Examples And The Perception Of Information

 

Question: The process of perception of new information goes through stages. The first stage is selective, a way of capturing information, then there is recognition based on some associations, followed by interpretation, assessment of the significance of the information, its understanding. And, finally, is the retention of information. Do you agree with this?

Answer: More or less. But all this is very difficult for a person. Let’s say I’m starting to get to know something and I have to check myself against this long list to find out how much am I in this flow of information or in its absorption within myself. This is almost impossible.

Remark: Scientists say that it is important to link new material to clear examples. Otherwise, the material will not be absorbed. For example, it is useless to tell a person about mutual guarantee unless we provide some examples.

The sages knew about this a thousand years ago and wrote the study materials (in the sources) in the form of stories. So when you talk about mutual guarantee, imagine someone drilling a hole in a boat, it all becomes very clear.

My Comment: Sure. In principle this remains, only a lot of data and conditions are added.

Question: I think that it would be a good idea to give various examples in our explanations. For example, when you say: “You must become as round as nature or reflect its laws,” what can I imagine?

For me, nature is forests, groves, the cosmos. What examples could you give when you say that man must reflect the laws of nature?

Answer: One should simply study what nature really is, its laws, what is it trying to tell us. One must acquire some new skills, knowledge, and expand one’s perception.

Question: You often say that the solution to any problem is in uniting humanity. And here the question arises: What picture should I imagine? What does uniting mean? Everyone understands this in their own way.

Answer: Unity is a connection between several completely different beings, concepts, or knowledge when they have a common platform.

The basis for all objects and phenomena lies in desires. And if the desires are directed at unification, then people are looking for some kind of foundation or platform. This usually leads to the fact that they outline for themselves the next, more elevated state and strive for it, and help each other.
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From KabTV’s “Management Skills” 7/24/20

Women In Management

 

Question: You often say that women can manage better than men. Why? What is your claim based on?

Answer: A woman, unlike a man, can manage many jobs. Let a man do a general cleaning of the apartment, he will not cope with it in a month. Give it to a woman; everything will be perfectly done in one day. That is, a woman is adapted to solve small but varied tasks.

Question: How do female leaders differ from male leaders?

Answer: I do not think that they are in any way different from each other at all because this is no longer a woman and a man, but a person who lives by an idea and has nothing to do with gender differences.
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From KabTV’s “Management Skills” 6/11/20

Communication In The Family

 

Question: What should be the basic principle of a person’s relationship with their family?

Answer: The family, according to Kabbalah, is a person’s environment, which allows him to exist in our world as correctly, normally, and comfortably as possible.

Question: For example, I love my children and my wife so I do not need to make much effort to treat them responsibly and altruistically. Can we say that nature gives us such an example so that we can later treat other people in the same way?

Answer: No. We cannot determine our attitude toward others without taking into account their attitude toward us. Therefore, if we are talking about building relationships within a family, then we must take care of the inanimate, vegetative, and animate levels in order to provide our household with these levels in the necessary, rational form.

Question: But why is it created by nature that a person should have some kind of small cell close to him?

Answer: Everything comes from the earth, from the inanimate level, followed by the vegetative, and then the animate level. In order to maintain and develop these levels in us, we must continue to exist in them, despite the fact that we are already, perhaps, at a higher level.

Therefore, any great Kabbalist still has a family, and he takes care of it to some extent. He satisfies the basic desires of his loved ones, although, in principle, his spiritual essence, his spiritual ties with the upper system in which he already resides, have nothing to do with communications within his family.
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From KabTV’s “Communication Skills” 7/30/20

What A City Of The Future Will Be Like

 

Remark: Working on the Internet and the coronavirus pandemic that has spread across the planet is making urban life obsolete. Many experts believe that cities may disappear and become ghost towns.

My Comment: I personally think that this is still a long way off. The creation of cities was necessary to bring people closer in order to better organize their lives. I think that people will nevertheless begin to understand how they should behave to each other, how to reshape their entire community, even the world community, so that everything is good and convenient for people.

