Question: What do you have in mind when you talk about life outside the body?

Answer: Even now we are living a life outside our bodies. I live in my feelings, desires, and thoughts received from the environment. They are not mine but obtained by me from the surrounding environment. Of course, they exist within me, but I call them “out of body” because I live by interests received from others who impress upon me and advise what’s worth living for, what to think about, and what to feel.

I don’t even realize that if I lived in a forest, my understanding of the world would be completely different from the one I have right now. It’s as though the environment gives me a different view of the world and forces me to perceive it one way and not another. And indeed, this is a big problem.

Suppose my environment makes me think that being a cannibal, or killing people, or taking advantage of them is normal, while you see life completely differently. You have a completely different attitude to animals, yourself, the world, and family. We live within the model of perception that society instilled in us throughout our development, and accordingly, this is the way we see the world.

When I travel to a different country, sometimes it really strikes me that people think completely differently there and gravitate towards different values. Thus they have another way of looking at things, and they don’t see what I see. They judge people differently than we do. And if we get acquainted with history books or law codes of different countries, we will see just how different we are.

I’m not even talking about cultural differences or specific cuisines. I am interested in a person’s worldview and not in what he likes to fill his stomach with. What’s important is a person’s understanding of historical events, of human life, of good and evil, his or her attitude to reward and punishment, to what one should achieve, and what kind of life one wishes to build for oneself.

Some people are prepared to spend day and night playing cards and enjoy having others serve them, while for others it’s important to make their contributions wherever possible, to take interest in achievements of science, and to reveal something new for themselves. The outlook on such things can fluctuate from one extreme to another.

We see that the problem of society is that we don’t understand each other. What do wives usually complain about to their husbands? “You don’t understand me!” And this is actually the case because we really didn’t receive an upbringing about how to live in a family.

When I was an adolescent, I wasn’t educated about what a woman is. Is it some living creature that exists by my side? Does she have certain demands, a unique personality? What vision of life does a woman have as opposed to a man? A woman is a completely opposite world, not dependent on anyone. Do I understand her? Do I wish to understand her? Do I take her into consideration? Am I capable of doing this?

Since we haven’t received any internal models of what a woman is, what type of mentality she has, and how she sees the world, we don’t have an ability to take her into consideration. A man truly doesn’t understand her, and this is why each of their meetings abound with mutual attacks. They try to get along somehow, yet they aren’t capable to actually understand each other, that is, to become included in one another. And this is a big flaw in our upbringing.

Statistics on divorce rates and on those unwilling to even start a family attest to this. We see a similar situation in child education: We don’t know how to approach a child correctly. We all know that there is an increase in child abuse cases, and it is all because parents don’t understand them.

In regards to my own children, I have sensed just to what extent I don’t understand them, how unprepared I am for being a father. After all, a father is an educator, a creator, someone who shapes the child for their life to come. But I wasn’t able to do that due to the fact that neither the feeling nor understanding of everything that pertains to children was developed in me at all, while it’s absolutely necessary to teach that.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” Episode 3, 12/29/11

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