There are three key steps involved in humans rising above the animal nature:
- Acknowledge that “love your neighbor as yourself” is the comprehensive law of nature that we have to achieve, and nature will make us reach it one way or another, i.e. either through our own conscious participation, where we progress to that law pleasurably and with ever-growing awareness, perception and sensation; or without our conscious participation, where increasing suffering will prod us to acknowledge this law.
- We have to examine to what extent our nature is opposite to the law of nature. It is written about our nature that “man’s inclination is evil from his youth.” In other words, our animal nature takes no one but itself into consideration to begin with, and such a quality is evil. It is evil specifically because it leads us to enjoy from harming others. Enjoyment from harming others is a quality specific to the animal nature in people, and it should not be confused with the nature in animals, where some animals harm other animals solely out of survival necessity. With us, however, beyond our survival necessities for food, sex, family and shelter, our animal nature further develops us by making us want what others have—to receive, to buy and even to steal from them—up to a point where we enjoy harming them without there being any other kind of benefit in it for ourselves. In other words, our animal nature develops to a point where we might not need anything that others have, but we enjoy stripping them away from what they have.
- We then go through different forms of recognition of evil, i.e. understanding the extent to which our animal nature is evil. That is, the second stage is mere knowledge of our animal nature’s oppositeness to nature. We can have knowledge of such a quality yet still enjoy being evil. The recognition of evil is a more developed stage where we understand and feel that our evil animal nature actually harms us, the very person that it resides in, and to the extent in which we gain such a recognition, we correct this animal nature—we start the process of rising above it to reach the higher nature of love, bestowal and connection. This is called a process of “correction” of our nature, and there is a specific method that guides this correction process up to the full attainment of the law of nature, i.e. fully rising above our animal nature and becoming human—a being with an intention similar to nature’s law of love, bestowal and connection.
Based on the video “How Humans Can Rise Above Their Animal Nature [in 3 Steps]” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman, Yael Leshed-Harel and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Photo by Pablo Soriano on Unsplash
Featured in Quora