Question: There are many examples in history when giant cities, successful cities, at the height of civilization collapsed because of growing internal ambitions, pride, and other negative relationships. And then it took a lot of time to restore not only cities, but entire civilizations.

What will help cities go through the stage of destruction and decay now?

Answer: I think it will not be destruction or decay, but stretching. Cities will sort of stretch.

Question: After deindustrialization, governments and city mayors invested in the development of city services. What should government and city leaders invest in now? Should they invest in the city or in the people?

Answer: Once we lived in caves and were very close to each other, a huge family of several dozens or even several hundreds of people. Then all this gradually began to disperse, turned into a village, a village turned into a city, and so on. That is, we gradually moved away from each other physically.

Then there was a division into professions, into specializations, and this also alienated us from each other. It so happened that somewhere there is a hospital, somewhere there is a school, somewhere there is a factory, and somewhere else there is a pasture and agriculture. And so we drifted further and further away from each other.

The following process is taking place today. We see that distance is not a hindrance to us. We are in such virtual connections that it is not a problem at all.

Question: Will this forced remoteness have an impact on the inner remoteness of people from each other?

Answer: While I am thinking about how not to get infected, it will be difficult for me to go out and communicate with others. But as soon as I start thinking about how not to infect others, it will become easy for me, and there will be no more boundaries. We will be able to stay together in a city, in the countryside, anywhere.

Question: In one of the programs you said that the walls of Jerusalem were built of bricks, but those bricks represented man’s desires, and that a city used to be a kind of protection, a bastion for a man, both for his inner and his external sensation.

What is a city from the point of view of Kabbalah? What does it carry deep within itself? Why would people still want to stay in a city and build a new city?

Answer: Here we are touching a special spiritual state. A city means a settlement of people who surround themselves with a special relationship to nature, to reality, to creation, to the Creator. And so they are, as it were, protected by so-called walls. Subsequently, they began to build walls around cities in practice.

In general, a wall is our common desire to be together and deter those opposed to us. And so the wall, in principle, was spiritual. Then they began to build stone walls, bastions, and so on.

So a city is a symbol of the fact that we limit ourselves to connection with each other and do not want to admit anything alien to this connection.

Therefore, there is a city surrounded by a wall. From the spiritual point of view, it is a community of people who connect with each other and feel how interconnected they are. Around the city there are even certain distances, which a person kind of clears around himself: 70 meters and then 2,000 meters. Thus, the city protects itself from any foreign influences, thoughts, and desires. It lives its inner life. This is called a “city.”

Question: What does it mean that a city protects its inhabitants from alien desires and thoughts? Who is an “alien”?

Answer: Inside a city we think only about mutual assistance to each other, and an alien does not want to act in this form, to be connected with everyone, and therefore, we do not let him in.

I think that in the future a city will cease to exist because the concept of a city is spreading all over the earth. People will be in good connection with each other. And then all sorts of borders between states, territories, and cities will disappear. Live where you want. You can come to any place and be in any kind of connection with other people. And everyone will understand you and you will understand them. I would like to see such a future.

Question: What is needed in order for a person to want to give up his self-identification, his city, his piece of land?

Answer: He will simply involuntarily feel that he is in his place everywhere. That is all. There will be no need to fence in, there will be no “I stay in my area, and you stay in yours; I have a certain social circle, and you have a different one.” Everyone can quietly develop in any place.

Remark: We see, on the contrary, that now there is a confrontation between countries and even between some cities.

My Comment: It still happens because we are going through a period of realization of the evil of our nature. And then it will stop. Simply, we will understand that this is evil and we need to rise above it to universal, mutual, correct communication, to universal goodness.

Question: Has an ideal city that the Kabbalists spoke of ever existed?

Answer: There were several such cities in Israel. They are Safed, Tiberias, and Jerusalem.

Question: What was so valuable in them that bound a city and its inhabitants together, due to which they were called ideal?

Answer: People felt their inner connection between themselves and with the Creator. We will have to build the same city all over the earth in which all residents will feel close to each other in spirit and understand each other. And it will make no difference at all where I live, in what area, urban or rural.

