense and unneeded process. Only through the upper world is it possible to get to know the lower one. This is how it is done— fast, specific, and in a complete way.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. What Does the Creator Wants” 11/3/09

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Question: Is our body a shell that allows us to be outside the spiritual state?

Answer: The physiological body, that is, the slice of egoism felt by a person, the lowest, thinnest, most primitive one, allows us to feel ourselves and the environment around us in this egoism and imagine it as our world.

Everything else that actually exists is outside of this slice. But we are still able to live in it as in oblivion, as in a dream. Basically, we are in a non-existent state. As if we got hit on the head and are disconnected from reality.

Question: If you remove this shell of feeling yourself as physically existing, is it already a transition to the next stage?

Answer: Partly. After all, you can’t just remove this barrier. What desire will you exist in? In the quality of bestowal?

Comment: When a person, for example, commits suicide, he seems to hope that he will remove this shell.

My Response: Nonsense, this person does not solve anything. He did not correct himself nor enter a sense of true existence. This has nothing to do with the method of revealing the true reality.

It simply benefits the ego to stop suffering. How many people do this, how many are willing to do it? What about drugs and alcoholism? This too is a kind of death, when one disconnects from reality and temporarily enters a different state.

These, however, are questions that require seeing the whole system and understanding what is happening to us; a person has completed what he had to, now he must somehow transition to another state, be reborn, and discern new Reshimot (spiritual information data).

Question: Why is suicide considered the worst sin in all religions?

Answer: It is as if you are running away from your responsibilities.

In this world, we have a clear task—to reach the image of the upper world, that is, in full unification, to correct the breakage of the common Kli, vessel.

Through all the millennia we have been moving toward this as primitive beings. We were led by inanimate, vegetative, and animate nature. But in our time, we have reached the level of a human solution to this problem; we are in a state when this needs a conscious solution. And we must solve it.

How can you commit suicide when you have to solve the problem of consciously connecting to all people on Earth, fully helping them, joining them as one whole, forming an integral analog system of complete interconnection with them and revealing the upper force of bestowal, love, and interaction in this system? This is where you begin to live and no longer perceive the previous system of forces called our world, you existed in before.

It is all before you. Today, it is all revealed and ready to be implemented.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. The Impact of Kabbalah on a Person” 6/11/14

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What do you think about the UN Sustainable Development Goals?“

I think that it is a childish initiative, but let them try.

It is childish because it fails to account for the root cause of everything that makes life on this planet unsustainable, and how to correct the problems and crises we face at their root.

The root cause of our troubles—from environmental and ecological problems to personal, social and economic ones—is overblown human egoism, i.e. our excessive desire to enjoy at the expense of others and nature. And the way we fix this problem is by applying ourselves to an educational method of correcting egoism, which means organizing our influences to redirect the intention upon our desires: to replace enjoying at the expense of others and nature, to enjoy by benefiting others and nature.

As a result of entering such a process, we would reach a heightened harmonious and peaceful state throughout humanity, where we would discover how to positively connect to each other through ties of bestowal. We would create a humanity that values mutual consideration, benefit, support and encouragement above our innate divisive drives, literally living for each other, and then we would discover a whole new world filled with forces of bestowal and love.

That is the key to reaching true sustainability.

By failing to account for the human ego and its correction, then we merely apply Band-Aid solutions to our problems, and egoism’s unabated growth beneath the surface would continually elicit new mutations and crises until we realize that it is fundamentally what we need to deal with.

Based on the video “Why Kabbalists View the 17 UN Sustainable Goals as Childish” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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Question: Where is the Creator hiding and why?

Answer: The Creator hides behind the entire canvas of this world, behind all our feelings and thoughts. If we want to attain Him, we must expand these actions, qualities, feelings, and visions, and then we will reveal Him as the basis of all this.

Question: What language does He understand?

Answer: The Creator understands the language of feelings when you relate to Him independently of yourself, want to feel Him and at the same time forget about yourself. That is, the feeling of the Creator must be absolutely objective!

Question: How can one understand that the Creator has no boundaries, that He is infinite?

Answer: I do not think we can understand this because a person perceives everything within certain limits. It comes gradually, precisely through the efforts.

Question: Does the Creator like when we pray to Him?

Answer: The Creator does not like when we pray to Him, worship or beg Him. The Creator loves people who want to come closer to Him because His state is absolute, the best! Which is what He wishes for the created beings.

Question: What is God like?

Answer: God is like absoluteness in everything!

Question: Does He have feelings and mind?

Answer: The feelings and mind of the Creator are not limited by anything. But we cannot talk about them because we perceive everything within a framework, within boundaries, in limitations.

Question: Does God have mysteries?

Answer: He has no mysteries. On the contrary, He wants to be fully revealed to the created beings. But at the same time, His task is to bring the created beings to a state where they can reveal Him. He is not hiding.

Question: What is the most real proof that God exists?

Answer: The fact that we exist.

Question: Which image can more accurately correspond to the Creator?

Answer: I would draw with the letters “י – ה – ן – ה”—”Yod-Hey-Vav-Hey.”

Question: What question would you ask the Creator?

