“What Does Nature Teach Human Beings?” (Quora)

Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What does nature teach human beings?“

Nature is leading us to the understanding that we are parts of a single interconnected and interdependent system, and that we need to reach a higher level of connection among each other in order to discover nature’s perfection and eternity.

We are all egoists by nature. What this means is that all of our thoughts and actions are ultimately motivated by a desire to enjoy at the expense of anything and anyone around us.

As egoists, we each perceive a narrow reality. We feel ourselves as separate from other people and things, primarily concerned with our personal problems, each in a constant race after ephemeral pleasures.

Also, as egoists, the way we conduct ourselves increasingly clashes with the opposite way that nature conducts itself.

In contrast to the human egoistic quality, nature aims to connect everyone and everything into a single harmonious whole. A harmonious whole acts such that each part receives what it needs for its sustenance, and gives according to its ability for the benefit of the whole, similar to how cells and organs of a healthy human body function.

While our egoistic quality increasingly clashes with nature’s altruistic quality, we experience more and more blows. Blows from nature can appear as global pandemics, as we’re now experiencing with the coronavirus, as well as myriad other forms, from major ecological disasters through to each of our personal feelings, where depression, anxiety, stress, loneliness, emptiness, meaninglessness, and other such negative sensations have been increasingly tearing away at us for many years.

What is the purpose of the blows nature sends us? What is nature trying to teach us through all the pains and problems it sends us?

It is all for us to pause for a moment and start contemplating our life, its purpose, why we are suffering, and rethink the direction in which we are headed.

We can then use such introspection to elevate ourselves from our current egoistic mode of existence, where the causes of our pains are hidden, to a more connected and altruistic mode of existence, where the reasons for our pains are revealed.

The wisdom of Kabbalah grants us this ability: to discover the hidden, connected and altruistic laws of nature, and to balance ourselves with these laws. By sending us blows, nature ultimately teaches us that we need to revise the way we live our lives, to recognize the bankruptcy of trying to continue living egoistically as we have until today, and that by changing our attitudes to each other from egoistic to altruistic, where instead of trying to self-benefit all the time, we try to benefit others, we enter into balance with nature, thereby experiencing a harmonious, whole and eternal existence.