Lecture by Prof. Erwin László

Presented at the Bnei Baruch International Kabbalah Congress, HaKfar HaYarok, Israel

April 12, 2006

Rav Laitman: I am delighted that Prof. László agreed to come here to speak to us today and on Saturday. He’ll now give a short lecture and afterwards you can ask spontaneous questions concerning the topics of his discussion. So let’s greet him. What he says is, in essence, a part of our work

Prof. László: Dr Laitman, dear friends, friends of Kabbalah and students worldwide, first of all I want to thank you, Dr Laitman and all of your collaborators for inviting me. It’s a wonderful privilege and opportunity to speak to you, to outline some ideas about the very crucial point that we live in today. It’s a crucial juncture in history and I would like to give you some ideas about what this crucial turning point is, ideas that you will be able to relate to on your own, with your knowledge of Kabbalah. I will talk to you about why we need a new mentality, a new consciousness, why we need to shift from egoism to altruism, and why the ancient teachings of Kabbalah have become so relevant today in the world.

The first point I’d like to make [refers to the slide presentation on the screen] is the way that everything is connected to everything else today. The whole universe is centered on each of us. Everything is in the center, the center is everywhere, and the periphery is nowhere.

So you’re talking about a human being, a human being who has become a very crucial element for what happens on this planet. And the responsibility that we have is to make sure that the life that has developed on this planet can continue in the future. This is the challenge that faces all of us.

We are the first generation in history that can decide whether we are going to be the last generation. It is our decision to make sure that humanity can continue to survive, to evolve and develop, instead of destroying each other and this planet.

Let me just say a few words about the situation of humanity as a background. I come from the sciences I just wanted to give you a very basic background. We see over here [pointing to the presentation] that we are actually living in a system on the surface of a planet that is fed by energy from the sun. The solar energy reaches the biosphere which is the lower sphere. It is used there, cycled and recycled, and everything that has developed here in the biosphere is used perfectly. Nature, as you well know from your studies, is a perfect whole. Nothing is superfluous, nothing is wasted. Everything in this lower level is cycled and used, and what is not needed, what cannot be used anymore is energy that has been used and moved from the lower level and has radiated into space.

But the equilibrium that has developed here [points to the slide] is now almost four billion years old and the equilibrium that we have, our balance of nature today, is at least six hundred million years old and it comes from the Cambrian age.

In the last 10,000 years, since the last ice age, this equilibrium has created a home for humanity. And humanity has evolved over the last ten thousand years as a separate system, a system that should actually be part of the big system, but has become more and more autonomous and separate.

The ancient wisdom tells us that we really belong to this system, but the modern world, based on self-centeredness, based on the egoistic wish to receive, has created a system more and more separated from this.

So the dynamics of the two systems are more and more unsynchronized, as we say popularly, “out of sync.” This has happened in the last ten thousand years more and more, and in the last 300 years since the development of the modern age and the mentality of the Western World, which is basically a very strong ego-centered mentality, the difference between these two systems has been exaggerated. It has been exacerbated so that now we are facing a dangerous point.

The upper system should be part of the lower system but it has taken a life of its own, and if we continue like this we are going to destroy the lower system, which is the life support system.

So we have to make sure that we do not destroy this system. We need to integrate ourselves and rediscover our true human nature, be a part of humanity, a part of the biosphere, a part of the cosmos actually.

Now I will give you a short list of the global consequences of the egoistic way of handling ourselves, of managing ourselves in this world and on this planet.

Right now we have a situation which I’m sure you all have read about where we are threatened by a change in the climate in such a way that vast areas of the planet will become much warmer. It is possible that Northern Europe will become colder. Much of the ice that is in the North and the South Polar regions will melt and the sea level could rise.

This could be disastrous for many reasons, partly because many of the agricultural regions will not receive sufficient rainfall because the rain patterns will change. Much of the rain will fall where there is no agriculture at the present time, and partly because the sea level will flood places where people live around the coast.

Here in Tel Aviv, next to the sea, we have the most marvelous areas, luxurious, beautiful regions and if the sea level rises a few meters, much of this will be flooded. And according to the latest climate models, it could rise by as much as eight meters in the next 50 to 100 years, but we don’t know how fast this will happen.

So one of the points is that because of our egoistic self-centered handling our technologies, we are changing the climate, changing it in a way that is negative for the survival and well-being of humanity.

Already the majority of the countries, you know there are 185 members/nations of the United Nations, (there are over 200 nations inscribed in the World Cup this summer in Germany so there are more nations existing having soccer teams than there are members of the United Nations). But the majority of these nations are small nations and poor nations. And the great majority cannot produce enough food to be sufficient so they will have to import food. But the reserves of food in the world are diminishing; the food reserves are fewer and fewer. The largest reserves are the United States and Canada to some extent. The greatest need is in China and Africa where we have to import food because the population is rising faster than the capacity to produce food, so the food reserves at the same time are diminishing. So we have a problem of more and more of a demand for food, and less and less of a capacity to produce a sufficient amount of food.

At the same time, there is less and less fresh water, really good safe drinking water for cooking, and water for hygiene world-wide.

