Description

Prof. Ervin Laszlo talks with Rav Laitman about how feeling others is the mark of a higher consciousness that we need to achieve.

Transcript

Do We Have the Ability to Feel Others
(December 2002)

Prof. Ervin Lazlo: I'm sure we can. And that's the mark of a higher consciousness, to have empathy, to actually enter into another person's feelings, to another person's mind. Not to invade it, but to feel empathy. But to feel that we are indeed one, one together-we are not separate.
We haven't talked about it, but I just want to mention that this is also an insight that's coming from the new sciences: the oneness, the phenomenon of connection, which we know happens in nature. It happens on the physical level, it happens on the biological level. It's also happening on the cultural level. Some great scientists like Carl Jung, for example, who knew... When you talk about collective unconscious, when Bernatsky and Tielhard de Chardin talked about the new sphere, the collective sphere of humanity. So this sense of growing together, I think, is being documented now, that it's true, it's part of nature, it's part of evolution. And this recognition is a very important element in being able to move to that new level of a new civilization, of a new thinking, a new consciousness.
Dr. Laitman: I think that our education or work concerning the raising of awareness that we're talking about, has to incorporate all of these techniques. Meaning, how to bring one an ability to hear and to feel the other. Otherwise, we will simply destroy one another and we will have no future. Yet here I see only one solution. It is necessary to raise the human being from the level of our existence to the level of the higher flow of information, energy and awareness, at which we are all connected together. We will then understand and feel that we all belong to a single system and that we are essentially one body. We just cannot see it while we are in our five egoistic senses.
Prof. Ervin Lazlo: Let me just perhaps just add to this. As a former musician, my experience was that when you are playing music with others, then you can enter into each others emotions. Sometimes the music is dramatic-it's almost like suffering; and other times it's very happy. But you are literally feeling other people, you are playing the same music, and you become one. So I know it can be done, but it's very difficult in everyday context to do it. But the task is to do it, to reach that level of consciousness where we can have that communication on the trans-personal level.