Michael Laitman
Michael Laitman
Founder and president of Bnei Baruch Kabbalah Education & Research Institute

The Task Facing Humanity

There are countless tasks facing humanity: We have to offset our negative influence on the climate, make sure everyone has clean drinking water, minimal healthcare, and staple foods. We also have to tend to the millions, if not billions of oppressed people around the world, to the growing inequality between the haves and the have nots, to the depression of so many people who seem to have everything but can’t find satisfaction in life, and so on and so forth. How can we deal with all those problems? The short answer is “We can’t!” The (slightly) longer answer is “We can’t because we’re dealing with the problems separately instead of looking for their common root. If we dealt with this, we would solve them all, and quickly.”

So far, I have not seen anyone seriously looking for the root cause behind everything that’s going on. Can it be that all our problems, social, emotional, environmental, and political, have nothing in common? That is, the only thing that is obviously common to them is man, but what is it about man that’s causing these problems? Are different things about us causing the different problems, or are they stemming from one root flaw?

From everything I’ve learned in science and in Kabbalah, everything is connected. Cybernetics, the field of science that I studied, teaches how to deal with systems. It relates to everything as a system whose parts are interrelated and interdependent. The wisdom of Kabbalah says exactly the same. The natural conclusion should therefore be that the problem is with the system we are living in, the system that connects us all.

In other words, if we fix the connections among the parts in the system, the system will function well, achieve balance, or homeostasis, to use a more scientific language, and our lives will run smoothly. The root cause of our problems, therefore, is not with each part individually, but with the connections among them.

Currently, these connections are negative. This means that the parts are striving to disconnect from the system or take over the system. If you take our brain as an example, it would be as if neuron in our brain tried to disconnect from all the others or, alternatively, to dominate them. Would such a brain be functional?

Humanity is like the brain of the world we live in. Yet, we are as dysfunctional as the brain in the example I just gave; this is why our planet and our lives are looking so dismal. If we want to change the world we live in, to change our society, and to change our own future from the miserable one that’s currently in store for us, to the glorious future we can have, we have to mend our connections. And since it is our connections that we need to fix, we can only do this together, through a mutual decision to change. The greater the number of people who understand the gravity of the problem of our negative connections, the more we will all want to change it. And the more we want to change our connections, the easier it will be to achieve.

Therefore, there are two stages in the healing process: 1. Awareness, 2. Healing. Currently, not enough people are aware of the singular cause of our multiple problems. This is why our main task at the moment is to spread the word that by transforming our connections from negative to positive, we will change the world and change our lives. Once enough people realize this, stage 2 will begin, and it will be much easier and quicker than stage 1.

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