February 22, 2012 at 6:59 pm · Filed under What is Kabbalah?
There are five levels to our desires, divided into three groups.
- The 1st group is animal desires (food, reproduction, and home);
- The 2nd is human desires (money, honor, knowledge), and
- The 3rd group is the spiritual desire (the “point in the heart”).
As long as only the first two groups were active, we settled for “taming” our desires through routine, and for suppressing them. When the “point in the heart” appeared, the first two ways no longer did the job, and we had to look for another way. This is when the wisdom of Kabbalah resurfaced, after having been hidden for thousands of years, waiting for the time it would be needed.
The wisdom of Kabbalah is the means for our Tikkun (correction). Using it, we can change our Kavana (intention) from wanting self-gratification, defined as egoism, to wanting to gratify the whole of Nature, the Creator, defined as altruism.
The global crisis we are experiencing today is really a crisis of desires. When we use the wisdom of Kabbalah to satisfy the last, greatest wish of all—the desire for spirituality—all problems will be resolved automatically, because their root is in the spiritual dissatisfaction many are experiencing.
The above text was taken from the book Kabbalah Revealed: A Guide To A More Peaceful Life by Dr. Michael Laitman with foreword by Prof. Ervin Laszlo. Also available as eBook (PDF, Kindle & ePub formats), and for free PDF download.
February 22, 2012 at 6:15 pm · Filed under Education
Dr. Anatoly Ulianov: I would like to touch on the topic of drugs. This is also a kind of game in a sense because through drugs a person enters a new state and changes. So what’s so bad about drugs?
Dr. Michael Laitman: The fact that a person becomes detached from reality, nothing else is bad about it. A person becomes detached from society and from life. He doesn’t do anything bad to anyone, and he is peacefully walking down the street with a glassy gaze, not seeing anyone. He cannot be considered a socially harmful element, but he causes harm by going against Nature, and we do not agree with this.
In general, drugs are very cheap. It’s possible to constantly feed them to 3 or 4 billion of the “extra” people on earth so that the rest can live in peace. We can shut them off from all the problems that way. We could hand out drugs to the masses and the crime rate would immediately drop. We could house them on reservations and let them sit there peacefully, getting high and having a ball.
However, the fact is that we inherently oppose this kind of attitude to life. Humanity cannot agree to this despite the fact that these actions are harmless to society and even useful in a sense. Nature has prescribed the goal of our existence so powerfully within us that we cannot passively observe a person who voluntarily detaches himself from a sober, adult life.
Therefore, we don’t agree to it. We don’t want to take this opportunity to be in nirvana for the rest of our lives and then to peacefully die. On the surface it might seem that nothing could be better. After all, life is full of disappointments, searches, troubles, and depression. But still, we don’t agree to this.
And we can defeat this evil by giving a person satisfaction with what he does, the sensation of a fulfilled life. Then he won’t need to cut himself off from life. But if his entire life consists of endless suffering and emptiness, then we cannot blame him for opting for drugs.
I read a speech by the chief of Russia’s health ministry where he says that in the next decade, up to half of the country’s population will be depressed, and today the rate is already 25%. And this is a declaration by the chief of the health ministry; these are the numbers he makes public! And how many more people are there who are not counted? What can be done with such a mass?
It is the same situation throughout the world. There are countries with even higher rates. Divorce, violence on a massive scale, terrorism—it is all part of the common problem of enormous inner emptiness. And it has to be filled by something. Otherwise…
We shouldn’t be fighting the drugs, but rather the reason that makes people want them. And that reason is the emptiness within us, which can only be filled by what Nature has prepared for us.
Why does the sensation of emptiness arise? And what can it be filled with? In our time we have to rise to the level of integral unification with everyone, and fill ourselves with that. That is how we will come to feel the common nature, its eternity and perfection, and will become included in it, identify ourselves with it. We will flow in that eternity.
We will still live the life on earth—where we will realize our integration with others—while sensing ourselves on an order above this world, on the level of a human being rather than an animal or a partially successful social element.
By making a person part of the global, integral society, we will tear him away from drugs and he won’t need them anymore. He will experience states of attainment, the search for perfection, and he will acquire harmony that is thousands of times more powerful than when he is under the influence of any chemical substance.
The above points were taken from the book The Psychology of the Integral Society by Dr. Michael Laitman and Dr. Anatoly Ulianov. Also available as eBook (PDF, Kindle & ePub formats).
