Question: We say that we want to correct a person. What part within us is called a human being?

Answer: If we separate man’s three main physical needs that are related to the physical (animal) body—food, sex, and family—then the fulfillment of these desires is the satisfaction of normal animal needs. The next level of desires—wealth, power, fame, and knowledge—belongs to human aspirations, and you have to fulfill them only in accordance with the social environment that surrounds you.

You can satisfy your animal desires in the family, regardless of where you live: on a farm, in a small village, or on an uninhabited island. You have a family, a wife and children; you have enough food and live in peace. If your desires are greater than food, home, and family, then you cannot live on an uninhabited island. You want to be in Manhattan because only there do you have the opportunity to realize your aspiration for wealth, power, fame, and knowledge.

Question: However, what would be wrong if I were a famous doctor and earned a hundred times more than others?

Answer: If you are in your animal state on a separate island, in balance with the environment and consuming as much as you need, you do not harm nature. You eat and reproduce, and everything is fine.

However, in Manhattan, with desires for wealth, power, and knowledge, you too must be in balance with the material nature that surrounds you. You find yourself in a new “jungle,” but are you in balance with it? The question arises: What is “balance” in today’s society, not somewhere on an island or in a village, but in Manhattan?

This means that you give as much as you receive. This is the basic law of nature, the law of equilibrium.

This law also applies to our bodies. All that exists—the still, vegetative, and animate nature—aspires toward equilibrium. And if balance suddenly disappears, this is a temporary condition, an illness, like in our body, when there is a difference between various internal parameters.

The question is whether all of it is established correctly. If we consider our natural internal system, then we can measure the health of society as the health of the body. According to this system, you can learn how we should behave in the environment, that is, with our own kind.

The fact is that wolves, bears, or tigers do not destroy the environment. They take as much as they need for food and no more. Being in dis-balance with nature, we destroy it and thus we destroy ourselves.

Imagine if a healthy bear killed all the rabbits with his paws. What would he do tomorrow? He would die from hunger. Thus, nature instinctively creates in animals a protective reflex, and a well-fed bear wants nothing more. He can play with these other bunnies.

A hunter’s instinct awakens in it only with the sensation of hunger. The bear is not an enemy to someone whom it kills; it does not do it to dominate others. It does not yearn for power as it is usually shown in cartoons. It is absolutely not true! The bear views other animals as a source of energy and nothing more.

However, the human being sees in the other person an object whom he can dominate. As much as I humiliate him, to that extent, I feel better. I am willing to subjugate the entire world and I want that. I want to know more than anyone else, to have more influence than anyone else, so that everyone bows to me, so that I am the richest. I want my “Self” to exist. All the rest are just tiny insects, crawling around me.

Of course, a person cannot be blamed for this because nature develops all these desires within us. For what purpose does it develop them?

Even if we don’t know why, we at least need to understand the cause of all our suffering. This is only in the fact that we must come into balance with each other. Any unbalanced state brings about big problems, and they lead us to destruction.
[105698]
From KabTV’s “The Medicine of the Future” 4/7/13

Related Material:
Balance Will Cure Everything
Smoothing Out the Imbalance
Who Is The Human Within Us?

Filed under: Crisis, Egoism, Health, Integral Upbringing, Q&A | Add Comment →