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Depression is a negative illumination. It descends from our desires and thoughts, the highest level of our inner structure, to our mood. From our mood, it proceeds to seep into the bodies’ systems, including our bones, tissues, nerves, and skin. Depression also wreaks havoc in our relationships, and it plays a major role in many breakups.
According to the integral approach to education, which views the human being, society, and nature as one whole, we become depressed because we constantly want to feel fulfillment within ourselves, in an inward self-serving direction. However, at a certain developmental stage, we reach the realization that we cannot and will not succeed in ever truly fulfilling ourselves in such a way.
Our nature is a desire to receive pleasure and enjoyment, the will to delight. This desire to receive evolves from generation to generation, year to year, and moment to moment. It arouses thoughts about how we can fulfill ourselves, and these desires and thoughts, increasingly directed inward toward ourselves, place us in a growing state of imbalance with our environment.
Therefore, in order to provide a solution to depression at its root, we need to shift into a new stage of development, in a giving direction. When we are oriented outward to others, i.e., when our desires and thoughts are aimed at the benefit of others, our worldview changes. We can indeed undergo such an upgrade if we are in an appropriate environment that supports it.
Imagine if pro-social values guided us through the media, communication channels, social networks, schools, universities, culture, art, and workplaces, from early childhood to old age. Instead of the current influences, which increase the desire to receive for personal benefit at others’ expense, we would aim ourselves at giving, mutual support, and even at love for others and society.
In such a state, we would feel a positive connection to others flourish. We would participate with others in society, sensing life that flows between everyone’s open hearts. This upgraded attitude to life would solve not only depression but also the rest of the problems and crises of today’s alienated era.
The integral approach to education teaches that we have entered an age of depression because evolutionary forces urge humanity to transition from narrow egoistic functioning to one similar to how different cells and organs operate in a living organism, i.e., in full integration, connection, and complementarity. While in a living organism, integration takes place on its own through the forces of nature that organize it, we require self-awareness, scrutiny, recognition, and choice at the human level.
It is no coincidence that the world is becoming ever more interconnected and interdependent in parallel with the intensification of the human ego that locks us each within our own self-interested shells. We are finding how we live on the same boat, and that we cannot get along with each other here.
Tomorrow’s world can only be a connected one, and therefore humanity needs to adapt. What does that mean? It means that we must rise to a completely different level of existence, with a different guiding quality. Until now, we have lived in a paradigm of egoistic competition, which has become increasingly destructive the more we have evolved. In our era, for the sake of our continued survival, and moreover, for the experience of a high quality of life as we head into the future, we need to prioritize values of positive connection, giving to others, contribution to society, mutual consideration and responsibility, and the feeling of others as ourselves.
Integral connection will bring a state where nobody disturbs, pressures, or suppresses others, but instead thinks about how to benefit others, how to give goodness and fulfillment like a loving mother toward her children, and like the very force of nature that gives life to all.
Therefore, the mass revelation of depression in today’s world is actually an invitation for us to progress to a whole new perception of reality. While a womb involuntarily nourishes and grows a drop of semen into a human baby, we are invited to voluntarily build the social environment that will give birth to a new harmonious, peaceful, and happy humanity.
Based on “New Life 91 – Depression, Part 2” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman, Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.