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According to the Academy of the Hebrew Language, the word for psychiatry is “medicine of the soul” (“Refuat HaNefesh“), and it refers to the attempts to treat mental disorders and rehabilitate people who suffer from mental illness. But what exactly is a healthy soul? What is likely to happen to mental health in the near future? Also, maybe society is somewhat mentally and emotionally unwell as well?
A quick disclaimer before continuing: When I speak here about the soul, I mean the popular sense of the word, which usually refers to a person’s mental and emotional faculties. What the soul truly is, in a precise definition, is another very vast question.
A healthy soul is essentially a way of looking at ourselves and our surroundings in a way that is considered “normal” in our society. A sick soul, on the other hand, is when there are distortions in perception.
Exaggerated feelings of fears, anxieties, disappointments, and depressions do not yet constitute mental illness. Mental illness is when there are malfunctions in the mental system, in the brain’s “software,” which lead to distortions in the perception of ourselves and reality.
We might suddenly have hallucinations and encounter a breakage. We could ask ourselves whether we are here or not. We could hear voices. We could experience splits in time, space, or in general, that we and/or the world divides into parts. It might suddenly seem to us that someone relates to us in a certain way, but it is not really them. Instead, there are several characters within them, or in other words, distortions in perception of reality.
Mental illnesses have been around for a long time, and unfortunately to this day there is no complete cure. In many cases, mental problems are hereditary, and even if a disease has not yet manifested in a certain person, there is no guarantee that nothing will emerge later.
Other than people who receive official diagnoses, medication, treatment, and supervision, there are those who suffer from various mental problems but are not officially recognized as ill. They might seem a little odd, and they might also successfully hide it.
While medication and therapy can somewhat balance us, with the main concern being that we do not harm ourselves or others, we can never be completely sure that we will not suffer some kind of breakdown. This is because our mental and emotional systems are under enormous pressures and constant turbulence from the media and social networks that regularly influence us.
To seek a comprehensive solution to all forms of mental and emotional imbalances, we need to gain awareness of the special program that develops nature, and us within it. It is a very delicate program, and if we strive to learn it, we will open up a whole new harmonious and peaceful world.
We study this developmental program in the wisdom of Kabbalah. One of its topics is the “records” (Heb. Reshimot), i.e., a chain of data that functions as our inner memory. The records surface and actualize one after another, as cause and effect, and we grow through them. These records include our future forms of development, and their mechanics resemble somewhat the genetic system.
The records determine our entire lives, and if we had access to them, we would know all the states we need to undergo. Moreover, if we could penetrate inward to humanity’s records, with the understanding of humanity as a single whole, we would know how we will develop at every moment, day, month, year, until each of our lives comes to an end.
We all live in a single network, a kind of giant computer that we can call “the system of nature.” This network closes us in together and brings us endless influences. Our bodies, brains, hearts, nervous system, and many other systems, are all completely interconnected.
Yet, in our corporeal vision, we seem far detached from nature’s integrality. The still, vegetative, animate, and human levels are bound together as different parts of a single integral mechanism. The more we learn about this mechanism and its law of development, the more we will understand where we came from, where we are headed, and how we should behave in order to suffer less.
Meanwhile, humanity is in a very unhealthy evolutionary stage. Lots of people today want to shut themselves away, lose themselves in drug addictions, and we live with constant anxiety. At the same time, key decision-makers act without understanding where evolutionary forces are pushing us.
We could say that we have a general problem of perception, a distortion in our vision. Our world is becoming ever more interconnected, and mutual dependence is rising, but the human ego also soars and it prevents consideration of anyone other than the person themselves. It destroys marriages, families, workplace relationships, society, the economy, nations, and the ecology. Ego games can sink the boat we all live on, and yet, we find ourselves incapable of stopping ourselves or calming ourselves down from its impulses and demands. Therefore, we see that it is not only certain individuals who are mentally ill, but the whole of society suffers from mental illness.
The key divide is as follows: On nature’s behalf, we are completely interconnected and interdependent in a single system, but our attitudes to each other are broken. We prioritize individual self-interests over the benefit of others and nature. Accordingly, we fail to develop improved and optimal connections to each other and nature, which are necessary to reach a balanced, harmonious, and peaceful state for humanity, society, and thus also each and every person that lives within this grand system.
In other words, interconnectedness and interdependence exists automatically in nature. We, by contrast, have been given the opportunity to develop interconnectedness and interdependence consciously in our attitudes to each other. We do so through learning about the integral system we live in, examining our place in this system, raising awareness of the precise place we need to apply ourselves in order to impact a truly positive shift, and to press on that point, i.e., to make the major choice that will correct and invert our egoistic nature.
At such a fateful juncture, the method of connection—the wisdom of Kabbalah—can help, teaching us how to build integral connections. We can then measure the extent of connection we generate against the strength of the ego that resides below our newly-developed attitudes of mutual consideration and love. In the wisdom of Kabbalah, we describe such progress in five main degrees, called Nefesh, Ruach, Neshama, Haya, and Yechida.
When we learn how to positively connect, we will discover the healthy soul in the full sense of the word. We will see the world as one whole, i.e., everyone connected in one great soul. The myriad divisions, illnesses, and limitations that we currently perceive will vanish from our perception, and we will feel creation as it truly is: one, united, and filled with light and love.
Based on “New Life 93 – Mental Health” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman, Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.