Connected by Nature S Law

Connected—by Nature’s Law

Michael Laitman, PhD

Connected—by Nature’s Law

Published by ARI Publishers

1057 Steeles Avenue West, Suite 532, Toronto, ON, M2R 3X1, Canada

2009 85th Street #51, Brooklyn, New York, 11214, USA

Printed in Canada

No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

ISBN: 978-1-897448-81-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013934488

Translation: Chaim Ratz

Associate Editor: Mary Miesem

Copy Editor: Claire Gerus

Layout: Baruch Khovov

Cover: Galina Kaplunovich, Inna Smirnova

Executive Editor: Benzion Girtz

Printing and Post Production: Uri Laitman

FIRST EDITION: JANUARY 2014

First printing

Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction: Modern-Day Slaves

Chapter 1: A Crisis or Rebirth

Chapter 2: From Blindly Groping to Conscious Development

Chapter 3: Man as a Product of the Environment

Chapter 4: One Law Affects All

Chapter 5: All Tied Up

Chapter 6: As Soon as We Feel It

Chapter 7: Work and Employment in the New World

Chapter 8: Another Form of Development

Chapter 9: The End of Ego

Chapter 10: Make the World Prosper Again

Chapter 11: From the Love of Man to the Love of Nature

Chapter 12: Overuse of the Power of Reception Causes the Crisis

Chapter 13: From Hate to Love

Chapter 14: The Woman in the Connected World

Chapter 15: Prisons as Education Centers

Afterword: A New Engine for Life

About the Author

About the ARI Institute

Further Reading

Contact Information

Foreword

Our lives revolve around our connections and our relationships. In the end, our lives reflect our feelings toward each other. The changes in our lives lead us to understand the importance of our interconnections. The more we tap into that understanding and cultivate it, the more we will achieve mutual love.

By focusing on the connections between us, we can experience a new reality in a new world. In this way, we will actualize the good, peaceful, and balanced world that we desire.

We must be alert to what is happening between us. Inadvertently, we’ve often found ourselves tied in connections of self-centeredness and hatred, unable to tolerate each other even in our own families. Our current way of life is removing us from the reality of love and mutual consideration.

All our attempts to work out problems and crises using familiar tools have failed;now, we must acquire the know-how and the wisdom by which we can develop new sensations and new interconnections. Life is leading us to examine our connections and rebuild them. In a way, it is a rebirth into a new reality.

Connected—by Nature’s Lawwill develop within us a new perspective from which we will try to resolve problems at a deeper level—one of interconnection with others. In resolving each problem, we will achieve love, concessions, and consideration between ourselves and others, just like a loving family.

If we open our eyes,

If we open our hearts,

We will feel how we are all connected

Because we, and the connectionsbetween us,

Are the most important things in life.

Introduction: Modern-Day Slaves

For a person in 21st century society, work is the center of life. Society is what created that situation—so much so that even our free time, as far as vacations and social activities are concerned, are often initiated and managed by our workplaces. Some of these activities are organized by our workplaces to strengthen the connections between workers. These include such activities as trainings, fun days, trips, cultural events, and even family-supportive initiatives like daycare centers and summer camps. This is partly why workaholism has become such a prevalent addiction, especially among those in the middle class.

In the past, people didn’t feel they were enslaved by their jobs. They felt much freer compared to our “modern-day slavery.” Today the bulk of our time is spent at work, getting to it and returning from it. Work has become our primary activity, andone that takes over our lives.

When we meet someone, we immediately want to know his or her occupation, and we evaluate that person accordingly. We don’t ask, “What do you like to do?” “What do you enjoy?” Instead, we ask, “What do you do for a living?” since work holds such a significant role in our lives. For this reason, a great concern for many of us is whether or not we will be fired, and if so, whether we will be able to find another job.

Today, our focus is almost entirely on our jobs. We’re afraid of retirement, afraid that we won’t know what to do with all that free time. We have no idea what it means to be free, nor have we any real desire to be so.

Even once we are at home after work, and even during vacations, we keep working, checking our emails and making calls to our work places.Modern communication helps us stay in touch with the system, keeping us captive to our working lives.

