Medium published my new article “New Drug that Promises to Target Only Cancer Will Not Kill It”

Scientists at Tel-Aviv University (TAU) reported that they have developed a new way to deliver drugs directly to cancer cells rather than dispersing them throughout the body. According to the magazine Science Daily, “The study opens a new path to a personalized and precisely targeted battle against cancer.” Prof. Dan Peer, head of the research team, stated that their aim was “to silence the enzyme HO1 which enables tumors to develop resistance to chemotherapy, and ‎to conceal themselves from the immune system. …Our new nanodrug,” he asserts, “knows how to ‎precisely target the cancer cells, silence the enzyme, and expose the tumor to chemotherapy, ‎without causing any damage to surrounding healthy cells.” I am all for advanced medicine, but medicine cannot cure the cause of cancer, and without curing the cause, it is like sealing one leak in a pipe only to find that we have created a new one instead.

Cancer is a unique disease. It develops when cells begin to consume their environment and grow at its expense. Eventually, cancer brings on itself its own death by killing the body that sustains it, but it cannot help itself.

That “selfish” behavior of tumors is very similar to the way we are behaving toward each other and toward the environment. Although we are dependent on both for our survival, our attitude toward them is opportunistic and abusive, yet we cannot help ourselves. In that sense, humans are the cancer of the earth.

While it is not that the more selfish one is, the more likely one is to develop cancer, the increasing prevalence of cancer in human society as a whole is a result of our increasingly exploitative attitude toward Earth and toward each other. Just as kind and generous people, or even little children, may develop cancer, the effects of humanity’s abusive attitude can manifest in parts of the world that are not particularly exploitative. There is mutual responsibility here: Just as the entire organism suffers when one organ becomes sick, all of humanity suffers when its overall attitude becomes sick, namely abusive.

Cancer is not the only outgrowth of our abusiveness. Basically, so are all of our diseases. However, cancer is the most striking case of a “selfish” disease, since the way it operates is so similar to the way we are behaving toward each other, toward animals and plants, and toward Earth as a whole.

Because cancer is an “egoistic” illness, the only cure for it is to cure our egoism. Eliminating cancer, therefore, requires uprooting egoism from our society.

Clearly, this is an educational process and not a medical one, but we will feel its benefits in every aspect of our lives. Education toward reciprocity and consideration will not only benefit our health, but our economy, the safety of our society, the level of drug abuse and drug-related crime, and our overall standard of living and well-being.

Even if we cannot see an overt connection between cancer and selfishness, eliminating the latter is clearly a worthwhile goal. Therefore, I would suggest that we try it first, and when we see the results, we will not want to stop.
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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “What If Iran Has a Bomb”

On April 11, the Institute for Science and International Security released what might well be considered an alarming report: “As soon as mid-to-late April,” namely these very days, “Iran is expected to reach a new dangerous, destabilizing threshold, having enough highly enriched uranium (HEU) to fashion a nuclear explosive, about 40-42 kilograms (kg) of 60 percent enriched uranium… With this quantity, an enrichment level of 60 percent suffices to create a relatively compact nuclear explosive; further enrichment to 80 or 90 percent is not needed.” As a result, the report continues, “the possibility of manufacturing a nuclear explosive cannot be excluded.”

“A common fallacy is Iran would require 90 percent HEU … to build nuclear explosives,” the report continues. “Although Iran’s nuclear weapons designs have focused on 90 percent HEU and likely prefer that enrichment, modifying them for 60 percent HEU would be straightforward and well within Iran’s capabilities.” In other words, according to the report, we are already dealing with a nuclear Iran.

Initially, I believed that Israel must do whatever it can to prevent Iran from getting a bomb. However, if Iran already has a bomb, I do not think that it is the end of the world, although now the rules of the game will clearly be very different.

