Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What are the key lessons from this pandemic?“

One key lesson is that the pandemic is only an initial blow from nature, and we can expect many more blows in more severe forms because the time has come for us to undergo a major transformation: a shift in our entire approach to life, from a competitive self-centered approach to one where we share mutual responsibility and consideration for each other and nature.

The pandemic-charged changes we already see in society, from social distancing conditions through to increased unemployment and falling businesses, hint at how this change of our approach to life will have to transpire.

Especially in the realm of work, we have built a society filled with businesses and professions that we have no real need for.

Through the pandemic, nature started filtering out the nonessential from the essential. Businesses that served our basic needs continued serving us, while those we had no real need for became sidelined.

If we look at the animal sphere, we see how a certain amount of animals die off, and others develop in their place, according to various changes that appear in nature.

It is similar with us.

We are parts of nature, and nature operates on us by placing us in new conditions. Accordingly, nature adjusts the human population and the emphasis of its activity.

Under the coronavirus’ influence, many people have become unemployed, and it is because there is a prominent declining need for much of the professions we once held.

We can expect businesses and professions that we have a real need for to continue, which is only about five percent of the service sector that has developed over the last 70 years or so.

Likewise, we will see that around 95 percent of what we engaged in will gradually disappear. People will feel that the materialistic values we held, which drove us to strive for expensive clothing, prestigious cars, and traveling incessantly around the world, will decline, and we will feel needs for more basic and simple fulfillments, together with more meaningful social connections.

Therefore, society and authorities alike will need to think hard about what to do with the growing unemployed mass around the world.

It is on this point that I have proposed a setup where people will have their basic needs provided by authorities in exchange for participating in learning and activities that aim to increase the sensation of meaningful connection in society.

On one hand, we won’t be able to revive our pre-coronavirus economy and lifestyle, and on the other hand, if we simply fulfill people’s basic needs without offering social accolades and goals worth striving for, then society will stagnate.

Therefore, by supplying life’s essentials in exchange for participation in learning and activities that aim to improve social connections, we will see a major shift in values—from egoistic to altruistic, individualistic to mutually dependent, and materialistic to people-focused—which will make this transition appear advantageous to everyone.

Moreover, by prioritizing positive social connections above all other engagements, we will also come closer into balance with nature’s interdependent and interconnected form, and will thus experience positive feedback from nature: elated harmonious sensations the likes of which we have yet to experience.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Is there a learning from the global Corona pandemic, that we all are missing?“

We should learn that the coronavirus is not merely a blow to our health and the economy, but it emerged in order to completely transform our lives.

On one hand, many understand that there is a major transition unfolding. On the other hand, we mostly wish to revive our pre-coronavirus lifestyles as soon as we discover a remedy for the disease.

We thus need to elevate our awareness to see that nature is acting on us via this pandemic in order to increase our understanding and feeling of why it is happening.

That is, the coronavirus did not appear to merely shut us off from each other in our respective homes, and to keep a distance of a few feet from each other when we have to go outside, and also not to stop us from attending public events, and so on. It surfaced in order to nudge us toward understanding our interdependence and interconnectedness, and to adjust our relations accordingly in order to live with more mutual responsibility and consideration toward one another.

The longer the pandemic dwells among us, the more it serves to gradually establish a new, more integral and global sensation.

Other than the blow itself, which does the work of teaching us about our interdependence against our will, I also very much hope that we will succeed in raising our awareness willingly, through education.

In other words, instead of merely reacting to a problem that suddenly reveals itself before our very eyes, we can learn about the greater evolutionary process we are in, and see how we live in a global and integral nature, acting to ultimately raise us to a harmonious state of perfect connection among each other and with nature.

By understanding this bigger picture, we can then view the coronavirus pandemic as a tough lesson that nature is teaching us in a very calculated way. Similar to how we educate children, if they willingly listen to our advice, then we relate favorably to them, and they spare themselves from various deviations. However, if they do not listen to our advice, then in order to save them from greater impending blows that we can foresee, we have to act more strictly and sternly toward them.

This is why I, my students and my organization invest so much in explaining the root cause of the pandemic, and how we need to use this situation in order to readjust our approach to life. That is, by learning about how nature operates on us, we can enter into balance with nature quicker, experiencing much healthier and happier lives, on one hand, and also saving ourselves from more intense future suffering.

