Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What is part of the time between Passover and Shavuot thought to be?“

“And by the exodus from Egypt they received the level of faith…and after Passover, the purifying work begins in preparation for the receiving of the Torah. And when the Torah is dressed in a person’s soul, this is the time of Shavuot, the time of the giving of our Torah.” (Kabbalist Baruch Shalom HaLevi Ashlag [Rabash], “Letter 52”)

Passover marks the end of the time of slavery in Egypt.

Our slavery in Egypt means that we feel problems stemming from the ego to make us want to disconnect from it and elevate ourselves upon it, and identify with the quality of love and giving.

In the process, we renew our efforts to rise above the ego time after time with the help of a supportive environment, i.e., others who share a similar desire to be above the ego and who support each other to do so.

The effort to rise above the ego is the work in Egypt. After we realize the full extent of that work, we receive a positive response to the effort: a force that emerges and corrects us.

That state is called Passover.

It is a significant correction on our spiritual path.

Passover, however, is only one stage toward our full correction. It marks the elevation above our ego.

Afterward, the time between Passover and Shavuot, designated by a count of 49 days, marks a time of disconnecting ourselves from our ego and rising to a level called “Bina,” a state of absolute giving, where there is no egoistic involvement whatsoever.

Shavuot marks the next correction, the full extent of the force we receive from Bina that lets us connect our ego with the force of correction, the force of the Torah. That is, at Shavuot, we don’t merely rise above the ego, as we do in Passover. At Shavuot, we gain the ability to connect our ego with the force of the Torah, which lets us use our ego in a corrected way.

Of course, such an explanation of the time between Passover and Shavuot relates only to the spiritual meaning of the holidays, as described by the wisdom of Kabbalah, which explains that the holidays are states on our spiritual path that we can feel at any moment we apply the necessary efforts to enter such states. See the links in my Quora bio for more info about how to get started with Kabbalah study.

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Question: My small children do not listen to me despite my endless efforts. I know that I am the main reason. It is as if I am locked up inside the cage of my character, my upbringing, and behaviors that I absorbed from my family. I physically feel that it disturbs me, but I cannot change anything. What should I do, and how should I build normal relations with my kids?

Answer: You need to be equal to them and to set an example for them!
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Answers To Your Questions, Part 245
Answers To Your Questions, Part 243

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What has the Coronavirus taught you in your life?“

The coronavirus is teaching us all to recognize our global interdependence.

Before the coronavirus, we were in a world of vicious egoistic competition, where the more we could exploit others, the more we could profit.

Today, however, we all depend on each other, as any breach of the social distancing conditions set before us could mean another coronavirus victim.

We have been given a mutual adversary in the coronavirus, and we need to exercise our mutual consideration and responsibility in order to beat it.

However, our true rival is much deeper than the coronavirus.

As much as the coronavirus is a nearly-invisible particle that has brought about much death, sickness and has overturned our socio-economic infrastructures, there is a much more cunning and complex enemy that has no physical form at all—our egoistic human nature.

The human ego, which is the desire for self-benefit at the expense of others, innately pits us up against each other, making each person constantly toil for his or her superiority over others.

Any success we have in such a constant struggle is short-lived, as if we are all in a game of tug-and-war and one of us momentarily manages to pull stronger than the others, before losing that grip and once again becoming pulled along by everyone else. Ultimately, such a struggle leads to us all falling down, as the coronavirus swiftly showed us.

How, then, is it possible to defeat an attitude that is embedded in our very nature since birth?

It is possible firstly by paying more attention to how it acts to our detriment even though it seemingly serves to benefit us; and secondly, it is possible to overcome our egoistic nature by re-prioritizing our values.

Instead of appreciating successful, wealthy and powerful individuals as we did at least until the onset of the coronavirus, if we instead appreciate positive human connection, and acts that serve to increase love, care and unity in society, then such a surrounding positive social influence would give us the necessary tools to shift our mindset: from egoistic use of others for self-benefit, to altruistic use of oneself in order to benefit others.