First, they will be different for Iran. Aspiring for an A-bomb and actually having one are two very different things. Once you have got such a powerful weapon, you realize that playing time is over. You imagine the possibilities that being a nuclear power will give you, but the truth is that the constraints are countless. You are no longer treated like a reckless child but like a nuclear power, and the demands from you increase accordingly. Any step you take toward using nuclear arms might be reciprocated with equal strength, if not more, so it is not as though you can do whatever you want. Instead, you have far less room for error.

Second, despite the toxic rhetoric, I do not believe that Iran has made the destruction of the State of Israel one of its goals. Clearly, it is vociferous and strident in expressing its hatred for the Jewish state, but I think it is more a matter of politics than of real commitment to Israel’s destruction. After all, despite using Hamas and Hezbollah as Iranian proxies that bully Israel, neither poses an existential danger to the Jewish state, and its own army has never participated in any of the full-blown wars against Israel. As I see it, Iran’s anti-Israel rhetoric is more a political tactic than an actual ideology.

Therefore, if Iran indeed has a bomb, we must make the necessary preparations for ourselves, but nothing more than that. After all, we, too, have our missiles and planes, as well as submarines, and all of them can carry nuclear bombs if needed.

Besides, Israel is not Iran’s only avowed enemy. As a Shiite state, it has been in conflict with Sunni states for centuries, and Sunnis are the majority in the Muslim world. Therefore, Iran’s struggle for hegemony in the Muslim world is just as bitter, and perhaps more important to it than its ambition to annihilate the Jewish state.

Also, there is a deeper layer to the conflict between Iran and Israel, which pertains directly to the role of Israel with regard to humanity. As the world becomes increasingly interdependent, humanity has no choice but to learn to work together. The semiconductor crisis, shipment delays, the pandemic, the rising inflation and food shortage are all happening on a global scale. No country can survive on its own today.

Israel’s past contains a formula of unity that has never been tried by anyone except Israel, and that, too, only in antiquity. According to this formula, one does not try to oppress the other or change the other person’s, or nation’s way of life. Rather, belligerent parties leave their adversaries as they are and try to bond with them above the differences. For this to happen, the value of unity itself must be superior to all other values.

Think of a woman and her child. She loves her child whether he is a saint or a Satan.

We must achieve something of that relation throughout all of humanity. Since it is completely unnatural, we must elevate the value of unity above all other values, so that it covers all the faults we see in others.

If we value unity above all else, we will use our traits for the common good rather than for our own good. The surprising result will be that we will realize that in reality, there are no negative qualities when we use them only where and how they contribute to society.

The conflicts we see today, whether between Israel and Iran or between Russia and Ukraine, are all for the same purpose: to make us realize that in the end, we will not agree but we will have to unite nonetheless.

The world hates Israel precisely because it had set a precedent in antiquity, and now it must revive it and become an example from which the world can learn. The enemies of Israel force it to unite, and thereby do what Israel must do for the world: become an example of unity. If Israel insists on refraining from carrying out its mission, it will stop existing with or without an A-bomb.
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Question: Why is Pharaoh constantly changing? First he was good, then he was bad and so on. What does it mean?

Answer: He does not change by himself, but what changes is only his manifestation in relation to a person. At first, it seems to a person that Pharaoh is good, that he equips him with everything, leads him, hosts him, and gives him a good place in Egypt.

Then gradually, it is as if a different Pharaoh appears and he is bad. So it is said in the Torah: “And a new king arose over Egypt” (Rabash, “A Real Prayer is over a Real Deficiency”).

It is the same king, but because the person has changed and requires a different attitude toward himself, then Pharaoh has changed and does not give him what he would like. So it turns out to be a bad Pharaoh.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 4/14/22

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How easy it was to feel, support, and inspire a friend when we were physically together. And now we need to learn to feel each other through the screen. In fact, there will be no need for physical meetings; this will be the further development.

We will develop to such states that screens will not be in front of us but around us. This screen on which I now see my friends will connect with the screen showing me the world.