Answer: Do you have anything else to show me?
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From KabTV’s “Ten Blitz Answers about the Creator” 5/21/22

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Why do so many people identify with the loneliest whale?“

The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52 is a documentary that, over thirty years, tracked a whale that produced high-pitched sounds on a frequency unique solely to that whale, to which no other whales responded. They thus called this whale “the loneliest whale,” as it lived in complete loneliness, roaming the seas with its unanswered call.

Many people identify with this whale because sometimes in life we feel that we too are like that lonely whale, that no one hears us. We could even be surrounded by a lot of people and have a social life on the outside, but on the inside, we sometimes feel so lonely that no one responds to us.

Indeed, we each live inside ourselves. However, instead of remaining lonely, we should apply ourselves to positively connect with others above our feelings of loneliness. It is because our development is leading us to a complete connection among all people, and by aligning with such a tendency, we will discover much happier, more fulfilled and meaningful lives than our current experience. We should thus consider the kind of frequency that we would need to produce in order for others to hear us and turn to us.

That frequency is a heart full of love, one which wishes to benefit them. If we calibrate ourselves in such a way, then we would cure our loneliness. We would then find that others would start responding to us, wanting to come closer to us.

Based on the video “Why Do So Many People Identify With the Loneliest Whale?” 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: “What is your take on gender equality?“

Nature made a specific distinction between genders, placing us into an unequal state. Male and female parts in nature are necessary for birth and procreation. If we try to impose an artificial removal of the difference between genders, destroying their influence and attraction, then we will have no next generation. The push for treating genders completely equally emerges specifically in our era when people have lost their bearings, not knowing where to further progress, and so they come up with ideas that there should be equality in a place where nature created inequality.

We thus need to differentiate between nature-made inequality between genders, and the man-made distortion of nature, which today has taken gender equality too far—something that is not in our hands to change.

If we let ourselves increasingly become influenced with the opinion that removes the differentiation between male and female, we will increasingly bear witness to society’s degradation. The expansion of such a view to the center of public opinion would mean people no longer giving birth. We would lose interest in each other, have no more families, and no next generation.

However, we also need to understand why today we experience more imbalance between the concept of our inner self and our external manifestation. In the past, we did not have such issues on mass scales as we do today, i.e. a woman was a woman and a man was a man. Our times, however, are characterized by overblown egoistic growth. Our ego has developed over millennia through its stages of base desires for food, sex and family, and social desires for money, honor, control and knowledge, and today we have started crossing the threshold where our egoistic approach to life can no longer fulfill us. Today, it thus comes as no surprise that we see such unreal and unreasonable egoistic mutations manifesting.

We need to go through these stages of egoism’s overgrowth in order to realize its failure: that we cannot fulfill ourselves and find happiness with the ego determining our way of life. Eventually, we will reveal the human ego as the sole evil quality in existence, that contrary to other levels of nature, the human ego pits us up against nature in its most basic aspects.

The two distinct genders in nature are essential for the development of society and life in general. There is no superiority or inferiority between the genders—only complementarity. Instead of distorting nature with our man-made definitions, which fail to make us happier and more fulfilled, we would be wiser to promote the ways in which we can complement one another, and by doing so, raise the value of positive human connections: among partners, in society and our relationships across the board. By building positive human connections, developing an atmosphere of mutual consideration, support and encouragement throughout society, we create the conditions to find meaning, happiness and true fulfillment, which is what we ultimately need.

Based on KabTV’s “Close-Up. The Future of Humanity” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman on July 17, 2011. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “How might being kind and showing you care about someone, including a stranger, make a big difference in the person’s life?“

One of my students told me a story about a young man who was hospitalized on the verge of death. He wrote a “Farewell to the World” post on Facebook, which was met with hundreds of warm and caring comments from his family, friends and strangers. Lying on the hospital bed, he said the following: “Every word and sentence flowed into me like enlivening energy that really forced me to breathe in more and more love. Miraculously, my body stopped collapsing, and gradually, I made my way back to life.”

Now this man is fine. What is that force that brought him back from death? People, with their caring attitude toward him, gave him strength, passing a vitalizing force onto him. Their words carried healing forces, which he soaked up, and which enlivened him.

Indeed, we can truly enliven each other and build worlds with a loving and caring attitude toward each other.

Based on the video “How Care from Strangers Saved a Man’s Life” 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: “What do you think of U.S. officials who said Monday the bullet that killed veteran Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh was likely fired from an Israeli position?“

I heard about CNN reporting that IDF soldiers shot the Al Jazeera reporter, Shireen Abu Akleh, as a targeted attack, which is uncanny because firing at civilians is the opposite of what the IDF teaches their soldiers from their very first training stage. It is no secret that the media is presenting Israel in an increasingly negative light, and it is because we Jews are not doing what we are supposed to, i.e. what humanity innately expects from us.

There is a subconscious expectation dwelling in humanity toward the Jewish people: to reveal the method of the world’s correction so that the world will become a positive, warm and friendly place. A common counterargument to this that I often hear from Jews in Israel is that “I wish the world would be a kinder and better place, but we’re living next door to people who teach their children to kill Jews from a young age.” What we fail to understand is that we are to blame for the increasingly negative attitude toward us, from our neighbors systematically teaching their children to kill us, to the global media painting a dark portrait of us.