The coronavirus has taught us that humanity can quickly reach a common ground when conditions call for it.

Using this example, we can take further steps to more and more unification out of our own free choice. In other words, instead of waiting for nature to inflict us with more suffering in order to unite us once again, we can take our unity into our own hands, and actively seek how we can place the benefit of others over self-benefit in our day-to-day and moment-to-moment interactions.

Photo by Nick Bolton on Unsplash.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “If everything is here for a reason, what does Coronavirus teach us about?“

The coronavirus came to teach us about how much we depend on each other, and thus, how we need to take more responsibility in our attitudes to each other.

If we look at major events in world history, including the world wars and past pandemics, even they did not involve the entirety of humanity to the extent that the coronavirus has.

We would thus be wise to learn a lesson in global interdependence from the coronavirus, and step up our game to think and act more responsibly and considerately of each other, treating each other as members of a single human family, with each person holding equal importance.

While we normally consider only our own health, the coronavirus forced us to pay attention to the health of others around us by directly connecting our health to theirs.

We were cornered into upholding a list of conditions in order to not infect others—maintaining personal hygiene, washing hands regularly, staying at home during the lockdown, wearing masks and sustaining a distance of two meters when in public—and as the economy reopens, the period of distancing continues making us think about the health of others, since other people’s good health ensures our good health, and vice versa.

This is one clear way how the coronavirus has taught us a lesson in interdependence.

The question then becomes: How much do we apply this lesson to our lives?

From herein, will we conduct ourselves in such a way where society’s benefit leads our thought processes, or will we resort to prioritizing self-benefit without considering the effect on others, as per our pre-coronavirus habits?

Considering others before we consider ourselves runs against our egoistic human nature, which constantly places ourselves before others.

Yet, as hard as it is for us to think about benefiting others, the coronavirus has shown us how nature can compel us to do so whether we like it or not.

Nature, however, has no intention of making us suffer.

On the contrary, there is immense fulfillment and enjoyment dwelling in nature, which it wants us to discover.

It wants us to develop into all-seeing, all-knowing and all-feeling creatures, and it can do so by elevating us above our self-aimed thoughts and desires.

How? It is by giving us situations where we are forced to better connect in order to survive.

Such pressures are akin to birth contractions. As a baby gets pressured to exit its comfortable-but-narrow world in the womb and enter a new world outside, we too get pressured by events such as the coronavirus to exit our comfortable-but-narrow egoistic perceptions of the world, and enter a new perception of our interdependence.

Moreover, as the baby did not know that its life in the womb was tiny, dark and constrained, we too fail to see how living solely according to the ego’s demands—self-benefit at the expense of others—is a tiny, dark and constrained world in comparison to the world we can discover when we shift our main focus onto benefiting others.

As much as we appreciate and want to have love, peace, truth, happiness, confidence, support, encouragement and care in our lives, we fail to see how such qualities are achievable at a much greater scale when mutual responsibility and consideration becomes a leading value throughout society.

When everyone aims at benefiting everyone, and when we encourage contributing to society as a principle marker of success, instead of increasing our wealth at any cost, then we will experience a harmonious life, balanced with nature, and will feel a new sense of calm spread throughout society, fulfilling us all.

I thus hope that we do take away the lesson of needing to be more responsible and considerate of others, which the coronavirus came to teach us.

We all have a special role in contributing to a society that can make our lives great, and until we take some strides in that direction of our own accord, nature will send us reminders through the likes of many such problems, pandemics among them.

Above photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What are some cool examples of two kinds of people?“

There are fundamentally two kinds of people in our world: egoists and altruists.

Egoists do everything out of a calculation for personal benefit, and need to see justifiable compensation, like more money or an improved social status, for any act they do to benefit others.

Altruists willingly concede of themselves and of personal compensation in order to benefit others.

Egoism is human nature. It exists in every single person. Altruism, on the other hand, runs against human nature.

However, there are a minority in the world—altruists—who are an exception to society’s majority of egoists. Altruists constitute up to ten percent of human society.

