Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Is it important to have love in life?“

The principle of love, or more specifically, loving others as oneself, is known to all, yet there is a lot of confusion surrounding it.

There is a general agreement among most people that there needs to be love among people, yet we see that some people are willing to eliminate large portions of humanity in the name of love. It is even more surprising how vaguely this principle is reflected in different religions.

As a result, we are not very concerned about loving each other in actual fact. We are raised through a multitude of influences that completely neglect the question of how we can reach true love among people.

Therefore, the question here is correct, and we should definitely stop and pay attention to it: Is it important to have love in life? Is love really that important?

Perhaps it is enough to teach children morals and have a general atmosphere of respect among adults? Or should love of others nevertheless be life’s goal, which we strive to reach at every moment, and which we are concerned about reaching every person and everyone together equally? Maybe if we set love of other people, all people equally, as our goal, and tried to reach that goal in the fastest possible way, then we could spare a lot of suffering in humanity, and moreover, experience lives of much greater fulfillment and happiness?

Therefore, this is an extremely important question. If we discuss the meaning of life, the purpose for which we entered our world, then why do we neglect this principle so much?

In essence, we are extremely far from understanding the fact that this principle is the universal law of the universe and of nature. All other laws that we know, and especially ones we do not know, rotate around such an axis.

If we wish to understand ourselves and the world we live in, then we have to attain the laws of nature, which are fundamentally laws of love and connection. Without attaining love for others, or as it was written, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” we will be unable to discover who or where we are.

Love is the key that lets us see the entire picture of reality accurately, to understand, feel and become included in it, and to use it for self-realization.

By acquiring love for others in practice, we attain the Creator’s quality. Other laws are just facets and partial expressions of this fundamental law of reality. It is similar to how the law of gravity can be expressed in different ways, but as a whole, it always determines how one object is attracted to another.

There is a general phenomenon and there are particular cases of it. There is a law of universal bestowal, and for us it is first and foremost expressed as the social principle, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” By realizing this principle in society, we carry out the universal law. It controls us, and if we want to arrange our lives well, we have to aspire to its realization.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Does Satan really exist?“

Satan is the human egoistic force, i.e., the desire to enjoy at the expense of others, which comprises the nature of each and every person.

The wisdom of Kabbalah says a lot about this force in books such as the Torah and The Zohar. For instance, the word “Satan” connects to the same root as the Hebrew word “Soteh,” which means “deviation,” and “Masit,” which means “incitement.” It is a force that diverts a person from the correct path—one of positively connecting to others in mutual love and bestowal.

This force called “Satan” is rooted in every single person, and it is impossible to rid ourselves of it. The human ego has many different manifestations, but specifically the one that diverts us from positive connection among each other is called “Satan.”

In order to become freed from its control over us, we need to actively engage in our society by building positive connections upon it.

This force will always exist and will constantly generate discord between us. Yet, when we achieve a positively unified state, then all the satanic forms that held us back will be added to our efforts to positively connect, and will then serve to increase the positive force of connection between us.

Precisely due to the human ego’s constantly running motor that tries to manipulate us at every moment, making us want to detach from each other instead of connecting, and sinking us deeper and deeper into ourselves instead of applying efforts to exit ourselves and connect with others, then thanks to this ego, we will eventually get sick of it, a state called “the recognition of evil,” and will then readily force ourselves to come closer to each other.

At that time, Satan will become a positive force. It is ultimately what will help us reach an understanding of our need to connect and the correct form that our connection needs to acquire.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “As an atheist, what do you think about Kabbalah?“

Kabbalah differs from atheism and religions in general in that it facilitates a clear attainment of the Creator, so that you will feel Him like you feel a friend of yours, and even more. There is thus no room in Kabbalah for belief in something others have told to you. Instead, you have to attain yourself, the entire world, and all the souls, and inside them – the Creator in His entirety.

Atheism is a belief that the Creator does not exist, whereas religion is a belief that the Creator does exist. In contrast, Kabbalah is the revelation of the Creator, through researching Nature inside yourself or inside your perceptions.

In this regard, Kabbalah is similar to other sciences. However, the other sciences reveal the world within the senses that we already have, whereas Kabbalah does it in an additional sense – the soul, which you first have to develop inside you. In any case, just like any other science Kabbalah speaks only about the things that are present in one’s senses! It is not interested in anything that’s imperceptible and that cannot be researched, repeated, and tested, and considers these things unreal. This approach makes it a science by definition. See the definition of Kabbalah in Baal HaSulam’s article “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah” – “Kabbalah is the method of revealing the Creator to a person in our world” – to every person and to everyone together.

