Teaching To Care About The World

Dr. Michael LaitmanEach of us has a predisposition for performing actions that are unpleasant to those around us. We can divide right or wrong acts into one’s actions in relation to oneself and actions in relation to society. Naturally, we have to teach a person not to cause self-harm, not to hurt himself physically, because while self-preservation mechanisms exist within us, destructive impulses are present as well.

In the same manner, we need to treat the environment with care and concern. The environment is primarily the still, vegetative, and animate nature in which we live and which we need to preserve. It’s necessary to teach a person the correct attitude towards ecology since our food, climate, and our entire existence depend on it. We live inside nature, and its vegetative, animate, and even the still parts are of great importance to us as we receive everything from them. This is why we need to teach a person how to treat their ecological environment with great care.

And second, we need to teach a person to relate correctly to human society, to exert a positive influence on it because in the end, it comes back to him and creates a good atmosphere around him.

Thus, man’s relationship to society and society’s relation to man are the most important aspects of upbringing. Everything else is just professional skills that we need to give a person so he or she will be useful to others and make an honest living for himself or herself.

What we lack in our development is mainly the ability to give a young person and even ourselves, adults, such an upbringing, such an outlook on life, whereby wanting to change our situation, we would take care of society that can change us for the better.

As we said before, a person isn’t capable of improving his life by himself. This can only be done by the environment, which obligates me, supports, and changes my system of values and priorities. Because of that, new desires appear in me and I set new goals for myself.

This is why a person’s future depends only on the choice and creation of his or her environment, especially in our global and integral generation that is entirely interconnected. Any person in the world determines what will happen with everybody else. If some country starts treating another badly, this changes the entire life of the latter, and it needs to defend itself and care for its safety.

This mutual interdependence will force us to build and shape a system of global upbringing. Above all, in the process of this upbringing we need to teach ourselves and others to understand that our future depends entirely on our environment.

A question arises whether a person has any free will and possibility of choice at all? Can he actually do, accomplish, and realize anything the way he wants? And we see that he doesn’t exactly succeed in that.

If so far I developed thanks to my intrinsic properties, the genes with which I was born and the surrounding environment that formed me (parents, kindergarten, and school), then going forward I, a grown up, can choose how I can change as well. But the realization of my transformation always occurs through the help of society due to the fact that I choose and structure my order of preferences and decide whether it’s worth to be under the influence of a given society. This is why I have freedom of choice, but this choice is only exercised in choosing the environment.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” Episode 3, 12/29/11

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Making A Stranger Your Own
A Greenhouse For Humanity
The World Through The Prism Of The Environment

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