Ultimately, however, we are developing to a state where we are realizing that an altruistic modus operandi in society as a whole will be able to alleviate the increasing problems we see in our egoistic-consumerist society.

The problem with making altruism a social norm is that the majority of egoists would feel a lack of compensation to be altruistic. It would be like a turning on a machine without any fuel.

Our current fuel to work in our egoistic-consumerist society is reward and punishment. In an ideal egoistic-consumerist setup, working more means reaping more rewards, which means more wealth, respect, power and knowledge, and working less means receiving the “punishment” of being unable to fulfill those desires.

However, the more we develop in an egoistic-consumerist society, the harder we find it becomes to fulfill ourselves. Various crises will eventually bring us to a sensation of helplessness, that we can no longer find fulfillment by prioritizing self-benefit over benefiting others.

We will then become readier to change our way of life and become more altruistic.

However, we will still require fuel for our altruistic society to function.

And what is altruistic fuel?

It is when giving, improving others’ lives and positive contributions to others become society’s leading values.

Developing an altruistic society starts by rewarding and appreciating acts of positive social contribution, and gradually, after a period of doing so, we would start appreciating altruistic values in and of themselves.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “How will the coronavirus affect modern culture?“

The coronavirus has reeled in a new time with many changes, and those changes will require a new form of culture as well.

As the coronavirus period with its social distancing and stay-at-home orders made us reexamine what is essential and nonessential in life, emphasizing how we can secure what is essential and have to put aside the nonessential aspects of life, likewise our culture will undergo a major rearrangement.

I expect a future for culture where, for instance, stars who rose to social media fame through portrayals of good looks and lavishness will lose their fame as people in general will seek more meaningful interactions.

I also see a future where leading cultural figures will be prime examples of people who contribute immensely to society and who uphold values of unity above division.

Artists, musicians, writers and media creators across the board will create items that primarily aim to enliven and inspire unity among human society.

Monetary incentives to create art, film and music will lessen, but social incentives will increase, and cultural figures will enjoy much more fruitful and happier social lives than they currently do.

In short, a new culture would ultimately fit into a new paradigm shift where we re-prioritize benefiting others over benefiting ourselves. Instead of a culture of creators who seek to primarily fulfill their personal interests, we would see a new culture blossom, which would soak everyone into a positive unifying atmosphere.

Above photo by William White on Unsplash.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What should be mankind’s next step after the Coronavirus debacle?“

Our future actions and dealings need to follow two main basic conditions:

• That they are essential to our lives, i.e. where life’s essentials are everything that makes our lives comfortable and qualitative.
• That they cause no harm to other people or to the ecology.

We can meet those conditions if we implement a new form of education throughout society, one where we learn how to enrich our connections and shift our focus from personal benefit to how we can benefit and contribute to society at large.

The sooner we realize such a form of education, the sooner we will experience upgraded lives via improved connections to each other.

Above photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What is the spiritual lesson of the coronavirus?“

The spiritual lesson of the coronavirus is that in order to live optimal lives, we need to develop different kinds of relationships, ones based on acknowledging our tight interdependence.

When we realize how much we depend on each other, we would then also realize that our happiness, health and well-being depends on fueling our relationships with support, encouragement and care, and any problems in our lives stem from a lack of positive relations.

Moreover, the coronavirus illuminated the idea of what is essential and nonessential in our lives, and accordingly, we can seek how to provide ourselves—all human society—with life’s essentials, and invest our free time in learning about what is most important in life and developing positive connections to each other.

By doing so, we would bring ourselves closer to balance with nature, and then receive positive feedback from nature, which would include the alleviation of future pandemics and other problems.

Above photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Why must the economy be reopened?“

Indeed, many countries, including those where new cases of the coronavirus are being regularly reported, have started reopening their economies.

Why must the economy be reopened, especially considering that a cure for the virus has yet to be found?

The problem is that many people need to pay quite dearly just to live their lives with its necessities, putting food on the table and keeping a roof over their heads, and they depend on the economy moving in order to do so.

We could ask the question differently: What would we do if we would not reopen the economy?

