Overcoming The Individualistic Barrier

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Even if we gather all the information about the development of the crisis and the rapidly changing world, most people aren’t able to perceive it. They don’t want to hear it or to change anything, and they continue to live as before.

Answer: This is natural; they exist in their individual egoism. All this information is foreign to them, which is why they shut themselves off from it. They have, if not aggression, at least a defense mechanism against something that isn’t simply new but completely opposite to their internal properties.

For that reason, we need to choose a very soft, simple, and, perhaps even in some ways, a playful approach to entice and engage them, and to clothe the integral knowledge in attractive forms.

These can be videos, movies, and various acting scenarios that illustrate the history of humanity and tell about our current states, not directly scientifically through tables and graphs, but conveying the information emotionally in a way that is close to a person using examples from life’s situations. Through that, they will learn.

People perceive information quite differently through the examples of others rather than themselves. This approach allows one to overcome one’s personal barrier; he or she learns from this and gradually begins to understand that what is said in general is talking about him or herself.

All sorts of explanations in the form of movies, videos, and theatre skits are discussed. Here, a person gradually adapts everything to himself and realizes that this is talking about him, about our world, our life, our lack of correspondence to the external universal human and civilization systems. So, here, we need to find a new form of approaching people.

For the first time in our lives, we’re encountering a teaching that goes “against” a person. Previously, we always were taught: “You need to know this in order to succeed, to be strong, knowledgeable, sensible, to overcome, rise up, and win over the others.” And now, we’re teaching that a person needs to be the same as the others: “You need to be connected to them on the same level; the most important thing is not to be above them, but to be together with them.” In other words, here, we’re basically playing against our egoism, which means that we need to be much wiser and more cunning than our egoism in order to outplay it.

In principle, the integral method is “help against you,” that is, against your egoism, and nothing can be done. We must understand that the same approach must be taken here as with a small child who needs to be taught things that he has absolutely no desire to accept, that is to approach him with some alternative methods. Gradually, he himself will realize, “This is exactly how I need to behave; this is how I need to relate to something.”
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing”, 5/20/12

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