Nature divides into four levels: inanimate, vegetative, animate and human. We currently belong to the animate level, because like animals, we engage in maintaining our body and earthly life.
Animals, however, instinctively provide for themselves. We, on the other hand, in addition to instincts, are influenced by society. In other words, animals live in a framework that guides them to secure their survival, whereas we are directed by society in addition to our instincts.
In principle, animals also have families, groups and leaders. However, their hierarchies and struggles are based on a natural and instinctive control that emerges from within, which makes their realization direct and simple.
We have a much more complex situation than animals. We are unaware of how to act in connection with each other, with the surrounding society, and how society influences us and determines our development and values. In this respect, we are much more confused and miserable than animals, which know exactly what they want, and what they need to do in order to secure their survival, as much as their environment and the ecology allows.
We humans, on the other hand, self-destruct. Nature supplies us with additional abilities to transcend our earthly development, and when we use this excess in the direction of our earthly development, solely in the plane of serving our egoistic desires, then we try to fulfill ourselves excessively with food, sex, wealth, and so on. As a result, we find no lasting or meaningful happiness, no real gains, but on the contrary, a life that becomes darker and emptier.
If instead of trying to direct the additional abilities nature gives us to self-benefit at the expense of others and nature, which leads us into a growing chasm, we would use our social desires for money, respect, control and knowledge as a means to achieve a higher level of reality, the human level, then we would reach that level to its fullest: a state of positive connection among us, and the discovery of a new life of happiness, confidence, harmony and balance with nature.
Based on KabTV’s “Close-up” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman on August 19, 2009. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
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