We would thus be wise to accept the coronavirus as a warning from nature, using it to become more like nature. That is, as nature is interdependent and interconnected, so we should realize our interdependence as parts of nature positively by increasing our mutual responsibility and consideration toward each other.

Ultimately, there is no pandemic or virus here, but a single force pressuring us out of necessity. It has no desire to burden us, but like a loving parent witnessing his or her child straying to a negative course, it needs to act more aggressively in order for us to notice what it wants from us.

One way or another, we will need to develop and become more positively connected. The question is whether we do so harmoniously by activating our minds and hearts to positively connect with others, and by reorganizing our lives so that we supply each other with the essentials we all need; or on the contrary, that we let nature’s steamroller of evolution continue catching up to us, goading us from behind to wake us up through painful circumstances.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What are the businesses of the future?“

We first need to understand that the financial, industrial and educational systems we have lived according to until today will change completely.

It is because the basis upon which we built all of our systems was our egoistic human nature, i.e., personal benefit at the expense of others. The more we develop with egoistic motives underlying our systems, the more corruption, exploitation, manipulation and abuse fills these systems, which gradually leads to a multi-system collapse.

Our past egoistic notion of success, where an individual or company is considered successful if they manage to run other individuals and companies to the ground, while simultaneously shining the spotlight on their increasing profit margins, is revealing itself to be unsustainable and harmful.

Today, nature presents us with increasingly interdependent and interconnected conditions, where we can no longer think of ourselves as separate from others, considering our own benefit alone. Therefore, increasing profit in one person’s hands as a result of subtracting from other people can no longer work as a success indicator.

Moreover, it is important for us to understand that the end of our egoistic-materialistic paradigm has been greatly accelerated by the coronavirus, which has forced us to distance ourselves from our past systems in a very poignant manner.

Today, we already live in a new system, but we have yet to fully acknowledge what that means. Thus, we are far from sensing our current transitional era positively.

The key for adapting to our new era is to start emphasizing the importance of human connections above all other engagements.

If we succeed in upgrading human connections, so that we will feel mutual consideration and responsibility toward each other, then we will discover exactly what kinds of businesses we will and will not need. In short, businesses will need to be conducive to improving human connections. On one hand, we will need our life’s essentials met, and on the other hand, we will need to continually invest in building positive connections among society.

All other surplus will be thus seen as nonessential and even destructive to our world, and the coronavirus has already helped us see this a lot quicker.

The principle of future businesses should be fundamentally opposite from today’s principle: that they benefit people’s connection, and that they cause no harm to people and nature. There should be no more situations where one person or company increases their profits at the expense of others. Our priorities will need to shift completely in order that we all focus on benefiting everybody. Success will then be seen not in terms of profiting from society, but in terms of contributing to society, and businesses that sustain the goal of benefiting society will be the ones that prosper.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “How long will it be until we have a coronavirus vaccine?“

First, if we could look at the intentions behind the global race for a coronavirus vaccine, then what would we see?

Would we see a sincere concern of experts and world leaders to improve humanity’s health?

Or would we see a cutthroat pursuit to be the first to birth a major source of new income for their country’s economy, as well as an ability to flaunt their country’s gleaming status and pride as being smarter and more adept than other countries for winning this race?

Since human nature is egoistic, prioritizing self-benefit over benefiting others, then it should come as no surprise that the latter inclinations are the primal driving factors behind the pursuit for a coronavirus vaccine.

This race thus becomes a reflection of the same overblown egoistic human relations that stand behind the disease in the first place. So even if we develop a vaccine, we can expect it to fall short of providing us with a lasting remedy. On the contrary, without correction of our egoistic inclinations, we can only expect our problems to worsen.

What does it mean that our egoistic relations are behind this disease?

When we can view the coronavirus pandemic as part of a process unfolding in nature that guides our eventual exit from our egoistic nature—and entrance into a new positively connected reality, balanced with nature—then we can see how the coronavirus emerged primarily as a blow to the very ego that nature pressures us to exit.

