Love Your Neighbor As Yourself

Dr. Michael LaitmanThis rule, familiar to all, includes the corrections of all of man’s desires (heart) and thoughts (mind). And on the contrary, only by correcting all of his desires and thoughts does man attain the quality of love for people, for all of mankind, and nature.

Every person’s love for the neighbor is very weak and is therefore not expressed explicitly. Thus, if several people unite together into a group and every one of them suppresses his egoism in relation to others, then every one of them will receive the forces of all the others. In that case, all of the separate forces of the group members will be amplified into one great force and they will gain the ability to carry out nature’s law of “love your neighbor.” A discrepancy arises here: Must one correct all of one’s egoistic qualities to attain love for the neighbor, or does one only need love for his friends in the group to attain it?

Usually people unite in a group to improve their situation in some respect, and every person makes a calculation as to how much he bestows to others and how much he receives since this kind of group is founded on egoism. If a member of such a group feels that he can receive more outside of the group than inside of it, he regrets being in the group. This kind of society distances a person from rising to the “human” level.

Indeed, reaching love is possible only by correcting all of one’s egoistic desires and thoughts. But by uniting each person’s small desires through love, in that union, together they create a new, common, great force, which every group member can use to attain love of friends and then to attain love for humanity and Nature.

But all of this can only happen on the condition that every person suppresses his egoism in relation to another. If a person is separated from the friend by his egoism, he cannot receive the force of love for the neighbor from him. Thus, one can receive the force of love from the friends only to the degree of one’s self-annulment before them.

This is similar to the inscription of numbers: If you first write a 1 and then a 0, you will get 10, meaning 10 times more. And if you write two zeros after a one, you will get 100, meaning 100 times more. This means that if one’s friend is a one and he is a zero, a person receives 10 times more from the friend. And if he says that he is two zeros in relation to his friend, he will receive 100 times more from him.

And vice versa, if he is a one and his friend is a zero, this equals 0.1, so he is 10 times less than his friend. And if he can say that he is a one and he has two friends who are two zeros in relation to him, then he is equal to 0.01 compared to them. Thus, the more zeros he places on the value of his friends, the smaller he is himself.

Yet even if you already have the forces to love the neighbor and you can really express that love, and you already feel that self-benefit only harms you, nevertheless, don’t believe yourself and be afraid that you might stop in the middle of the path and fall into egoism. You have to be afraid of receiving such egoistic pleasures that you won’t be able to resist them and will enjoy them instead of love for the neighbor. Precisely the fear of falling into egoism gives a person the forces to observe the law of nature, the law of bestowal and love.
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(Based on Rabash’s article “According to What Is Explained about Love Thy Friend as Thyself”)

Related Material:
Love Of Friends (3)
A Person Will Help His Neighbor
Love Of Friends (2)

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