Psychology As A Mirror Reflecting The Development Of Ego

Dr. Michael LaitmanHuman evolution occurs as a result of the development of the ego. By existing within inanimate, vegetative, and animate nature, a person constantly and dynamically develops under the influence of the egoistic desires that overcome the simple primitive desires and become more and more complex.

The desires are divided into physical ones for food, sex, and family, and into human ones for wealth, respect, control, and knowledge, and spiritual needs.

If we divide the time axis on which humanity develops into sections, then since about the 5th century BC until the 5th century AD people aspired for wealth. Of course, the exact time is debatable since it all depends on which civilizations we are looking at.

From the 5th century until the 15th century, the desire for power and respect grew. The Middle Ages isn’t just a period of time in which humanity froze, but a period of deep internal development that is typified by very serious events, such as the Crusades, etc.

The next stage in the development of the desire is from the 15th century until the 20th century and it is typified by the yearning for knowledge.

After that, everything began to wane and from the beginning of the 20th century we started a new era, the era of the conscious necessity of attaining the meaning of life.

Although we come across the first psychological quests in the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt, Plato, and the ancient Greeks, it was all on a level that doesn’t yet touch the inner essence of man, since it wasn’t revealed in ordinary people yet and not in great personalities that could be studied.

Only after fulfilling the physical desires and the human ones did we enter the area of the spiritual needs that belong to a person’s soul, which means not the way he lives, what he invents, and how he manages in life, but the essence of his existence, his personality, and the meaning of his development. Then the serious question regarding knowledge appeared. Here psychology was born. It happened at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, but on the whole it all leads to our times.

After the first phase of the development of psychology, its gradual waning and the disappointment in its abilities began. The shift from research and new discoveries to mere psychological work made people feel tranquil instead of showing them the process of their development and raising and developing them.

By understanding how much we don’t understand this process, by perceiving to what extent we don’t perceive the goal of our development, psychology seems to have turned to a narrow practical area, shrinking and limiting itself to practical applications, limited by the training of different experts, by publishing different articles, and by calming people using different methods. The result was that psychologists began to serve people instead of taking people and raising them to the next level of development, which was actually expected of psychology.
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” 5/24/12

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