Like all sciences, Kabbalah uses the scientific method or instrument (even though scientists find it difficult to agree with this because they are used to researching the world only through the animate body). The scientific method assumes that:

• Every scientific statement must be proven by experiment.
• Every scientific statement can be proven wrong.
• It is pointless to discuss an idea that cannot be verified in practice. For example, here is a scientific opinion about G-d’s existence: Immanuel Kant showed that it cannot be proven that G-d exists as well as that He does not. The very notion of an unattainable and almighty G-d is not subject to experiment, because if G-d is almighty, then he’s able to control the outcome of the experiment. People don’t accept G-d through evidence, but through faith. Hence, the idea of G-d is beyond science. Any question that asks “Why is so and so this way?” can be answered, “Because it’s G-d’s will.” (This is how religion compelled people to answer all questions, and therefore it slowed down scientific progress.) Kabbalah allows one to reveal the Creator and His actions in practice. However, it is just as indifferent to the things that cannot be verified in practice as the earthly sciences.
• Every scientific statement must be logical and not contradict the laws that are already known. Usually, the old laws become particular cases of the new laws.
• Every scientific statement must indicate its “weak spots”; it should mention which of it constituents are subject to doubt and objection.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Who is the God of Kabbalah?“

God in Kabbalah means the general force of nature, where other than this force, nothing exists.

In and of itself, we consider God as an abstract concept and cannot discuss something existing outside our perception. No one has ever felt it. This state of God, also called “the Creator,” in no way can be perceived by us, and therefore, this force is called “Atzmuto,” i.e., “His essence.”

Everything that we attain and what is possible for us to attain are the actions of the upper force in relation to us. The wisdom of Kabbalah deals with revealing these actions in relation to a person.

We call this upper force “the Creator” because He created the human being and all of our qualities, within which we feel our world and can explore the Creator through our senses. We can explore why He created us with such qualities, limitations and abilities, and what He wants from us.

By making progress in such an exploration, we begin to attain the Creator. We do not attain the essence or “self” of the Creator (Atzmuto), but the Creator in relation to us. It is written about this, “We will know You by your actions.” We explore the Creator’s actions, how He created our world and all other worlds, as a system of connections between Him and us. This system of connections in degrees that cascade down to us is called “worlds,” and this system influences us at every moment of our lives.

By studying this system, these worlds, we study the Creator and ourselves, both our nature and the nature of the Creator, and we progress to the understand of what states we connect to Him with. We can change our behavior and our actions in accordance with this in order to raise ourselves to higher connections, to be connected directly with the Creator.

In other words, we can see what kind of reactions our actions produce in Him and, conversely, what reactions His actions produce in us. We can reach an absolutely complete, open and two-way connection.

When we begin to attain this opportunity, to reveal and achieve it gradually, we naturally change our behavior in accordance with what we reveal, and we enter a completely different stage of our development where we begin to undergo changes in becoming more and more similar to the Creator.

At the same time, our world and we ourselves radically transform, and our state becomes increasingly reliable, convenient and true.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Is the esoteric Kabbalah even approaching legitimacy?“

Kabbalah is not a form of esotericism.

People want to label Kabbalah as esoteric or mystic, and connect it with blessings, curses, charms, and many other phenomena. These labels became linked with Kabbalah because there was a prohibition on the study of Kabbalah in the masses for 1,000s of years since humanity’s spiritual desire still hadn’t ripened. In the 16th Century, when the Ari (Kabbalist Isaac Luria) lifted the prohibition on the study of the wisdom of Kabbalah, claiming that the time had come for Kabbalah to be revealed to humanity, he also mentioned the prohibition on the use of charms and blessings, since they have nothing to do with Kabbalah.

Kabbalah is a science that teaches the law of reality, of which we are a part. Through this science, we discover those rules and the spiritual world, which is the reason for everything that happens here with us. They are collective rules, which encompass the laws of all the sciences in our world.

Kabbalah is not another belief or an imaginary view of life. Instead, it offers precise and clear laws that depict the structure of the upper worlds.

It is when we study Kabbalah that we first acquire knowledge of the world outside our own. We discover the higher, spiritual world, and then we gradually attain the ability to affect it. Through tests and experiments, we learn how to do it, and then we enter the comprehensive reality.

At this point, we begin to work not from within our own bodies, but from our souls, which are our true essence. The human being is not the physical body that is replaced at the beginning of each new life. The human being is the soul that we currently do not sense.

