Question: One of the diseases of humanity now is a problem with sleep, either insomnia or sleepiness. How do we deal with this?
Answer: I do not think we should treat this as a problem. Just go with the flow as much as you can, and gradually your body will find out how it needs to adapt to this state.
Here you just need to devote yourself to the correct, normal lifestyle, not too much exercise, not too much laziness. Then you will see that the amount of sleep you get is enough for you.
So what if you sleep for five hours? It’s all right; it means you do not need more sleep. And if necessary, the body will make adjustments. [272153] From KabTV’s “Kabbalah Express” 9/1/20
Question: Stress is called a disease of the 21st century. According to some research, 40% of the population of Earth need help with stress, anxiety, and so on. How can a person avoid or withstand stress, anxiety, and uncertainty about the future?
Answer: This usually happens when a person understands who controls him, who leads him, and to what extent he can position himself correctly with the force that develops him. Then he will not have any worries and problems. He will be completely inside the system that controls him and go along with it.
Remark: But when a person expects something good, he is still under stress.
My Comment: He must understand what it means to expect good or bad, from whom to expect it, when, and how. One can find this out only by studying the method of controlling nature. Therefore, nothing will help here except a serious education that is given in our courses. [271911] From KabTV’s “Kabbalah Express” 9/1/20
People who commit suicide do not want to endure ongoing feelings of frustration and emptiness.
Like any person, they wanted to become fulfilled—and today there are myriad pleasures available to us at the tap of a button—but suicidal people find fulfillment to be completely elusive.
The inner distress they feel within exceeds any sensations that they can receive from anyone else.
Do our lives have meaning, a goal and a purpose that make our lives worth living? What is our impetus to continue living on in life?
Such questions awaken in certain people, and they drive some people to seek their answers, and some to a pit of desperation, where they would like to invert such questions and sensations, but they cannot, and then they reach the end.
To get answers to the questions about life’s meaning, I recommend checking out the links in my Quora bio, where there is a plethora of courses and other materials available to help people find the answers to life’s deepest questions.
We will see an end to the coronavirus when we overcome our negative thoughts, divisiveness and hatred of each other.
Today’s world is fundamentally different to the past because our present era increasingly reveals how dependent we are on each other, all around the world. And the more we depend on each other, the more we rely on each member of human society upholding values of consideration and responsibility toward their fellow human beings.
We need mutual consideration and responsibility today more than ever to spare ourselves from a lot of unnecessary suffering, and more so, to create a safer and happier future for all people.
In terms of the coronavirus, we are still in stages where we think that it will soon end and everything will return to “normal” again.
But it won’t.
The new era of interdependence that we have entered demands that we bridge our rivalries in order to experience our tightening connection harmoniously. Likewise, the coronavirus will subside to the extent that we rise above our negative attitudes to each other and positively connect.
We simply fail to see how much the health or illness of our bodies and surrounding society depends on the positivity or negativity of our thoughts in relation to other people. Until we start actively surrounding ourselves with socio-cultural influences that inspire us to compromise, cooperate, care for one another, and positively connect, then we will continue seeing a rise in negative phenomena—from more and more people falling ill with the virus, to more and more people losing their jobs, their businesses, and their sanity the more they have to maintain social distance.
Today’s tightening interdependent conditions embody a new stage in human evolution, and so we will have to get used to the fact that we will not return to our pre-coronavirus lives. As evolutionary biologists have shown, nature constantly evolves through crisis to greater cooperation and unity, and today is precisely a time of global crisis preparing us to make a global-scale unifying shift.
If we fail to actualize our shift to greater unification above our differences willingly, then we will experience tightening interdependence in an undesirable fashion. It would be akin to sharing a small room with our biggest adversaries. However, if we make moves to positively connect above our divisive inclinations—prioritizing values of mutual consideration and responsibility throughout human society—then we will experience a whole new harmonious world open up to us, ensuring good health, safety and happiness for all.
The good times in the United States have indeed come to an end, and they are not returning. There is a process unfolding in nature, and accordingly the future of the United States will be worse than the future of other nations.
The prevailing disunity within the nation, the individualistic detachment among people, even among more and more American families, and the increasing divisiveness and polarization throughout American society are all outcomes of competitive-materialistic individualism clashing with a new interdependent paradigm that nature is increasingly pressing us with, where we will need to exercise mutual consideration and responsibility in order to secure ourselves a positive future.