We still see the world around us on the screen, but we do not understand that it is a screen. All of humanity and the events happening to it are a broadcast on a screen that comes to me from above, from the Creator.

But it is possible to build an additional screen with which I will reveal a different, upper reality. And this screen depends on me, on whether I acquire the desire for bestowal.

In the same way, we will build a screen between us and with it we will no longer need today’s computer screen to see our friends.

Inside us there will be such an “Windows operating system” that will allow us to move from one window to another, from stage to stage, from world to world.

We will definitely come to this. If we do not have time in this life, then we will meet in the next cycle and continue this work.
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From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/24/22, Writings of Baal HaSulam, “A Speech for the Completion of The Zohar”

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What thoughts or attitudes are helpful with stress management?“

Life—both our own lives and life on all biological levels—is in constant stress. It is because life is a clash of opposites and their combinations, and it unfolds on the boundary between plus and minus, positive and negative.

Stress is thus neither bad nor good. It is a necessary aspect of life. We should thus focus on how to best manage our lives with its necessary stress.

We were given brains and our social environment in order to adapt ourselves and manage stress properly. We can manage stress by understanding the necessity of the combination of plus and minus at all levels and in all circumstances, and seek how to reach balance between these poles. On our human level, we reach a balance between positive and negative forces by creating an attitude of love, giving and connection over hatred, reception and division.

As with the necessity of stress, there is also a necessity to feel negative sensations of hatred, rejection and division. Why? It is in order to rise above these sensations and cover them with their positives of love, giving and connection.

The wisdom of Kabbalah is a method for covering the negative with the positive. Using this method, we become aware of the negative sensations that surface in us, and learn how to establish positive attitudes upon them so that they exist in addition to each other. In Kabbalah, this tendency is described as the correspondence of darkness to light.

The more we learn about the necessity for the coexistence of positive and negative forces, and that their correct combination creates life, then the calmer and more reasonable we become. We then progress along what Kabbalah calls “the middle line,” accordingly constructing ourselves and our world in balance.

We learn how to become aware of the source of every state, how nature creates everything in order for us to balance negative qualities and states with positive ones. When we reach this level of awareness, we then start relating to everything and everyone out of absolute kindness. We do not deny any negative sensation, but we accept everything as necessary.

Even the most negative sensations such as hatred are necessary in order for us to rise above them, to simultaneously exist above and inside them. To put it simply, we should keep in mind the formula that “minus equals plus.” In other words, wherever we see a “minus”—the surfacing of a divisive drive—we should see a “plus”—an opportunity to positively connect above the divisive drive.

If we exercise changing our attitude to the world in such a way, by replacing our divisive drives with unifying tendencies, egoism with altruism, and hatred with love, then everything will turn out fine. If we fail to do so, then our divisions and hatred will proliferate in the world, causing us much suffering.

Based on “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Semion Vinokur on December 23, 2021. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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Question: Archaeologists often find a great number of figurines of different gods and idols dating back to the time of the First Temple during their excavations. How can the worship of various idols be combined in a people who believe in one God?

Answer: Look at small children—how they make all sorts of idols for themselves, build some little things. When a child firmly holds a toy, it calms him down, gives him self-confidence.

Keeping something familiar, something a person is used to (cameos, amulets, red threads, holy water, for example) gives a person confidence, like a child who does not let go of a small toy because he is used to it, it soothes him.

This is the original basis of worship, pure idolatry.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 4/5/22

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Comment: In modern trading, we observe a peculiar chain when someone profits from someone and the other from him, then from someone else, and so on. And in the end, everyone loses, no one gains anything.

My Response: This is how the world operates, so that everything that people do goes away like water into sand. Nothing remains of this, except terrible efforts and crippled lives.

But now we are at a stage when we begin to be aware of our pettiness, the corruptness of our egoism, and we understand that we are unable to do anything.

And so we come to the realization that we need to do something with ourselves, with our nature. This is already a serious affirmation that people will see that in Kabbalah there is the power to get rid of human suffering, the power to transform all of humanity into something great. Not just to arrange life on earth somewhat, but to pull us out of this state to the next level, to the higher universe, to unlimited existence.

I see how many are approaching this. They may not even understand yet or be fully aware of what they are saying. But the process has begun.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Global Financial Fraud” 5/4/10

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Comment: “Do I think or does someone think for me? Do I live or does someone control me?” Such are the questions asked by many scientists.

Today, the hypothesis that consciousness exists independently of the brain is defended by modern Dutch physiologists, who believe that thinking matter does not exist at all. And British scientists argue that the brain, like any other organ, consists of cells and is not capable of thinking. It works like a device that only detects thoughts.

In 1935, a baby was born in New York, who lived for 27 days, cried, behaved like all newborns, and only after his death, pathologists found that he had no brain at all. How is this possible?

My Response: We do not know what the brain is. We do not know where it is located. In practice, it spreads throughout the body, because each cell must know what to do and how to interact with the whole organism.

The body is a mechanism that must receive signals, implement them, and give a response, a response about execution. That is, the brain should be practically everywhere in every cell, at every point.

The brain is a field that exists in us, around us. You can’t even say “in or around us” because this is a completely different reality, a different dimension. It is the thought that fills and surrounds the entire universe, the entire universe.

Even astrophysicists and astronomers say that our universe is a thought. They feel that in the conversation of the stars, in the entire vast volume of the universe, in the accumulation of seemingly completely dead bodies, there is a thought, a melody, a transmission of huge information about the past, present, and future, and not at the level of inanimate masses, but at a completely different internal level, which, unfortunately, we do not cover, do not understand.

Therefore, all our attempts to understand the work of the brain, in principle, do not lead to great success because the brain is an executive part. It is what catches the surrounding signals, interacts with them and converts them into some very external, very primitive instructions to our body. No more.

We are beings completely unknowable to ourselves, we do not know ourselves. We just feel our body, and who we really are, we do not know.

Moreover, we do not know the system that controls us and binds us together into one single control force. The brain is there.

Question: Where do all the signals come from?

Answer: What does “come” mean? We are in this system, in the same volume. And we feel ourselves in the form of an animal, a material body, with its executive part, which includes our brain.
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From KabTV’s “Close up. Dissenting Opinion” 8/29/10

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Question: Why is there always a sense that a man is looking for a mother in a woman?

Answer: Because he always remains a child. Even if he develops industry, technology, science, art, and so on, he is always guided by his fantasy, which is like a child’s fantasy. Men even become better chefs and cooks than women. And this is how it is with everything. Precisely due to the fact that man remains a child.

There is no reproductive function in a man. He does not give birth to the next degree, which represents a new generation in our world or a spiritual degree in the upper world. To do this, he needs a female part. Only through her can he realize himself.

A woman takes semen from him, either his spiritual or his biological part, and develops it.
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From KabTV’s “Close-Up. Siamese Twins” 9/19/10

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Question: Can a mother establish negative inclinations in a child who has not yet been born and has not yet been formed?

Answer: I think that the inclinations of an unborn child are established long before its conception. It is necessary to count not from pregnancy but from the way the parents themselves were formed as children, how they were brought up and how they went through life.

We also need to pay attention to what happens to them when they become adults. If they have bad inclinations, then, of course, they will somehow pass these inclinations on to their offspring, and not only in the form of informational data, but also with some kind of bias for implementing them.

Therefore, children with such inclinations must be surrounded from the very first days with very close care, given them the right education, so that they do not realize not only negative information data, but also the incorrect use of these inclinations in their parents, who have become, for example, criminals or socially dangerous elements.

Therefore, children with such inclinations should be surrounded from the very first days with very close care. They should be given the correct education so that they do not realize and implement in themselves, not only negative information data but also the incorrect use of these inclinations in their parents who have become, for example, criminals or socially dangerous elements.
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From KabTV’s “Close up. Unwanted Children” 11/28/10

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