Due to commenting frequently on the coronavirus outbreak as nature’s response to the egoistic and exploitative way we as a human society had been relating to each other leading up to the pandemic, I was asked by one of my students:
How could a virus on a biological level come about as a result of people becoming increasingly egoistic and exploitative? It is clear, for instance, if one country wants to retaliate against another country that was exploiting it, but how are nature and viruses related to negative person-to-person attitudes?
To the naked human eye, it indeed seems as if the biological level and the level of human relationships are separate.
Everything in nature began from a single particle. That particle started connecting with another one, and then another one, and so on and so forth. At some point, this process generated atoms, and with further such development, molecules came about.
Life emerged when energy and information became transmitted between the various particles. This process then further developed into more and more complex forms of life.
In other words, everything in nature has been created such that even its tiniest parts are intrinsically connected with the whole universe.
Within this completely integral system, the human is the most complex and qualitatively highest level of all, and human thoughts, attitudes and relationships hold the most powerful influence over nature’s other levels.
Due to the capacity of human thoughts to impact other levels of nature, there is a Kabbalistic saying that states, “Everything is clarified in thought.”
I understand that we are unable to notice the extent of our thoughts’, attitudes’ and relationships’ influence on nature, and thus when a seemingly negative phenomenon strikes us, such as the coronavirus we now endure, we look like children who point at a broken glass that they accidentally hit while playing around, saying that it fell by itself.
However, the way that the coronavirus has forced us all into a common global situation, with many millions of people under stay-at-home orders, should serve to wake us up to our thoughts, attitudes and relationships to each other as being what ultimately connects us into a single network.
Moreover, we would be wise to reach the conclusion that our thoughts, attitudes and relationships to each other are the most important network that determines how nature responds to us.
If we create balance in such a network, we will then see how other levels of life become balanced. The gates to heaven on earth—a world of absolute perfection—will then open up before our very eyes.
The coronavirus is a major historical event that is changing the face of human society around the world.
One minuscule particle surfaced that has already infected over a million people, caused dozens of thousands of deaths, and moreover, put spokes in the wheels of civilization.
Within weeks, our lifestyle of shopping, cafés, restaurants, bars, clubs, travel, sports, culture, churches, synagogues, mosques, and in short, any public gatherings, came to a sudden halt.
The coronavirus physically isolated people across continents to the same stay-at-home conditions, with the mere ability to leave home for life’s essentials.
With the rat race we were running coming to a standstill, the coronavirus has shown us an example of how when we leave the environment alone, it rejuvenates and improves. For instance, the notoriously polluted air of urban China, and the water in Venice’s canals, after a relatively short period of lockdown, cleared up.
The seriousness of such events should lead us to a few conclusions:
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
The fact that a tiny and barely visible virus has caused so much death, illness and socio-economic change shows how small and weak we are in nature’s presence.
The way we were living our egoistic, consumeristic and materialistic lives was detrimental to the environment and to ourselves, and when we live according to mere essentials, nature quickly rejuvenates.
While forced into social distancing conditions, we should ideally revise the way we have been living our lives.
When revising our life’s course, we would be wise to ask ourselves how we reached the state we entered, look into where we are headed, and also, whether we can impact a positive change moving forward.
How did we reach a state where we were polluting the world so much, causing so much harm to the environment and to ourselves? It stemmed from a fundamental opposition between human nature and nature in general.
Human nature is self-centered egoism. It aims to self-benefit at others’ expense, and when unabated, it leads us to a struggle for power and control.
On the contrary, nature’s quality is interconnectedness and interdependence. When left undisturbed by the egoistic human interference, natures guides all of its parts to harmony and balance.
After the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in 1986, releasing ten times more radiation than the amount in Hiroshima, scientists estimated that the area would be uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years. However, a decade later, a blossoming nature reserve emerged from the nuclear ruin, with trees restoring themselves, and a variety of animal species reemerging: reptiles, poultry and various mammal species, some of which had not lived in the area for many years before the disaster.
Nature continuously develops its diverse and interdependent parts to a state of balance.
