A good year (Shana Tova) comes about first from understanding the previous year’s shortcomings.
We then go through a time of introspection. In general, human society is starting to realize that a good life is further and further out of reach. When we start seeing that our egoistic form of development—where we each try making a better life for ourselves at the expense of others and nature—leads to a growing entanglement of troubles and crises, then we reach a state called the “realization of evil.” Thanks to such a realization, we come to see that the egoistic way we live our lives is false, which is a very important step toward the truth.
We then have to find a solution. If we discern our egoistic modus operandi as the problem we need to fix, then the solution is in rising above our egoistic approach to life: that we shift from prioritizing self-benefit over benefiting others to its opposite—the benefit of others over self-benefit.
Therefore, in order to experience a good year, we should set as our goal a positive connection among each other, with mutual support, encouragement and care in our ties.
The more we develop an understanding and feeling of our true state as a single, global, interconnected and interdependent system, with us as the system’s key parts, then similar to how cells and organs function to uphold an organism’s health and well-being, we too would start thinking more and more about the benefit of others and the whole system of humanity and nature we live in.
The more we understand that our egoistic approach to each other and to nature destroys us, then the readier we become to rise above our egoistic goals, and place a higher goal of a harmonious and peaceful connection among all people and nature before us.
We will then start feeling the need for help from a power that is beyond our human powers, since our human powers are all self-aimed. We will find how we cannot “fight fire with fire,” so to speak, and that without the help from a higher power, intelligence and consciousness, we are doomed.
A good year is thus one in which we will invite the positive force dwelling in nature to come out from its concealment, due to our need and request for its help, and then feel that force fill the space between us. When we genuinely desire to reach positive connections of mutual support, encouragement and care among us together with feeling the impossibility to achieve it with the egoistic powers at our disposal, then we develop what is called a “vessel” for the reception of the positive loving and bestowing force of nature to enter into and upgrade our connections. Such an upgrade from egoistic to altruistic connections that are balanced with nature’s force of love and bestowal will then grant us access to a whole new harmonious and peaceful life.
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