Today, the family unit is falling apart. Period. There is no point in looking for someone to blame. Actually, this is one of nature’s ways of progressing humanity to a much higher and more sublime connected state. If we understand how the inner force that is breaking apart our relationships operates, we can also discover in advance what our next destination should be. This will save us precious time and much suffering and tears. Along the way, we will rediscover our relationships and also find a method for communicating with our screen-absorbed children.
Life in nature develops through the connection of opposites. Plus and minus, heat and cold, light and darkness, and so on. At every level of nature, the opposites become more pronounced, and their connections become more refined. The human species is also part of nature, an outcome of the animate world. Through our emotional and intellectual development, we have built a vast world for ourselves, with all kinds of connections. We no longer live in packs, clans, or isolated villages. Instead, we are all interconnected. In the 20th century, we created one small global village, and accordingly, we as individuals have also changed considerably.
Whereas in all previous generations it was clear that people married for life, raised children, taught them a profession, and grew old beside them, today this no longer exists even in the movies. The human ego has grown enormously. Our psychology has changed, as has our entire perception of life. The general trend is one of disintegration. Relationships between parents are falling apart, as is the connection with children. We are beginning to feel increasingly isolated, and all those connections that only a few decades ago were natural and taken for granted no longer work so well in our time.
This natural process is a result of the human ego’s development. Today, a person’s ego has become very personal, individualistic, and narrow. Each of us distances ourselves from others and guards our boundaries. We are behind our computers or phone screens and have no interest in meeting others physically. We disconnect whenever we feel like it. We want to be by ourselves and have no one obligate us to do anything. We do not want commitments, no children, wife, family, parents, or anyone else. This is our ego, and it continues to develop more and more.
We are advancing toward a world of billions of individualists, each enclosed within their own cell and willing to connect with others only virtually. What kind of family can we even talk about in such a state? Let your imagination run wild. In an age when sex has also become electronic, the family becomes virtual, and children are projected by lasers. Moreover, if someone becomes too annoying, we simply switch them off. Yet precisely at a time when the world will be able to provide us with everything at the touch of a button and no one will lack anything materially, a new feeling will awaken within us that will wipe away all the comforts of the “alone age.”
New and very powerful desires will awaken within us, opening an inner void that nothing familiar will be able to fill. The world will be full of lonely people who will somehow come to terms with it and suffer, until the suffering grows to such proportions that it urges us to change. In such a state, we will be forced to discover that there are desires in us that cannot be fulfilled alone or remotely, but only through new relationships—in relationships, parenting, the family, and with human beings in general. The main insight that will carry us into the future is that a truly good life cannot be built by distancing ourselves from everyone, but by building a new kind of relationship between people. For this, we need a new connection between ourselves and our entire environment, an emotional, inner connection that stems from the recognition that we all belong to one system.
After we each have entered our own cell and isolated ourselves, the realization will emerge within us that this is not the way to feel free. Freedom means being connected with others and still feeling free. Two conditions are required for this: first, the connection must not be forced, but maintained through our own desire and choice; and second, the connection should be as close as possible. We feel the flow of life only in a heart-to-heart connection, when one person wants to fulfill the other and the other wants to fulfill them, and we become like organs in a single body.
Within such a complex connection, based on the combination of nature’s two opposing fundamental forces—the force of the ego that distances and separates us, alongside the recognition that we must learn to connect in order to feel vitality and fulfillment in life—we will discover the next level of our existence. Each person will then have an ego as high as the heavens, and above all our egos we will be connected in love. This is how we will begin to experience life on a different, higher, unlimited level. This special connection between us will bring each person joy, inner excitement, and love. It will open our deepest inner channels and fill us completely.
From this new approach to life, relationships will also be built on a new level, followed by the connection between parents and children. Through special exercises described extensively in the wisdom of connection, we will learn to feel our partners and they will learn to feel us, and we will enjoy mutually fulfilling one another. We will build a sacred connection between us, a connection of love and giving, and through it we will begin to feel a flow of new, spiritual life between us, as it is written: “A man and a woman, if they are worthy, the Shechina (Divinity) is between them.” We will become as one, and within the love between us, we will also raise our children.
In practical terms, it is recommended that the whole family sit together at predetermined times for connection workshops. It is worthwhile to prepare something tasty to eat and drink so that the atmosphere is joyful. We enter a state in which there are no adults and children, no big and small; we are all equal, we are all friends. We talk about all kinds of things without arguing or contradicting one another, with the aim of connecting. We try to reach a shared inner flow in which each person wants to complement the others, support them, strengthen them, and fill them with everything good. Each person speaks in turn and shares something that is important to them with everyone else. It could be about their relationships with friends, something they saw on television, a game they took part in, or any other experience, positive or negative. What it is about does not matter very much.
Most importantly is for the others to enter a state of listening, make themselves small in relation to the speaker, without criticism, and try to feel them wholeheartedly, what they are thinking, what they want, what they are suffering from, and what they lack. Then the next person speaks, and we all try to feel them as well. Each time, the person speaking becomes the important one for us, and we all make ourselves smaller in relation to them in order to feel them. In this way, a mutual connection gradually develops between us. The feeling of connection is built through speaking and listening, by creating an atmosphere of warmth, care, mutuality, patience, and consideration.
As parents leading the process of building the new family, we must set a good example together. Children are extremely sensitive to this. Suddenly, they will begin to open up, communicate, and connect. And the connection of love that we create between us is what, for all of us, will be called “family.”
Based on “New Life 203 – The Family Unit in Crisis” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
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