Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What are your thoughts on pain?“

Pain is our body’s reaction to all kinds of bodily disruptions. It warns of danger and makes us act—to move toward pleasure and away from pain, to diagnose the cause of the pain, to reach conclusions and to advance in our lives to new states.

Pain impacts our ego, the desire to enjoy at the expense of others. We can feel pain when we feel bad, or when sympathizing with others who feel bad, or when the pain of envy strikes us when we see that others are better off than us.

There is pain that prods us from behind, making us evolve, and also existential pain that ultimately pulls us forward to greater fulfillment.

We would feel nothing at all if it were not for pain. Whether it is a certain kind of conflict, contact or pressure, our every feeling is built upon a certain form of pain, and we can only feel pleasure, fulfillment and enjoyment after pain.

However, we can overcome pain. When we rise above the ego, i.e. when we ascend beyond prioritizing self-interest at the expense of others to its opposite—prioritizing the benefit of others—we can then live in complete fulfillment, without emptiness, where we relate to everything and everyone out of an ever-increasing wholeness and love.

Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What question should we all be asking ourselves today?“

Humanity has to acknowledge that it has developed a corrupt society with hostilities and collisions in its connections.

Today, we have to undergo a self-examination and ask ourselves serious questions about how and why we live: What are we living for? What is the meaning of life? What is its purpose? What is the point of living? Is it simply to survive the few years that we are here, or is there something greater worth investing ourselves into?

For our first 20 to 25 years, we grow up in learning environments. Then we work quite hard for the next major portion of our lives, and then at the ages of 60 or 70, we start approaching our life’s end. In our years of work, we have children that we need to raise and show them the way into life. What do they get out of this society that we have built?

It is like we have placed ourselves in turbulent waters, and then we try to keep ourselves afloat somehow so as not to drown. Ultimately, however, our lives’ frictions and hardships are all in order to lead us to the most fundamental questions about our life’s meaning and purpose, and suffering will increase until we will have to undergo a serious self-scrutiny.

Based on the video “What Humanity Must Acknowledge” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “How can people avoid being ashamed of themselves?“

We constantly adapt to various codes of behavior in order to avoid feeling ashamed.

Beyond taking care of life’s essentials, namely that we have food, shelter, good hygiene and can take care of our families, everything else we do is motivated by our need to avoid shame.

The reason for our need to avoid shame stems from the very basis of our existence, in the process of our reality’s formation.

The wisdom of Kabbalah, which explains the process of our reality’s creation and evolution, describes that the Creator (the will to bestow) created the creation (the will to receive) and filled it with light (pleasure, fulfillment, enjoyment). After the creation felt the pleasure by the light, it realized that there was a greater quality behind the pleasure that it felt—a giver of the pleasure. Feeling that there was a giver of the pleasure and that it was a receiver of the pleasure caused the creation to feel shame. In other words, shame is the first reaction of creation to feeling its Creator, and it is thus what we must complement in order to attain likeness to the Creator.

That is why in our world, which emerged from this giving-receiving interplay between the Creator and the creation, the feeling of shame is behind the way we think and act in society.

Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “How does God communicate with you?“

Thoughts about the meaning and purpose of our lives are the Creator’s way of inviting us into a dialog.

They are like couriers knocking on our doors to notify us about a special delivery.

We only need to open our doors, accept the packages, unpack them, and from their content recognize their sender and how we should respond to them.

Many of us hear the knocking, but we wait, staying seated on our sofas, watching our TVs, thumbing our phones, and yelling at the couriers to leave the packages by the door—that we’ll pick them up later.

Such an attitude dissolves the awakening, and who knows when we will again feel a knock on our hearts’ doors?

When we receive such invitations, we should immediately realize them. We should do everything in our power to open the packages, find the Sender’s address, work out what kind of special delivery He would most enjoy, and how we could send Him that delivery in return.

Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Is suffering a punishment from God?“

Punishment from God is among the many theories people have come up with for why we suffer, i.e. that God punishes us for certain actions we have (or have not) done either in our current life, or in past lives. However, aside from theories, nobody really knows why we suffer.