Therefore, no matter what sophisticated vaccines we come up with, if we fail to use this pandemic in order to increase our awareness of the greater process we are in, and of what nature ultimately wants from us, then we will inevitably have to experience harsher blows in order to wake us up to the goodness that exists outside of our divisive egos.

The main discovery we thus need to make with this pandemic is not outside us, in the form of a vaccine, but inside us, in the form of upgraded attitudes to each other: from egoistic, indifferent and even hateful, to altruistic, caring and loving.

Moreover, the coronavirus has laid out before our very eyes just how connected we are, showing how a minuscule particle that surfaced in a small Chinese province became humanity’s common problem, placing people around the world into similar restrictive conditions.

In other words, through the coronavirus, nature shows us how connected and interdependent we are, while at the same time, this should illuminate how much we are disconnected and divided in our egoistic attitudes to each other.

The parallel opposite tendency of becoming increasingly interdependent while also becoming more and more egoistic is a recipe for disaster.

Therefore, the sooner we implement a change in our attitudes to each other in order to align ourselves with the connectedness surrounding us, then the sooner we will develop immunity to the coronavirus and to other even stronger diseases, without needing to stick any needles into our veins.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Is God the laws of nature?“

To start with, I would like you to read an excerpt by Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag (Baal HaSulam) from his article “The Peace”:

It is best for us to meet halfway and accept the words of the Kabbalists, that nature (הטבע – HaTeva) has the same numerical value (in Hebrew) as the word God (אלה-ים – Elohim) – eighty six. Then I’ll be able to call the laws of God the commandments of nature and vice-versa, for they are one and the same, and we need discuss it no further.

The problem with society today is that we follow laws opposite to the laws of nature. Human nature, which is egoistic, i.e., concerned solely with personal benefit, is a destructive force that opposes nature.

In other words, while the laws of nature are laws of love and bestowal, which harmoniously connect between all of nature’s parts and consider the benefit of the whole, the human ego divisively exploits other people and nature for its personal gain.

Therefore, instead of following the laws of nature, we have invented our own laws—ethics, civil and religious—and we have discovered over 200 physical laws.

It is as if we try to find our way in the dark, and slip over, hurt ourselves on sharp objects, bump into each other and knock down furniture by accident. That is, we enter into bigger and bigger crises the more we develop, with no awareness of nature’s laws.

What, then, does it mean to gain awareness of the laws of nature?

It means that we learn and exercise how to positively connect in society so that there will be an envelope of love and care in our relations. In other words, by connecting as a single whole in human society, we match nature’s wholeness, and we then experience newfound harmony, happiness, confidence and peace filling our lives.

Especially in our present times, as we experience tightening interdependence all around the world, we need the laws of nature, or God’s commandments—laws of love—to become revealed between everyone and everything. We need to see such an attitude as something outside our current reach, and which we need to learn and implement on ourselves if we want to experience better lives. Otherwise, we can expect more and more unfortunate pains and suffering in order to bring us to the inevitable same conclusion: that we need to learn and exercise love for one another.

That is why I and my organization, the Bnei Baruch Kabbalah Education & Research Institute, invest so much in spreading the message of connection to the world. We provide courses and an entire study and community framework for anyone who wants to study these laws of nature on a deeper level. However, even just encountering such messages as short articles, videos and other media online holds value in adding to humanity’s much-needed awareness about the laws of nature in our times.

It is my hope that such growing awareness will spare humanity from much future suffering, and that in its place, we will discover a world of love and positive connection, balanced with nature.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “If you imagine the psychological state of all humanity as an individual, how would you diagnose humanity at the moment? Is it becoming more or less sane or is it remaining fairly stable?“

Humanity is currently living under the rule of its egoistic nature, i.e., a nature that makes each person prioritize self-benefit over benefiting other people, society and the ecology.

Moreover, humans are the only part of nature under egoistic control. The rest of nature—from still matter through plant and animal life—is bonded integrally by altruistic ties.

The human ego cuts us off from the sensation of nature’s altruistic quality, making us disagree with thinking and wanting to benefit the system we exist in. In other words, contrary to the way cells and organs act to only receive what they need for their survival, and give all surplus for the benefit of the whole organism that they exist in, we think and want solely with “What will I get out of it?” at the basis of our every calculation, which leads us to even act detrimentally toward others in the name of personal gain.