Almost half of the world’s population does not have access to clean water, and an estimated 6000 children die, on the average, everyday because of illness, the diarrhea produced by polluted water.

There is also a problem with the status and well-being of women. There are more women educated in schools, but less women have regularly paid jobs world-wide than before. Many women need to work without regular pay, either by selling things on the street, or being at the mercy of generosity. So the situation for women in the world has not improved.

As you know, terrorism is more and more of a world-wide threat and there is a sense of insecurity in the world, both in rich and poor countries.

At the same time the majority of governments, not all, but the majority of governments believe that they can contain the problems. They can respond to violence; they can eliminate terrorism by using more violence. They believe that the answer to eliminating terrorism, the solution to this is to kill the terrorists. And this is very similar to a very short sited medical practice. If somebody has cancer, they will try to take a knife and surgically try to cut out the cancerous cells. Sometimes it has to be done, but in most cases if you do not cure the organism, then more cells will turn cancerous. The same thing with terrorism; if you merely kill the terrorists without readdressing the balances, addressing the frustrations that people have, then more and more people will turn to terrorism.

The root of the problem, as you all know about the Tree of Life, the roots have to be addressed, not only the branch. So, as a result of this belief that all problems can be solved either by money or by military means, there is an increasing concentration of wealth in the world and there is increasing spending on the military.

In the year 2005, military spending grew again by five percent to 1.04 trillion dollars. The majority, 45% is by the United States, a large percentage is by Russia, and the rest is by other countries.

The so called G8 countries, the developed countries, together have been selling arms to the poorest countries. And last year, they sold twelve billion dollars worth of arms to the very poorest countries that could really use food and development, not just arms.

Now, the situation in cities is getting worse and worse. One in three people now live in cities. This is about 40% of the world’s population live in cities. These people live in slums under very primitive conditions, in urban ghettos, 900 million people worldwide are classified by the United Nations as “slum dwellers.” In the poorest countries 78% of people live under such minimal, really dangerous circumstances.

At the same time the disparity between rich and poor is growing. Eighty percent of the domestic products of the world belongs to one billion people, and we have 6 and a half billion people in the world. So 80% belongs to one billion people. The remaining 20% is shared by 5 and a half billion.

So these are the problems of egoism, of short-sightedness, of using technology and using money to serve one’s own narrow interests and forgetting that we are part of a larger group, part of humanity, and that humanity is part of nature.

How did this happen? How did this big change happen?

You don’t need to look at the details of this. I merely wanted to show you that evolution does not work; development does not work little by little, in a smooth way. If you draw a picture of development, it’s not a straight line. It’s a line of many long periods with no development or sometimes falling backwards, and a very short period where there is a sudden transformation.

The first sudden transformation happened 10,000 years ago to humanity as a separate species, and that was the beginning of the human species divorcing itself from nature as it were. 10,000 years ago in this part of the world, of course not in Palestine specifically, but in the Middle East which was known as the “fertile crescent,” a fertile region of the world.

People discovered agriculture; they discovered it on the shores of the Nile, on the Tigris, on the Huan Ho, and other parts of the world. The Tigris and Euphrates are the largest rivers in the Middle East and in Asia, and agriculture began there. And this was the first revolution, the so-called “Neolithic” revolution where science in a practical way entered into the way of life of people. So people began to adapt nature to their own needs rather that adapting themselves to the rhythms and to the balances of nature. And from here on, there were more and more innovations, technological breakthroughs created more and more evolution. There were more and more changes in the way human societies behaved and human societies went further and further from the equilibrium with nature. So now we find ourselves in the present time, at the present point where we are, and we cannot continue to develop in this way.

We can no longer continue to develop in a way in where we disregard that we are a part of this larger system, the biosphere and the cosmos. If we keep doing this, we will not develop we will destroy the system. Just like cancer, when a cancerous cell just multiplies, it kills the organism that it lives in.

What you have to recognize is this very basic pattern. I just want to impress on you this pattern which is very, very important.

Development, change, what we call in science evolution, the dynamics of evolution, is never smooth. There are periods of fluctuation, periods where a system tries to adapt itself to its environment and it does so successfully. If there is too much criminal behavior it puts the criminals into prisons or exiles to make them change.

If there are people who are not sharing their own views of the world it treats them as enemies and tries to fight them.

There are periods when this kind of strategy works so that the system, the society maintains itself. It’s the same with the species by the way, they also maintain ecology by correcting always, deviations for changes. But then comes a crucial point, a point that is known as “bifurcation”. Nowadays it is known as the “tipping point” where the system (it can be a human society, or ecology, or a state or a community), when it can no longer grow in the same way, where it has reached the limits of its stability.

At that point, there are basically two possibilities. Either the system fails to adapt, fails to change itself and then it disappears. When a human being an individual organism reaches that point, it’s clinically known as “death.” An individual has to die because that’s the way biological evolution works. And then the human individual as such (the body, I’m not talking about the spirit), then it decomposes, disaggregates to its molecular components. This is what happens after death to the body, but the spirit can live on. But a society, an entire group of people can change itself so it doesn’t go down along a red path. It goes up to a new path by changing itself, adapting itself to the current conditions, creatively restructuring itself, and then it will create a new kind of a system.