The past “what’s mine is mine, what’s yours is yours” paradigm, which America championed, no longer suits the new conditions that nature has placed humanity into, which demands us to function in a much more unified way.
Human nature is fundamentally egoistic. That is, it is a desire to enjoy at the expense of others, and our egoistic nature constantly grows throughout our evolution to a point where we can no longer find any meaningful or lasting enjoyment by trying to fulfill our egos directly. We have been crossing that tipping point significantly over the last 20 to 30 years, and thus we also bear witness to America reaching a satiation point and increasingly struggling to maintain the status it once had.
A positive future for any nation and for the world at large depends on a significant paradigm shift: that we change our connections from trying to egoistically gain and profit off of anyone that we can, to trying to benefit and care for others. These are not merely nice words for us to agree with in one moment, and then forget about in the next. Rather, these are laws of nature, and they reveal themselves to us more and more in our current era.
If we apply ourselves to reach balance with the laws of nature by looking out for each other instead of looking out for self-benefit, then we will experience a much more harmonious existence as we head into the future. Nature will respond to our connection-enriched relations positively, and we will discover a new kind of enjoyment and fulfillment seemingly filling the space between us.
Therefore, while on one hand, the past egoistic paradigm that America championed is coming to an end, as we head into the future, America has the pioneering spirit as well as the world’s stage to impact a major shift in human relations: By implementing positive connections in American society above divisions and polarization, America can become a major positive influence in the world, and such a shift in American society would have harmonious rippling effects all throughout American society as well as the world over.
The only way to end domestic violence for good is by implementing serious education that we need nowadays for our very survival: a new kind of education where we learn about how our egoistic human nature operates on us at every moment, how it is growing in us individually and in humanity as a whole, how it brings about such phenomena as divisiveness, hatred and violence, how today it has reached such heights that it needs new methods that our past education can no longer fulfill, and how to stop it from erupting in such terrible situations as domestic violence.
Violent tendencies exist in every person. While most domestic violence is thought of as men violently abusing women, today we also see such phenomena as mothers violently abusing their children, and even on the contrary, children doing so against their mothers.
Why did nature make us so savage that many of us strike out against our own family members?
It is in order for us to reach a conclusion that our egoistic nature is an evil inclination. Our ego, which is a desire to enjoy at the expense of others, ultimately hates anyone or anything that does not seem to benefit it.
Moreover, today more than ever, domestic violence acts as a prominent example of the immense hatred that is building up within human beings, and that it is all in order for us to reach a desire to put aside this hatred—which clearly leads to no positive outcomes—and start loving one another.
Therefore, the more violence and suffering amounts, the more potential we acquire to reach a desperate cry for change: to transform our nature from egoistic and hateful to altruistic and loving.
This is where the importance of a new form of education enters, one that focuses on teaching us how nature works—including human nature—and how we can develop positive attitudes to each other above the hatred that involuntarily surfaces inside us.
I’m optimistic that with such connection-enriching education, we can bring about great corrections to humanity. I have applied myself to connection-enriching education for dozens of years, and even though by nature I am very egoistic and domineering, by learning how human nature works, and by drawing alongside it a positive environment that is filled with positive examples of altruism, love and care, then I develop constant hope and motivation to become a better person from one day to the next.
That is the kind of drive we need to spread out to society at large if we are to see an end to domestic violence, as well as many other hateful outbursts occurring increasingly in our world today.
Good leaders first and foremost need to love the people they lead.
Their people need to be like their baby, the number one priority in their lives. They should thus be willing to live, work and sacrifice themselves for their people.
By loving their people, good leaders have no thoughts about themselves, but only about how to benefit their people.
In addition, good leaders should have the ability to foresee the future, to feel closeness toward the people they are directly responsible for, as well as the wider spectrum of human society. Good leaders should thus possess the wisdom to understand that a positive future depends on positive connections among people, and have it in their interest to develop positive ties not only among their own people, but between their people and all others. In other words, good leaders need to have a broad heart, a willingness to love everyone, and treat everyone’s success as their own success—not to build their own people’s success on the ruin of others.
Pandemic fatigue takes place when people get exhausted with the pandemic’s restrictions over a prolonged time period, and become less inclined to adhere to public health guidelines.