We then would reveal a greater problem, that we neither feel, think or act as a unified society. While divided, we succumb to the interests of various people and groups who play with power and extreme wealth, none of whom prioritize the public’s benefit.

How, then, could we reach a decision out of what would benefit society the most?

We would have to start by raising awareness of our tight interdependence, that the thoughts and behaviors of one person affect the thoughts and behaviors of everybody else.

Acknowledging our interdependence should pave way to our becoming more responsible and caring of each other, as even if we consider solely our personal benefit, when we realize that we’re interdependent, we then realize that our happiness, health and safety is linked to the happiness, health and safety of everyone around us.

The more we recognize our interdependence and increase our mutual responsibility and consideration in society, then the more we would also recognize that capitalism and egoistic competitiveness no longer serve as positive fuel in today’s interdependent humanity.

The coronavirus has acted as a hard lesson in global interdependence. It has shown the vast extent of our dependence on each and every one of us following each of our government’s health department’s orders in order to stop the virus from spreading, and how an epidemic in China quickly expanded to become a worldwide pandemic.

While the coronavirus clearly illustrated our interdependence in terms of our health and the economy, we would be wise to see how we are interdependent in many more respects, and how we all depend on each other relating responsibly and considerately—that we will at least not do to others what we ourselves hate, and in addition, that we will seek how to positively contribute to society according to our ability.

Ultimately, to experience healthier, more balanced and harmonious lives, we will need to reach a state where every single person receives great care and support. We will continue facing more and more challenges spanning health, the economy and human relations in general until we do.

Above photo by Iwona Castiello d’Antonio on Unsplash.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What is that one thing humanity can learn from the coronavirus (COVID-19)?“

The coronavirus has revealed humanity’s interconnectedness and interdependence. Accordingly, we would be wise to adjust to this revelation of our connectedness.

As experts alert us to future pandemics and problems at global scales, we should hear this message of our global connection that nature communicates to us, and likewise prepare a new global basis for dealing with all such problems.

Humanity can thus learn from the coronavirus that dealing with global-scale problems with local responses is like applying band-aids to the skin when there is a disease affecting the whole body.

In other words, it is insufficient.

As we head into a recovery mode from the pandemic, we would be wise to revise society’s leading values in order to make recovery truly possible and sustainable.

What values are optimal for humanity’s state today? They are none other than the need for more mutual responsibility and consideration to flow among all people, societies and nations.

We are one interconnected and interdependent system, and as the coronavirus did not distinguish between the socio-economic status of who it infected, or whether it infected someone who was good or bad to the ecology, but treated all people as equal, we too would be wise to learn this lesson about our equality from the coronavirus.

In learning this lesson from the coronavirus, we can see ourselves as little children who were fighting and arguing with each other, and then our strict mother caught us. No matter how much we try to point out that the other children started it and are to blame, our mother doesn’t care about all of our finger-pointing, and simply punishes us all equally, forcing us to stop playing, think about what we were doing, and how to improve our behavior.

Therefore, the main take away from this pandemic is that we should relate to each other equally, that all people, societies and nations share a common role in a globally interdependent world, and that in such a situation, we depend on everyone taking responsibility, and thinking and acting considerately toward each other.

If we fail to upgrade our relationships to become more responsible and considerate toward each other, then we can expect more and even harsher blows from nature to come and alert us of our interdependence and our need to upgrade our relations accordingly.

In order to undergo an upgrade in our relations, we need a revised educational system, which will use all communications means possible in order to raise a new global society of positively connected individuals, societies and nations.

The more we are influenced by and reminded about the idea that humanity is a single family, and as it works in a family, every member should care, support and encourage the other members equally, according to each one’s unique place in the family, then we will experience a much higher quality of life, more happiness, confidence and prosperity throughout society.

Nature has its own means to bring us to this conclusion—the coronavirus being one of them—but the sooner we raise our own awareness of our global interdependence and improve our relationships, then the less negative phenomena we will experience from nature, and the more we will feel at peace and balance with each other and nature.

Above photo by Macau Photo Agency on Unsplash.

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