Today, we are in a global village. We are here in the “Green Village”, but we live actually in a village that is a global village because we are all part of it, we are all inter-dependent. And in this village, we must all interact in such a way that the entire system can restructure itself, we restructure it, and then we call it a civilization. Civilization is a global phenomenon. All people are members of a human civilization, even if there are different cultures. There are Jews, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and Animists, all kinds of different cultures, many cultures, but we all share a civilization because we all live on this planet and will all share its energy, its resources, and we all share its information. So it’s up to us to develop a breakthrough instead of a breakdown.

Now I’m giving you a very pessimistic picture, a very drastic picture of a breakdown due to egoism.

I want to now give you very briefly, another picture, of what will happen, as you have learned, as Dr Laitman teaches, if people change from the wish to receive to the wish to bestow. If your primary value is to give, if you want to live together so that you give to others at the same time you give to yourself, because when you are part of the system, really the organic part, then what you do to the others, you do to yourself.

So imagine now what would happen, if this kind of altruistic culture would become dominant in the world. This is now another scenario, another kind of future. So instead of breaking down due to all these various problems, an increase in conflict and warfare, an increasing gap between the rich and the poor, and the destruction of the environment, you have the following things:

People recognize that we have growing problems that we share and they come together. There are concerned groups of citizens that create associations amongst themselves, networks. They pursue shared objectives and they recognize that sustainability and peace are the highest values, that they are simply more valuable than wealth and power.

Business leaders in their terms, recognize that there is a change in the thinking and expectations of their customers and their clients. They, themselves, restructure their enterprises so that they can produce goods and offer services that meet this new demand.

The news media, the entertainment media recognizes that there is an interest now in collaborative projects, in sustainability projects, in peace, in collaboration. They offer different kinds of programming, the kind of things that you have on the channels. Kabbalah, what we are trying to develop, is also a way of programming that will bring forth a new culture.

So as a result there will be a new concept, a new vision of a human being, of nature which will be surfacing on the internet, on television, in the communication networks of business, of communities, of cultures.

So there will be a new culture in society at large, an emerging culture, which is shared by all the different cultures no matter what the religion is. The emerging culture is to live responsibly, live in a way that other people can also live, so that we can all live together on this planet with social and ecological responsibility. You know, corporations now call it CSR - corporate social responsibility which is a new element that is almost accepted by the majority of the global players of large corporations. They don’t all apply it equally, but they accept in principle that they have to be socially and ecologically responsible. And this development will be a greater deal when there is a new culture in society and a new demand arises. So, there will be more and more measures to safeguard the environment, to create a system of food and resource distribution that will reach all people, to develop sustainable forms of energy, and transportation of agriculture.

On the level of finance, funds and capital are channeled from military and defense applications, basically from violence based applications to the needs of people, to human needs, to those who make up the great majority of society.

So when all of these developments happen, one thing reinforces another and then you can develop national, international, and intercultural networking. There is more confidence in each other. There is more happiness, more joy in living. There is more trust and respect for others. There are more partnerships so the result is we are creating a community, a human community on the planet, a civilization that is peaceful and sustainable. It is entirely possible. But what is required for this?

What it really requires is a new consciousness, a new development of our spirit, the transformation of our egoistic desires so that we can truly form a family world-wide. And this family also has moral principles. Moral principles in an interacting world are different from moral principles that are in a small community that seems to be separate from other communities.

In an interacting world, in a global family, our responsibility extends to all people. That is a new development in moral theory. I come from science and from philosophy so I am aware of the development of morals.

Before we used to think, even 20-25 years ago, that we only have responsibility for other beings that have consciousness because there is no need to be responsible for something, even if it’s a living being, if he doesn’t have consciousness because he doesn’t know whether it’s right or wrong. For example, you would have no responsibility towards animals or towards very small children.

Now this has changed and we recognize that our responsibility is to all people on the earth and even more than that, towards all living things on the earth, so that we owe responsibility to the entire sphere of life, and like Albert Schweitzer says, “we have to have reverence for life.” We have to revere, we have to respect all of life.

So this has changed on the one hand, but we also have to recognize it, and it has become recognized in the last ten years more and more, that we are responsible for the physical aspects of the planet. That the entire planet, you can call it a Gaia system, it’s almost like a living thing. It forms one giant system and we are responsible for it. So it is not enough to say I am a living being. You have to be responsible for the seas, for the forests for the mountains, for the air, and for the soil. All of this you can change because you have the technology to destroy it, and you also have the knowledge to safe guard it. So we have to have a broad morality, new ethics. And the new ethics we call, as you know, I have founded and I am in charge of the Club of Budapest, there they talk about planetary ethics.

Planetary ethics is having responsibility for all things on earth, for this entire system. And the key principle of a planetary ethic is very simple but it’s very different from the key principle of the so called “liberal morality.” The liberal morality says “live and let live.” Live in any way you can, in any way you want, as long as you don’t break the laws, you’re alright.

But what happens when people live only along these lines? Even if they stay within the laws of the state, (secular laws, I’m not talking about spiritual laws). What happens is that rich people become richer and more and more people become poor because wealth becomes concentrated. Also, the environment becomes more and more destroyed, degenerated because we do not really have laws yet, rules, whereby our responsibility extends equally to all people. So we have to have a new principle. And this new principle is very simple it’s not “live and let live.” The new principle is “live in a way that others can also live.” Live in a way that everybody on earth can live.