Over the last several decades, our approach to our lives has become such that we cannot see ourselves as free. “Free” should mean that we limit the time dedicated to work to three hours a day, during which we engage in what is necessary to maintain our society. In this way, we can provide for our society’s needs after we have provided for our own. The rest of the time should be used for enjoying other things.

And yet, we cannot perceive this as possible. We think that if we don’t work, we’ll have nothing to do, yet nothing could be farther from the truth.

This mindset of work, work, work does not favor us as human beings. We are ruining and depleting Earth’s resources, and we are immersed in this pattern much the way children become immersed in their games until an adult comes and pulls them away from it, saying, “Enough, you need to move on to other activities.”

Alas, we cannot stop playing; we are addicted. The world and public opinion have “hooked” us on this game. Modern society has created a reality based on limited and purposeful connections, whose aim is to achieve very limited goals. Alongside this experience of limited connections, we have begun to feel a sense of meaninglessness in our lives. Thisis creating a crisis in every realm of our personal and social lives.

Today, we’re at the threshold of a revolution. The gap between the environment we have createdand Nature’s imperativesis taking its toll. New conditions, both within us and in our environment, are pressing us with growing intensity, changing us from withinand disintegrating the oppressive patterns of human society. Nature is pushing us to reach the next stage of our evolution as humans, to come to view life from a different perspective.

The reality in which work takes over most of our time is about to change. When that happens, people will not sit idly by, but will begin searching for another meaning to life. This is when we will truly learn what it means to “be human.” As work hours shrink to the necessary minimum for sustenance, we will fill our lives with engagements appropriate to our level as human beings, engagements where we feel our souls.

This is a radical change that implies reorganization of the entire human society. This change is mandatory; we will have to go through this processdue to pressures from within and without, or through awareness and initiative to immediately begin paving the way toward our new destination. Then, our perception of life will change, our economy will change, and industries will shrink and shift from over-production to producing solely what is needed to sustain us.

Work will become nothing more than a necessary tool for our survival, and our perception of the growing unemployment will change. Our free time will be channeled toward the primary purpose of our lives—to answer the question, “Why are we here in this life?” This question will arise in the majority of humanity, and will become the issue that directs our lives and all of our engagements.

Our goal now is to set up the infrastructure for an alternative environment that offers another avenue by which wewill conduct our relationships. For example, in our future society, when I meet someone I won’t ask about his or her job or profession (that person’s “master”).It won’t matter whether it’s in hi-tech, banking, ormechanics. Instead, I’ll be interested in what that person studies, his or her areasof interest, and the social circles to which he or she belongs.

In other words, I’ll relate to the person in front of me as a human being, rather than as a slave indentured to a“master,”a.k.a., ajob. The job will lose its status as a person’s ruler because people will engage only in what is essential to society.

To adapt to this future image, we need to imagine it and plan how we will shift from the current image into the projected one. We need to change from within, which is no simple task. It will entail revolutionizing our perceptions, sensations, and approaches to reality—a redesign of all our thoughtpatterns. There is no greater revolution than this one.

Such a change affects the essence of life, the reason why we get up in the morning and go to sleep at night, the thoughts that run through our heads during the day, our achievements, and how others relate to us. Even the structure of society will change accordingly, and of course, the education system will evolve into a radically different one.

While the nature of the change is still unknown to most of us, it is nonetheless our future. The small steps we initiate preparing for it, gradually moving toward it, will allow us to see the direction of the shift and understand and welcome the process that is bound to happen.

It is similar to a child walking into kindergarten for the first time. He doesn’t know what he has entered. He doesn’t know that it’s a part of an entire education system that will accompany him through the rest of his childhood years. Similarly, we are not yet aware of the global system and the processes that are about to unfold.

Nature demands that we be in “equivalence of form,” meaning “in balance.” As Nature is circular, a complete and harmonious system in all its actions, so should human society be built—circular and synchronized in all its parts. We will all benefit from being part of a balanced state, and the right connections between us will grant us “Nature’s blessing.”

“Connecting properly” means applying an integral form toevery realm of life, including education, culture, family life, our attitude toward Nature, and to every realm of life. This is the only way we can be saved from the blows about to hit us, whose threat we can already feel under the strain of the global crises in ecology, economy, family values, and society.

Instead, a whole new perspective will open to us, putting us on a course toward resolving the major crisis we are in today. After all, the crisis is only the contradiction between the way we are managing ourselves and the essence of Nature, which presents itself as integral at every level of our lives.

