I may have imagined my morning because it seems so surreal now just a few hours later. After all the years of searching and experimenting with various methods, did I really just get an exciting new explanation about how to control my destiny? Or has my perception of reality shifted? If you feel like taking a little trip down the rabbit hole, then please proceed. I also just learned that the world is our mirror. So if you are perfectly satisfied with the world you see around you — this isn’t for you.

Getting Keys to The System

Instead of just fumbling along in the dark as we have been doing for thousands of years, we can look at our ego as a vehicle with a whole dashboard for measuring various aspects of our progress toward our destination, just like in any car. We can get keys to the engine that drives and manically controls everything in our lives — our insatiable ego!

Transitioning From Self-Help to “Self-Change”

It all started in our regular editorial meeting with the world’s foremost Kabbalist, Michael Laitman. The meeting started out as normal , but suddenly the subject shifted to perception of reality. I was fascinated to hear some new terms like ‘self-change’ and ‘self-correction’ that I had never heard before. And I’m pretty sure I experienced some kind of shift in reality because my two worlds definitely collided:

World #1

I’m talking about my previous life of reading dozens of self-help books and trying all kinds of methods to feel satisfied with my progress in life. (I wasn’t really sure what my destination was but I was willing to try anything).

World #2

And my current lifestyle, where self-change is my top priority. But it can’t be just any old change like before, it has to be change that will advance me toward my goal of correcting my given nature — or rather the attributes of my nature — the main goal in the study of Kabbalah.

“Self-Correction”

So self-change in Kabbalah, is really all about self-correction. People will need to see the world around them as a mirror that constantly projects back the result of their self-correction. Learning how to do this will be the turning point of humanity.

It is up to Israel to introduce this new perspective to the world, and explain how the success of our development is based on it. This is the real Torah that Abraham discovered — the laws of nature, which are essentially a very precise method for accelerating our self-development.

So what’s the big change? Up until now we’ve been focused on fixing the world, but we can only change what is reflected in the world by changing ourselves. Once we acquire a corrected perception (inside us) of what we see around us, then we’ll feel the world change accordingly.

The world is given to us to see our internal corrections, our inner state, our qualities. So if we want to change the world in which we live, we need only to change ourselves. When we change ourselves, we will see the world change for the better. If we do not change ourselves then our growing ego will take us in the wrong direction, and we will view the world as more and more spoiled.

Love Thy Neighbor

According to the wisdom if Kabbalah, once you correct your attributes, you will see the world in a better light. And the height of these changes, meaning the highest correction we can carry out is Love Thy Neighbor as Yourself.

So how do I really change myself? By loving my neighbor. That doesn’t mean I need to run out and mow their lawn. It’s really about changing something in your heart, to make you capable of loving others. Of being just as concerned for others as you are for yourself, which is possibly the most challenging thing you can do in this lifetime.

From ‘New Year’ To ‘New World’

As we begin the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah), it’s actually a great time to begin this new change in our lives. We can continue to advance in a random way without really understanding the system as we have done since the beginning of time. Or we can step up our game, and learn how all of reality is actually inside us.

When we open our hearts to others, when we develop this new inner sense of kindness toward others, we will reveal the new world awaiting us. This is the next step of our evolution, where we retrain our hearts to get closer to one another, without any need to account for old fashioned things such as time, place and movement. We now have a tool for acquiring a correct perception of reality, and that’s all we really need to be truly happy.

Originally published at medium.com

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