Indeed, the world produces enough food to feed everyone, but the problem is that we cannot divide it correctly, genuinely and fairly. Our ego does not let us distribute products well and correctly, equally for everyone. Food is thrown out in some places of the world, while in other places, people starve to death.
Such is our nature, and it will not change until we reach the conclusion that we need to change our nature from egoistic to altruistic. Until we do, the situation in the world will also not change, and the polarization in the world will become more and more diametric. We can expect to see a sharper division of the world into some places where people starve to death, and others where people discard of excess food.
The problem with changing our nature from egoistic to altruistic is that we cannot overcome the ego while we remain in our ordinary boundaries. In order to undergo this transformation, we need to discover the law of nature, which is a law of love and altruism, in our human relations. By seeing that nature acts this way, we will also be able to change ourselves in order to prevent self-annihilation. Everyone will then discover how to realize our global interdependence and interconnectedness harmoniously, and we will be able to divide all products equally, so they will be balanced among everyone.
Based on a Q&A with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman on September 9, 2006. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
There are several examples of countries that have a high GDP and a low level of people’s happiness, which show quite clearly that GDP is not an accurate gauge for people’s happiness.
Why is it the case? It is because people are made to enter a framework where they feel constrained, unhappy, and forced to task like slaves, and accordingly, their happiness levels are low. They lie to themselves, thinking that they are happy, but have no idea what happiness is.
Happiness does not mean working most of the time. Rather, happiness is an inner state that is inseparable from our connection with society and nature—a state of harmonious connection between everybody and everything. Therefore, GDP is far from being an accurate indicator of happiness.
If we wish to increase our happiness, then we would be wise to revise the way we currently think we make ourselves happy, and start focusing on how we can discover true happiness through achieving harmonious connection with each other in society and with nature.
Based on KabTV’s “Conversations” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman on June 9, 2021. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
We can find our life’s purpose by learning the higher plan and program of nature that develops us toward life’s purpose at every moment.
By learning nature’s plan, we gradually start feeling what we can realize in our present incarnation, what our fate was in our previous incarnation, how nature operates, why we were created the way we were, and how we develop the way we do under the environment’s influence.
We can then understand how to click into this system and control it. Using our desires and intentions together with guidance based on learning nature’s higher plan, we can enter into nature’s control room and discover how and why everything was created the way it was.
Asking about the purpose of life is the first step toward this discovery. Over the course of history and our individual lives, we develop through desires for food, sex, family, money, honor, control and knowledge, which are all desires that belong to our current level of perception and sensation.
The desire for meaning and purpose already belongs to a higher level of perception and sensation, and asking about the meaning and purpose of life is the seed of its discovery. By learning how to direct this desire at the purpose of life, which is eternal and whole, we learn how to rise above our physical level of existence, and find ourselves living in a higher reality where we perceive how and why everything is operated. Moreover, from such a level of attainment, we also learn how to influence our very destiny.
Based on the Daily Kabbalah Lesson with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman on September 20, 2015. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
The reason to live is in order to reach “love your neighbor as yourself” through which we discover the higher, eternal and perfect existence among each other and with nature.
Based on New Life episode 401 with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman, Oren Levi and Tal Mandelbaum Moshe on June 12, 2016.
Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
World peace seems like a far-fetched utopian concept when we look at today’s world.
To start with, what is peace? Is it simply the opposite of war? When we look into the word “peace” from the perspective of the wisdom of Kabbalah, we find a different definition to how the term is commonly conceived, and we also receive a method on how to achieve it.
Peace is commonly considered a state of no war. Humanity has created several peace treaties, ceasefires and armistices after tough conflicts, wars, and much suffering, and it is always a question of how long they will last until the next outburst.
The term “peace” in Hebrew (“Shalom”) equates to “completion” or “perfection” (“Shalem”). Is it enough that we have an absence of war in order to experience perfection? Of course not. If we look deeper into the word “peace,” we arrive at the common root of our nature, before we divided into different genders, races, species and diverse nations.
