Dr. Anatoly Ulianov: How many people should there be in a group [aspiring to unity]? Psychologists have noticed that a group of 8-12 people is optimal because it simulates a model of society. If we gathered a thousand or 10 thousand people, would it be even more vivid?
Dr. Michael Laitman: The amount of people is less significance. What’s most important is whether or not they can unite with each other, and that depends on a person’s ability to transcend the ego for the sake of uniting with the society, on his sensitivity, on how developed his sense of the collective is.
Unification under the influence of a crowd does not produce any results. It is not an integral interaction. A crowd united by a common slogan, tearing at some animate goal, is not an integral society.
For people to unite into an integral society, they must be doing it to find the quality of mutual bestowal, unification, unity. In this case each of them rises above his egoism and unites with others in spite of his “crass” natural drives. He is not driven by the desire for personal fulfillment because it will never let him unite with others.
This unity is their newly acquired organ of perception that does not operate inside, but outside. That is how it’s aimed—from within outwards, toward bestowal. It can be created only by rising above the ego when each transcends oneself toward bonding with others, above one’s egoism. And therefore, this feeling cannot be private but only common.
It’s common because it exists through the fact that we create it together, and each of us perceives it as his own sense of external, altruistic perception. It is one for all of us, meaning that it is one and the same inside each of us.
This gives us the opportunity to speak about our common heart and mind, which we produced together and inside of which we exist together. In that case we perceive everything absolutely identically, with the same thoughts and feelings circulating inside of us.
We ascend to a level of feeling the world existing outside of us. In reality, this world is inside of us, but we start to feel it by coming out of the previous egoistic state, and we feel it all together. Meaning, as we develop each new level, we will attain it together.
We perceive each new level as existence that does not depend on each of us individually. This means that it does not depend on our bodies or on our current “I.” If I sympathize with “I” that exists in this integration, then I detach from my earthly life.
This life seems increasingly hazier and less real to me. I begin to understand that my body and all of my previous impressions and sensations of the world and of life took place in the egoistic perception. But now I cross over to a new state and see the world differently.
The integral perception of the world gives me new, more vivid impressions. The past becomes gradually more distant and less important, uninteresting, very flat and childish. I am so unimpressed by it that I am ready to part with it without regretting it in the least.
A person develops his new, integral state to such an extent that the past disappears.
We think, “How can it disappear!? After all, here are our bodies!” We don’t understand that these bodies exist only in our perception, which constantly changes. That’s how we change the sensation of our world to the sensation of the world that is on the next level. But there it also exists in our common desire and thought, while the bodies, as such, do not exist. Only thoughts and desires do.
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).
