According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, evil is the revelation of a person’s egoistic attitude to others.
We are made of desires to enjoy, and this desire develops through different levels: from individual desires of food, sex and family, to social desires of money, honor, control and knowledge, and then to a desire to discover the meaning of our lives. This desire to enjoy has always been the driving force that makes us perform any movement or thought toward various pleasure goals. In our current times, however, this desire has grown to a state where it becomes evil: it starts turning into a desire that wishes to enjoy at the expense of other people and nature.
So while desires to enjoy are our nature and we constantly feel impulses to move toward pleasure and move away from pain, evil comes into the picture when our desires start wishing that we enjoy at the expense of others, i.e. when we rise above others and humiliate them.
It might sound extreme that we have reached a level where we wish to humiliate others and be above them, but we do so automatically. We do not realize the extent to which our inner wiring makes us completely driven by self-interest. For instance, even if we engage in pleasant conversation, we each try to be above the others, trying to position ourselves in a way where we look better, and presenting ourselves more favorably in order to catch others’ attention, even if only a little. Human nature consists of such veiled forms.
This is the final manifestation of the egoistic desire, and it surfaces in order for us to determine it as evil, and that if we are to alleviate the myriad problems that this desire brings about, we need to rise to the next altruistic form of desire opposite the evil: a good desire to love, positively connect, and give to others, above the egoistic desire. And it is a very difficult transition.
The wisdom of Kabbalah is a method that was made in order to guide this transition fast and pain-free.
Based on KabTV’s “Close Up” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
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