People with pandemic fatigue turn their attention away from health department regulations, and while different people feel and react to it differently, symptoms often include restlessness, irritability, low motivation, and difficulty to concentrate. It might also include socially retreating or changing eating and or sleeping patterns.
Also, people experiencing pandemic fatigue might react by blatantly opposing its regulations: attending parties, protests, cafés, restaurants, bars, and generally rejecting social distancing, mask-wearing and the recommended level of personal hygiene.
However, despite the various types of pandemic fatigue that many people experience as we plod forward in these testing times, the coronavirus itself remains unaffected. As carelessness increases, so do the amount of people testing positive for the virus. And we see that wherever governments loosen their public health restrictions, infections also increase.
The stressful paradox that many face today, where on one hand, they see no light at the end of the pandemic’s tunnel the further they trod into it, and on the other hand, they burn out in desperation, will lead more and more people to erupt in resistance to the regulations.
Pandemic fatigue should ultimately serve to accelerate our demand to try new remedies for the coronavirus. Instead of twiddling our thumbs waiting for vaccines, we can try to implement a remedy that is risk-free, and which costs us nothing. Before discussing this remedy, I’ll make an important disclaimer that this by no means suggests that we pay no attention to public health guidelines, but on the contrary, while rigorously following public health regulations, we can try to implement the following remedy to the coronavirus: adjusting our attitude to each other to think positively, considerately and responsibly toward one another.
If we could look deeper into what brought about this pandemic, then we would see that negative attitudes to each other create the biggest imbalance in nature, which invites a negative response upon us from nature. Likewise, if we change our attitudes to each other from negative to positive, careless and exploitative to considerate and responsible, then we would enter into balance with nature—and nature would respond positively to us in return.
So while we keep our physical distance from each other for the time being, we would be wise to seek how we could become closer in our mental and emotional distance. One practical way to do so is by relating to the observance of the health department regulations not for each one’s individual protection, but on the contrary, that we observe the health department regulations, keeping our social distance and wearing masks, etc., in order to not infect others. In other words, if we all thought of only “myself” as the one who hosts the virus, and that I now do not want to infect anybody else with it, then we would be on track to seeing the virus quickly subside from our lives.
Inverting the focus from one’s personal protection and benefit to the protection and benefit of others holds immense power. By using this period to make significant improvements in our concern and responsibility toward other people, we would bear witness to tremendously positive effects spreading throughout human society, starting by securing each other’s health.
We thus have nothing to lose and everything to gain, just to twist a little attitude knob within us so that we relate positively, considerately and responsibly toward each other, and then we would be headed on a path to healing not only ourselves, but human society as a whole.
Before asking about who would be a more supportive US president for Israel, we in Israel would be wise to question what we have done to merit the backing of a world superpower.
What are we projecting to the world? Beyond our impressive technological output, what are we contributing? And is advanced technology what the world really needs from us?
Today, the global environment we live in is changing, and likewise, the expectations upon Israel are gradually shifting as well. Heading into the future, if we will want to receive support from a major superpower, or from anyone for that matter, we will need to start paying more careful attention to what we project and contribute to the world, and whether it is what the world ultimately needs from us.
We are a unique nation because unlike other nations, we have no common biological root. Our ancestors, who were from originally from different clans and tribes, united as a nation under an idea: to unite (“love your neighbor as yourself”) above division (“love will cover all crimes”), which granted us the ability to project a positive force to the world, or in other words, to be “a light unto the nations.”
After living for a short period of time upholding our unification “as one man with one heart,” we soon afterward lost awareness of this common value that tied us all together as a nation. Likewise, as we failed to hold onto a mutual umbrella of love above our differences, then our differences eventually got the better of us, and we became exiled: we both lost our unification, and a land of our own.
Goaded by anti-Semitism throughout our exile, many of us rounded up in the land that would become known as the State of Israel, and after the mass tragedy of the Holocaust, a majority of nations agreed to its establishment.
Today, as we head toward the end of 2020, we stand after a decade of rising anti-Semitism, peaking in 2019 with its highest-recorded year of anti-Semitic crimes and threats in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany and the Netherlands. We also face growing anti-Semitic sentiment worldwide dressed in a “criticism of Israel” rhetoric, which has gained considerable support diplomatically, academically and culturally, largely due to the efforts of the BDS movement.
