Comment: Ohio State University conducted research on atheists and believers. According to the results of the study, a person who doesn’t believe in God is likely callous and manipulative. And a person who is a believer has more characteristics associated with compassion, understanding, and sympathy for others.

Atheists are also dominated by psychopathic traits associated with lack of emotional response to pain of other people’s suffering, etc.

Answer: There are many different nuances that express the differences between believers and non-believers in our world. But all of them operate egoistically.

They simply have different models of behavior. These perceive the world according to their value system and those according to their value system. In both cases, this system is egoistic, so in relation to the wisdom of Kabbalah, they are, in fact, equivalent. The only thing is that the believer is more difficult to convince that he is living according to egoistic laws because he believes that he is living correctly.

Faith in the wisdom of Kabbalah is a completely different property than the “faith” of religious people. With them, faith is the acceptance of the existence of a higher power, and if I follow the rules that seem to be detailed in the Torah, I will earn the world to come. In contrast, a person who is a non-believer (secular) believes only in the payoff that he will get directly in this world. This is the entire difference.

In The Book of Zohar, there is a description of three types of awe (fear). The first type of awe is typical of an ordinary secular person (non-believer) who is concerned about everything being okay for him in this world. The second type of awe is that of a religious person (believer) who is concerned about his life in this world and in the next world after death.

The third type of fear is typical of the Kabbalist who only yearns to be like the Creator, meaning that he will have a characteristic of bestowal and love for others without receiving anything in exchange since being like the Creator is his reward.

Everyone thinks that the wisdom of Kabbalah is a part of religion, but it has nothing to do with religion. The wisdom of Kabbalah brings a person to fulfill the law of the Torah, “And you shall love your friend as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18), which all the others not only don’t touch upon, but don’t even talk about.

Although they give lip service to “Love thy neighbor,” nobody thinks that this is the main general rule toward which all implementation, resolution, and realization of the Torah is directed.
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From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 4/4/16

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Question: Faith and not knowledge is at the basis of every religion. All religions have certain restrictions and prohibitions regarding the attainment of the laws of the universe. Why is that so?

Answer: It is because the religions don’t engage in attaining the upper force. They cannot do that and they exist in the dark. If a person could attain the true reality, there would be no religions, only the wisdom of Kabbalah would remain.

This is the reason that the religions are interested in blind faith, and thus they suppress any questions that people may have about the meaning of life. A religious person’s perception of the world is fanatic and he advances without any specific goals.

Comment: But the term “faith” actually stems from religion.

Answer: It is religious faith when a person accepts all the basic assumptions without asking any questions, without feeling or perceiving them.

Comment: But still it is the human level and it is very hard to skip it and to reach faith above reason.

Answer: It isn’t a level, but merely mistaken conceptions and a step backward.

There are three parameters of faith: faith below reason, faith within reason, and faith above reason.

When I believe in what I see, it is faith within reason; when I don’t need proof and simply accept what I am told and act accordingly like a child, it is faith below reason and that is religion. I believe what I am told without checking anything.

When I ascend above my ego and begin to perceive what is going on, it is faith above reason, which is what the wisdom of Kabbalah engages in. This is from where the contradiction between faith below reason (meaning the different religions) and faith above reason (meaning the wisdom of Kabbalah) stems.

According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, we have to yearn for attainment and not for faith. You must attain according to Kabbalah, to touch, to smell. Just like a kid who puts everything in his mouth because that is the most certain way, we also have to taste everything.

This is the reason that the attainment of the upper world is called flavors, which actually stems from the instinct to feel everything in our mouth, since it is the surest most certain feeling closest to us.

After all, I cannot put something sweet in my mouth and feel that it is bitter just because you claim that it is bitter. It is the same here; there is no room for faith.
[180139]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 1/24/16

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Question: Can the future really be revealed through dreams?

Answer: Sometimes dreams give correct and true information about the future. After all, the future is programmed clearly and completely accurately. There are people like Wolf Messing who sense the future, but Kabbalists don’t particularly deal with this.