In today’s world, where we find ourselves among a rapidly rising global population of billions of people, we perceive ourselves as separate from each other, and often not at peace. Moreover, our lack of knowledge on how to reach peace is our main problem.
The wisdom of Kabbalah describes how nature develops us toward a state of total world peace. Approaching peace, however, requires recognizing that nature is an interconnected and interdependent system, and that we humans are the only disrupters of the sensitive balance in nature. More specifically, the human ego, which is a desire to enjoy at the expense of others, harms us, the world and nature.
Interestingly, as far back as 1930, in his article, “Peace in the World,” Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag (Baal HaSulam) recognized the interconnected state of the world:
“Do not be surprised if I mix together the well-being of a particular collective with the well-being of the whole world, because indeed, we have already come to such a degree that the whole world is considered one collective and one society.”
How, then, do we achieve world peace?
Achieving world peace requires a long-term comprehensive social form of education that aims to raise us to discover a state of completion and perfection, and this is where the wisdom of Kabbalah, which describes nature’s causes, plan and functionality, can be of assistance. Kabbalah describes how we can impact self-transformation to change our egoistic nature to an altruistic one—a necessary change in order to reach a state of peace. As part of this transformation, we learn how to rise above our divisive drives that bring about separation between people and nations. Similar to a couple that makes up after an argument, uniting above division is what strengthens our connection.
Rabbi Nachman of Breslov explained, “The essence of peace is to try to make peace between two opposites” (Likutei Etzot, “Peace”). Also, it is written in Proverbs (10:12) that “Love will cover all transgressions.” Nature also contains a plethora of opposites working harmoniously as a single common system: light and darkness, heat and cold, sweet and bitter, and so on.
A process that leads to world peace thus depends on the development of an inclusion between opposites up to a point where a new feeling of the world emerges. Instead of feeling “them and us,” we come to feel a common whole in which we are all important parts.
Moreover, the wisdom of Kabbalah explains that we are all headed to a state of world peace, and Kabbalah is a method that lets us achieve this state faster, more enjoyable and with growing wisdom, knowledge and consciousness of the nature we all share.
Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman
The enveloping reason for increased divorce rates is due to natural human evolution. Our times are characterized by exiting the animal level of development and rising to the human level. In other words, nature is urging us to connect as a single global interdependent framework of humanity.
Since there is a growing need to connect as a single global system, we find our personal connections breaking more and more. Nature wants us to look beyond the family framework in order for us to later return to it on a different level, i.e. where we feel humanity as a single family.
In our individual lives, we experience a feeling of being in love, where we are overtaken by powerful emotions, excitement, inspiration, and a seeming perfection that was worth striving for in order to be together and upon which we could build a family. However, over time, we lost this feeling. Why, then, do we naturally fall in love if later that feeling dissipates?
What we need to understand is that we are in a system that nature runs. In this system, nature wants us to discover true eternal love, i.e. as love exists in nature itself. In the process, it wants us to detach from the conceptions and feelings of being in love that we experience temporarily in our current reality. We thus need to change our instinctive attraction to the other sex, which is fueled by natural passion and hormones, to a more goal-oriented connection.
We form the connections we currently know because we live for our children or our shared household. Moreover, being together is convenient because it lets us support each other as we grow older. Today, however, we need to find a new deeper kind of connection. We thus see more and more cases of divorce because we are in this transitional era where we already start feeling an increasing lack in the traditional frameworks that once held us together, that there is an additional and more sublime drive that we need in order to sustain and grow a happy family in our times.
If we can tap into this drive, which we have yet to accurately identify, we can set ourselves off on a path to discover a completely new feeling that emerges in a more goal-oriented connection to each other. We can then springboard from our increasing distaste toward our current frameworks to seek connections on a whole other level: a much stronger and warmer family-like connection among all humanity. If we enter such a sensation, then we discover a fulfillment that we have never felt before. It is as if we float freely, becoming very light and feeling an eternal thrush of life permeate us.
