Using our Environment

Everything we do in life is determined by the pleasure and pain principle

We run from pain and chase pleasure. And the less we have to work for the pleasure, the better.

The pleasure and pain principle is dictated by the will to receive, and the will to receive controls everything we do, because that’s our essence. Therefore, while we think we are free beings, we are actually chained by the two reins of life, pleasure and pain, held in the hands of our egoism.

Four factors determine who we are:

1. the Bed (our inherited genetic makeup),

2. the unchanging attributes of the Bed (attributes embedded within that makeup),

3. attributes that change through external forces (environmentally influenced changes in our attributes), and

4. changes in the external environment. We can influence only the last factor, but that factor influences all other factors.

Therefore, the only way to choose who we are is by choosing the last factor, thus monitoring and changing our social external environment. Because changes in the last factor affect all other factors, by changing it we will change ourselves. If we want to liberate ourselves from egoism, we need to change the external environment to one that supports altruism, not egoism.

Faith Above Reason

And once we’ve been liberated from the will to receive, from the shackles of egoism, we can advance in spirituality. To do that, we follow the principle of “faith above reason.”

“Faith,” in Kabbalah, means complete perception of the Creator. We can acquire faith by becoming equal to Him in our attributes, in our desires, intentions, and thoughts. The term “reason” relates to our mind, the “foreman” of our egoism. To go above it, we must make the value of equivalence with the Creator more important, more precious to us than any egoistic pleasure we can imagine.

Using Our Environment for Altruistic Change

On the personal level, we increase the importance of the Creator (altruism) by using books (or other forms of media), friends, and a teacher who show us how important it is to be altruistic. On the social level, we try to embrace more altruistic values in society.

However, and this is imperative to the success of the change, embracing altruistic values should not be done merely to make our lives more pleasant in this world. It should be done to equalize ourselves and our societies with Nature, meaning with the only law of reality—the law of altruism—the Creator.

When we surround ourselves with these environments, as individuals and as a society, our values will gradually change to the values of our environment, thus transforming our egoism into altruism naturally, easily, and pleasantly.