From the book The Essential Secret of the Jews, M. Brushtein
Where Are We Going?

How is our development expressed and where are we going? In fact, these are the main issues that humanity faces. Kabbalists offer a detailed and rather intelligible description of the process of development.

The law of stage-by-stage development consists of going through many of intermediate stages until the completion of the process. This process is difficult, very slow, and unusually extended, stretching for a very long time.

The fact that this process is long and painful is no secret and requires no proof since everyone experiences the results of this process. The question is what the essence of this process is.

The force, inbuilt in these stages and forcing a person to rise from a lower to a higher state, is nothing but the force of pain and sufferings. They accumulate in the lower level to such an extent that it becomes impossible to tolerate them. As a result, suffering forces people the leave the level at which they are it and ascend to the higher one.

This description is similar the law of dialectics, isn’t it?

Engels defines dialectics as “the science of the general laws of motion and development of nature, human society and thought.” In Anti-Dühring and The Dialectics of Nature, Engels gives an account of the laws of dialectics, beginning with the three most fundamental ones:

1) The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa;

2) The law of the interpenetration of opposites, and

3) The law of the negation of the negation.”

Well, we are in a certain step-by-step painful process; however, we have not yet received the answers to the questions, “where humanity is going” and “how to manage this process.”  At the same time, the development trends can be “estimated” if we put the human being and society next to each other.

“But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations.” (Karl Marx, Theses On Feuerbach)

The founder of materialism simply insists that the essence of man lies in social relations. Kabbalists say almost the same thing.

“In addition, being a social creature, the individual development is not enough. Rather, one’s ultimate perfection depends on the development of all the members of society.” (Baal HaSulam, “The Solution”)

Let’s try to summarize the facts. The human being, or rather, people are initially created social. With each new generation, humanity is growing, and correspondingly, ties between people are becoming tighter. Along with this there is a paradox: The more humanity is trying to unite, the less it succeeds. Nonetheless, we do not abandon the attempts to unite, although we do not realize this. But this is in the next chapter.
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Related Material:
The Essential Secret Of The Jews, Part 14
The Essential Secret Of The Jews, Part 13
The Essential Secret Of The Jews, Part 12

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