We have revealed an illness, but it still isn’t quite clear what the treatment for it is, so we keep searching. Until we find the treatment, we will continue to feel ill – to experience a crisis. Yet the treatment is gradually being revealed. We know that if humanity reveals a problem or illness, then people will spend decades or even centuries looking for the remedy. In the Middle Ages, the epidemics that broke out in Europe were so great that they killed half the population. But eventually, people found the remedies.
Suffering pushes humanity to look for and find the remedy. It makes people more refined, sensitive, searching, and understanding. One’s desire opens the doors to Nature, and then one finds what he is looking for. There is an answer to everything.
It is the same in our case. As a result of suffering, we will find the remedy to the crisis. This is difficult because the problem is happening in one’s inner world, one’s desire and psyche, and this is something we don’t know how to treat. Lately we see that all the misfortunes happening to humanity are taking place on the psychological level – whether it is divorce, drugs, depression, the relationships between parents and children, the crisis in upbringing, the crisis in science, the crisis in a person’s attitude to the world, or our neglect toward nature. All of this occurs on the level of psychology.
We are quite weak when it comes to overcoming our psychological problems, since a problem can only be solved when one is situated above it. One can then examine it from above and understand it. One’s mind is then able to grasp the problem from all possible angles, and the problem is “grasped” by the consciousness, so to speak. A person studies it, performs an analysis and a synthesis.
However, psychological problems occur on the same level that we are on – the human level. This is why we have a difficult time solving them. If we wish to solve these problems, we will have to rise to a higher level. And we can find out how to do this instinctively as well as consciously, if only we will desire to rise above ourselves. Otherwise, as it says in “The Scroll of Esther,” “That generation will be convicted to death.” Certainly, we won’t agree to this, and therefore we will be forced to solve this problem.
(From the lesson on Baal HaSulam’s article, “One Precept,” on 03.05.2009)
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