While we have the opportunity and the ability to determine these new goal-oriented connections through connection-enriching education, we see how these explanations go largely unnoticed. Nature thus prods us from behind by means of pain and suffering, and we find all kinds of connections that we once held shattering, with divorce being a key indicator of our broken connections in relation to the family. The purpose of this increasing feeling of detachment we feel, including the increasing divorce rates, is in order for us to get sick of our separation and develop a sincere new desire to connect on a whole other level. Eventually, we will make motions to connect in this new way, since we will find that otherwise we will be cornered. When we start connecting as nature requires us to, we will then discover the beauty in such connection.
Therefore, together with the increasing irreconcilable hatred and disagreements that break up more and more families, there surfaces a new sincere need for love. If we all understand the sublime fulfillment that true love brings, then we will want to have these feelings in our families. We will then return to the family after we learn how to love the entirety of humanity, and we will then wish to share a deeper and more uniquely personal and internal version of this connection with a spouse.
Based on New Life episode 19 on February 2, 2012 with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman, Oren Levi and Tal Mandelbaum Moshe. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.
Positive relationships in society are the enveloping means for good mental health. Mental illness comes from imbalance in the mind and body, which comes from imbalance in society, which is further caused by imbalance with nature. By fixing our social connections, we bring ourselves into balance with nature, and such balance will positively influence not only our mental health, but also our general health and well-being.
Whether or not we are aware of it, positive relationships in society give our lives a sense of meaning and worth. It is no wonder, then, that the more we become divided, isolated and lonely, as is the case in much of today’s world, then the more we also see mental illness on the rise.
By nature, we are social creatures and our lives are full of relationships: at home, in the workplace, with friends, relatives, acquaintances, strangers, and through various media. On one hand, we all want to feel good and enjoy positive relationships. On the other hand, we find ourselves dealing with more and more inequality and conflicts.
When we are young, we learn that we need to behave and speak a certain way in society, because if we do not, then we can evoke a negative reaction from other people. We thus apply certain rules and codes of conduct to ourselves in order to fit in, and while they may contribute to advancing us personally and getting us into certain career paths, they often fail to serve building meaningful relationships, which is what truly makes us happy and gives us emotional stability. We thus find ourselves living in a world where divisiveness, isolation, loneliness and stress are on the rise, and our health and well-being thus become negatively affected as a result.
As important as positive social relationships are to our health and well-being, and in both preventing and treating mental illness, they are tremendously under-emphasized in today’s world. On one hand, we are evolving outside our past boundaries of several classes and hierarchies, which made our lives much clearer and simple, and have achieved a state of more equality. On the other hand, such equality is superficial and it leads to more and more confusion and anxiety.
The great paradox of our times is that our world has become like a small global village, where our interconnectedness and interdependence becomes tighter worldwide, but on the other hand, we find ourselves becoming more and more internally divided and hateful in our attitudes toward each other.
While it stands to reason that the more dependent we become on each other, the more we should learn, apply and exercise positive relations to realize that dependence harmoniously, the opposite is the case: that we keep trying to use each other for self-benefit, and we wish to impose our own views and egoistic decisions on others. This self-centered attitude contradicts the principle of an egalitarian society, where we are each equally important even though we are each different.
Therefore, we have a fateful challenge to meet in our times, where if we succeed in standing up to this challenge, then we will be able to solve several problems in our world, with mental illness among them.
The challenge is: How can we realize our increasing interdependence harmoniously?
To this end, we need to establish a social-educational system that will open our eyes to the deep level of interdependence in all areas of our lives, which should amplify the indispensable need for positive social connections. We can begin with concrete steps to acquire strong and solid relations.
First, it is important to realize that in this tightly interdependent world, every piece is indispensable to complete the full picture of reality, like in a puzzle. By affecting one another, we affect the whole system, for better or for worse. It is a system that each person is part of and that influences each person directly. Do we want to benefit from the fact that we have positive social relationships and a warm environment? Certainly, every person wishes to live in such a reality. It is then in our own interest to transform our actions and intentions from harmful exploitative ones to mutual understanding and care.