Seems very simple but it is not because if you continue to live the way the typical western individual lives in a so-called industrial developed society, then no more than 1 billion maybe 1 and a half billion people on this earth could live. They are using too much energy per person. We are using too much of the productive capacity of soil per person. We are using up to twelve acres to feed an average person in the western world. In Africa and the poor parts of Asia, one half acre is the average, so called, “footprint” of an individual per year. We are using up too much water.

All of these things make it impossible for all people on this planet to live the material way of life typical of western industrialized countries. That means we have got to change. We have got to change. We have to live in a more responsible way, in a simple way, and we also need to have the people who are still living in the poor countries change, so that they do not develop in the same way that we did.

If all of China and India, which together have almost a quarter of the world’s population, were to adopt the Western consumption habits, the Western lifestyles, Western economic demands, then in a matter of a few years, the economic and the ecological systems of the world would break down. There is not enough oil, there is not enough food, and there is not enough quality air around to sustain 6 and a half, 7 and a half, or 8 billion people eventually living like we do according to the material standards of the west.

How do we adopt a new principle and live in a way that all people can live? This is something that Gandhi has already said and he said it very well. He said “live more simply so others can simply live.” Now it’s a question of living in such a way that simplicity has to be defined so that it’s not poverty. It’s not a poor lifestyle but a lifestyle that uses less and does more. Uses less energy, uses it better and more effectively. If you eat more produce of the land, the grain and the vegetables directly for example, you will need far less land to feed each person then if you first feed it to the cows, the sheep and the pigs, and then you slaughter and eat the animals because they also have to live and they also use a lot of caloric energy themselves.

In all ways of living you have to recognize living simpler doesn’t mean living not as well it means living more responsibly so that everybody in the world can live.

Let me conclude now with suggesting to you what I call ten principles. They are not commandments like in the Bible, but they are ten principles of new ethics of the new consciousness.

You have planetary ethics, a planetary consciousness when you live in the following way:

1. Live in ways that all other people are able to live as well, that you can satisfy your needs without taking away the chance of other people to satisfy their needs.

2. Live in ways that respect the right to life and economic and cultural developments of all people wherever the live, whatever their ethnic origin, whether they are men or women, whatever their citizenship, their station in life, whether they are rich or poor, or whatever their belief system.

3. Live in ways that safeguard the intrinsic right to life and to a healthy environment for all things, human and non-human, for all the things on earth.

4. Pursue happiness, freedom, personal fulfillment in harmony with nature, not against it and this consideration for similar pursuits for the happiness of other people.

5. Ask that your government, the people that are responsible for your state, relate to other nations, to other people peacefully, in the spirit of cooperation, that they recognize the legitimate aspirations for a better life and healthy environment for all the people of all the states of the human family.

6. Ask business enterprises, clients, and customers to accept responsibility not just for the shareholders, but for the stakeholders and for everybody concerned. They should accept responsibility for all of their stakeholders as well as for the sustainability of the environment. You should demand that they produce goods and offer services that satisfy the legitimate demand without impairing nature and reducing the opportunities of other enterprises to compete fairly in the marketplace.

7. Ask the information media and the entertainment media as well, to provide for you a constant stream of reliable and relevant information on what affects you in life; the trends and the processes that will help you choose your future. This will enable you and those around you to make informed decisions on all the issues that affect your life; how you live, how you clothe yourself, what products you buy and how you relate to other people.

8. Let those around you, who are less privileged than you, live a life of dignity, free from the struggles and humiliations of poverty.

9. Encourage young people and people who have an open mind, of all ages, to evolve their spirit and develop more altruism so that they can make ethical decisions on their own. Because their decisions and your decisions come together in determining the kind of future we will all have.

10. Collaborate with all people who have a good will to preserve or to restore the essential balance of nature, paying attention to the balance of nature in your neighborhood, in your country, in your region, and even in the entire biosphere.

My time is more or less up. I’d like to conclude with the words that we have now an unprecedented responsibility because we have an unprecedented opportunity, an opportunity to change. You cannot change a very stable, properly functioning system. But our systems, our political systems (I’m speaking world-wide), our ecological systems, our economic systems are not functioning well. They are becoming unstable; they are fluctuating more and more as you see. And at this point you have what is known as “butterfly effect”. A butterfly effect is when even a small butterfly can create a change in the current of air that we can amplify a so called “chaos dynamics” and change the weather. So even small inputs can have big consequences because our systems are unstable.

So here your consciousness, your ethics can make a major difference. This generation that you’re living in has the unique chance to change the world. It’s you’re responsibility to accept this challenge and live up to it. Thank you for your attention. [Applause]

Oren Levy: We would like to thank Professor László for the fascinating lecture and we already have a few questions. You can ask questions either by raising your hands or by writing notes and sending them over here and we will present them to Professor László in an orderly fashion, in any language.

Question: This is a question that has repeated itself several times. We’re talking about upsetting facts and people don’t want to hear about them. How do you think that we can present this information to humanity that doesn’t want to hear about it because it is upsetting?