Nevertheless, reorganization happens in a dream, rearrangement, renewed referencing of all impressions, so future states can also be revealed because a person is not found in his ego but in a particular detachment from his ego. To that degree he can sense the future.
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 1/24/16

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Question: Scientists at the University of Pennsylvania studied the belief in God. They concluded that the belief in God grows stronger when a person thinks about meaningful events in his life where he chose a certain route and which could have end badly but ended well. A person relates this outcome to the upper force.

Scientists believe that belief in God does not necessarily need to rely on blind faith, but rather it is based on rational thinking. They claim that it is actually this fact that allows them to explain the stability of religious belief and that it provides clear evidence of religious principles

Answer: Humanity is very stable, and the longer that people live on this planet, the more they believe in unreal forces that have not been proven. A person wants God to exist. It is in his subconscious.

We can ask small children of religious people about the belief in God, and they will say that they believe in a certain force and that we should pray to it and ask it whatever we want. Their attitude toward the upper force is the same as their attitude toward their parents from whom they can ask anything and everything will be alright. It is a natural, instinctive response to uncertainty.

Question: People look for logic, even when they say that something did not happen by chance.

Answer: Of course, they can make up whatever they like, but when a person encounters the wisdom of Kabbalah, he receives an explanation for how he can feel the Creator and discover Him, and then he begins to understand that everything else is absolute psychology.

Question: Does this means that we cannot reach the Creator using the rational tools we have in this world?

Answer: The tools we have in our world are related to our senses. We cannot reveal the Creator through our senses, with our mind, or in our heart in any way.

The Creator is totally concealed from us, and therefore all of the assumptions result from the same illusions in the same way as all religions are based on guesses and assumptions.

They have nothing to do with the wisdom of Kabbalah and therefore are faiths that have no basis. In the wisdom of Kabbalah, on the other hand, there is a simple principle, as it is written, “A judge has only what his eyes see.” We only need to clean the glasses that we see through and view the world realistically without any double vision. Then you will be able to be your own judge because you know that you are looking at things correctly, judging them and making the right decisions. If you say, “this is what I think” or “what psychologists say,” and so on, you are still in the framework of our world. In our world, you can believe only what research discovers, which means what is based on clear evidence, not relying on philosophers and psychologists.

However, a person cannot enter the concealed part of human nature by himself since he has no feelings that match it. First, a person must establish these abilities inside himself, these sensors, and then he will begin to feel the Creator. You can attain that only through the wisdom of Kabbalah.

If a person wants that, he must study in an organized framework. Study, and you will discover the Creator and will not need to believe anything and, most importantly, anyone!
[180257]
From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 3/20/16

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Question: There are some people who claim that they have attained Godliness and the revelations of miracles through different religions. Are there miracles or people with special abilities in the wisdom of Kabbalah?

Answer: A Kabbalist does not engage in miracles. Everything a Kabbalist attains is internal and so he cannot show off his attainment before anyone and will never do it.

There is no point in forcing him to show some trick. It will not work. There are no miracles in our world. If we don’t know and don’t recognize the laws of nature, certain phenomena may seem to us as miracles.

If you lit a match in front of a Neanderthal man who lived 600,000 – 350,000 years ago, he could wonder how you did that and think that the fire came out of your finger, and would even bow before you and think that you are a creature from another world. So it all depends only on the relative level between two people.

Comment: When the Spaniards discovered America, the American natives received them as gods.

Answer: So the Spaniards gave them pieces of glass in return for tons of gold.
[180133]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 1/24/16

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Research (from wired.co.uk): “Co-operation is a key component in human interaction and also, according to new research from the University of British Columbia, the spread of civilisation. Not because [of] any altruistic reason, though; instead it might be directly down to a fear of a vengeful god.

“In a study published by Nature, a team from the university found that it wasn’t a belief in divine reward that promoted co-operation, but a fear of punishment.

“’Co-operation among throngs of strangers in expanding societies required a common faith in moralistic gods,’ said Benjamin Purzycki, who conducted the research.

