What lifted humanity out of the animal world was the development of the ego. Kabbalah defines the ego as a desire to enjoy for self-benefit alone at the expense of others. With an egoistic desire that steadily grew stronger, we built an extensive civilization. Eventually, an interconnected world emerged where everyone is interdependent, yet people are increasingly unable to tolerate one another. In such a reality, if we do not learn to function through connection and complementarity, like parts of the same mechanism, like siblings in a healthy family, no one will have a positive future.
Prayer, in the deepest sense of the word, is inner work of adapting the egoistic nature within us to the interconnected nature that is closing in on us from the outside, and to which we must advance. “Do not do unto others what is hateful to you,” mutual consideration, mutual responsibility, and “love your neighbor as yourself.” In order to live in such a society, we first need to correct our own heart.
In the work of prayer, we turn toward our heart, examine it, speak to it, and soften it. We want it to become a little more sensitive, open, receptive, and giving. We want it to become like cotton that can absorb everyone into itself and, in turn, pour goodness out into the world. We want it to work emotionally with other hearts in a reciprocity similar to that which exists between the heart and the other organs in a living body.
In general, the heart symbolizes the totality of a person’s desires, and it is within the heart that we experience the world. Our picture of reality is formed as something unknown enters through the five senses and is received within the general desire called the “heart.” By nature, this desire is egoistic, and through it a person perceives what may benefit them or what may harm them. Beyond that, the heart is unable to perceive. Therefore, opening the heart means removing the egoistic filter that covers it. It is a kind of shell that prevents us from feeling the broad and enlightened world that already exists around us now—the entirety of reality.
The work of prayer is to expand our feelings as much as possible, to widen our range of perception, and to work on the blocked heart so that it may open. We must examine why we perceive the world in a particular way and how we can come to perceive it differently.
The final form of our development is to become united with everyone, connected ״as one man with one heart.” Through this, we will exist in friendship, equality, and balance with one another and with nature. By developing a desire to benefit others and advance to greater harmony with reality as a whole, we will gain the ability to determine for ourselves what the next moment will bring. In such a state, the future will no longer frighten us. Every moment will lie open before us, spread out like a map. Human beings can and should attain this level of development.
The first person to teach this was Abraham the Babylonian, the same seeker who discovered that all of nature is one unified system. He discovered that a single force operates throughout reality and pushes us to become united in love as well. In his time, there was a major eruption of egoism, described in the story of the Tower of Babel. People stopped understanding one another and began to fight. “Half the world fell by the sword there,” says the Midrash (Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, Chapter 24).
Abraham tried to explain how to rise above separation and pride, and those who learned from him the method of connection eventually became a nation of their own, the people of Israel. It was a unique group that engaged in prayer, in correcting the heart from egoism to love, and thereby adapted itself to the single force, the nature of which is love and bestowal. As a result of this adaptation, the single upper force became revealed among the members of the nation.
When were we destroyed? It was when great hatred erupted among us, i.e., when we turned to egoistic desires for power, status, and control. At that point, the single force disappeared from our perception, and this has been our condition for the past 2,000 years. Only if we work on opening the heart and connect to each other through love will we develop a detector capable of receiving it again.
At present, human relationships are highly egoistic and exploitative, and therefore we all suffer. As we continue to develop, we will discover that people do not harm one another only through actions but also through intentions. When the heart is filled with negativity, everything unfolds negatively. Eventually, it will become clear to us that until everyone thinks well of one another, no one will have a good life in this world. This realization will lead humanity to learn the work of prayer, that original work of softening the heart and developing love.
“For My house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples,” says the prophetic vision (Isaiah 56:7). This is the advanced state in which all the inhabitants of the world will seek only that the force of love will dwell among everyone. Such a mutual connection will be called the “House of God,” and within it we will discover the one force, the general force of nature, the force that from the very beginning created everything in order to enable the created being to become like it, eternal and perfect.
From the Sources:
“Prayer is the work of the heart. This means that since a person’s heart is, by its root, the desire to receive, and it must be transformed so that it desires only to bestow and not to receive, he has a great task in transforming it. … For this he must pray, seeing how deeply immersed he is in self-love.”
—Kabbalist Baruch Shalom Ashlag (RABASH)
Based on “New Life 176 – Prayer And Human Development” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.