If today the United Nations needed to reach a two-thirds majority vote on whether to establish the State of Israel, would it pass? It certainly doesn’t seem so.
We need to understand the root of the negative attitude toward the people of Israel from the nations of the world. When we do, then we can focus on what we need to do in order to invert the negative attitude into a positive one.
The source of the nations’ negative attitude toward us is due to our failure to live up to what made us the people of Israel to begin with: our unity (“love your neighbor as yourself”) above division (“love will cover all crimes”), which granted us the ability to project a positive force to the world (to be “a light unto the nations”).
As the previous decade was characterized by rising anti-Semitism that peaked in 2019 in many countries, including the United States, another characteristic of the last decade was that it was one of ongoing crisis: from aftereffects of the financial crisis that opened the decade with mass unemployment, home foreclosures, austerity measures in many countries, global protests and the forthcoming wars in the Middle East, the constant gray clouds of terrorist acts, mass shootings and a 9.17 percent increase in natural disasters hitting the planet, as well as higher levels of depression, anxiety, stress, loneliness, social division and opioid abuse in the United States than in previous times. In short, as history has shown, such as during the time of the Black Death pandemic that led to mass killings of Jews throughout Europe, or Germany’s First World War defeat and subsequent depression, which eventually led to the rise of Hitler, the Nazis and the Holocaust—when crisis hits, anti-Semitism rises.
Therefore, with our current divisive track record coupled with the crises humanity continues to experience around the world, and especially in America, we can expect more and more detractors eyeing us critically. Likewise, the next United States administration’s attitude to Israel as either positive or negative will depend on whether we upgrade our attitudes to each other to become a more unified people.
Today, one of my students told me about this year’s very low ratings of the NBA finals, also mentioning how the recent Emmy awards plummeted to all-time low viewer numbers, down 14 percent from last year’s ceremony, as well as the Oscar awards earlier this year dropping to an all-time low viewership. They asked me what I think about this general decline in interest among various forms of entertainment and sport.
Our generation lavished in excesses of entertainment and sport more than any other. We placed them up on pedestals, showering their proponents with our utmost attention and respect. However, all such ways of enjoying and fulfilling ourselves are transient, and at a certain point, our interest in them wanes.
This is because human nature is a desire to enjoy, which constantly grows and demands new and different kinds of enjoyments to our previous ones. While all kinds of influences can turn our heads to basketball one minute, and then to film and actors the next minute, and then to another pleasure the minute after that, ad nauseam, at a certain point of our desire’s development, we will find that no matter what anybody tries to attract us with, we will feel disinterested.
It will simply be because our desire has outgrown what previously gave us enjoyment. Similar to a child who outgrows his or her toys, we too will start feeling drives for more mature and meaningful fulfillment—genuine human connection and answers to deeper questions about our life’s ultimate meaning, which will itch away at us more and more.
This year in particular, the coronavirus struck our lives, highlighting our vast interdependence all around the globe, and placing us all into a common global situation. It is as if we found ourselves aboard a new global Titanic, floating in space, without any clue as to where it is taking us or what will happen tomorrow.
As we float along together on this giant planetary ship, nobody really knows where to turn or what to do, so some turn right, others turn left, and we find ourselves in a major global crisis as we polarize more and more.
Therefore, as our desires start outgrowing what previously fulfilled them, and while we increasingly realize our tightening interdependence and interconnectedness worldwide—that we share a common global problem—it is no wonder that the NBA finals, and Emmy and Oscar award shows, have reached record lows in interest.
We are growing up. I am optimistic that we will become more aware of how our human nature operates on us, how it is growing to new heights, and how it starts demanding different and more meaningful kinds of fulfillment. I am also hopeful that we will succeed in providing our more mature needs the fulfillment they seek—to realize our increasing interdependence and interconnectedness positively, and by doing so, feel a much fuller, more expansive and authentic reality to our current one.
If we start navigating through these turbulent seas crashing against our common ship today, seeking how to meaningfully connect above our drives for momentary pleasures, then we can rest assured that our ship will reach a safe shore.
Question: One of the diseases of humanity now is a problem with sleep, either insomnia or sleepiness. How do we deal with this?
Michael Laitman, On Quora:
