Question: The global luxury goods market, which encompasses both products and experiences—cruises, fine wines, gourmet food—has rapidly dropped for the first time in all countries around the world.

What will a person come to? He won’t need expensive cruises anymore or to travel all over the world?

Answer: This will go away.

Question: Exclusive, beautiful clothes, couturier?

Answer: It will also go away. No one needs it!

Question: Diamonds?

Answer: No one needs them! They’re useless these pieces of glass.

Question: And this is how it will all fall? To what state?

Answer: Until a person has no taste for all this at all. And he will think: “And what is the value of this life? Is there any value in it? Is there something I should gain, some results to finish it with?” And so on. And then the realization of evil will begin.

Question: Do you think that this is a fall to the end, to the bottom?

Answer: I hope so. According to Kabbalah, this is a descent to the bottom. There may be some more spikes. But I think it will all be over very quickly.

Question: And the bottom, is this the question about the meaning of life?

Answer: Yes, it extinguishes everything else, this question about the meaning of life. What do I care about diamonds, what do I care about houses? We will see these billionaires in the future, what they will do with their billions and everything else.

You can close your eyes and make a pink mist around you, as if you were in the previous life and so on, as it was before, or imagine something else. But in principle, when everything happens on Earth, as it does now, it affects even these billionaires through the air, and they also lose the desire for all sorts of jewelry and a life of luxury.

Even on a separate island with all the conditions, there will be not the same environment, not the same air, the wrong atmosphere—neither airy, nor moral, nor sensual, none. A person will have nothing to be proud of in relation to others: “Look who I am, what I am!”

And others look at him: “What do you have? What?!” “Look, here I have a house!” “So what, you’re going to tear yourself apart into 200 people and live in this house?”

“Here, I’m going somewhere!” And where to rush to? I live within myself, I feel satisfied with myself, nothing is needed! Now marijuana will enter the whole world, the world will be engaged in smoke to calm down, and that’s it. Why is all this necessary?

All this will be done perfectly.

Question: But is this also the period before the fall?

Answer: This is a period to calm down from one through the other and eventually come to a normal worldview.

Question: So what will they find the meaning of life in? What will they understand?

Answer: They will understand that the meaning of life is to experience an upper force, eternal and perfect. When we feel it, we become like it—all.

The upper force is kindness, it is the eternal good that fills the whole world. Eternal! And I have to reach its sensation and lose myself in this eternal good. I don’t disappear, I just become similar to it.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 11/19/20

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Comment: What is good and what is bad? Many people are confused now.

For example, it was good for a lot of people before, and it was possible to make plans. A virus came, and it became bad. And you say, “Good.”

Earlier, America was America and the European Union was the European Union. It was good; people wanted to live there.

America is now divided into camps, and there is intense hatred. It is not known what will happen with Europe, it seems that there will not be this unified alliance. It got bad, and you say, “Good.”

The world has practically lost its purpose, there is no purpose, it is a dead end. Many people feel it.

My Response: This is the best!

Question: Can you sort it all out? What is good and what is bad?

Answer: Good: this is when we move forward in the right direction inherent in nature, not in the one that was created by some great minds, Marxism-Leninism, Capitalism, Socialism, or some other academies.

And now there is none of this, nature gives us a good impetus, and we are moving forward. And that is why it is good.

Question: That is, everything that is created by the human mind is, by and large, bad. And if we try to move, at least approximately, in accordance with nature, is that already good?

Answer: If we reluctantly move where it pushes us, then this is good.

Comment: But if we are reluctant to move, we feel bad.

My Response: Yes. But it is good.

Comment: Here is the whole stumbling block.

My Response: So the point is not to feel good and go to bad. The point is to go for the good. To the good  is where nature pushes us.

Question: That is, can we go to good only if we feel egoistically bad?

Answer: Yes.

Comment: If we feel bad, and now we are at a dead end, we have lost our bearings.

My Response: That’s very good. And from this we will find a good way out.

Question: How do we hear nature? It is impossible for an egoistic person to somehow hear it, move with it?

Answer: You just have to think about where we live, what kind of nature it is. Nature is integral, global, in which everything exists in harmony. So let’s do the same with each other.

Question: What do you mean by the word “nature”?

Answer: Nature is inanimate, vegetative, and animate, and most importantly people, who must achieve a good mutual connection with each other. And then everything will be fine, everything will be okay. These are not children’s fairy tales, this is just a law of nature that everything should be interconnected.

When we begin to unite with each other into one global whole, into mutual good dependence, mutual assistance, with the understanding that this is how one should live, in spite of our petty, philistine egoism, then we will begin to feel that all nature is so closed, altruistic. And inside this state, such a close, warm, normal connection, we will begin to feel ourselves existing in a completely different world, in a different environment.

Question: That is, I only have to make these good efforts toward the other, and I will begin to gradually feel this law of nature?

Answer: Yes. Moreover, this is all described in the Bible anywhere. Nobody can argue with this, you just need to implement it. Ideologically, everyone agrees with this, no one will say no. The most terrible bandits shout that they are for truth, justice, and so on.

So, no problem with that. The problem is how to make a good bond between us.

We cannot implement it! There have already been attempts by socialists, communists, Trotskyists, anyone else. We cannot implement it. And now nature helps us, does it for us.

Question: But people tried all the time. There were all sorts of currents. For example, the utopians tried to create cities in which there would be warm, good relations. And they couldn’t. Why? There were efforts.

Answer: There was no methodology, there was no plan, no program. And now all this is already coming to fruition.

Comment: Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem ends like this: “The boy went away happy and the little one decided: ‘I will do good and not bad.’”

My Response: So it will be with this “boy.”

Question: Will it do well? That is, we will move on to this state.

And another very important question. Retirees who live only on their own pension, those who have only enough for this life, will they have it? It won’t be taken away from them?

Answer: Nature will make it so that everyone will have everything in the necessary and sufficient quantity, no less and no more. And in this way it will set the person up for the right attitude to everything.

Question: So your appeal now is to hear nature, rely on it, and flow with it?

Answer: Yes. Everything will be calm so that everything will be like this. And the most important thing is to open a new world in the right communication with each other. Everybody is in there!
[282434]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 10/29/20

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Question: In our world, every person feels the ups and downs in their desire to receive, i.e., less or more filling, a change of mood. This can even happen several times a day depending on the situations that occur in our lives. What are the ups and downs in Kabbalah, on the spiritual path?

Answer: The spiritual path is the path to the property of bestowal, which is the main property of the upper world.

Our world is built on the property of receiving, egoism, and the spiritual world is the opposite of our world and is built on the property of bestowal. Relative to it, there are falls and rises there also.

If in our world we feel them on the basis of whether I have received more or less, won or lost a little, then in the spiritual world it is whether I have approached the property of bestowal or moved a little away from it.

In addition, if in our world we can work with the help of egoism, gain more, sometimes feel our strength, the strength of reason, willpower, the strength to achieve the goal, and accordingly with this feel ourselves on an ascent or in a descent, then in the spiritual world we do not have the strength to work with the property of bestowal.

We do not even have a clue what it is. After all, when I think about giving, I immediately automatically, subconsciously calculate: what will it give me, what will be the benefit. Otherwise, it makes no sense for me to give.

I cannot bring myself to think about it, so completely selfish is our nature. Therefore, the most important thing in Kabbalah is to somehow master the property of bestowal so that it starts working in us. This property exists around us and is called the Creator.
[282555]
From KabTV’s “Spiritual States. Spiritual Ascent and Descent”

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Preparation to the Lesson

Lesson on the Topic “Preparation for the Convention”

Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Study of the Ten Sefirot, Vol. 1, Part 1, Table of Questions for Topics, Item 55″

Selected Highlights

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Question: The Creator, or Atzmuto (He Himself), sounds very egoistic. Is this the point of ultimate egoism in spirituality?

Answer: The point is that we attain the Creator from the bottom up to the extent that we become like Him. We are the absolute desire to receive and He is the absolute desire to bestow.

We reveal Him to the extent that we can make our desire to receive resemble His desire to bestow. But He Himself, Atzmuto, is unattainable. We only attain our resemblance to Him from 0% to 100%, that is, not the Creator, but ourselves in the corrected state.

We cannot feel Him. We can only feel ourselves when we become like Him.

Question: So, apart from my current sensation, the Creator does not exist?

Answer: Correct. The Creator is our subjective sensation of the upper force that formats us, manages us, and fills us. We cannot say anything else other than that.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 2/24/19

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When the economy finally began to open up after a year of quarantine, a new phenomenon emerged: Enterprises are unable to recruit the necessary number of workers to resume production despite the high unemployment rate. It was assumed that those who lost their jobs due to the coronavirus pandemic would rush to look for any job opportunity, and there would be no problem with employees.

And yet, there is a huge shortage of labor, both in Israel and around the world. And this applies not only to low-paid, unskilled work, but also in high-tech, law offices, accounting. For this reason, offices have to work with a small staff and on a reduced schedule.

And the people who previously held these jobs are sitting at home, receiving a good allowance from the state in relation to the pandemic and are in no hurry to return to work. How can we explain this paradox, that with a huge level of unemployment, it is impossible to find workers?

There are not enough people who would like to work. Many have lost this desire. After all, they are not in danger of starvation or social pressure. When receiving state benefits, you can lie on the couch, read a newspaper or book, watch TV, or go to the beach with your family.

And in fact, there is nothing wrong with this, because it is said that sometimes “it is preferable to sit and do nothing.” The world is not made to overstrain at work. There are a lot of jobs that don’t do any good, so wouldn’t it be better to stay at home? At the very least, the environment will improve and pollution will decrease.

There is nothing unexpected in this, because of who the person is, the desire to enjoy, which adapts to the conditions that are pressing on him. If there’s no pressure on him, he won’t budge.

Previously, society adopted the attitude that it is impossible not to work: no work—no means of subsistence. Therefore, a person aspired to get a good profession in order to secure a living and feed his family and children. Today, everything is falling apart: There is no desire to start a family, have children, and there is no need to work.

And indeed, the goal is not to work more and more and enrich the owner, but to understand what we exist for. What is the use of working as an economist, who from morning to night is puzzling over how to twist the business so that the owner will evade paying taxes and earn a few more millions? And what is the use of technological progress, allowing us to produce more and more toys for ourselves and play?

It will be more useful if a person devotes this time to his family, children, and really develops himself by studying science, philosophy, Kabbalah, that is, spiritual development. He will study not the artificial world that he built for himself, but the natural world of nature, in which he lives. And so everything will calm down, there will be no pressure and problems, divorces.

Otherwise, we ourselves support the systems that keep a person in shackles.

If a person stays at home, he will have time and energy to think about the world and about the life of his family, his nation and the whole world in order to make it better. What useful results has the development of technology over the past hundred years led to, which has driven us into the grinder?

The pandemic has sobered humanity. People don’t want to work, don’t want to go back to work, to be the slaves of a handful of capitalists counting billions of dollars in profits. In order to exist in the world, a person does not have to work ten hours a day and spend another two hours in traffic jams.

Finally, we realized that we don’t have to work as slaves for Pharaoh, filling someone’s pockets. The era of slavery is over! We are free! Let’s think about what to do with our life. After all, thanks to modern technologies, which we have achieved with our hard work, it is enough to work a couple of hours a day and have everything you need for life.

What do we work for the rest of the time? To accumulate billions in some accounts. Let us see how we can turn all our modern possibilities into arranging a harmonious life for ourselves. How much do you need to work: a couple of hours a day, and not everyone, but mostly men.

And let’s see how many lawyers, economists, etc. we really need in a correct, reformed society. Apparently, much less than now. But we will need a lot more teachers, educators, and more women working with children. We need to invest more money in the care of the sick, the elderly, to restore order in our home.

We do not agree to return to slavery. We are ready to work only as needed in every position, in every enterprise, if it is really for the benefit of humanity and not just for profit. In the pursuit of profit, we have squeezed all the juices out of nature and out of ourselves, and have reached a total crisis.

Let’s review the whole order again and set it according to the need, with the benefit of the environment, the person, the family. We need a state program for raising a person, training courses for mothers and fathers to build proper, corrected families and all support systems so that each person is well and not one at the expense of another.

We have already invested enough in the development of technology, let’s now focus on culture, art, education, things that internally fill a person and not just feed him and dress him.

The process that we go through according to the program of nature is irreversible. And so we will inevitably move away from the hard work that we have been doing for the past hundred years. We have destroyed the environment and human beings, their opportunities to develop, and now we need to recognize this. And humanity is ready for this, in any part of the world, the terrible consequences of the technological and industrial race are manifested. It’s time to stop it, make a serious calculation and fix what is still possible to fix.

There is no other way for humanity. We need to understand why nature treats us in this way, what we need to do, how to behave, what new world we need to enter, and what new systems we need to build.
[283013]
From KabTV’s “A Conversation with Journalists” 5/25/21

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Why is antisemitism prevalent among the progressive left, particularly the feminist left?“

Antisemitism is a natural phenomenon, which emerged together with the emergence of the Jewish people in ancient Babylon around 4,000 years ago. It is rising in both the political left and right, as they both stem from the very causes of the phenomenon of antisemitism itself. Hatred toward the Jewish people unfolds in several additional ways to how it appears from a particular political standpoint.

However, the burning question right now is, what do we do about it?

Antisemitism is not just against Jews. It is against the inner law in nature, where only unity among all people can save us from this phenomenon and bring about a positive transformation in humanity. Antisemitism is thus by no means a narrow inclination toward Jews. It is much broader in scope.

