Man In An Interconnected World, Part 4

The Element of Freedom in the Rigid Program of Nature

Question: According to Baal HaSulam, the law of mutual guarantee is the basis for the interaction of all living organisms and is built on the balance between reception and bestowal.

Moreover, the law of reception is that each member of society tries to get everything he needs to live in the way his individual, egoistic system requires. And the law of bestowal is that each person cares about the welfare of the entire society.

If a person does not observe the law of bestowal, then he is hit by disasters and problems sent to him by nature. How can a person observe this law?

Answer: How to observe is one problem. And the fact that a person is obliged to observe this law follows from the image of nature that is revealed to us.

We see in front of us an absolutely integral picture: one single nature in which man is included with all his egoisms, scientific and anti-scientific “isms.” It turns out that we can not dodge and escape from the integral picture of nature. Whether we want it or not, we are inside this system and cannot exist outside of it.

This system is constantly evolving: from the inanimate level for hundreds of thousands of years, to the vegetative level for tens of thousands of years, to the animate level for thousands of years, and at the human level for literally decades. In other words, the higher nature is organized, the faster the stages of development occur in it.

The only question is when do we begin to discover ourselves in this system? We see that we are opposed to it for a very simple reason. We are not instinctively involved in nature because it affects us with the element of freedom.

We can agree or disagree with the way nature works on us, and to this extent, we determine our fate. It turns out that we are unhappy people. Nature is given to us, we can live in it, work, reproduce, create anything imaginable—unlike animals—on the next, conscious level. And we do not know what to do with it.

We create everything based on our natural egoistic nature, acting to the detriment of others and ostensibly for the benefit of ourselves. We do not understand that integral nature forces us to become different. For the benefit of oneself means for the benefit of others.
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From KabTV’s “The Post-Coronavirus Era,” 4/16/20