The purpose of creation is that we will act from within our souls, from the upper world, and live at the highest degree possible, rather than in the lowest (our world), which is at an animal level. By discovering our souls, we attain contact with the upper world, and thus achieve a whole, complete, eternal and blissful life.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Do men and women experience falling in love or being in love differently?“

By nature, men and women are two opposites. Thus, by default, men and women experience nothing in the same way.

There is a saying that men love with their eyes, and women love with their ears. We can see how a man can lose his mind when he sees a beautiful woman. An attractive woman can distract a man from any serious task. However, this does not mean that he is a bad husband or a bad man in general. It is simply his nature. A man can be completely in love with one woman, but can occasionally stare at others, and one has nothing to do with the other. It is simply part and parcel of man’s nature.

The situation with women is completely different. According to nature, a woman cares about the home environment. She builds a family nest and sees to it being comfortable and welcoming. Regardless of the fact that today we live in the so-called “unisex” era, the natural urge of the woman—before it comes in contact with various social and media influences that can redirect the woman’s natural desire in myriad directions—is to take care of her very own home. Therefore, she requires a man who can sustain it. That is why women are more likely to fall in love with smart and wealthy men rather than with handsome ones.

In a woman, a man looks at the purely external and corporeal features that attract him. Even if behind the beautiful “interface,” he finds a girl who could be considered as silly, he is okay with that. As long as the woman falls into his idea of beauty, then that is enough for him.

However, it is not with the case with a woman. She judges a man not by his appearance, but makes a precise calculation whether she can build a comfortable family nest and raise her children with this particular man. Therefore, a woman can get used to any kind of man, but only as long as he aligns with her nature.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What is a black hole? How can we understand it?“

What we know about black holes is that inside them, time stops, laws of physics do not apply, and their gravitational field consumes everything, including light.

In our world, we live within three dimensions: time, space and motion. Each of these dimensions conditions the other.

The human mind can comprehend nothing beyond these dimensions. We can make measurements, receive results, and even build models, but in our current limited perception of reality, we are unable to piece together the whole picture.

Why?

According to the law of equivalence of form, it is in order to understand that reaching a different nature requires attaining its qualities.

This is where the wisdom of Kabbalah can help us. Kabbalah gives us an opportunity to expand the boundary of our perception and receive an additional sense with which we can penetrate the unknown. We will then be able to perceive exactly what is inside a black hole, and how we observe from that point.

We live below the speed of light. If we take the universe into consideration, we seem to be very primitive, as being under something means being completely ruled by it, controlled by this light that we exist within, and unable to realize an independent sensation of ourselves within this reality.

However, by becoming closer to the qualities of the light and rising above our nature, we will then gain complete knowledge and sensation of our universe, including what we now perceive as the secrets of the black holes.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Is optimism better than pessimism?“

There is a point of view that being optimistic is more beneficial than being pessimistic, that optimists live longer, and that they are more successful. However, this is not what we see in reality.

Naturally, every quality has its opposite, e.g. left and right, light and darkness, men and women, and so on. Each quality balances another, giving it a premise for future development.

Our society is a locked interdependent system. If we want to be healthy and progress in this system, then accordingly, we need to be both optimists and pessimists.

We all have optimistic and pessimistic qualities embedded in different proportions. Some people are naturally more optimistic while others are more pessimistic. Despite being unable to change our innate characteristics, we can learn how to use them in specific ways so as to make a meaningful impact on both our individual lives and on society in general.

The wisdom of Kabbalah teaches us how to do so.

Optimism and pessimism manifest only in relation to something or someone. In order to balance these opposite qualities within us, we have to create a kind of resistor or management tool, which provides us with an opportunity to select when and where each quality needs to be used and in what proportion.

A single person is incapable of doing so. Therefore, in order to create a regulating device between optimism and pessimism, we need to participate in the creation of a society that provides each member with an opportunity to train such a fusion in a common network of interaction, aimed at a common goal of harmonious social connections. I always have a part of a person I have to contact within me, and he has the part of me within him. Interaction between us helps to reveal those properties and start working with them.

In today’s modern society, where various characteristics that are distributed among humanity create rich diversity, we need to understand how to complement one another, and how to use the method of connection that leads us to succeed in building a complete system. If we stick optimistic and pessimistic attitudes and together for a common goal, we will see a perfect picture.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Why are people so lazy?“

People who are lazy generally lack purpose in their lives.

Our nature is a desire to enjoy. This desire manifests in two directions: either we have a goal and strive in order to achieve it, enjoying the fruit it bears, or we run away from pain, and avoiding suffering is what we consider as enjoyable.