“Worshippers believed that these gods were able to read thoughts, observe good and bad behaviour and punish and reward them accordingly, the study suggests. Shared beliefs about these gods apparently paved the way for trade networks, economies and institutions such as governments and courts.”

My Comment: Religions are a kind of club or lifestyle. Humanity needs frameworks like these for its development until its finds its inadequacy to solve social problems—the mutual hatred and rejection. After all, the religions are fundamentally egoistic, as is the human society in which they came to exist and continued to develop, until present day.

The masses, in any case, need to find the wisdom of Kabbalah, and will be compelled to sell it. However, as Baal HaSulam writes, everyone can remain in his religion. This is because the Kabbalah only reveals the characteristic of bestowal and love toward others. Religion fills a person’s “niche of the unknown.”
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Question: The Torah attributes stars to different astrological signs. Does the Creator manage people’s souls by the stars? What is the relationship between the soul and the stars?

Answer: There is nothing special about the stars. It is simply an allegory and that’s all. There is no power in the stars and it makes no difference whether a certain star is destroyed or remains. These are simple inanimate systems that have no effect on anything that is spiritual and upper.

Astrology first appeared a long time ago because people wanted to know where they are, how they should behave, how to measure time, and what to do.

In ancient Babylon astrologers could tell a person’s character and what will happen to him according to the stars. In those times people were much more sensitive and closer to nature and could say a lot about a person according to different signs. But this isn’t the system of the upper management. This is the system of our corporeal existence that could make life safer and more comfortable.

Today it is quite meaningless since we have lost our sensitivity to nature and there are no sages like the ones who lived in the past; they couldn’t help us anyway today. We are so negative in our thoughts and desires and so polluted by different chemicals that nothing can help us.

Comment: But people are still interested in the predictions of the Bulgarian Baba Venga and others.

Answer: This is only natural, but it isn’t the wisdom of Kabbalah and they cannot teach us anything correctly either. They can only accurately predict something in advance, but they cannot change anything.
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 12/27/15

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Question: After a thousand year rift that divided Christianity between East and West, an historical meeting was held recently between Pope Francis and the head of the Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill. Did they truly unite?

Answer: It is not whether they united or not; the fact is that all religions worldwide universally exist within human egoism, which causes them to enter into an irreversible crisis. The ego has grown and religion could not give the evolving person an answer to the question that arises in him about the meaning of life: How he can manage his life correctly, toward what he must bring it and toward what nature is leading us?

Religion has remained on the same level that it was 2,000 years ago when the nations of the world got it from the wisdom of Kabbalah. The wisdom of Kabbalah was the religion of the people of Israel until the destruction of the Second Temple. Then out of it came modern Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Since then, they haven’t changed.

Neither Judaism, Christianity, nor Islam can give an answer to their faithful audience because humans have evolved in the direction of attainment. Since humans have attained our world with the help of science, they also want to recognize and achieve their fate, their life, their destiny, and everything else that is found above them scientifically.

But religion is not capable of that. It can only serve a small, egoistic person, making it possible for him to suppress the question about the meaning of life. It says to a person, “Believe,” and he believes, and in order to settle down into this mollification, he slowly lowers a screen over his eyes. Then he apparently doesn’t see or think, he believes and that’s it. Moreover, this doesn’t depend on his intellect but on his inner psychological need.

The wisdom of Kabbalah says that to everything that religion preaches, a person must truly apply the religious Mitzvah (commandment), “And you shall love your friend as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18); and the wisdom of Kabbalah teaches how to apply it.

Religion talks about the existence of an upper world, a Gan Eden (Paradise, Heaven), a Gehenna (Hell), and the rest of its symbols, and the wisdom of Kabbalah claims that it is up to us to come to discover these concepts now, here in this world. Our world includes all the worlds generally, and all the various possible situations can be seen and attained while still within this world, in this life, right here and now.

And so, of course, Kabbalah, a further development of all the sciences, comes to change religions..So understandably, the religions are very opposed to it. This is less so for Christianity and Islam because it is still far from them.