Especially in our current times, we can see that we are globally interdependent and interconnected. The more we develop, the more our global interdependence reveals to us.

We live in a single global system, and we each share a mutual responsibility for the well-being of the entire system.

Similarly to how our bodies work, we feel a wound in our pinky toe as a pain throughout our whole body, and if it is a major wound, then it demands our complete attention. That is how we increasingly reveal ourselves in our world today.

If we comprehended and felt the full extent of our interdependence, then we would quickly conclude that we need to fix our connections: to upgrade our attitudes to each other as to members of a single family—and even closer. If we do, then we will start sensing that we live in an absolutely perfect world, free from suffering.

Based on a Virtual Kabbalah Lesson with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman on September 27, 2015. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Photo by Alexey Malakhov on Unsplash.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “How should I know what humanity needs?“

Humanity needs to know that there is a next level of complete unification to which nature advances us, and the fact that nature is connecting us against our will is the reason for all forms of suffering we endure. In other words, there are forces of nature that are connecting us more and more, and by rejecting the tendency to positively connect, we experience suffering, and on the contrary, if we act in unison with the forces that connect us, we will experience life blissfully.

That is why we require a whole new kind of education today, one that teaches us about the forces of nature that operate on us, and how we can equalize with those forces by realizing our connection positively. We can then rise peacefully to the next level of a harmoniously-connected life to which nature guides us.

We see that we have become a global humanity. There is nowhere to escape from our global interdependence and interconnection. Entering into unison with nature thus means that we should upgrade our attitudes to this tightening globally interdependent and interconnected state we find ourselves in—to realize that we are all in one boat, that we are all a single family around the world—and to start relating to each other accordingly. This is the message that nature wants us to hear, and if we remain as foolish children who wish to simply chase what seems sweet and good for each one of us individually, without considering our mutual influence and dependence, then what will nature do? It will punish us until we start listening to what it wishes to communicate to us. Our incongruence with nature’s connecting tendency is the reason for our suffering today, and it is the reason we will experience more and more suffering as we head into the future.

We should thus take heed to what nature has started showing us, that we are a single globally interdependent and interconnected humanity, and that if we wish to realize our interdependence harmoniously and peacefully, we need to invert our attitudes to each other so that they are all-inclusive like nature itself.

It is quite complicated since we are born and raised solely in our egoistic nature—self-benefit at the expense of others and nature—but if we set ourselves on a path of implementing a new connection-enriching learning throughout the world, then we will be able to undergo a positive transition, alleviating the need for all kinds of turmoil to befall us.

Based on KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Medicine From all Sickness” on October 27, 2012 with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What are things that can only happen to Israelis?“

It is common in Israel to disrespect people of status, such as state officials. The reason for this is that we—the people of Israel, the Jews—are a free people in our roots. We originated as a nation of members who were equal to one another.

About 4,000 years ago, when we first united as “the people of Israel,” we had gathered around Abraham. At that time, Abraham invited anybody in ancient Babylon who had a desire to reach the degree of equality, love and freedom from the limits of this world, to implement his method.

Abraham taught his group that they were a free nation in that they each needed to develop themselves to become a positive force of support, encouragement, care and love toward each other. In such a state, nobody is lesser than others and no one can tell others what to do, but we can each give each other examples of love and care. If we can sustain ourselves in that continuous motion to love and care for one another, then we experience harmony and peace, but if we cannot hold ourselves in such a positive direction, then we become like savages.

Abraham’s method is supposed to unite people as equals, without any limits, where no person is greater or smaller than the others. In other words, in our origin, we have no sense of one or is powerful and another who is weak, but rather we all complement one another in a common effort to unite above our differences.

Since Abraham once united us as equals in a connection of love among one another, then we developed a very open approach in our relations. We dwelled in a positive connection where we behaved as if everyone everywhere was in our bedrooms.

Later, when we fell from the degree of a common love for one another and immersed ourselves in opposite attitudes to each other—a state of unfounded hatred—the feeling of our equality turned into a common disrespect and disregard. In other words, disregard, rejection and alienation replaced love, mutual consideration and unification. That is what we see among us today.