Nature has implanted this egoistic modus operandi into us so that we would eventually realize how it leads us to an impasse, and desire to change our egoistic nature.

Therefore, a diagnosis of humanity at its current state of development is that it is nearing such a revelation. At the moment, our egos make us increasingly destructive to each other and to our planet, and we also witness how nature becomes increasingly intolerant of our opposite mode of behavior. In other words, we head deeper and deeper into a crisis, but we have yet to reach such a depth where we will simply raise our hands and wish for the right kind of change.

The coronavirus pandemic is a prime example of how nature reacts to our rampant unabated egoism today. With the coronavirus, nature has forced us to become more cautious with each other, i.e., with the social distancing conditions implemented globally. If we fail to upgrade our attitudes to each other according to our own will, then nature sends us situations to do so against our will.

However, I still see that we fail to draw the correct conclusions from this situation we are now in. We have reached no understanding of the deeper causes behind the virus, and avoid responsibility on our behalf for its spread. We merely await its end so that we can let our egos loose on the world once again, and remain blind to how nature will send us much more difficult states the more we neglect self-transformation.

Until we reach the conclusion that our egoistic nature needs changing, we will continue trying to exploit nature by all possible means, failing to foresee the next smack nature will deliver us to once again hint at how the way we are headed is incorrect.

I thus hope that we will wake up to this change sooner rather than later, out of our own awareness, through learning how nature works, how we function within nature, and by exercising how we can accelerate this fateful change with our own efforts to invert our egoistic nature to an altruistic nature in balance with nature.

When we eventually make that change, we will experience a completely new world of harmony, happiness, peace and tranquility, and will look back at our current state as a depraved one: the last throes of death of an egoistic paradigm before our greatest ever transformation.

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Question from Facebook: What kind of contact with the Creator do we speak about? After all, contact is unilateral, the Creator has been silent for over 5,000 years now, why?

Answer: The Creator is silent and will continue to be silent. Of course He will be silent if you don’t connect to Him and don’t establish the connection.

Comment: But people have been trying to do that throughout these 5,779 years.

My Response: You can try, but if you dial a wrong number, or you call the wrong line, there is no connection.

So you imagine that you are seemingly in direct contact with the Creator and that you speak to Him and feel that He answers you. Here everything depends on a person’s imagination. This is what all religions are based upon.

Comment: But the connection is unilateral.

My Response: No. The wisdom of Kabbalah calls us to re-establish complete and absolute two-way sensory connection with the Creator through all our senses and even above them.

Question: And then there will be a concrete feeling that He answers?

Answer: Not only answers. It is a kind of connection that does not exist in our world. It is telecommunication, teleportation, whatever you like, which means that the Creator is inside me and I am inside Him.

Comment: People are asking for proof.

My Response: Go ahead! Come and get acquainted with the method of the revelation of the Creator and reveal Him. All the evidence will be right in front of you.

A few years ago the mathematician Grigori Perelman proved the Poincaré Conjecture. If you haven’t read about this research, look it up. It is not a big book. The first 300 to 400 pages introduce the actual theorem, and then a bit more about his actual revelation.

Here we speak about the Creator, while the theorem of the Poincaré Conjecture is merely about the connection between a few parameters that are not that obvious, while here it is about much more.

Question: So you mean to say that it is a complicated matter.

Answer: No. I want to say that even in the connections in our world, because mathematics deals with the connection between different quantities, it is a problem to link these things with each other. They may be on different planes, different volumes, and perceived differently, after all, we are also complicated elements of creation.

So we need to reveal and to scrutinize all that. But I promise you that eventually you will be able to be in direct contact with the Creator.
[239174]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 10/2/18

Related Material:
Be In Close Connection With The Creator
Work With The Creator
The Taste Of Connection With The Creator

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What do you think about suicide?“

Suicide is an unforgivable act.

It is a final statement of a person to his family, friends and relatives that he does not accept what he receives in life, that he cannot justify what is happening to him, that he deserves something else, and that he gives up on fighting for whatever he thinks he deserves.