Question: What would you wish people who are now leaving the cities for the countryside, moving away from each other? What should they do: Stop? Think? What about?

Answer: Do not hesitate, leave! This is what I can tell them. You will not lose anything because any city today is a breeding ground for evil. Move away from it and you will find goodness. You will be closer to nature, and you will become better.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 8/17/20

The Purpose Of Our Life

 

Question: Does nature have any purpose?

Answer: Of course. Its purpose is to develop a person to reach its highest level when one begins to attain the meaning of the existence of nature itself. That is, one will rise above oneself and reach an understanding of what everything exists for.

Question: How can we show this to people?

Answer: There is no way. Everyone should discover this for themselves. You cannot reveal this to someone. It is not possible to prove anything to anyone. After all, if my cat is on the animalistic level, I cannot prove anything to it from the human level. This is always the case.

Only when an individual grows up and becomes a human being will they be able to understand me and what I wanted to say to them.

Question: You are saying that the purpose of life is to reach the level of nature, to become like it.

In principle, there are two forces in nature: reception and bestowal. In people, however, there is only one negative force. Therefore, we must attract the positive altruistic force of development upon ourselves and thus balance our egoism. Is this what you call “becoming like nature”?

Answer: Yes, because both forces come from nature. We must adapt them within ourselves and exist between them in the middle line, simultaneously managing the right and the left lines. This is the purpose of human life.
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From KabTV’s “Management Skills” 7/2/20

Verbal Transmission Of Information

 

Question: Any relationship implies the transfer of some information. It can be verbal. In inanimate nature, these are vibration processes, in vegetative nature—smells, in animate nature—sounds, some kind of language.

And a human, in addition to speech, has the ability to think abstractly. Scientists say this is what makes him human. Why are we given this opportunity?

Answer: We have such an opportunity so that we can transmit a special type of information, which in our world is not transmitted by conventional methods.

A person rises above the animate world and is considered a person because he must make contact with others in a space where there are no earthly opportunities for communication.

Question: Suppose animals and plants can emit some smells, sounds, and communicate to each other about danger or some other information. And a person can sit down and for several hours in a row tell things that he has never seen or invented himself. For example, some myths, abstract things. What is it all about? What does it give people?

Answer: Man differs from the animal world in that he needs to receive, absorb, process, and transmit a huge amount of information that cannot be conveyed by any terrestrial carriers: not smells, light vibrations, not even sounds.

He must convey this in speech, a certain set of sounds, and there are not so many of them. The combination of these sounds can convey an infinite amount of information. These combinations, which can be not only sound, but also visual, any kind and generate codes, words, and sentences. This raises a human above the previous earthly levels: inanimate, vegetative, and animate.

Question: So, according to the design of nature, one must develop to a certain state in order to be able to convey something by speech to other people who are not yet in this state?

Answer: Of course. It is most important.

Question: Suppose I can tell you about some worlds, about a future that does not yet exist. But if you’ve never felt it, can you believe it?

Answer: It is not that I can believe it; I perceive your story and with the help of this move on. This opportunity allows people to develop. This is how we are different from animals.
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From KabTV’s “Communication Skills” 7/30/20

Kabbalah And Zionism

 

Question: The creation of The State of Israel cannot be viewed without such a phenomenon as Zionism, which preceded the formation of the state. Are Zionist’s ideas close to Kabbalistic ideas?

Answer: Naturally. Kabbalists interpret the arrival of the Messiah as a revelation of a special power in the hearts of people, first of all, the Jews who are striving for unification in order to build a new society together.

This is a society in which people will live according to the laws of an ideal commune, rise above their egoism, and move from love for each other to love for the Creator. In relationships with each other, they will reveal the highest power, the power of bestowal and love. The science of Kabbalah speaks about this.

Mechanically it looks like a return to Zion—Israel.

Question: Still, Kabbalah is a method of revealing the Creator to the creations in this world. Zionism is a social movement to return to Israel. What is the connection between them?

