The goal of the spiritual work is to acquire the attributes of the upper world. We call it upper but it is actually the only world there is. We, however, are external to it, as if senseless, unconscious, like in a dream.

How can we awaken from this dream in which the ego closes us in like a cocoon?

We are immersed in ourselves since we constantly think about ourselves and want everything only for ourselves. As a result, the space around us is distorted since all the forces are drawn inside and are locked up in there. So it is as if we are in some kind of cocoon made of forces and cannot see anything external to it.

There is a huge world around me and I am just a tiny point, an embryo, that cannot exit the cocoon and feel what is actually happening.

All this is arranged that way in order to help us be born independently. The birth should be on our account since otherwise we will not feel the real enormous world we live in but which we don’t feel at the moment.

In order to feel this world, we have to gather and establish in us the senses for perceiving this world. Thus, we will discover exactly what we lack and how to feel what we don’t perceive.

When I do something by myself, I know exactly what happens in every part of this “machine.” If I start to illustrate a machine to someone and show and explain how it operates, it will take many years before a person understands its structure and all the subtleties will still remain a riddle for him. He will find it hard to understand why I have created the parts of the machine from special materials that I have put together this way and not any other way, how I thought about it, and jumped out of bed in the middle of the night when an idea came to my mind and drew it. I remember such times in my life.

A person who studies this, looking from the outside, will not understand anything anyway. You have to give birth to yourself, and then it will be yours. So we have a mission: to give birth to ourselves in the only, big, eternal, perfect world, in the Creator’s world, which is the only force that wants us to want to know Him and to attain and to reveal Him by ourselves.

He has created a special state for us called our world or this world in which we live like in a cocoon tightened by a great egoistic energetic force, so that we will begin to actually feel and to attain the Creator outside His luminous world. It is in our world that we can give birth to ourselves by gradually developing and creating in us more and more new attributes that can help us discover the Creator’s world and gradually resemble Him.

But how can we break through this massive egoistic protection, through the border, which we have to change?

As strange as it may seem, this is why there is a very special attribute when people come together. By getting together, we create a special energetic form. If each of us gradually exits himself and connects to others, the preliminary conditions for the attributes that exist in the real world are created.

Although we are inside a cocoon, we already manage to move in it somehow and to do something among us by partly connecting to some common form that is gradually formed as everyone tries to annul himself and imitate others, to some extent at least, and to connect with them.

A person experiences pangs of conscience since he sees that all the others manage to exit themselves, can sacrifice something and give in to others, and that they are not so tight-fisted, arrogant, and cruel and can be considerate of others; the connection between them is somehow natural, but not for him. He doesn’t succeed in anything.

When a person goes through such states, he is cleansed internally according to our collective efforts to get closer and to create a certain form that resembles what is external to it, inside the cocoon, by our mutual yearning for connection.

Don’t be put off by this, don’t fear, don’t think that it is a return to the old socialism, since there is nothing to ashamed of here. Try to do everything that you can in order to nullify your individual egoistic urges and to attain something that is collective.

It is this collective “something” that will eventually be born and which will be called a soul.

Dr. Michael Laitman, from the Moscow Virtual Convention “Unity Without Boundaries” Day Two 12/14/13, Lesson 4