We need to understand how much of a better life we could be living if we once again applied Abraham’s method to our relations. If we start uniting above our divisive drives, then we would experience a whole new harmonious and peaceful world open up to us. We would draw the force of love and connection that dwells in nature into our relations, and by doing so, we would tap into that ability that once united us as “the people of Israel.” Our unity would have immensely positive rippling effects not only for our own well-being, but people around the world would also feel a surge of a new positive force enter their lives, and the attitude to Israelis and to Jews in general around the world would become very positive: people would revere the group that brings love, peace and unity to the world.
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Based on the video “The Matter of Equality among the Israeli Nation” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Why is social division in Israel becoming more extreme?“

There are different kinds of divisions in every society and nation, but in the Israeli nation, the division is much stronger. This is because, as it is written, we are “a stiff-necked people.” It means that we are incredibly stubborn, and this stubbornness comes from us having an overblown desire.

It is unlike the desire in other nations. We can see it clearly among Israelis, among Jews in general, and everyone feels it one way or another.

How is it expressed?

We each feel as if we have a certain power, and accordingly we are ready to stand up to anyone. We do not care who it is. If you put the Prime Minister in front of any Israeli, you will see that there is an attitude as to a person of equal status. Moreover, it is common to feel smarter than others, no matter what position they hold, and to relate to them accordingly.

In other nations, there is a feeling of knowing one’s place and degree in society, an unspoken code of how to speak to one person or another. In Israel, however, no one cares about other people’s seeming status. It is the nature of the Israeli nation and of the Jewish people in general.

In the past, religion tied us more tightly together. It calmed and restrained us as it made us fear all kinds of punishments, and it also attracted us to various rewards for being nice people.

When we move away from religion—and this happens in all sectors, including the ultra-religious—it is called “the decline of the generations.” That is, we believe less and less in a common path, in the various higher forces of nature that we think might punish or reward us. We then become more and more stubborn from one generation to the next, and it leads us to a point where we take no one else into account.

In such a state, however, we cannot return to how we acted toward each other when we had smaller desires. Rather, we need to learn how to rise above our bloated desires today, to unite above our divisions, i.e. to realize the state of “love will cover all crimes” that we once discovered when we first became a nation. Our lives will become harder and harder in our stubborn divisiveness until we eventually realize the mutual detriment we bring to each other in such a state. We will then need to shift our course to unite above divisions through our mutual positive influence on each other.
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Based on the video “Why Is Social Division in Israel Becoming More Extreme?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman, Oren Levi and Yael Leshed-Harel. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Are Israelis united enough?“

In order to unite, we need to annul our egos toward each other.

What are our egos? They are our self-aimed inclinations that make each of us consider ourselves the greatest, that there is no one like us. Such an egoistic approach obstructs our unity.

Our problem is that we unhealthily seek how to overpower each other instead of searching for closeness.

Our egos stand in the way of us building a true nation. We might prosper in many fields, but that is only due to the competition in our midst. However, there is no unity.

Unity is at the basis of nature, and of the Israeli nation, and today it is nonexistent here. Moreover, our lack of unity is our greatest threat because unity is what should support us. We thus become increasingly vulnerable to our enemies the more disunited we are.

Based on the video “Are Israelis United Enough?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What makes people right-wing and left-wing? How do people who have no political connections become left or right-wing?“

Nature consists of two forces: giving and receiving, plus and minus, positive and negative.

We each also host these forces within us. Existence itself requires that a plus has a minus next to it, and vice versa. Such a duality exists on all levels of our lives: material, psychological and spiritual.

As for political right-wing and left-wing inclinations, I would first stay clear of defining them as such because nowadays these terms have become so convoluted that people confuse one for the other.

In its origin, however, a left-wing inclination is more or less toward completion, connection and compromise, while a right-wing approach is its opposite: one of rejection, which defines borders, limitations and boundaries.

Generally speaking, a left-wing approach in its essence is “what’s mine is yours, and what’s yours is yours” while a right-wing approach in its essence is “what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is mine.”
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Based on the video “The Nature of Right-Wing and Left-Wing Political Approaches” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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