Why Does A Person Need To Be Educated?

Question: People don’t like it when you educate them. What does the idea of education mean according to the wisdom of Kabbalah?

Answer: If we look at animals, for example, we will see that they develop instinctively and thus learn certain skills from their parents. The mother takes the cubs hunting and helps them in every way. Nature teaches them how to adapt to the environment correctly. We can see how developed this instinct is, especially among mammals.

However, this instinct does not exist in man. If we remained on the animal level, we would be the same, of course, but since we quickly develop and in totally different directions, we often lack the understanding of how we should interact with each other.

In animals, the interaction is very simple: friend or foe, your pack or stranger. There are many possible relationships between humans. Between animals the connections are also either positive or negative. They are instinctive, whereas a man has to develop them according to a system that is unfamiliar, especially in our days when the world is becoming increasingly more mutually and integrally connected.

The human essence is absolutely the opposite of the correct relations between us, in which people refer to each other kindly, think of each other as a good family – just like their relatives who are closely connected and invoke the same response from others. Unfortunately, such a corrected attitude is not part of our nature and we are in fact the most corrupt animals. You will not find such an attitude among animals. Animals don’t harm each other; they feel no envy or jealousy. Their relations are only on the instinctive level and nothing more.

Animals examine who is strong and who is weak, and accordingly the power is distributed.Totally different impulses emerge in the human pack: cruel, conscious impulses that stem from our unrestrained egoism, which feels good when another feels bad. These impulses do not exist among animals. They act according to very simple instincts. An animal that wants to eat kills another animal but not because it wants to harm its prey. An animal doesn’t hunt more than what it needs to eat to survive, whereas man acts in an unrestrained manner ready to kill the whole world although he has no need for it.

Therefore, what we need is to educate people. We have to insert the positive force from the world around us into our cruel, negative egoistic nature.

This force is found in nature, but we have to pull it out of nature. We have to know how to extract the positive force, how to place it against the negative force, and how to raise ourselves in the connection between the two forces.
[198581]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 7/3/16