But this is certainly so for Judaism since it sees a very great threat to its continued existence in the wisdom of Kabbalah. The wisdom of Kabbalah just shakes up the entire enormous mechanism that has been built by religion to serve, to subdue, to influence and control the people, the believers, in that it opposes all the rules and laws that exist in popular Judaism, which tell a person to shut his eyes and believe without any true understanding of both the prayers and the Mitzvot. Understandably, in this form they cannot talk about fulfilling the law, “And you shall love your friend as yourself”; all of that is forgotten and left on the side.

So a very big difference exists between religion and the wisdom of Kabbalah regarding a person’s approach to creation, humanity, and everything that happens with him. This is talking about a fundamental change in his internal mechanism of understanding and perception. In other words, according to the wisdom of Kabbalah, a person must rise above the animate level within himself to a higher level.

Humanity is facing a big problem that will produce suffering on its spiritual level. We are in the beginning of this process and I hope that we can lay down a good and solid foundation for humanity. Then it will be easier for us to move forward.
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From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 2/14/16

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New Life #507 – Why Is the Bible Considered To Be a Holy Book?
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Tal Mandelbaum ben Moshe

Summary

The holy books speak about something higher than our world. In order to attain and understand what they are saying, we must become holy. The wisdom of Kabbalah explains to us that holiness is the characteristic of bestowal and love. These are divine qualities that every person in our world must acquire.

Holy books were written by people who attained divinity, and their goal was to help us also attain what they attained. The Kabbalists explain that those authors wrote these holy books in the “language of the branches,” which is a special coded language through which they could describe the higher forces in our language.

The Bible is not a historical book; it is a living book. It is a book in which high spiritual states are described that every person can and must ascend and attain. All that we must do is to take the words about this world that are written in the book and explore and attain their true meaning, which is that they basically are describing a world that is above our world. Basically, when we read the Bible with its true inner meaning, we discover the operating system that manages our lives and our world.

After all, everything in our world—the still, vegetative, animate, and speaking—are operated by spiritual forces. All we must do is to recognize this operating system in order to attain the properties of bestowal and love.
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From KabTV’s “New Life #507 — Why Is The Bible Considered To Be A Holy Book?,” 1/22/15

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Question: Several influential rabbis strongly condemned the campaign in support of the mobilization of the ultra-Orthodox youth in military and alternative service.

In particular, the rabbis in Jerusalem said that the campaign should be considered sinful and deserves condemnation. They even signed an Halachic ruling.

It is a long struggle that is now gaining momentum. More recently, police detained a group of ultra-Orthodox on suspicion of incitement against the supporters of the mobilization. What do you think about this?

Answer: This is a big problem that has to be solved. I can not imagine any of the Orthodox Jews that are surrounded by the Arab population, not being protected by the Israeli army. On the one hand, they understand that perfectly. On the other hand, do not wish to participate.

There is no doubt that the Arabs don’t differentiate between non-religious and religious Jews and don’t really care who is who. Today, they are the spearhead in the attacks to destroy Israel and the Jews.

And the ultra-Orthodox Israelis must defend themselves from third-party influence. They protect themselves, the “ghettos” in which they live: Jerusalem, Bnei Brak, ultra-Orthodox areas in all the cities of Israel, because otherwise they can not exist. They are afraid of dissolution in the secular community, and therefore I understand it.

Question: Don’t you see a solution?

Answer: There is no solution. It is a serious schism that has been going on for a long time. There must be a division between the general religious population and the Orthodox sector because there are other religious sectors who serve in the army, and many of them even serve in combat units.

This is basically a political game because from the non-religious perspective, the Israeli Defense Forces don’t need them. We simply must leave this issue and not deal with it. It is a political squabble before elections when each party takes pride in being for or against it, and thus tries to make a political gain.

Generally speaking, this issue isn’t worth discussing since it will lead to nothing. I don’t side with any of the parties. I simply am stating a fact.
[176173]
From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 2/1/16

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