Description

Our true environment is one of total interconnection with others, but we don׳t feel this interconnection. Why? What should we do about it?

Transcript

Our Environment: The Collective Soul





Our environment consists of all of the stages in our development prior to where we are, which include everything that went before, and also the situation that we find ourselves in at the moment. So let’s just go over what our situation is in terms of where we came from.



In our original first state as we were created in the creation of a creature, the four phases of Direct Light, in this condition, there was one soul in relation to the Creator, with no boundaries on that connection. This is the collective soul, Adam ha Rishon, and actually, this is the state we still live in, except that we have lost any sensation of our true condition.



As this state was lowered through a number of phases by the force of development, which is the development of desire and also the development of the will to receive rather than the will to bestow, it arrived at the independent desire of the creature.



Now, this is reflected in our experience this way. This state is experienced rather as a kind of a matrix. A lattice that contains six hundred thousand independent parts, individual souls, all related to each other. The relationship, one to another, and the influence between them, is enormous. They are all interrelated actually, in the way that they were related in their original state, but the awareness of this relationship is lost to each of the individual parts.



Anything that is done in one of these parts—which is an individual desire—is felt through this interconnection in every other part. That is, there is an influence, an enormous influence that is felt throughout the entire system given the condition or the inner action of a desire of any one of these. So nothing inside here actually functions as an individual. We perceive that it does. This is our sensation of it as a result of the hiddenness of our real state from us.



And rather than feeling the interconnection, what we really feel is something more like this—that a person exists independent of others, and is a user and an exploiter of others. But really the condition that we feel is more like this (I’ll do it like that)—connected to nothing. But the truth is that this collective soul is our environment and it puts tremendous pressure on us in the form of our society—societal pressures; the way that everything in our environment affects us. So much of what we feel (and we’ll see how much) comes from this and not from this.



So, as you can see, we are influenced from all sides—inside and outside—and yet freedom is still achievable even in the material world, in this lifetime, and not in some other world as most religions say. But it takes a very special effort, and the effort is to rise above our nature.