This reality of Nature has only been revealed in the last century. Prior to that, the crisis was not comprehensive, but appeared to be part of a gradual process inthe development and thriving of human society. It is only lately that we’ve begun to notice that Nature is closing in on us, presenting itself as an integral network, and presenting our inability to connect to that network.

Humanity’s driveshave become opposite to those of Nature, and we now sense that contrast as a crisis. This is the essence of the problem. The solution is simple: we need to balance ourselves with Nature, align ourselves with it. This is the goal of the studies we are now offering. It’s becoming clear to us that, despite our sophistication, Nature will win, and that understanding is growing everclearer in view of the problems we’re seeing in all the systems we have built, which we can now barely manage.

In the coming years, unemployment will spread throughout the world. The unemployed will know that chances of finding a job are slim, and detachment from the job market will lead to frustration and disillusionment with life.

Yet, this process will take place alongside a vast change about to happen, in which free time will become the most qualitative, and where the unemployed will learn the real “humanities”—that is, what it means to be a human being. All of humanity will learn the new information that will help people move through the next stage of our evolution.

With the help of integral study materials, we will understand our situation, the state of the world, and the reasons for everything that is happening. Without that knowledge it is impossible to reach the human level. The difference between a human being and any other animal is that man has consciousness: we understand and consciously and willingly partakeof life. We know where we live, how we’re operated, and how we should operate. In the end, we will learn to act as part of an integral humanity because reality dictates it.

The frameworks of study will become the new frameworks for everyone for an unlimited amount of time. People will treat these frameworks as a job, but unlike our current feelings about work, we will find in these studies, like children, constant rejuvenation.

The integral laws will have a strong impact on our lives. For example, a business that will operate without aspiration to sustain us will be treated as an infection that must be removed. That is, the ecological system dictates that we keep only what is necessary. This is a new approach, unlike the present one that says, “I feel like doing something new because I think I can sell it.” Instead, we will adopt the opposite approach by which the less we produce and the less we sell, the better. As a result, everything will change.

In the near future, there will bea steep incline in unemployment, food shortages, and other problems stemming from the ecological problems we’ve created. High unemployment will invoke riots, leading to the disintegration of government and then, to anarchy. Governments will have no choice but to collaborate and divide the existing resources. They will have to implement an innovative global plan, similar to the one we are presenting here. Otherwise, human society will collapse altogether and a world war will ensue.

In the global division of resources, man’s economic participation in society will take place only according to society’s essential needs. People’s schedules will be managed over the Internetso that they will work for three or so hours to satisfy for their basic needs, and dedicate the majority of their time, say five hours a day, to academic studies, which will count as work.

The future unemployed individual will not be considered an outcast, but will make a decent salary and will be rewarded for study time,to which he or she will dedicate the bulk of the time. This will assure the person’s future contribution and investment in the development of human society.

Our timeframes will not change compared to what we’ve been accustomed to, but the content of our time,as well as the type of work we perform,will change. There will no longer be so much emphasis on work,such as when people thought about how to profit and succeed. Instead, the new framework will serve us as “gentle support,” making certain we are not thrown out into the street, but can continue to make a decent living.

Every month, millions of people are losing their jobs with no substitutes in sight. They are often sent for needless trainings. But in the new framework of life, employment will not be offered to the unemployed, as is the case today. Instead, they will be offered a new approach to the world, one that paves our way to the next stage of our becoming human, becoming humane.

The problem is that today everyone wants to be aslave, except for a few tycoons who enjoy their fictitious freedom and free time. People feel that being preoccupied with something fills up their lives. Otherwise, with what will they fill them?

A person who seeks to be fulfilled searches for something to help realize his or her potential.It can be education, culture, or technology, but people want to be special, experts in something, to feel safe and secure. They believe that work will provide them with satisfaction and form a social environment for them. We are all searching for the same things.

Therefore, people will have many optionsfrom which they can develop in this new, integral living: communication, human relations, hi-tech, and anything that can be used to connect people into the system.

The integral system requires any profession that can help people train and adapt to this system. People canthen become productive and creative with everything they learn and wish to do. Along with the new studies, a person immediately begins to ascend in his awareness, in the general perception.