The human ego—the desire to enjoy on account of others—has started consuming itself, and it needs correction. The more this ego makes people feel hatred toward each other, and the more this hatred pains them, then the more people instinctively connect that hatred to the Jews. In addition, hatred toward Jews temporarily helps them, because without it, their growing hatred would erupt more among themselves.

Therefore, I think that we should view antisemitism as a natural phenomenon that exists before and beyond political sides, and we need to respond to it accordingly. Antisemitism cannot end with any small fixes within or between political sides, or if we leave the State of Israel, as several of our critics—especially in the Arab world—demand.

Antisemitism is a phenomenon that exists at the level of nature’s forces, which permeate humanity and all of nature. Jews, the people of Israel, the nation founded on uniting (“love your neighbor as yourself”) above division (“love will cover all transgressions”) in order to spread that unity to humanity (to be “a light unto the nations”) need to correct the human ego—to unite positively above it. They have a method that can save humanity from the ego’s overgrowth in our era.

Therefore, I make no special connection of antisemitism to the left, the feminist left, or to anywhere else on the political spectrum. Antisemitism goes much deeper than politics. However, natural evolution through the inanimate, vegetative and animate levels of nature has turned humanity into a self-consuming being. And it is not that the Jews are the worst people in the world. It is simply that they have a method for how to unite humanity, and by doing so, save humanity from today’s excessive and dangerously destructive human ego.

We should thus not think about how to make small fixes here and there. Instead, we need to achieve unity. I am certain that if the few million Jews on the planet today would think about how to unite in order to do good to all humanity, then that unifying tendency would expand throughout the world, and everyone would join in.

As a practical measure, if I had it in my power to do so, I would not turn to Jews, but to all haters of Jews and Israel. I would explain to them how exactly the Jews block their happiness, and would also request that they redirect their pressure on the Jews: to demand Jewish unity. This is because, if Jews unite, antisemitism will disappear, and the whole of humanity will unite. And when united, all the burning problems we perceive in our lives today would simply disappear.

In short, humanity is headed toward a state of perfect unity. Humanity can unite on condition that the people of Israel unite. Today, however, the Jews are more divided than any other people. Therefore, antisemitism will gradually acquire forms that will force Jews to unite. Eventually, an inner perception will form within us Jews, that we need to unite, and by doing so, we will save ourselves and the whole of humanity from all hatred, division and crises.

Based on a talk “Meetings with Kabbalah” between Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman, Prof. Eli Avraham, Gabriel Malka and Dr. Eli Vinokur on May 28, 2021.

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

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Why do so many people have depression nowadays?“

Depression is a sensation of lacking vitality. In our current times, we are in the transition to another level of life that is starting to show itself to us. It is expressed in growing interdependence and interconnectedness around the world, which we feel negatively because we have yet to realize how to adapt to the new conditions nature has placed us into.

Depression is one of the key negative sensations that a lot of people feel as we head into a new level of human development. The more we develop into an era that demands that we learn how to positively realize our growing interdependence and interconnectedness, then the more we will feel ourselves in the shadows of this era, with growing negative sensations of meaninglessness, purposelessness, exhaustion, and a general lack of vitality. The purpose of these negative sensations is in order to signal to us that a certain shift in our attitudes needs to take place if we are to change our negative sensations to positive ones.

If we make a certain shift to realize our interdependence and interconnectedness positively, we will then invite a new force of life into our lives: the positive force that dwells in nature. We will then find how the array of problems we experience, from problems on personal levels such as depression, anxiety, loneliness and stress, through problems on social, national and ecological levels—will all disappear.

On one hand, we are doing our best to sustain our outdated egoistic, individualistic and materialistic approach to life. However, rising depression, loneliness, anxiety, stress and other problems will keep showing our failure. Today, nature acts on us as a kind of evolutionary steamroller, pushing us to rise to a different level of existence, which includes understanding what we here are for, where we are headed, and how we should positively connect above our egoistic drives. Humanity now faces specifically this challenge.

Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Photo by Paola Chaaya on Unsplash.1

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Question: Where did the twelve tribes of the people of Israel come from?

Answer: There is a so-called common Kli (vessel), a common mutual connection of the people, which consists of twelve parts. The fact is that the people are a four-level combination “Yod-Hey-Vav-Hey,” the so-called HaVaYaH.

Each of these parts, in turn, consists of three lines: right, left, and middle. Therefore, four levels times three lines give twelve different flows of movement towards the complete connection. They are called the “twelve tribes.”
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States”

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