New Life 1201 – Behavior Modification
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Tal Mandelbaum ben Moshe
People are affected by pleasure and suffering, which exert various pressures that shape one’s behavior. When a person is given relative freedom, he can develop from within by learning about himself, his environment, and the harmony of the entire system in which he lives. If he is lowered to the rank of an animal, his behavior can be shaped according to the pressures of pleasure and suffering; he can be trained through reward and punishment or positive and negative reinforcement. In order to develop spiritually, an education system must help a person connect to the environment in a mutually complementary way. Nature requires that we build a proper internal model of the outside society so that we know how to relate in a loving way toward the environment. [259346] From KabTV’s “New Life 1201 – Behavior Modification,” 1/28/20
Question: Everyone should begin working on selfishness with themselves, but it is very difficult. It turns out that you think about yourself all the time. How do people stop being selfish?
Answer: This happens gradually. Don’t worry; it will happen to you too. You will have to go through many kinds of thoughts, pondering, changes, and activities with us, but as a result, you will see that it all comes down to a person’s internal transformation.
One begins to feel the world as different—connected, integral, eternal, and perfect—and oneself in this system.
A state arises when a person does not care about the perception of our world in the form that we now feel it, but what is important is to be in this world as the right integral part. In this case, one can bring to this world what no one else can. It turns out that this world depends on it. [265913] From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 4/19/20
Question: You often say that the outside world doesn’t really exist, that it is an illusion and that there is only our perception. What do we perceive if the outside world does not exist?
Answer:You feel yourself inside yourself, your desires that depict the picture of your world inside you.
Question: Suppose there is a cup of tea in front of you, could it be cognac instead? After all, if it is an illusion, is there really a difference between tea and brandy?
Answer:If you change certain desires inside you, you will have cognac in that cup instead of tea, no problem. Do you know how to change your desires this way?
Comment: No, this is why I am asking.
My Response: This is the reason you have reached the wisdom of Kabbalah, in order to learn how to do that. Everything that you feel is your desires and this is what you depict for yourself. If you want to depict brandy instead of tea, you can do that, I promise you. There are many stories about Kabbalists regarding this issue. [258148] From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 12/15/19
We’re reopening the economy while COVID-19 is still here, well into 2020. From the looks of it, there will be COVID-21, too. And if this prediction comes true, will the economy survive it? What business can endure alternating for so long between opening and closing?
Some industries are essential. There is no question that food, housing, gas, electric power, and education are required. As for the rest, only a fraction of the pre-coronavirus transactions were truly necessary. In the new reality, what is not essential dies.
But governments will need money. Essential sectors such as food production and various services will provide work to some of the people, but the majority will be out of work for good. We have entered a world where joblessness is the norm, and occupation the exception. How will people live? If countries spend their currency reserves on futureless sectors, they will not have the resources to support people through the process of adapting their lives to the coronavirus era.
To adapt the society to the new era, all those who are out of work today, and will probably remain so, should be admitted into a program that will inform them about the new reality and teach them how to live in it. During the course, they will receive a full scholarship that will sustain them and their families.
The courses will not only provide information about the new world; they will also help the participants develop the right attitude to living in a world where people have abundant free time.
Just as people learn about the mindset required to succeed in the business world, or the attitude required to succeed in the high-tech industry, people will need to get acquainted with the frame of mind of the COVID era.
Accordingly, the program will include exercises in social communication that builds connections suitable for a world where everyone is dependent on everyone else, regular jobs are scarce, and people must rely on each other for their survival. Gradually, people will come to find value in bonding and socializing more than in their previous values such as obtaining wealth and power.
As the courses focus on fostering bonds among people, mutual responsibility, awareness of others’ needs, and concern for society, people will begin to think of these positive social values as the product of their learning. Just as it is possible to accumulate wealth, it is possible to accumulate happiness.
The more people become socially integrated, the happier and safer they will feel. People’s values and aspirations from life will change to ones that give them true and lasting satisfaction.
In this way, the coronavirus will usher us into a new reality, where some of the people tend to everyone’s sustenance, and the rest of the people tend to everyone’s happiness. [266552]
I understand the push to reopen the economy and return to business-as-usual as quickly as possible.
Lockdown brought on a lot of mental and emotional tension, loneliness and uncertainty in the future, all of which contribute to a yearning to exit the state of isolation and re-enter into our familiar settings.
However, reopening the economy too quickly, without adequate readiness, sets the scene for more hardships.
In such conditions, we can expect a fiercer wave of the coronavirus to sweep over societies, infecting and killing many more people than the first wave, and forcing us into much stricter and harsher social distancing conditions in order to deal with it.
