Ever Wonder Why Other Species In Nature Are in Balance but Humans Aren’t?
Our reality is built by the interaction of two forces, the desire to receive and the desire to give. When there is an imbalance in between those that forces problems arise.
Our imperiled world is indeed a sad result of man’s lack of recognition of the desire to give. In contrast, the rest of nature is a magnificent display of balance between the two desires. In the diverse ecosystem that is Planet Earth, each creature has its unique role. The system is incomplete if even a single element in it is missing or deficient, be it a mineral, a plant, or an animal.
An eye-opening report submitted to the U.S. Department of Education in October, 2003 by Irene Sanders and Judith McCabe, PhD, clearly demonstrates what happens when we breach nature’s balance. “In 1991, an orca—a killer whale—was seen eating a sea otter. Orcas and otters usually coexist peacefully. So, what happened? Ecologists found that ocean perch and herring were also declining. Orcas don’t eat those fish, but seals and sea lions do. And seals and sea lions are what orcas usually eat, and their population had also declined. So deprived of their seals and sea lions, orcas started turning to the playful sea otters for dinner.
So otters have vanished because the fish, which they never ate in the first place, have vanished. Now, the ripple spreads, otters are no longer there to eat sea urchins, so the sea urchin population has exploded. But sea urchins live off seafloor kelp forests, so they’re killing off the kelp. Kelp has been home to fish that feed seagulls and eagles. Like orcas, seagulls can find other food, but bald eagles can’t and they’re in trouble.
All this began with the decline of ocean perch and herring. Why? Well, Japanese whalers have been killing off the variety of whales that eat the same microscopic organisms that feed pollock [a type of carnivorous fish]. With more fish to eat, pollock flourish. They in turn attack the perch and herring that were food for the seals and sea lions. With the decline in the population of sea lions and seals, the orcas must turn to otters.”
Thus, true health and well being are achieved only when there is harmony and balance among all the parts that make up an organism or a system. Yet, we are so unaware of the other force in life, the giving force, that we cannot achieve this balance, or even positively define what being “healthy” means.
What Everybody Ought to Know About Depression & How to Overcome It
The definition of health in the Britannica Concise Encyclopedia truly captures our sense of bafflement: “Good health is harder to define than bad health (which can be equated with presence of disease) because it must convey a more positive concept than mere absence of disease.” But because we have no perception of the positive force in life, we cannot define a positive state of existence.
We all have dreams, and we all wish for them to come true. But the sad truth is that we never feel that we have realized all our dreams because even if we fulfill them, new ones step in to replace those we have fulfilled. As a result, we never feel satisfied. And the more we strive for wealth, power, fame, and everything else we deem pleasurable, the more dissatisfied we become, and the more disillusioned.
Thus, the more we have, the more frustrated and disillusioned we are because we will have tried harder to find happiness and will have failed more often, and possibly more bitterly. This explains why richer countries generally suffer from higher depression rates.
Ironically, there is a positive aspect to depression. It is an indication that we have given up on focusing solely on our desire to receive. People who are depressed are those who see no prospect of joy or happiness in the future. They are too experienced in life’s failures to be lured into yet another failed attempt at happiness. But all they need to cure their depression is to realize that there is another half of reality, the “giving half.” If we can help these people see that they have been trying to suck joy out of a vacuum—a desire to receive—a force that knows only how to receive and not how to give, it will bring back all the hope and energy that they lost to depression.
How Acting Without Regard for Others Is Like the Spread of Cancer
Indeed, reality is a two-legged creature, and we have been using only one of them. Why, then, are we surprised that it is lame?
Humanity has been lost in the wilderness for generations and did not heed the first warning signs of impending trouble. Instead humanity kept on going, relying on what tools it had, although it has been blind to half of reality, as if a mist (or cataract) had covered its eyes. This is why today we are in such a massive, global crisis.
This time, it truly is survival for all, or for no one at all.
The average adult human body contains roughly ten trillion cells (10,000,000,000,000). Placed side by side, they would circle the earth 47 times! Not one of them is autonomous. Instead, they all work in perfect harmony to support and sustain the body they live in, sometimes at the expense of their own lives. As a result, their “awareness” stretches far beyond their cell membranes and encompasses the whole body. The harmony between cells is what makes a healthy body such a perfect and beautiful machine.
A healthy body has such an effective maintenance mechanism that if even a single cell were to neglect its duties and work for itself, the body would detect that cell and then heal it or kill it. Without yielding to the dominion of the body, no organism could ever be created because its cells would not be able to cooperate and work for the good of the whole body.
In fact, a cell that works for itself instead of for the body is called a “cancerous cell.” When such cells succeed in multiplying, a person develops cancer. The end result of cancer is always the death of the tumor. The only unknown is whether the tumor will die because it was killed by the body or by the drugs, or because it killed its host body, thus killing itself. Whether we are aware of it or not, when we act for ourselves, disregarding the needs of the whole, we become cancerous cells in the body called “humanity.”
Before we realized we could change the environment to fit our needs, we were healthy cells in humanity, in natural harmony with the call of nature. But once we realized we could “bend” nature to our benefit, we divorced ourselves from that harmony. Therefore, to avoid disrupting nature’s balance, we have to become consciously harmonious with it.
However, we haven’t yet been able to do so. Because we’ve been unaware of the interplay between the desire to give and desire to receive, we have been taking nature for granted, believing that it would be there for us regardless of our behavior.
Are You Aware of this Trick that Makes You Connected to Others in a Beneficial Way?
In complex, integrated systems, the rule is that the system dictates and the individual yields, just as with the example of cells in a body. As humanity grew in numbers and began to build increasingly complex societies, our need to match the rules of integrated systems became more pressing.
But the crisis we’re all facing today requires a unity that goes beyond friendship between individuals. Uniting all parts of humanity has far deeper implications than saving the lives of a few adventurers. We need to unite not because it is more fun (although it is), but because we need to discover the desire to give, the part of nature we have been oblivious to for millennia, and the only way to discover it is to emulate it. When we emulate it, we will suddenly discover that it actually exists in every aspect of our lives, from our cells to our minds.
As sentient beings, we can only perceive the existence of something when we feel it. We live in an “ocean” composed of the desire to give, but we can only feel this desire when it is “dressed” in some palpable form of pleasure. We naturally focus on the pleasure we derive from objects or incidents that cross our path through life, but it is never only the desire to receive there. Instead, it is a combination of the two: the desire to give creates a new sense of possible pleasure, and the desire to receive shapes that pleasure in the form of, say, a delicious piece of cake, a new friend, making love, or making money.
But the new emergence of the desire to give that we are sensing today is no ordinary emergence. This desire is not for sex, money, power, or fame. This time, it is a desire for connectedness. This is the underlying motive behind the massive growth of social networks on the Internet. People need to connect because they already feel connected; now, they just need to know how to do so in a way that truly fills their needs. However, the only way to feel completely connected is to study the force that binds all individuals into one: the desire to give.
“The Surefire Way for You to Achieve Balance in Life” is based on the book, Bail Yourself Out: How You Can Emerge Strong from the World Crisis by Dr. Michael Laitman.
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