We should first understand that negative emotions surface in order to change us and bring us to a more positive state. Similar to diseases, they are signs that something is wrong. For instance, if my foot hurts, it is not that there is a problem with the foot, but it shows me that there is a certain problem that I have to take care of. I thus have to delve into the depth of the problem and take care of it.
Therefore, negative emotions tell us that there is something wrong in ourselves, our families, society, and our relationships. Today, we cloud our negative emotions with leisure of all sorts. Whether it is travel, sports, entertainment, getting drunk, taking drugs or going out to various clubs, negative emotions have become so strong that there is a great need in people to forget about and suppress them, and so leisure has become a much-sought-out solution.
The fact that we turn to forgetting about and suppressing our negative emotions so much shows that we fail to understand the root cause of the problem. Negative emotions are symptoms of a deeper problem that we need to accurately diagnose in order to heal ourselves of them.
The root cause of negative emotions is in fact the root cause of all problems on individual, social and global scales, and between the person and the still, vegetative and animate levels of nature. From the tiniest problem to the worst possible disaster, our every problem is sourced in our very egoistic nature, where we wish to benefit ourselves at the expense of others and nature.
The more we evolve, the more our egos grow, and thus the more we experience outbursts of all kinds of problems. This is why we feel much more negative emotions today than in the past, and we can see such phenomena in the rising cases of depression, loneliness, anxiety, stress, drug abuse and suicide worldwide. Eventually, we will reach a state where the increasing negative emotions we experience will make us ask about their deeper cause, and we will increasingly recognize our very egoistic human nature as their base cause.
The problem with our egoistic nature is not that we want to enjoy ourselves. It is that we want to enjoy ourselves at the expense of others, and by doing so, we harm others and only then feel that we gain. Until we correct our egoism, switching the desire to enjoy at the expense of others to a desire that enjoys by benefiting others—a process that we can implement if we upgrade the way in which we educate and influence each other—then we will experience more and more negative emotions and other problems in order to show us that we are failing to conduct ourselves correctly and that desperate need to change.
Based on the video “Why Do We Have Negative Emotions?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Nitzah Mazoz. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman
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