Since the egoistic human nature is opposite to nature’s unifying tendency, we lack the intuition to maintain balance with the rest of nature.
However, we have been granted the ability to become aware of our opposition to nature. We can learn through such blows as the coronavirus pandemic that by letting our lives run on an opposite egoistic course to nature, we end up suffering.
Also, unlike animals, we have the additional mental capacity to ask about the source of our pain, and reach the conclusion that our opposition to nature is the root of our troubles. We would then consciously and willingly undergo a transformation to balance ourselves with nature.
Unlike nature’s inanimate, vegetative and animate levels, which function instinctively in balance with the integral nature, we humans, devoid of this instinct, have the ability to prioritize our own social values that shape the social influence and public opinion that affects the way we all think and direct ourselves.
If we therefore organize social values according to nature’s value—mutual consideration and responsibility in order to realize nature’s interconnectedness and interdependence harmoniously in our connections—then we would supplement what we instinctively lack through our own conscious and willful participation in nature.
Therefore, the seriousness of the coronavirus crisis, while disastrous in many respects, also offers us an opportunity to upgrade human consciousness and the quality of life in society. How? By activating mutual consideration and responsibility in our connections.
If we fail to revise ourselves in order to become more considerate and responsible for each other, then we can expect nature to place us in even stricter conditions until we realize the need to positively connect.
How, then, can we undergo this shift of consciousness in practice?
On one hand, governments would need to provide basic income, food, housing and health-care, in exchange for our participating in educational programs where we would learn why and how to implement the principle of mutual consideration and responsibility in our lives.
On the other hand, by prioritizing values of mutual consideration and responsibility, we would aim to promote ideas and examples of the kind of positive connection human society needs throughout our media, which currently sends us a barrage of divisive messaging.
With mutual consideration and responsibility becoming society’s guiding principle, the media would address the problem of how our divisive drives negatively impact and weaken human society, and that the way to a more conscious and stronger society is by becoming better connected.
By coupling a more unifying media discourse with a connection-enriching educational agenda, we would learn how to accept, understand and get along with everyone, becoming influenced by a new atmosphere of mutual understanding, support, awareness and sensitivity.
As a result, nature would have no further need to send us pandemics or other crises in order to wake us up to our need to positively connect. In the same vein, we would experience a whole new kind of harmonious and peaceful life, where we live in balance with nature.
Question: If a person aspires to reveal the Creator to all creatures precisely to achieve the greatest common enjoyment (because the Creator wants us to enjoy) is this an indication that he has the right intention (from the point of view of Kabbalah)?
Answer: Yes, if the ultimate goal is the Creator’s enjoyment. [262405]
Question: Our nation only survived thanks to various unions, albeit shaky ones. The true, important reason for unification is not clear to us today, and we have nothing to reject except the enforcement of another reason for unification. How can we rise above this?
Answer: The people of Israel existed because they united above the forces of separation, and then abandoned these attempts 2,000 years ago. It is time to renew them and achieve success.
Question: Why does the Creator constantly evoke a terrible hatred toward Him in me?
Answer:So that you will rise above your egoistic qualities and acquire the opposite. In this way, He draws you to Him. [262261]
Question:Why is there so little of the Creator in BYA (Beria, Yetzira, and Assiya)? Why are there are more descents than ascents the further we are?
Answer: In the worlds of BYA there is no Creator because the Creator is Ohr Hochma, which manifests itself in Ohr Hassadim, and Ohr Hochma does not penetrate under the Parsa. [262158]
Question: Could imposing a fine on the ego help in correcting people if such a fine were introduced in one or several countries?
Answer: The restriction on using the ego is possible only by voluntary awareness of the person; otherwise, it will not be a correction but a modification of the ego.
Question: How can I strive to bring contentment to the Creator if I do not imagine Him as existing outside my sensations?
Answer: You try, and gradually the picture will become clear in your sensations. [262114]
Question: What is the difference between the Kabbalistic explanation of our world and the Passover holiday from the ordinary opinions?