Prof. László: You know we are becoming more and more open to questions that are upsetting. I’m thinking right now about the news from two weeks ago; that next month a film will be released in May and the main protagonist is the former Vice-President and Presidential candidate in the United States – Al Gore. The title of the film is An Inconvenient Truth. He says in the film, I’ve seen some of the clips, that it’s so inconvenient that we wanted to ignore the truth. The truth is really about the way that we are changing the environment. Now the film is going to be released next month, and already the media is recognizing and responding to it. This to me is an indication, a sign that we are ready to accept some inconvenient and even upsetting facts. The criticism that I read about this, which is also a criticism that I would make myself, is that Al Gore spends about one hundred minutes showing all the problems in this film and at the very end of the film, eight minutes showing possible solutions to them.

I think the important thing to recognize is to present not only the upsetting facts, the inconvenient facts, but also what we can do about them. This is the purpose of the book that I’m doing together with Dr. Laitman. It has an equal balance between presenting the crisis, the problems, and the solutions to them. We always have to create a solution; we can do something. If we have only upsetting facts, then people will fall back into pessimism and say, “What can I do? Maybe it’s hopeless; I might as well just live from day to day.”

We have to give a vision. A lack of vision is part of the problem. We have to furnish a new vision.

Question: I’m from the U.S. and I can tell you in southern Illinois, along with Texas, Colorado and the other places I lived in the country, although there’s concern, especially in churches and that type of environment, about people that are hungry, it’s still a society where more people are interested in football, fishing and hunting and this type of thing, and pleasing themselves. The fact of the matter is they’re comfortable, they’re very comfortable, and they are not hungry. It’s a very small amount. The question, you can see it coming, how in the world do we actually achieve a change of consciousness in a society that is extremely successful?

Very good. I used to teach in Carbondale, by the way, for one semester.

I’m familiar with the mentality and that’s part of the problem that you’re raising. But I think the level of concern is rising at the same time. It was first highlighted by Katrina, by the hurricane, what happens when poor people are really not well taken care of. They are also not well prepared for changes in the climate, for example. When you look at the title story from the April 3 issue of Time Magazine, I don’t know if you have seen it, but it said, “Climate Change: We have reached by any measure the tipping point. We can’t go back anymore.” The big headline was “You can be worried, very worried.” That’s the upsetting news. The upsetting news has its uses. People have to recognize that you may appear to be comfortable, but you won’t be comfortable for very long if we continue like this.

Change is no longer a question, whether you want to change or not, changes must happen. To some extent, changes are happening with the people that you least expect. One of the fallouts, the consequences of Katrina, was a glide going up in the head of Lee Scott. Now who is Lee Scott? The CEO of Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is probably the largest private employer in the world. He, all of a sudden, said “We now have to pull our weight. We have to use only recycled products, only organic products and so on." I read the speech that he made to his managers and they are trying now piece by piece. I’m not trying to make publicity for one company, but I’m saying that even a company that’s so successful, that you don’t think that it would need to change, is beginning to recognize that they better change if they want to continue like this.

Just one more example, I had the opportunity at the end of November, to give a talk to the assembled managers of the most successful private utility company, power company in the world. It’s called E-ON. They had one thousand two hundred managers there from all over the world and the CEO of this company put together the entire meeting, which they have every two years. At this meeting they were planning the next few years on the concept of a wave rider. A wave rider is one who is able to move from one wave to the next. He said, “We’ve been very successful for the past few years, but the wave that has been carrying us is about the crash. How do we switch to a new wave?” The entire discussion, for three days, with these one thousand two hundred managers, who could have jolly well said, “All we have to do is to continue what we have been doing for the past few years and we will be successful in the future,” but the entire discussion was how to change.

There are indications that people recognize that you cannot be that comfortable that you can be assured. Your security and your comfort are at stake. It won’t last very long. If that’s recognition, we’ll be in the upper hand. You’ll have different political leaders, different business people, different managers, and different spiritual leaders will come and take the podium to takeover the reigns of leadership. This is my hope that we’ll wake up very quickly.

I have just one more thing to add to this. Who would have thought, in 1988, that a year later, Eastern Europe would break down from Communism? Who would have thought in ‘88 that the most powerful political party in the world, and the Red Army, with the greatest military mind, with the control of Communist Party of the Soviet Union, would two years later be outlawed – a complete turnover. I’m saying this is a bifurcation; this is the sudden change that can occur, not only in nature, not only in climate, but also society. We have to wake up and see that we are on the threshold of a sudden change.

Question: How long have these principles been formulated, the same principles which you just mentioned, were they developed to implement and put into reality, or will those principles only be utilized on a political and maybe on an ideological periphery of the society?

Prof. László: Since we have powerful computers, we can model how complex systems behave over time and we can see, even in simulation, that systems do not change little by little, they progress by leaps and bounds. They maintain themselves as long as they can, and then suddenly something new happens. The scientific background that was developed twenty-thirty years ago is developing more and more, but the extra principles are very recent. Maybe ten years, I don't know how to date it.

