PETACH TIKVAH, Israel — “I think, therefore I am,” said French philosopher René Descartes, and he was right. We are living in the world of thoughts. In fact, our entire world is a thought, and our perception of it keeps changing and evolving. As our perception changes, so does our world. We may not realize it but we can control our thoughts, and in this way determine the kind of world we want to live in.
Although our thoughts seem to come into our minds of their own accord, so to speak, they are actually a product of our environment. We absorb ideas and thoughts from people around us, social media, and every interaction we have with people, whether real or virtual. If the streams that create our thoughts projected positivity, we would become positive people. Since they currently project negativity, ill-will toward others, and promote concentration on ourselves, this is what we end up doing, and we end up thinking that the whole world is as selfish and as mean as the sources portray.
These sources tell us that this is the real world, and if we want to present a more optimistic, considerate, or caring perspective, they tell us we are unrealistic and make us feel as though we’re out of touch with reality. The truth, however, is that they simply want to keep pumping negative ideas into our minds since fear and negativity benefit them. But they don’t benefit us, and they are not the truth.
The truth is that life could not exist without balance, without equilibrium between good and bad, negative and positive. Everything in life gives and receives. Every cell in our body loves the body it lives in and gives it all it can. In return, the body sustains and nourishes the cells in our body. We wouldn’t be alive if this weren’t so.
The true reality is reciprocity and balance, but people think that ill-will rules the world, a ruthless desire to receive, to take, to plunder and abuse. In fact, people are the only species in all of reality that’s warped this way, and this makes us more miserable than any other being.
So if we change what impacts us and accept more balanced messages from the environment, we will change our thoughts. If we change our thoughts, we will change reality. This is all it takes to fix the world.
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Michael Laitman, Ph.D., studied philosophy and Kabbalah at the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and now resides in Petach Tikvah, Israel. He has published more than 40 books on a variety of topics.