From Chaos to Harmony
Rav Michael Laitman, PhD
Chapter 10: Balance with Nature
This chapter concerns a topic that is a little “off-track” from the topic of this book, but addressing it may help us clarify many of the topics discussed in this part of the book.
These days, when individuals and society are in a predicament, a new trend is spreading—the return to Nature. Some consider it a path towards change, and hope that it will improve their lives. But the question we must ask is, “Is there a connection between balance with Nature and return to Nature?” In other words, will returning to Nature help us achieve balance with it? This chapter will center on these questions and on similar topics.
The idea of returning to Nature is to live in harmony with Nature, much in the manner of our fathers and forefathers. Those who support returning to Nature strive for cleaner air, organic food production, and a return to country living. There are many aspects of this phenomenon, but they all center on the idea that if humanity were closer to Nature, we would be more balanced and, on the whole, feel better.
If we were to study how ancient tribes lived, we would find that the closer they were to Nature and to their roots, the more easily they sensed Nature’s force of love. In that regard, I would like to mention a conversation I had with primatologist and anthropologist, Jane Goodall, who dedicated her life to the study of chimpanzees and lived among them for many years. For her research, she won numerous awards, including the Encyclopedia Britannica Award for Excellence, The National Geographic Society Hubbard Medal for Distinction in Exploration, Discovery, and Research, and the Albert Schweitzer Prize.
When I asked her about the discovery that impressed her most, she replied that after long years of living in Nature, she felt Nature’s inherent force of love. She said that she began to feel and hear Nature, and that she felt love, that there was no “evil” force, only thoughts of love. Through long years of living in the jungle and merging with the primates, Goodall began to understand their emotions. She discovered that primates understand Nature and experience the love in it.
No doubt, such an experience is exciting. However, this is not the kind of balance we were referring to in this book. The most sublime feeling that the return to Nature can grant a contemporary person is a temporary and incomplete sensation of Nature’s force of love. It is only a fraction of what every animal senses. However, Nature has designed for man a much higher degree of evolution than that.
There is good reason why Nature has pushed us out of the caves and the bush, and prompted us to develop human society with all its complex systems. It is precisely within the human society, atop the alienation and the intolerance of others, that we must create the balance between us and other people. We must use our own egos as levers to elevate us to that state. A return to Nature can be a fascinating experience, but it will not assist us in uprooting the problem we are suffering from—imbalance at the human level.
The return to Nature is often coupled with other traditional teachings such as Yoga, Tai Chi, and a variety of meditative techniques. Such teachings provide calm, peace, and a sense of wholeness. However, they cannot bring us closer to realizing Nature’s goal, since they rely on suppressing the ego and diminishing it. In doing so, they lower the human ego from the speaking degree to lower degrees, called “animate,” “vegetative,” and “inanimate” degrees within man.
Therefore, these methods actually pull us back, and thus contradict the direction Nature is leading us in: elevating us to a higher level than our present state, to the level of the “corrected speaking.”
Nature will not allow us to diminish our egos, as we can evidently see in countries such as China and India, which until recently maintained a low level of egoism, but are presently experiencing an outbreak of egoism. In recent years, they have joined the race for wealth and power and have closed a gap of many generations in record speed.
The egoism that is currently sweeping the world is the egoism of the speaking degree. To cope with it, a completely different method must appear, a method whose inclination is opposite from the inclination to decrease the ego. The wisdom of Kabbalah is the only method that utilizes the full force of the ego, while mending its application. It is surfacing today to help all of humanity realize Nature’s goal and to rise as one to a new level of existence.
BALANCE AT THE SPEAKING LEVEL
For purposes of explanation, we will call the balance that relies on diminishing the ego from our present speaking degree to the animate, vegetative, and inanimate degrees, “balance at the animate degree.” The difference between balance at the animate degree and balance at the speaking degree is on the level of how we sense Nature’s force of love.
To equalize with Nature at the speaking degree, we must research ourselves and find where we, and all of humanity, are being led, the kind of evolutionary process we are in, its beginning and its ultimate purpose. Without such self-scrutiny, under which we can experience every phase in this evolution, we cannot attain Nature’s thought.
Such scrutiny can lead us to balance with Nature at the speaking level. In other words, it raises one to the degree of the corrected speaking. In that state, we can transcend the boundaries of time, space, and motion, and sense the entire flow of reality. The beginning of the process and its end unite, and we are aware of how all the phases in the process gradually surface within.
This allows us to perceive how all the phases are joined in wondrous harmony, how they are interdependent, and how they affect one another. Thus, one completes the evolutionary circle and no longer sees a beginning or an end in times, in places, or in processes, since one discovers that everything preexists in Nature’s plan.
Attaining Nature’s thought transcends us to exist at a supernal level, and grants us wholeness, eternity, and unbound pleasure. Our world is not where our bodies are, it is where our “selves” are. If we perceive a reality of eternity, sublimity, and perfection, this is where we are.
Attaining Nature’s thought does not end with having a better feeling, but with having a sense of eternity and wholeness, as does Nature itself. Only in that state, the state of complete attainment, the corrected speaking, can one really feel why those who have attained Nature’s force define it as one that is “good and does good.”
While it is true that those who lower their egos from the speaking level to the animate level can feel Nature as benevolent, this would only be a sensation at the animate degree. In that state, they feel physically and psychologically contented, but this contentment is bound to be short-lived. Our egos incessantly grow and separate us from the animals; it will not let us settle for the animate state for long.
On the other hand, we might say that while animals feel the “good and does good” as a state, the speaking degree experiences it as a continuous process. The difference between the degrees is similar to the difference between one who feels contented detaching one’s thoughts entirely and caring only for bodily pleasures, and one who uses one’s mind and thinks about life from its start to its end. A person who thinks about life is in touch with an entirely different level of Nature.
One who reaches the sensation of the “good and does good” at the level of the corrected speaking regards life as more than mere contentment; rather, he or she is in touch with a higher reality, a flow of information and processes. Such a person enjoys the perception of Nature’s wholeness. This liberates one from any limitation, and one ceases to identify one’s self with one’s body.
The thoughts of such people soar to a level of existence beyond the reality perceived in the physical senses, and reach into Nature’s thought, the eternal, comprehensive field. Hence, when the body of such a person expires, one still feels that one’s true self continues.
To summarize, the “return to Nature” is not connected to the spiritual process of achieving balance with Nature. It might even deflect our attention from the need to search for balance at the speaking degree within us, the level of thought.
The wisdom of Kabbalah, whose principles have been presented in this part of the book, specifies all the evolutionary phases we have experienced, and those we have yet to experience to reach Nature’s goal. It explains that we are at the threshold of a dramatic change in people’s awareness. Humanity will come to realize Nature’s plan, there is no question about that. The only question that remains is, “How soon will it do so?”
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