We are the Club of Budapest. We have a motto and a logo, which says “You can change the world.” We have published a book with practical advice about what people can do to change the world. The preface was written by a person who did more to change the world in the twentieth century than almost anybody else, and that was Mikhail Gorbachev. He pointed out that if you are willing to change what you can change in yourself, then ultimately your leaders will change. Do not wait for leadership. Everything that you can do, you must try to do. Eat in a healthier, more simple way, dress in a better way, use less energy, communicate with others about problems, read about the possibilities, and try to find out which technologies you can use. All of this fantastic information and technology that we have around us hardly uses any energy.

You can be on the Internet without polluting anything, for example, and you can get a lot of information. Technology is always a servant but do not let it be the master. If you just follow advertisements in technology, you will end up by buying unnecessary things and by getting into a lot of pornography and crime and other things. But you can also choose the right things. It's up to you to live in a healthier way, in a better way as an economic activist, you're an economic activist because you're a consumer, as a political activist because you vote and also as an environmental activist, because you can pollute or you can take care of how your environment. Whatever you can do around you – always ask this question: What am I doing now, is it possible, and does it make possible for other people to live? Or do I destroy the environment or take too many resources away from other people? If you ask yourself this question, you will find many creative and intelligent ways in which you can act.

Question: How do you counter the question that the issue is really about scarce resources, pollution, and population control? That it's getting out of control. How do you respond to a question where some say, “well everything would be okay if we control our population, especially in the poor countries where the population is way out of control, so to speak?”

Prof. László: First of all, if you want to make the population a key issue to maintaining the privileges, that we have in the western world, then you will have to reduce the population to less than one-third of what it is, because I doubt if much more than a billion and a half people could live in this way, in a sustainable way, you know? It's hopeless. How can you get rid of three and a half, four billion people in the world? You can't. Can you control it in such a way that it doesn't grow? That is a possibility. Right now, about forty percent of the world population is under fifteen years of age. If those people grow up and have just two children in their family, the population will still grow because there are so many young people. You practically have to go down to 0.3 or 0.5 or 0.6 children per family. We tried that in China and tried it in India. It doesn't work. You have to be a dictator and in today’s world, dictatorships in a large country just cannot work. The point is, there is a way to control the population. The United Nations, the development experts, have been saying it all along. We need to create a development for well-being, for example, social security. A lot of people want to have many children in the poorest regions because they need help around the house. Perhaps they need children to go and beg or to work on the farm or to carry water or to do some kind of paid work, even child labor, and then to take care of them in old age because they don't have security. If you had a better system of security, of economic security for people, they would not need so many children. Next we need to educate women. If women only had the number of children that they want to have, the population would not grow to this degree. I mean it would grow in a very moderate way until it levels off. But right now in many parts of the world, women cannot control their own fertility. It's men who want to have more children, either because they're proud of it, it's a macho thing, or it's simply because they are not using family planning methods. So another way is education and family planning for women. This, I think is the best way. We would still grow, but maybe to seven, seven and a half billion people.

We still have to reckon with this unless diseases like AIDS, or god knows what, Avian flu, or whatever really decimates the population. This is a very inhuman and very dangerous way of reducing population, but unless that happens, the population will continue to grow. Right now, it's growing by nearly ninety million people a year. We have to make sure that that population that will level off by sometime around 2040 or 2050, and that we can make a world that is capable of providing for the basic needs of that many people. I think that's the humane way of handling the issue.

Question: In your words, you mentioned the ancient wisdoms. Why do you think the ancient wisdoms are emerging at this time?

Prof. László: The ancient wisdoms come to us from a time when humans lived much more in balance with nature. It was only in the western tradition or the past three hundred years that there's been this rapid development out of sync of nature. But of course, the roots of the problem go back maybe ten thousand years, as I said. But many of the ancient wisdom come from communities and from cultural traditions where people lived in harmony with nature, so they contain the teachings of how to live in harmony, how to live as a member of a larger family. We have to see what we can get from these wisdoms. We need to recover this because they are not just for the past; it's for today and it's for the future. It tells you really that humanity is a part of nature.

Human beings have lived in harmony with nature for 99.9999 percent of the time that they became human because that was five million years ago. It's only really the time since the Neolithic revolution and then through the rapid western development of technology that humans disregarded the fact that they are part of nature. And the egoism, maybe the egoism that you would know better, Dr. Laitman knows better that the roots of egoism go way back. But there are also the roots of altruism, and human nature goes way back. And the exception, I think in the world, is the kind of egoistic high tech culture that we developed in the last few hundred years, especially in the last twenty or thirty years. And the rule is living as part of nature. That's the rule, because for five million years, we have lived mostly in that way.

Question: One of the possible solutions for today’s problems could be uniting altruistic organizations. What way, in your mind, can we do this?