Answer: There are several levels of explanation of existence, its creation, development, goal, and the human’s task in it. For example, we can say the Passover holiday is:
the historical period of slavery of the people in Egypt,
about the “slavery” of man in his egoism, Egypt, Pharaoh,
about the development of creation, desire, under the influence of the Creator, light, and its absence, under the influence of darkness, Egypt, Pharaoh.
At different levels you can also say it is about:
the mechanical performance of rituals, which are commonly called commandments,
the psychological fulfillment of the instruction “love your neighbor as yourself,” as a general(klal) instruction of the Creator, which includes all other instructions, as stated in the Torah: “Love your neighbor is the general law of the Torah,”
the Kabbalistic effect of the upper light on the worlds and through them on the souls that go through the stages of their spiritual development, correction.
Question: Are there among your students, those who are trying or willing to practically test or at least seriously discuss educational methods that are not specified in the sources?
Question: All that exists in the corporeal world is a consequence of spiritual forces. Are spiritual forces not fully attainable even to Kabbalists who are at high levels?
Answer: To the measure one’s spiritual ascent, the complete picture of upper forces and their descent into this world is understood. [262014]
Question: What is the state of the Creator since He is in bestowal—bestowal for the sake of what?
Answer: To raise you to Himself.
Question:With regard to the study of Kabbalistic sources, which takes place face to face (a teacher or one of the students addresses the group and passes on their knowledge and experience to everyone at once), should it not be supplemented with dialogues between each and every one?
Answer: I follow the example of my teacher Rabash. [261966]
Aside from the ecological benefits that the stay-at-home orders spanning the world’s continents have brought about, such as significant drops in pollution and carbon dioxide emissions, another major positive impact is that the COVID-19 crisis put spokes in the wheels of our over-inflating egoistic, exploitative and manipulative interactions, heated social division and tense international relations, which were leading to a world war.
Also, while ordered to stay at home, we are now given time to calm down from our usual rat race, reconsider what is most important in life, and learn a deeper perspective of how nature works in order to exit this crisis into a better state.
Essentially, if we use this period we are now in to upgrade our awareness of ourselves as parts of a single interconnected and interdependent system of nature, it would result in an immense positive impact, both for ourselves and for nature in general.
The COVID-19 crisis is a prime example of how nature’s interconnectedness and interdependence is becoming increasingly revealed among us humans, as it forces us all into a common global problem.
We would thus be wise to learn from nature, to adapt our human thoughts, attitudes and relationships to the integral way in which nature operates.
If we fail to use this period in order to upgrade the quality of our connections, then we can expect nature to respond with further blows, whether an intensification of the current pandemic, or other natural disasters.
The principle is that according to nature’s interconnected and interdependent form, we, as the human level within nature, have to assume the same form in our attitudes and relationships to each other, in order to experience a harmonious and peaceful existence.
We have the free choice to make this leap, since our egoistic human nature that involuntarily prioritizes personal benefit over benefiting others sets us up in opposition to nature’s consideration of the whole.
Our selfish makeup is what led us to create a society functioning by each one trying to profit off of everyone else. However, as we see with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and other crises in our world, such egoistic development has reached a limit.
Nature is now trying to wake us up to our need to make a further step in our development: to exercise positive, supportive, encouraging and considerate relationships in a place where we by default relate negatively to each other.
Yet, as much as nature leads the horse to water by giving us this global shock, it still cannot make the horse drink. We will still have to make that leap from negative-egoistic relations to positive and mutually considerate ones by applying our own free choice.
This becomes possible if we study how nature functions as a complete integral system, and how each of us together need to act similarly in order to reach and maintain balance in the system.
Essentially, we need to reach a state where we care about others to the same extent as we care about ourselves.
If we thus use the time when we are bound to our homes in order to upgrade our awareness of nature’s unifying principle, and implement it in our relationships, we will then see far-reaching positive impacts of the COVID-19 crisis—a shift into a completely new and harmonious state among humanity the likes of which we have never experienced before.
Michael Laitman, On Quora: “COVID-19: is nature fighting back…more precisely was such an outbreak inevitable as a response to a disrupted Earth system?“
