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Helping people sometimes turns out badly if those helping do not understand the laws of nature at work. For instance, a common mistake is that people try to help others by aiming to improve people’s external conditions without inner education. As a result, people’s egoistic desires increase, i.e., their desires to enjoy for self-benefit at others’ expense, which ultimately leads to negative outcomes.
There is a poignant example of this situation in a story about a young man who grew up in harsh conditions in a remote Chinese village, became a millionaire, and out of a sincere desire to help his fellow villagers, he built them new homes with warm toilets and bathrooms. But instead of gratitude and peace, he encountered a negative outcome that he did not expect: quarreling, demands, lawsuits, resentment over who deserves what, and even pressure to provide larger homes. The millionaire became shocked, disappointed, and nearly fell into depression.
His disappointment is understandable, because he simply did not understand how human egoism is built.
People cannot “calm down” just because they received better living conditions. It does not work that way. The moment people’s external conditions are improved, their consciousness rises, and their egoistic desire to enjoy themselves at the expense of others and nature expands. They suddenly begin comparing themselves to others, measuring who received more, who deserves more, whose toilet is warmer, and whose bathtub is bigger. In other words, the millionaire unintentionally let the devil out of the box. When our ego grows beyond our inner development, we can no longer cope with it. Then we begin gnawing at each other and, ultimately, we become ready to destroy each other.
Does this mean we should never change people’s conditions? It does. Under no circumstances should we change people’s conditions abruptly. External conditions must be improved only very carefully, only according to the population’s inner development, and only together with a correct ideology. According to Kabbalah, progress must go hand in hand with education and inner correction. Otherwise, nothing good will come of it. Even if everyone has bread, they will feel even more unhappy, and eventually they will invent bigger and bigger weapons until they destroy one another. This is exactly how it works.
Why give someone a warm toilet and a bathroom if the next day they begin looking at their neighbor enviously? Yesterday they lived and accepted life as it was, and today their wife demands a wardrobe, then a bigger wardrobe, and then a second closet, because there is no end to egoism. Desire keeps growing, and what was a blessing becomes a curse. Only the development of our inner level should determine our material status.
So what is the way out? How can people live well and be happy? It is evidently not through technological progress and external comfort. Humanity already has more or less normal conditions, and yet egoism has grown so much that people do not even want children anymore. They say it is because the world is terrible, but the truth is simpler: they think only about themselves. Why should I invest in children? In the past, children ensured the future, supported their parents, gave them continuity. Today egoism wants none of this. It wants comfort until death.
Technological progress is ultimately not working to our favor. It confuses us, traps us inside external comforts, and we begin to live our life inside a “warm toilet,” thinking this is happiness. However, besides this, we have nothing, i.e., no purpose, inner fulfillment, or a meaningful understanding of life.
So what should the Chinese millionaire have done if he truly wanted people to feel good? He should have opened schools. He should have invested not in houses, but in education. First a school, then a university next to it, and most importantly, education that teaches people how to become integral elements in the world: how nature works, how the world turns, and how a person must turn together with it, so as not to violate harmony. This is a long process, but it is the only one that impacts a positive change in a human being.
This is because the real correction is not to change the world around a person, but to change the person himself through the right environment. When a person changes, we will see a completely different generation.
This is how good can be brought to the world. Only education, and only to the extent that people are ready to accept it. Education toward the integral person, toward conscious connection with nature, with others, and with the Creator. This must be instilled from early childhood.
What, then, is real progress? It is not spaceships plowing the universe. What for? Real progress is in relationships between people and in penetrating the depth of integral nature. There, we discover everything. We do not need to leave his village. We soar through the universe inwardly. We understand what is happening, why we exist, who created us, and for what purpose. We fulfill this purpose and feel ourselves eternal and perfect, so complete that even the transition from life to death is no longer frightening.
This is what we truly want: inner comfort. External comfort can never be enough, because it only awakens comparison, envy, conflict, revolution, and hatred. Inner comfort is when we achieve balance with ourselves and with nature. Then nothing threatens us.
In short, the millionaire made a mistake. It was not because his intention was bad, but because he improved external conditions without correcting the inner human being.
Based on KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman on January 29, 2020. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.