Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Is the love of truth the ultimate spirituality?“
What is spirituality? Spirituality is an opposite altruistic quality to our egoistic human nature.
The human ego—the desire to enjoy—is behind every thought and desire we have, and behind every action that we do.
Therefore, we perceive what we want to see according to the ego, i.e., whether we can enjoy something, or whether something comes to threaten our enjoyment.
This is why if we want to discover spirituality, i.e., to find out what surrounds us that is imperceptible to our egoistic perception, we thus need to recreate ourselves, and in the process of recreating ourselves, our environment holds primary importance.
In other words, since altruism is imperceptible and opposite to egoism, we thus need help from our surroundings to inspire, prod and motivate us to want to reach an opposite quality to our egoism.
When we make the shift from egoism to altruism, corporeality to spirituality, we will sense a new world that has always surrounded us, but which we could not perceive.
In the wisdom of Kabbalah, that new world is called “the spiritual world” or “the upper world.”
Our current worldviews are perceptions that have formulated upon our egos in order to comfort and shield ourselves in various ways.
“Truth” then becomes what coincides with our ego-based opinions.
We seek support for our opinions and repel what counters them. As such, we ultimately do not want to change ourselves.
How, then, do we reach a desire to change ourselves and discover spirituality?
If we fail to do so of our own accord, through positive means, i.e., by surrounding ourselves with an environment that supports the shift from egoism to altruism, then suffering will enter our lives more and more in order to show us that the purely egoistic direction we head in is problematic and that something needs to change.
However, suffering itself won’t lead us to change, but to a desire to change, where we will seek out different environments and influences than our current ones, in order to develop ourselves spiritually.
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