It is an act of betrayal to those who love and care about the person. That is, instead of involving others to work on finding a solution together, the suicidal person retreats into his own self-aimed thoughts and feelings, prioritizing the elimination of his own pains and pressures over the negative effect that the act has on others.

However, there are two sides to every coin. The fact that suicidal people lose hope and see no light at the end of the tunnel is also because they feel no support at the end of that tunnel.

Therefore, as with any problem in life, we need to bear mutual responsibility for that problem. In other words, we all carry the blame for failing to actively build a society that provides everything people need in order to live healthy and happy lives, i.e., conditions that would prevent people from considering suicide in the first place.

For instance, where are the mechanisms in society that check whether people have the essentials they need, both in terms of basic survival necessities as well as psychological support?

It is true that we live in very stressful and difficult times, and we can expect them to become more stressful and difficult. We thus need to think seriously about how we can organize teams and groups that will distribute life’s essentials to people in need of them, to save people from becoming cornered into choking financial and psychological situations that often bring about insurmountable stress and depression, and also teams and groups that will be able to talk with people, providing them with ongoing psychological support.

For more on this topic, watch the following video (the topic of suicide starts at 8 min.): News of the Week with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi

Above photo by Dan Meyers on Unsplash.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Why do other people’s opinions matter to you?“

It has been shown in various social psychology experiments, and Kabbalists have long described it as a fundamental aspect of our lives, that others’ opinions are important to us, even if we fail to acknowledge that it is the case.

There is a paradox here: According to our egoistic human nature, which prioritizes personal benefit over all else, we consider nobody but ourselves. Why, then, do we care about what others think and say?

Nature has set us up in such a way so that we will enter into a reciprocal relationship with our surrounding society and world.

If other people’s opinions would not matter to us, then we would not be able to reach our full human potential. That is, we would not be able to change ourselves, expanding our perception and sensation in order to realize our interconnectedness and interdependence with the single system of nature, including us humans as its integral parts.

Today, as we face a world closing in on us, with tightening ecological, economic and social conditions, the change to a more positively-connected human consciousness is of primal importance.

By recognizing the vast extent to which others’ opinions influence us, we can make wiser choices regarding our surrounding society: choosing the people we surround ourselves with, i.e., according to shared goals, needs and values, and also the kind of influence we input into this network and impart onto others.

Ultimately, the fullest realization of our mutual influence leads us to feel a need for mutual responsibility, consideration, compromise, support, encouragement and cooperation.

In other words, if we were to understand the full extent of our influence on each other, we would feel necessitated to think and act positively toward one another, as it would secure our harmonious coexistence. Any deviation to a negative hate-driven thought or act would be felt as harmful to the entire system we share, and thus also harmful to ourselves.

We would then feel a need to build a new enveloping social atmosphere that supports, educates and encourages everyone’s development to realize the change in human connections and consciousness positively.

Above photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Why does life punish good people?“

In today’s distorted egoistic world, where people around the world prioritize personal benefit over society’s benefit, it is naive and incorrect to think that “good people” will have a good life, and “bad people” the opposite.

Rather, since our egoistic intentions underlie our social, political and cultural constructs, then it is natural to expect nothing positive to emerge from them.

It is especially the case today, where our egos have grown to enormous proportions, much bigger than in any other time in history.

According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, humanity is in a developmental process toward a state of total unification, where we will experience perfection. Our current era marks a major transition in this process from our old egoistic world to a new unified one.

Today, we can expect major flips and turns (the coronavirus pandemic is a prime example) where, if we successfully view them from within the natural process we are in, we will then see how they emerge in order to give us conditions that guide us to realize the very high density of our interdependence and interconnectedness.

We will increasingly feel on our flesh that if we fail to align ourselves with the new and more connected conditions, then we will experience them as painful. On the contrary, if we upgrade our attitudes to each other in order to balance with our tighter interdependence, we will then experience our transition to a more connected world positively and harmoniously—as a new world of greater happiness, confidence and prosperity for all people that opens up to us.

I thus hope that the awareness of our connectedness and our place in nature will spread, so that we will be spared from a lot of suffering as we head into completely new conditions, different to anything we have experienced before.

Above photo by Simon Shim on Unsplash.

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