Prof. László: That is a big problem and that is also an important solution because there are more people who are altruistic, who live responsibly, so called “alternative cultures.” There have been whole surveys done on the culture creatives, the people who are trying to live in a more responsible way. The big problem is that these people are not united with each other. They are segmented into small groups and the groups themselves don't even know of each other. To a very large extent, the movement in humanity to a more altruistic world and culture doesn't appear on the surface. It's below the level of public recognition. Politicians don't recognize it, business people don't recognize it, and the media doesn't recognize it. To some extent, the media also refuses to recognize it, and that has to change too. I can give you an example, in the Club of Budapest we believe that we should survey people about the alternative culture using the culture creatives survey because there'll be more people than people think. This is a bigger movement than most people think. One of the places where we carried this out very recently was in Italy. On the first of February we had a meeting, a press conference in Milan, we were going to announce the results, and the results are fascinating because the results said: thirty five percent of adult Italians already belong to this alternative culture and the public expectation is maybe two-three percent, but in reality thirty five percent according to a very detailed questionnaire. We were going to announce this; we invited the press and there were fifty journalists who planned on coming but forty five actually came to the press conference. And you know the five that didn't come were the three major daily papers and the two major television channels; these did not come. The journalists themselves said they would like to come. They said that they planned to attend, but their editors or their managers said, “This is not for us. We are not interested.” So we have to overcome this kind of ignorant denial of a change in society. Why? Because people are afraid. The people in power are afraid, they don't want to see too much change because their own privileges, and wealth are at stake.

Question: I come from Germany, and I see many people here from America, and they really feel this crisis. Few of us here are from Germany, and I think it was last year that we took a little survey in Heidelberg. We went to Heidelberg and asked people about the crisis. When I walk through the streets, I don’t recognize a crisis in Germany. In America, you see big problems with nature, these typhoons or storms, hurricanes, and big floods in the world. But in middle Europe, we have no crisis there. If I talk to the people they would say “everything is all right – I have my money, I feel okay.” So how can you bring this consciousness to these people, that there actually is a crisis?

Prof. László: You know, with a crisis... I keep using this as an example, but it’s awful, similar... it’s a bit like a cancer. By the time you see a cancerous tumor, you see it with your eyes, it’s usually too late to do something about it. It’s the same thing with a crisis. By the time, a pocket of well-being, like Germany or France or wherever, by the time these people see that it’s actually there, by that time it will be so visible, it will be very late and very expensive to reverse it. We have to do something “in time”.

Now the crisis is there if you look at the newsreels; if you look at the TV news, for example, you see what’s happening in the world, even the media doesn’t report it fully.

Question: The people who are sitting in front of the television, I feel these other people might make me feel bad. How can we bring them to consciousness, the people of Europe, how can they perceive this crisis?

Prof. László: Well, you know, there are people who are willing to change, who have an open mind, and those who are not. Very often, changes will come, not because people change their mind, there are exceptions of course because I think in the Kabbalah group it’s all about changing your mind, but in society, very often changes happen not because people change, but because people die, and the new ones come and take their place. Only right now, that process can be too slow. We need to accelerate it; we need a flow of public information. It’s well documented, what I’ve been saying, not just a few statistics, but many, many statistics. You can look, for example, at the annual reports of the state of the world, which is being published, which is in all different languages including German. If you read this, you will recognize that we are at the point of a crisis, but until you get there, it appears very sudden. Until you get to a catastrophe, it’s like a sudden dip in the ground, like a gulf in front of you. Until you get there, it looks okay, but it’s the next step you take where you can fall in. We have to recognize this.

And there is ferment. I’m sure that it’s very superficial to say that everything is the way it was. People look at the economic situation, and they know it isn’t the best. Now your hope for America is that it will become better, perhaps, but it will be a temporary patch-up to this situation. We have unusual weather patterns in our environment now, even the fluctuations in the rainfall and in the cold. When I came here a few days ago, I was flying via Frankfort, and the news said we’re expecting snow, so jokingly they said everybody should paint their Easter eggs, color them, so we can find them in the snow.

If you talk to people and they are honest, they’ll tell you, yes, they believe that something is happening, that changes have happened. I live in a small village, or near a small village, in Tuscany, Italy. If you talk to the people who have vineyards, who have olive groves, who grow wheat, and so on, they’ll tell you, there is something happening, nature is not the same and people are wondering what to do. The problem is that the political system doesn’t give you an alternative. In a two-party political system, there isn’t too much difference between them. And the real radical parties, who would be creating some new innovations, they do not come to power because the people are not connected to each other. Those who are concerned, like yourself, I assume you and your friend are concerned, because otherwise you wouldn’t have done the survey. So you must join these others.

We are also going to be doing a survey in Germany in the next few months, the culture creatives survey, and we'll also be doing it in Holland and in France. I expect that the numbers will be quite impressive. There could be, again, one third of the adult population will be ready to adopt a different lifestyle, but it is not known. And if you ask the people who are asked by the media, they will say everything is okay, I’m not going to change.

So it’s below the surface and you have to bring it to the surface.

Question: You described humanity, or man, as a cancer in the body. How do you expect the cancer to heal itself?

Prof. László: The body has to heal; all of humanity is not a cancer. Humanity can be a cancer, if we continue in our egoistic ways, because what is a cancer cell? The cancer cell is an egoistic cell. It says, “All I need to do is multiply, I don’t care about the rest.” What happens? It kills the organism eventually. And what is a healthy cell? A healthy, if it had a consciousness, would say, “Okay, I am part of an organism, and I can only multiply and specialize according to the limits and the needs of the organism. My job is to sustain the organism.” This is a good way to act. We don’t need to be cancerous. The cancer occurs through the wrong way of thinking, so this narrow, self-centered thinking that says, “I don’t care about the rest, I only represent my own interests.” We have many ways of consoling ourselves, telling ourselves this is a good way. Adam Swiss said at one point, that there’s an invisible hand and if you do well for yourself, then you do well for society, although he didn’t actually mean it that way. It doesn’t work. People that do well for themselves become richer, while society on the whole becomes more polarized, more violent, and nature degenerates, etc.