The way to achieve this goal is not rocket science. Yet, it is also not obvious to us because we have not been taught how to do it. However, there is a method of connection that we can implement in order to bring about improvements in our social relationships, and the more we undergo such connection-enriching learning, the more we will find ourselves getting along much better, on one hand, and lessening the cases of myriad problems in our lives, including mental illness, on the other hand.
Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
The Creator is the quality of the upper world, the principle characteristic of which is bestowal or giving.
We do not know who or what the Creator is in and of itself. We can only know how we perceive the Creator. As much as we sense the quality of giving, perceiving in a manner of bestowal, we accordingly attain the Creator. Similarly, we can say nothing about any object in our world in and of itself, but only about how it appears to us in our perception.
Therefore, in Hebrew, the language kabbalists use to describe the upper world, the word for the Creator is “Boreh,” which is a connection of two words: “Bo” (“come”) and “Reh” (“see”). “Come” means that we undergo a certain kind of self-transformation, where we attain the quality of bestowal, and then we “see.” In other words, we perceive everything in our sensations.
How can we attain the quality of bestowal? This is what the wisdom of Kabbalah was given to us for. It is a method for attaining the upper world by acquiring the quality of bestowal, and we discover the Creator to the extent in which we sense the quality of bestowal. That is why Kabbalah is defined as a wisdom that brings us “the revelation of the Creator to His created beings in this world” (Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag [Baal HaSulam], “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah”). By progressing in the method, we acquire new tools of perception and sensation called “Kelim” (“vessels,” plural of “Kli” [“vessel”]) with which we sense the Creator and the upper world.
Based on KabTV’s “Spiritual States” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
It starts by wanting something more or different to what everyday life offers. In the wisdom of Kabbalah, it is called the emergence of the desire for spirituality called the “point in the heart.” When this desire emerges, we feel a need to get answers to the question about the meaning of life.
How do we come to such a desire?
It comes after developing over several lifetimes, where we were first like animals, with desires solely for food, family, sex and shelter, and we then developed through desires for money, honor, control and knowledge.
In our first stage of development, we had desires only for food, family, sex and shelter. We still have such desires even if we are completely isolated from society. Our next stages of development—desires for money, honor, control and knowledge—are characterized by desires that emerge in relation to society.
Afterward, the desire for knowledge appears. Sciences blossomed as we set out to discover where everything came from, and to discover our roots. Such a desire for knowledge, however, still only resides within the framework of our world.
Only in the next stage of our desire’s development do we wish to know our real source, essence and purpose: the meaning of life. We then start becoming troubled by questions about our origin, our future, and who and what we really are.
We are egoists by nature. Common to all of our desires is that they are self-centered and want fulfillment. They pressure us and literally control our every move. The ego’s limit in our world is the desire to become filled with knowledge about something above us.
Suffering is at the core of our desires. We shift from one type of desire to another under the influence of suffering. If we are in a balanced state, then we feel at peace. When a new desire surfaces, we then feel as if we lack something and want to experience or receive something new, so we start trying to fulfill our desire’s demands… and this process repeats throughout our lives. In short, we always move toward fulfillment, and move away from pain.
We live our lives trying to fulfill our countless desires. After several lifetimes, we come to a state when one desire is all that is left: the desire to attain our source, the meaning of life.
When this final desire appears, everything else seems to lose its meaning. We then become depressed, feeling emotionally and spiritually empty, as if nothing can bring happiness.
The feeling of life as pointless and inauthentic is an expression of a new desire that is starting to surface in our era, the desire for spirituality. It is a desire that essentially asks about life’s meaning and purpose—”What is the meaning of life?”—even if we do not verbalize it as such. It makes us seek through various teachings in order to find some kind of meaning and answers.
The wisdom of Kabbalah was made specifically in order to fulfill this desire. It is an empiric method that leads to the discovery of the meaning of life—the attainment of the higher reality—and is open for study by anyone who wants to delve into it.
Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
The human ego is the basis for all our drives and characteristics. It operates in an absorptive manner, receiving from others and nature for the sake of personal benefit. Over the course of history, the ego undergoes development and leads us to a fateful transition where it changes direction to its opposite: from receiving to giving. We can aid such a transformation, to make it faster and more enjoyable, if we learn how the ego operates on us, and what we can do in order to realize the transformation consciously.
When our perception shifts to a direction that aims from ourselves outwardly, toward the benefit of others, we discover a paradigm of totally different feelings and understandings. When we are self-aimed, we always calculate whether something is good or bad for us. It means that we automatically choose that which we perceive as good for the ego, and throw aside what we see as bad for it. When there is a phenomenon that neither benefits nor harms the ego, then we have no sensation of that phenomenon. This is how we perceive reality.
When we change ourselves, shifting our constant egoistic focus on self-aimed benefit to an altruistic focus on the benefit of others, we then start perceiving the part of reality that surrounds us, which we had no prior perception of, because we perceived everything through our egoistic impulses.
We then start perceiving everything via a completely opposite altruistic lens. Instead of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, we develop five new altruistic senses called “Keter, Hochma, Bina, Zeir Anpin and Malchut.” We then perceive a new world, called the “upper world” or “spiritual world,” through the new altruistic nature that we attain.
When we reach such attainment, our egoistic perception of reality still remains. We continue living and feeling the world through our same inborn five senses, however our focus completely transforms to perceive the altruistic part of reality that is concealed from our egoistic perception. We then start feeling life in two worlds. Via this new perception and sensation, we start making decisions on how we orient our every motion. We are all destined to reach this state.
In the meantime, our egoistic perception prioritizes whatever it perceives as serving greater benefit to ourselves, while everything that does not benefit us, it rejects or does not perceive at all. In general, we automatically choose what we enjoy and find useful for our goals, and reject everything else.
Racism is a state where, in addition to our senses being directed solely toward self-benefit, we also enjoy when others are worse off. Humanity in general has this problem. Part and parcel of our egoistic development over generations is that the ego reaches a state of overgrowth, where we live and work not only to serve our own interests, but we also wish to inflict harm upon others. This comes from excessive social desires (wealth, honor, control and knowledge) where we constantly compare ourselves to others, and the bigger our egos are, the more we want to be above them. Then the worse it is for them, the better it is for us.
Envy, hatred, and generally the desire to reap enjoyment from harming others, is nonexistent in animals. This constant comparison to others in society thus sets the scene for racism. We start blaming others for all kinds of problems and misfortunes in our lives when we think that they cause our troubles, or when we see that they are more fortunate and successful than we are. Also, we want to look good in the eyes of society, and the more we see others looking seemingly better than us, the more we want to put them down in order to elevate our own status. Such traits exist only in humans, because we are composed of animal and human qualities. The animal part of us requires food, sex and family, and the human part demands money, honor, control and knowledge. When our egoistic desire grows and we wish to fulfill ourselves more and more with the sources of these emotions, we then encounter envy and hatred.
It follows that we feel better off when we see others as worse off, as it is an essential aspect of our inborn ego. If our egos are small, similar to animals, then we do not encounter such negative emotions. However, if our egos are highly developed, then we feel great unrest due to constantly comparing ourselves to others and seeing that they are more successful and fortunate. This unrest thus acts on us in order to make us want to be above them, either by outcompeting them, or by putting them down.
Racism thus increasingly surfaces the more our egos grow. We find ourselves emphasizing our differences and divisions more and more, without any inclination to rise above them, which ends up creating more and more instances of racism, hatred and division.
We thus find ourselves moving toward a state of immense hatred and divisiveness, on one hand, but on the other hand, we also find ourselves becoming increasingly interdependent. At such a fateful juncture, we need a new kind of education that emphasizes how we can positively connect above our divisive drives—specifically a wisdom that acknowledges the causes of our divisive drives, and which guides us not in order to diminish or cancel them, but in order to rise above them in a positive connection—and by doing so, we will reach a newfound harmonious balance between these two opposite tendencies.
Based on a video conference with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman on June 7, 2015. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Photo by Josh Calabrese on Unsplash.
Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Does the world produce enough food to feed everyone?“
