Mr. Gorbachev noted in 2005: “History increases in velocity and there is danger of falling behind in consciousness.” “Today,” he said, “we need new thinking for a new century,” including new vision for politics, business, and civil society. “The future needs to be for all of us or we won’t have it at all,” concluded Mr. Gorbachev.
Well, let’s move close to the clearer point of view:
“The reason for this crisis is human egoism which increases every generation. But we cannot fight it directly and force people to love one another. We cannot force love. That is why we have to utilize the power of society over individuals. Each and every one of us is greatly affected by society: each of us wants respect from society; each of us is influenced by the opinions of society. If we can make it so that the most appreciated thing in the world will be giving-more appreciated than any other act of man, then people will want to give, they will want to bestow and to share, because they will want the respect of society. We have to see how we can cancel, revoke all of the prizes in society, except for one prize: the appreciation of a person’s contribution to society. So when we point to a person and say that he or she gives to others that would be the greatest reward of all. That will make people give to one another, and love one another. Because we see how society influences people. I think we can do that. I hope that together we can build a new civilization.” (Rav Michael Laitman)
We are “installed” into this life. You find yourself in a family; you didn’t choose the family. And yet, there are all kinds of influences on you. Everything that you are, your character is shaped by the values of your mother and your father, your community, your school, your set of friends, and everything that develops in you in terms of your personality, what you value, what you dream, what you suppose the limitations of things are, they’re all defined for you by that situation. In other words, if you are going to have a dream about what your life is going to be, it’s going to be one of a number set before you. It’s like choosing items on a menu. And even when you leave that sort of situation of your school and the heavy influence of your parents, and you step out to make your way in the world, you still find that that organization and pressure of society is still affecting a person.
There is no need to sentence man to death. Disappearance of light – this is death by itself. Spiritual death is losing the connection with the Creator. We are yet to attain such a level while living in this world.
A person who has never had a connection with the Creator, does not feel its loss. Existing below the line of Machsom (boundary, separating spiritual and corporeal worlds), we do not perceive the spiritual, and thus are not considered dead. Only a person who knew he was alive and felt the Creator’s light but later ceased receiving Him, can be called dead.
There is nothing random about any of life’s events: every single thing, good and bad, is sent to us purposefully in order to prompt us to eventually question the purpose of our lives and to try to get to know the upper power that is orchestrating our world.
Just as we organize all aspects of our schools in order to maximize the learning progress of our children, so this upper power organizes all things within our world to hasten our progress through the stages that will culminate in an enlightened state of “loving our neighbors as ourselves.”
We can refer to the upper power as Nature, the Creator, God or whatever suits us.
The world’s current state of crisis fueled the scientists’ need to explain this overarching integration: that we have a “way out” of our current state through acceding to a more fundamental, all-encompassing state of awareness.
Common to all presentations was that, as human awareness grows to embrace concepts that emerge with globalization, so does the knowledge that humans have been irresponsible in their approach to creating this environment. As a result, our approach to ourselves and our environment are in dire need of a revision if we are to avoid sinking into an unsolvable catastrophe.
A soul is a united, total system of the universe; the main feature of which is integrity, that is, the inability to reduce any system to a sum of its parts. This means that where one common soul, called “Adam” exits, only this soul truly exists. All the parts that have become detached from it are not its separate parts, but something completely different. To a level to which they re-unite again into this common structure, they already form a single common organism. That is, any state of each individual soul, each individual object, is defined only by a degree to which it is connected with the remaining objects.