It is almost impossible for us to hear that we are to blame for the negative attitude toward us, because we perceive ourselves as the victims, and it seems preposterous to say otherwise. Why? It is because we do not want to see the core reason behind this statement: that we have a role to guide the world to its correction, i.e. to a state of “love your neighbor as yourself.” Ultimately, although it appears we are headed in an opposite direction, humanity in general is headed to a state of mutual love, consideration, respect, support and encouragement. That state is set in nature, and our current state of development is akin to an unripe fruit that becomes increasingly bitter, until at its very end it inverts, becoming sweet, ripe and good to eat.

So who are we Jews in this developmental process? Unlike other nations that have biological roots, we share an ideological foundation: we first become known as “the people of Israel” when, under Abraham’s guidance in ancient Babylon, we attained a state of “love your neighbor as yourself,” and that heightened connection between us—balanced with nature’s force of absolute love and bestowal—attracted nature’s positive force into our connections. That is what it means to be “Israel,” from the two Hebrew words “Yashar Kel,” which means “straight to God”—understanding God as the root force in nature, a quality of love and bestowal that created and sustains reality.

Today’s increasingly negative attitude toward us is due to the increasing need in humanity for the revelation of nature’s positive force of love and bestowal, and that there is a critical mass within humanity who hold the key to attracting that force, and they are not doing so. Instead of acting like an open tap that lets nature’s positive force of love and bestowal stream freely into humanity, this critical mass instead acts like a cork, blocking the positive force from humanity. Without letting nature’s positive force of love and bestowal into humanity, the negative force of human egoism continually grows unabated, and thus problems across the board increase: from personal problems such as depression, loneliness, stress, insecurity and anxiety, through to problems in society such as increased distrust, inequality, poverty and crime, to name a few.

The more humanity experiences hardships, the more a subconscious negative feeling emerges in humanity toward the Jewish people. Today, that negative feeling becomes expressed as a recent exponential rise in antisemitic crimes and threats, together with an increasingly negative view of Israel.

If we Jews would start realizing our role, to achieve relations of “love your neighbor as yourself” among each other and to become a conduit of that positive force dwelling in nature toward the rest of humanity, then we would see the negative attitude toward us dramatically invert to a positive one. The subconscious urges within humanity would take a major turn. People would start feeling a new light, harmony and peace fill their lives, seemingly out of nowhere, but it would be due to our attainment and projection of a mutually considerate attitude that is sourced in nature.

We hold the key to making this immense positive change a reality. We just need to find the lock and turn it, and then we will see how a whole new perception and sensation of reality would open up. We would understand the core drive behind what currently appears as unjust and unfair accusations against us, and through our own attitude shift toward each other above our differences, we would enable that attitude shift en masse.

It is my hope that we will awaken to this process sooner rather than later, because the sooner we do, the more we will spare both ourselves and the rest of humanity much suffering.

Based on the video “Media Coverage of Al Jazeera Reporter Shireen Abu Akleh’s Death – A Kabbalist’s Response” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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Question: How often do you yourself have to act as if you have the importance of the goal when you do not feel it, meaning you are in a certain state?

Answer: It sometimes happens to me that I am in complete disgust from everything, I am ready to give it all up, and then I come back to this again.

Question: But how do you implement it?

Answer: I am watching from the sidelines. I have my own system when I am outside of egoism and outside of altruism, and use myself as an instrument. By being exactly in the middle of these scales, egoistic and altruistic forces, I make out of myself a middle force.

Therefore, when I feel hatred, love, rejection, attraction, the need for connection, the need for separation, I feel it all in a desire with which I do not identify myself.

I position myself with a thought that is above that. This is called “faith above reason.” From there, I see myself as a patient, as if I were lying on the operating table.

Question: How do you achieve this?

Answer: It comes with time because you cannot do anything by yourself and now. This has been carried out for many years under the influence of the upper light.

Therefore, it is a pity that some people are engaged in some of their methods or leave us for something else. I pity their efforts. After many years you meet this person and, not wanting to stir him up, you ask:

– “Well, what’s up?”

– “You see, I am working now, I am busy now …”

– “Well done, good. Good luck! Be well!”

This is how thousands of people slide by. But let’s hope it becomes less and less common.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. How to Play the Importance of the Spirituality?” 11/3/09

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What is the meaning of the image of God?“

Our attitudes to certain people and things lead to various images and behaviors.

We depict the image of the Creator in His attitude toward the created beings. We can do so in relation to the inanimate, vegetative and animate levels of nature, but we mostly do so in relation to people, the human level. When we aim to apply the Creator’s attitude toward the created beings in our human connections, we gradually assemble the image of the Creator.

The Creator is the general force of nature, immaterial, still, and above the loftiest of our imaginations. The wisdom of Kabbalah studies how this force operates toward us, and what it desires from us.

Based on “Spiritual States” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Michael Sanilevich on May 21, 2022. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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