Evolution of the Generations

Society today is an egoistic society. However, it also contains sufficient preparations that can help it become an altruistic society. As a matter of fact, the evolution of humanity throughout the generations was only made to prepare it to realize the purpose of life in this generation.

In the article The Peace, Baal HaSulam describesthe evolution of the generations as follows:

…in our world there aren’t any new souls as the bodies are new, but only a certain amount of souls that incarnate on the wheel of transformation of the form, because they dress each time in a new body and a new generation. Therefore, with regard to the souls, all generations since the beginning of creation to the end of correction are as one generation that has extended its life over several thousand years until it developed and became corrected, as it should be.

From generation to generation, the souls accumulate data, which eventually brings us to our present level of evolution. At the end of the long evolvement, the speaking degree, human beings should rise to a new level, which we will call “The Corrected Speaking.”

To understand the impact of the evolution of generations before us, we can compare the internal data within us to units of information. Such units of information are within every object that exists in reality, and contain the innate data of all matter.

In truth, we are living in a space that contains an enormous amount of information about each and every element. This is an information field called “Nature’s thought,” and we exist within it. Any change that occurs in any element, such as efforts to maintain its present state, transition from state to state, forces operating on it, forces which it operates on other elements, internal changes, external changes, all those are changes in the information field.

In every generation, people look for a formula for balanced existence and a good life, the formula that Nature did not grant them. These searches are registered as additional records within their internal data units. As a result, these information units gradually improve.

All the understanding and the knowledge we acquire in one generation, through our efforts to have a better life and to cope with our environment, become additional natural inclinations in the next generation. Consequently, each generation is more developed than its former.

It is a recognized fact that children are always better able to cope with innovations in the world that their parents who actually invented those innovations. Today’s toddlers, for instance, approach such things as cellular phones and computers very naturally, and it takes them a brief time to operate them better than did their parents.

Thus, from generation to generation, humanity acquires knowledge and wisdom and evolves, much like an individual who has accumulated thousands of years of experience. In manuscripts published in the book, The Last Generation, Baal HaSulam writes about this accumulative process:

The opinion of an individual is like a mirror, where all the pictures and beneficial and harmful actions are received. One examines all those attempts, selects the beneficial ones and rejects the acts that harmed one (called the “memory brain”). For example, a merchant follows (in the memory brain) all the merchandise in which one had lost, and the reasons; and similarly with all the merchandise and the reasons that yielded profits. They are arranged in one's mind like a mirror of attempts, after which one selects the beneficial and rejects the detrimental, until one becomes a good and successful merchant. It is similar with each person in one’s experiences in life. And in the same manner, the public has a common mind and a memory brain and common images, where all the actions performed with respect to the public and to the whole are registered.

The evolution of the information units within us has brought us to a preliminary level of awareness of just how opposite we are to Nature’s force. Hence, we are becoming willing to listen to explanations of why we were created in this way. Moreover, we are becoming able to understand the goal we have to reach.

The internal void and the chasm being opened within many of us concerning the life we know are not coincidental. They are results of the creation of a new desire—for humankind to rise to a higher level of existence, that of the “corrected speaking.” This is the evolutionary phase in which we can consciously advance toward the realization of life’s purpose.