If You’re An Egoist, You Must Read This
Today, we realize that our development as “humans” has driven us to a dead end. And while before, we tried to correct the world around us, trying different socioeconomic systems, today we also understand that it is our inherent nature that has driven us astray.
We come into this world with only an egoistic desire to enjoy, not caring for anything but ourselves, as a newborn baby that feels only itself and thinks only of itself. It takes several weeks for a baby to begin to feel the world outside it, to really see and hear, to “switch on” its senses. But what it wants from life, from the environment, is for its needs to be satisfied, primarily through its mother. This is how we grow.
We need to understand that Nature has deliberately given us this egoistic desire from birth so we can build atop it, a form different from our original nature, an altruistic form of giving and bonding using the law, “Habit Becomes Second Nature.”
Yet, we are opposite from that. We are individualists. Each of us wants to profit from others, to be completely inconsiderate of others. Hence, we are constantly conflicting with, and colliding with, each other.
The Art of Balancing Yourself with Nature
Nature has deliberately created this negative form within us so that from it we would build the positive, good form, one of connection among us. We are to use all the powers at our disposal and build that new form consciously and with complete comprehension. We must reach a state where we are all connected in similarity to the general Law of Nature, which is all bestowal, goodness, and love.
Then we will understand that this law is not evil, that all the forces we currently feel as blows are not bad forces. The disintegrating families, drugs, terrorism, fear of a nuclear world war, ecological and financial crises, and all the forces that seem negative to us are intended only to make us build our forces of love, giving, and bonding. Anything that happens to us that we currently feel as a negative force affecting us is sensed in us as negative only because we are opposite from the singular law.
For example, when we are faced with heatstroke or hypothermia, we need to know what to do to balance our temperature and bring it back to normal. When the body is under pressure, such as when diving, or if we climb to altitudes where there is little oxygen, we create a kind of “compensation” that brings us back to balance with Nature.
Today, we are suffering blows from every direction. Every day, humanity is being pressed together under the “weight” of collective blows. Precisely here, then, is there an instrument we can use to balance ourselves with Nature?
Now You Can Achieve Balance With Nature and Be Happier than Ever
Everything that happens to us is an expression of our oppositeness from Nature. Therefore, we have to compensate for that oppositeness. Nature is presenting us with adverse phenomena, but if we overcome ourselves and correct ourselves, becoming as similar to Nature as we can, we will experience those very forces as positive because we will be in balance with them. At that point, all the crises—climate, family relations, international relations, and economic crises—will calm down and we will discover a good, wholesome life in every way.
How do we play that game? We learned that Nature is a singular force that operates on all of us, that it “wants” us to learn how to balance ourselves because then we will begin to comprehend the whole of reality. By bonding, we will understand where we truly are. We can obtain that bonding by cultivating good relationships. Although we might not yet want these relationships, we can create them through games, using the law, “Habit Becomes Second Nature.”
To realize the bonding between us in actual fact, we need to create the bonding within society through our attitudes toward it. We must build social systems where each person feels obliged to treat society favorably, where the well-being of society, as well as one’s own well-being, depends on one’s attitude toward society.
If we wish to restructure man’s attitude toward society—because we are dependent on each other and society demands that each of us treats it properly—we need to understand what society needs to do de facto. For that, society must give us examples of the right behavior, like that of a mother toward her child. Society must fundamentally transform its impact on each of us, beginning with transforming the media and the educational system. These must provide each of us with a sense of urgency to change our attitudes toward one another.
The Ultimate Human Society Is Just Around the Corner
A good society is like an incubator, enveloping and warming its young, a place where we develop well and properly. Just as temperature, humidity, and all the conditions in an incubator are ideal for the hatchling to develop in the egg in the best, quickest, and healthiest way, we need to build around us a society that will be our own ideal incubator. In such a society, we will be warm, cozy, comfortable, and we will never want to leave it. Just as a fetus develops in its mother’s womb in the safest way because the womb is perfectly suited for it, we must establish our society so everyone develops ideally in it.
In such an incubator, each person builds the society for his own, as well as for everybody else’s sake. When everyone works that way for everyone else, we will build our great family, and all will become kin.
It turns out that our attitude toward Nature, toward that singular law by which we should be as one, is realized within our society. In fact, our attitude toward society and the realization of that law within it is more important than our attitude toward Nature itself! The single most important thing for us to do is to construct our human environment. For this reason, everyone must learn these new studies and acquire a new career: Becoming a Human Being in the New Society.
Written by Michael Laitman
Michael Laitman is a global thinker dedicated to generating a transformational shift in society through a new global education, which he views as the key to solving the most pressing issues of our time. He is the Founder of the ARI Institute, Professor of Ontology & Theory of Knowledge, PhD in Philosophy, MS in Medical Cybernetics. You can find him on Google+, YouTube and Twitter