Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What should we change? But what are we changing?“

We should change our inner attitude to each other: from our inborn egoistic attitude that prioritizes self-benefit over benefiting others, to a new altruistic nature that prioritizes benefiting others over self-benefit. Doing so leads us to balance with the altruistic and interconnected form of nature, which in turn invites the positive force that dwells in nature into the new altruistic threads of connection we establish among each other, and as such we achieve eternity and perfection.

Instead of the inner change of our attitude that we should be focusing on, we instead focus on changing all kinds of things other than our egoistic nature: failing to reach any harmony or balance, and instead become increasingly imbalanced and divided, experiencing an accumulation of suffering as a result.

An inner change of our attitude to each other requires education—a different kind of education to the one we have today. Education means organizing our environmental influences such that we would reach a desire to change our egoistic nature to its altruistic opposite. In other words, by witnessing regular positive examples of altruism in society, and by learning wisdom that lets us better understand how human nature and nature in general works, and how to align ourselves with a evolutionary tendency that is guiding us toward this fateful egoism-to-altruism transition, we can embark on a change of our nature.

If we undergo this egoism-to-altruism change, we would see a vast transformation and upgrade in human relations, our connection with nature, the family, business, culture, science, and literally in every sphere of activity. Our lives would change completely into a positive form as a result of our inner changes. We should thus focus on helping educate about and promote the inner change that we will all need to eventually undergo.

Without education, we can expect no such inner change to take place. In its place, we can expect suffering to accumulate the more we try to make all kinds of changes outside of our attitudes to each other, which would eventually lead us to seek an inner change anyway. However, the latter is an undesirable and unfortunate process that only leads to increasing desperation and helplessness, and this is the process we are largely experiencing in today’s world.

We thus need to start from scratch by establishing a new educational foundation. Wisdom of connection that explains how nature works, our place in nature, the purpose and plan of development, and how to align ourselves harmoniously with this purpose and plan, is incremental in impacting a change in our inner attitudes to each other. However, in order for such education to succeed, it needs to function like an environment that we are parts of.

The environment that raises us to undergo a transition of our nature from egoistic to altruistic should function similarly to an incubator, where it provides us with the most favorable conditions, the right amount of heat, and which adjusts itself to the conditions that are needed in order to eventually hatch us into a new form. In other words, such an environment needs to accord to people’s desires; it should not be coercive or oppressive in any way; and it should inspire people to learn about the deeper altruistic workings of nature through engagement and participation.

Based on talks with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Photo by Jane Palash on Unsplash.

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