In order to gain the impetus to progress in life, where we do more than merely run away from pain, we need to establish what our purpose in life is, and it needs to be worth the effort to achieve.

There is generally no success in any field without effort.

Effort is a prerequisite for success because contributing to something makes us value the results. If we were given something without first having invested effort, we would not know how to enjoy it. However, in order to have the constant fuel to strive, the goal needs to be important.

I have been studying and teaching the wisdom of Kabbalah for over 40 years. The immense importance of the purpose of the study provides me with the motivation to work day and night. It is because investing in this work means investing in the human soul. Therefore, the efforts that I apply, even though they might be tough and unpleasant at times, bring me tremendous joy.

The same goes for all people. If we find a goal that suits our inner request, it will give us the fuel we need to work determinantly in order to achieve it, and experience no tiredness on the way.

The main challenge is in setting the goal.

Our desires and yearnings are affected by various social influences. Unfortunately, the enormous amount of redundant information filling our culture extinguishes our true internal aspiration, replacing it with cheap and artificial pleasures.

Nevertheless, everybody has a chance to exit this vicious circle. How? Ironically, it is with the help of laziness.

Laziness gives us an opportunity to slow down from the rat race and ask ourselves whether our regular engagements really lead to something worthwhile, whether our ultimate goal is correct, and whether we have enough importance and motivation to continue. If not, then we can examine the ways to change our goals and actions.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Why do some teenagers and young adults become mass shooters?“

It is a consequence of the internal pressure they feel.

We can say that today’s youth just seek attention and try to deal with the lack of their parents’ and society’s participation in their lives, which is also true, but the root cause lies much deeper.

What makes young adults commit massacres?

They simply don’t know what they live for.

If I have no goal, and my social environments, from the home through to society at large, give me insufficient importance of any specific direction that could really develop me and not just relate to me as a “user,” “consumer” or “customer” in its systems, then I start seeking my own ways to express what is inside of me.

Each and every child, and especially teenager, wants to be loved and taken care of.

Youth have to feel that the surrounding world values them and is ready to support them. Unfortunately, today, there is just an illusion of such a system of support. Moreover, even if it really existed, it wouldn’t be enough.

What is missing in society for today’s youth?

According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, our desires have developed to a point today where all the pleasures and beauty available in the world fail to satisfy our inner requests.

Nothing provides us with a failsafe response to the question, “Why am I here?” or “How can I turn my useless existence into something great and valuable?”

There are various theories and approaches that provide different answers to such questions, but they all fall within the realm of achieving something corporeal in this world, or some kind of fantasy pleasure in the afterlife, and an increasing amount of people are waking up to the fruitlessness in such approaches.

This is simply because a new desire is awakening in humanity, which demands a new kind of fulfillment to everything we have ever felt or imagined until today.

Human nature is a continuously growing desire to enjoy. It develops through desires for food, sex, family, money, honor, control, knowledge, and the peak evolution of this desire is when it starts craving spirituality.

At that point, our desires to enjoy pleasures in our world reach a dead end. We become increasingly dissatisfied with life, either trying to dumb down the desire with drugs, medicines, video games, watching hours of Internet video, and many other such engagements; others gauge that dissatisfaction into extremist forms of hatred at society, which can lead to harming others.

What we lack is a method that can lead us to understand how and why this nature is working on us as it does, and how through increased awareness of nature, discover the concealed force of nature that can fulfill this most developed desire: the force of love and bestowal.

The younger generation, especially teenagers, feel this necessity the most. They subconsciously disagree with the world they are coming to terms with, a world where they are afraid to express their feelings, and where all kinds of manipulations stand behind a façade of care and concern.

They want something real and genuine, but have no comprehension of what is real and genuine, since there is no example of anything like that in the surrounding society.

Such helplessness pushes some to commit rash acts, even though they are neither stupid nor criminals—it is just how the inner pressure affects them.

Moreover, we as a society are responsible for it.

Therefore, if we want our future generation to live happily and fulfilled, without engaging in antisocial and destructive thoughts, ideas and actions, we then have to take care of our society.

We need to teach both adults and youth how to exit the false paradigm of this world, how to understand reality, how to correctly relate to the myriad influences of the information age, and discern, from within all the noise, the ultimate meaning of life: the entrance to the upper world, a higher level of existence where our currently tense and divisive relations become replaced with positive, supportive and encouraging ones due to the revelation of the higher force of love and bestowal in our connections.

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