It’s time to recognize that we are a cell in a larger body, and we can be a healthy cell. The movement of Kabbalah, and the movement of culture creatives are both signs of healthy cells. They have to grow, they have to develop, and they have to disperse throughout society.

Question: How would you measure the readiness of the mass media and the political circles to accept the change, to move towards the new consciousness?

László: Opinion polls, of course, if they are well done, they can help to give some measure. Before you bring a new product in the market, every enterprise does market research. Now the major political parties, before a campaign, before a political election, they do a lot of research on the public's opinion, but they don’t do research on other alternatives to the main parties, to the main standard leadership. They should have to ask the one who is being interviewed for example, like the research on culture creatives, to what extent would you be willing to live in a different way?

I’ll give you an example, of an interesting measure in investment. People invest usually, because they want to get some interest on their money. Well, now there’s a new phenomenon, which is called the “Ethical Bank” or “Green Bank.” It’s growing very rapidly. Just ten days ago, I had an interesting dinner meeting with the president of one of the ethical banks in Holland, called the Triodos Bank. The Triodos Bank says to its clients, “We can invest your money as safely as possible but you will get less for your money, but we will discuss with you exactly what your money will do, where it will go, and whether it does anything good for the world. If you’re willing to accept this, you will be more assured that your money will reach its destination and will do something positive, but we’ll ask you to accept a smaller return.”

Now this started twenty years ago as a little office with two or three people. Now it has become a giant bank with branches in various countries in Europe, and it’s not the only one. There are many of these banks that are growing up. When you look at the ethical investment funds, at how much money is counted in billions of dollars of ethical investment, that’s also a measure of people saying, okay, I am not only interested in making the maximum amount of money, I’m also interested in doing something positive with money. So that’s one way to measure. It’s a narrow measurement perhaps, you know we need much more than that, but it is a measurement that shows that there is something happening to people’s minds. It’s not just as egoistic, as self-centered as we used to think.

Question: The young people of today, they are afraid. When they leave school, they are afraid to step into this world because of everything that they see in it. And right now, the alternative for them is to take drugs, and to hit the street. What kind of alternative can we propose to them, because just an explanation of the crisis won’t do, they will be more afraid?

Prof. László: I noted before the need for vision, the need to recognize that there are positive things you can do. I think people who go to the trouble of studying Kabbalah seriously, they probably are not looking for drugs, because you find meaning. There’s a lot of people who are searching for meaning, they are searching for something to do, and they don’t find it in society. Already in education they are leaving school, but what do they get in school? The standard curriculum in schools does not address the problems that we have. It does not produce a vision of the kind of life that you can live, the kind of service you can provide.

If you were to create an idea of what young people can do with their lives, I think many people would respond. One thing is a fact. There is a tremendous growth in alternative communities, in alternative cultures. Some of them are quite esoteric, and some of them are also quite self-centered, but many of them are oriented towards doing something good for society.

Just look at the growth of the NGO, the non-governmental organizations. They have grown from a few hundred 20 years ago, now I think there are fifty thousand members, NGO's are in the United Nations. And there is a possibility for people to join a movement, join together with others, if they become informed, if they know there is something meaningful.

We need a school system that gives you better information, we need media that gives you better information. And then you need to create networks, wherever you live, if you are aware of other people who have already found something that gives them meaning, that gives them a sense of fulfillment, I think there are a lot of people instead of turning to drugs would turn to that. Drugs are a sign of a lack, a sign that something is missing. You don’t find something else, so then you turn inwards to yourself, and you just want to have your own experience. There is a way to have a positive experience together with other people, not by drugs, but by undertaking meaningful activities, and serving society.

Think of how much need there is because the world today is in need of a fundamental transformation, a real perestroika. Gorbachev still keeps talking about the global perestroika, and this means there is a challenge to everybody. Everybody can ask themselves, “What can I do?” and can find many ways of doing it. They can join with other people in doing things. To simply sit back and contemplate your own navel and do nothing, is an escape, an immoral escape, and I don’t think it’s the only way. So better, more relevant information, networking, and joining together, that I think, would go a long way towards solving this problem of drugs and criminal behavior.

[End of Q&A]

Oren Levy: At this point we have to finish, but in two days’ time, on Saturday, we will continue with Professor László’s lectures, so all of you who wanted to ask questions, please write them down, bring them over here, and we will ask them on Saturday.

I would like to thank Professor László, on behalf of all of us, for the fascinating lecture.

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קטעים נבחרים משיעורים על תלמוד עשר הספירות (קליפים)

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קטעים נבחרים משיעורים על תלמוד עשר הספירות (קליפים)

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Copyright © 2003-2026 Бней Барух – Асоціація Кабала Ла-Ам, Всі права захищені