The coronavirus has illuminated both our tight interdependence, as well as our inner detachment from each other.
On one hand, our interdependence became marked by the need to maintain personal hygiene, wear masks and keep social distancing conditions in order to remain disease-free.
On the other hand, our inner detachment became visible in the mental and emotional wear and tear on many during the lockdown.
Therefore, any lasting solution to the coronavirus requires fixing the alienation that many people feel.
Instead of reopening the economy, we would be wiser if we realized that our negative connections to each other are the bigger problem in our lives, and opened new programs that aimed to improve our connections.
If we felt an enveloping togetherness over society, we would then have the means by which we could rise above our negative and dark sensations.
Therefore, we would do well to shift the focus of our attention onto the benefit of society, seeking how to make sure everyone has their needs covered and that they feel cared for, and also to keep in mind that our efforts to keep the virus away from others are ultimately efforts to keep the virus away from ourselves.
The revelation of our tightened interdependence demands an additional push of each person accepting responsibility for the health and well-being of others. If we do so, and society rises to a new level of mutual responsibility, we would then be on track to stopping the spread of the coronavirus.
Disbanding the police department is a step toward crumbling the communities that it ideally protects and serves.
Police are elemental to societies. They hold a certain level of order, providing a layer in society that helps constrain people’s innate drives to benefit at others’ expense from getting out of hand.
By doing so, police serve to make societies safer places so that people can focus on how they can find their optimal, contributory roles in their respective communities.
For thousands of years, police have held an integral role in societies, providing a sense of security so that we could go about our business and progress scientifically, technologically and culturally.
However, since the police is made up of fellow humans, who share the same egoistic nature as everyone else, it is thus not immune to criminal tendencies within its own ranks, which gives rise to some police officers abusing their role, resorting to unjustified use of violence, brutality and other negative phenomena.
Yet, the entire police force should not be branded according to a few of its members that get out of line.
Since the question about disbanding the police department is on the table, we can ask what would a police-free society require?
Police-free societies would be possible if societies thought and acted with much more mutual responsibility and consideration than we have today.
Such a state is reachable through regular connection-enriching education, which is currently elusive from society.
In other words, the attitudes and relationships dwelling among society would need a major upgrade to replace the regulative police layer with a new regulator that acts within each and every person.
Such a regulating force acting within people would only be possible if the social atmosphere was filled with new values of mutual responsibility and consideration, where benefiting others would be valued more dearly than self-benefit.
Society would then feel close like a family.
It is, however, impossible to reach a positive social atmosphere if we fail to engage in learning that aims to bring about such an improvement.
Today’s society is far from upholding values of mutual responsibility and consideration, and thus requires police departments to sustain a certain level of order.
In general, any increased amount of freedom that we acquire needs to be preceded by thorough learning of how to relate to the increased amount of freedom responsibly. Otherwise, our egoistic drives to benefit at others’ expense will put that increased amount of freedom to use on account of others, and we’d find ourselves steeped in deeper problems.
“At least 14 states have seen an increase in coronavirus hospitalizations since Memorial Day weekend. Arizona is now seeing more than 1,000 new daily cases and the state’s former health director is sounding the alarm,” reported CBS This Morning (June 12, 2020).
The coronavirus pays no attention to the fact that we are reopening our economies and trying to return to our pre-coronavirus lives.
It will continue infecting more and more people until we undergo a serious attitude adjustment.
What is that adjustment?
It is a shift of our center of concern: from self-concern to concern about others.
In other words, we naturally think about what we need to do in order to protect ourselves and our families.
The coronavirus, however, has emerged to show us that we need to redirect our concern toward others: that we think about what we need to do in order to protect other people, providing them with the conditions to stay healthy and virus-free.
We all depend on each other maintaining certain conditions in order to stop the virus’ spread, including the maintenance of thorough personal hygiene, wearing masks and holding our physical distance from each other.
Therefore, if we uphold such conditions not with our own protection, but with the protection of others, primarily in mind, then we will be able to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
By exercising an intention for others’ benefit to the actions we conduct in order to stop the virus’ spread, then in addition to overcoming the coronavirus, we will also reach the understanding that we can truly be protected from disease and other harmful phenomena when we consider others.
If we concentrate on the protection and benefit of others, our community and society, then instead of a virus spreading illness and death, we would generate a positive virus that spreads health, well-being, peace and happiness.
Therefore, we would be wise to relate to the coronavirus not just as a disease or pandemic, but as a lesson in our interdependence: that others’ health and well-being depends on us caring about them, and likewise, our own health and well-being depends on others caring about us.
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