Answer: Very simple. Kabbalah says that one who has a craving for the disclosure of the Creator seeks to return to the land of Israel and build a society that obeys spiritual laws. In principle, all the rules of conduct, the social order that should be in the state, we draw from Kabbalah.
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From KabTV’s “Systematic Analysis of the Development of the People of Israel” 11/25/19

“Trouble In Paradise, The World In Peril” (Medium)

 Medium published my new article “Trouble in Paradise, the World in Peril”

Natural disasters have doubled globally in the last two decades. The world is in danger of becoming “an uninhabitable hell for millions of people,” warns the UN, unless actions are taken on climate change — floods, hurricanes, heat waves, earthquakes, fires, and now a pandemic. Calamities are more intense and more frequent than ever before. What does this acceleration mean? Humans look at nature as a force that is out of balance, which is out of control, but feel it has always been like that since catastrophes have been constantly omnipresent, as if this attitude would make our life easier. It will not work. Nature is precisely pushing humankind to take responsibility and fix the mess it has created once and for all.

More than 7,000 major natural catastrophes were reported between 2000 and 2019, affecting 4 billion people around the globe, according to a recent UN study on the human cost of disasters. That is almost twice the number of calamities registered from 1980–1999, an extraordinary rise mostly due to the climate crisis which threatens our very existence.

We need to understand that all the plagues and increasing suffering appear for one reason: to guide people to find the actual cause of what is happening and tackle the problem at its source, since it’s obvious that the efforts of scientists and politicians are ineffective and have failed to stop the avalanche. Why now the rise of unfortunate natural events? Kabbalists who study the details of the structure of reality provide the answer. Foremost Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag succinctly explains it:

“Nature, like a skillful judge, punishes us according to our development. For we can see that to the extent that humankind develops, the pains and torments surrounding our sustenance and existence also multiply… the right conclusion must be drawn — that nature will ultimately defeat us and we will all be compelled to join hands in following its laws with all the measure required of us.” (The Peace).

Simply put, as the world has evolved to this point, it has now entered a new stage of development, a completely different level in which humanity must fully recognize the unity of nature as a holistic system, one whole.

However, there is a bug in the system, an exception that is the source of the problems. Inside this system stands the human species, the center of the world, who is given the freedom to choose to do as it pleases in spite of the consequences, and who is currently acting as a negative influence in opposition to the trajectory of the rest of nature which is global, integral, and united. Therefore, it is the human who is throwing the system out of balance, transforming its well-oiled operation into a disjointed machine whose pieces are constantly colliding and grinding against each other, a network that needs urgent repair to continue functioning before it falls into total collapse.

If we want to save the planet, and ourselves as a consequence, our task is to rebuild human society to bring human activity in balance with the laws of nature. If we were to see in depth the intricate interconnections of the network of nature, we would realize how we, as the rational element in creation, can and does drastically affect the rest of the parts.

Thus, now comes the time when each of us must look in the mirror and say, “Enough blaming others for my problems; I have to take responsibility.” How can this be done? It can only be done by all of humanity deliberately uniting to achieve equality, interconnection, and mutual understanding. All of our development, where human innovations ripple through and transform the lifestyle of each and every one, demonstrates the extent to which we are interconnected. When we understand this, we will understand the true meaning of balancing ourselves with nature and thus, we will balance nature. We cannot escape from this requirement that we must synchronize with nature.

Thus, now comes the time when each of us must look in the mirror and say, “Enough blaming others for my problems; I have to take responsibility.” How can this be done? It can only be done by all of humanity deliberately uniting to achieve equality, interconnection, and mutual understanding.

However, we should not have high hopes for any leader. Each leader ultimately only cares about honor and is inherently selfish, even more so than the rest of us. That is how and why each one of them managed to climb to the top of the political ladder. But once they reach its peak, the nice words promoting the common interest become hollow promises. So we, as the general people, must work together to repair the planet, through our unity, from the wounds we have inflicted and demand from international organizations to advance a global plan for the creation of positive qualitative connections between human beings of all countries, all societies. Only such a protective and luminous ring of light as this surrounding the planet can save it from the impending hailstorm and transform our lives to paradise on Earth, just as was conceived for us in the thought of creation.