Where Can We Be Free?

We are controlled by laws of nature.

There is a general force of nature, and two opposite forces — bestowal and reception — extend from it.

We exist between these forces, and both of these qualities affect us.

Then, the question arises: How do we develop under the influence of these forces? Where do we act? Where are we free? How do we accumulate and correlate these two forces within ourselves? How can we build ourselves out of them?

How could we act if we do not have freewill? Who would we be? Would we just be like robots, always under control?

These are the questions that the wisdom of Kabbalah engages in: how we receive these two forces in an optimal balance, and with their help, shape ourselves so as to resemble the very laws of nature, to arise and reach equivalence of form with the force of bestowal in nature. These very laws gave us the opportunity to control the pace of our progress in accepting them upon ourselves.

That is the point of our freewill.

How could we act if we do not have freewill? Who would we be? Would we just be like robots, always under control?

Until now, we have always been under control. What does it mean?

Nature as if injects a drop of egoism–the desire to enjoy at others’ expense–into us, and then it does so a little more, and a little more again, and we then get the impetus to move toward all kinds of egoistic goals. The more our egoism inflates, the more we become willing to move to increasingly gain at the expense of others. Nature constantly squeezes the syringe into us until it eventually infuses us with the full amount of egoism.

Our era is characterized by the syringe of egoism having become completely injected into us, with no more egoism left to inject. That is why we have nowhere left to run.

Our era is characterized by the syringe of egoism having become completely injected into us, with no more egoism left to inject. That is why we have nowhere left to run.

Where do we head from here? What do we do?

Moreover, egoism has become global and integral. In the beginning, we felt good because we reached egoistic global connections in the world and thought that everything would be fine. However, when such connections started depending on everyone, we turned out to be nature’s opposite.

At this juncture, we find ourselves with a major dilemma, and we need to work out what we do about it. Where our fully-inflated egoism coupled with our tightening global connections brings us to increasing problems around the world, today we require a new form of connection-enriching education that would have the ability to guide us on how to change our egoistic connections to altruistic ones. That is the key to a shift to a harmonious and peaceful world.