The One Principle That Can Change Our Reality

“Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Rabbi Akiva called this “a great rule of the Torah.” At first glance, it sounds like a beautiful moral principle. But according to Baal HaSulam, Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag, it is far more than that.

It is the organizing principle behind the entire system of human development.

For this reason, we begin our study with Baal HaSulam’s Matan Torah (“The Giving of the Torah”), one of the foundational essays in the study of Kabbalah.

Baal HaSulam published Matan Torah in 1933 as part of a planned series of essays exploring the purpose of humanity and the social structure necessary to achieve it.

Baal HaSulam published Matan Torah in 1933 as part of a planned series of essays exploring the purpose of humanity and the social structure necessary to achieve it. Two additional essays followed: The Arvut (“Mutual Guarantee”) and *The Peace.”

Together, they develop one central idea.

Matan Torah presents the principle.

The Arvut explains the condition necessary to realize it.

The Peace expands it into a social and universal law.

At the heart of the first essay is a seemingly simple question: How can a commandment concerning our relationship with other people contain the essence of the entire Torah?

Baal HaSulam takes this question seriously.

And his answer challenges the way we normally understand human nature.

The world we experience is shaped by what we care about

We tend to assume that we experience reality as it is.

But we don't.

We experience reality through our desires.

When everything is filtered through the question, “What is good or bad for me?”, our perception becomes centered on ourselves. We notice what benefits us, threatens us, attracts us or repels us.

Our entire world is organized around the self.

This is why changing our relationship with other people can fundamentally change the reality we experience.

The moment I begin asking not only “What do I want?” but “What does the other person want? What is good for them? What are they experiencing?”, I begin to perceive something that was previously outside my field of attention.

I have, in a sense, stepped outside myself.

This is what the Kabbalistic approach means by developing love of others.

It is not simply being nicer.

It is changing the center from which we experience reality.

From self-interest to another person's reality

Imagine that you and I are looking at the same world.

You experience it through your desires, fears and needs.

I experience it through mine.

Normally, I am trapped inside my own perspective. Your inner world remains fundamentally inaccessible to me.

But what happens if I make your experience important to me?

I begin to recognize what is good for you and what is bad for you. I begin to understand your desires, your fears and your needs.

I have created a new set of “senses.”

This is what the Kabbalists describe as moving from the perception of the physical world toward the perception of the spiritual world.

The language can sound abstract, but the exercise itself is remarkably practical.

Try it.

Instead of spending the next conversation thinking about what you want to say, try to understand what the other person wants, what they are feeling and what matters to them.

Your reality changes immediately.

You are no longer experiencing only your world.

You are beginning to experience another human being's world.

Why “love your neighbor” is called a great rule

This is the deeper meaning behind Rabbi Akiva's statement that “love your neighbor as yourself” is a great rule of the Torah.

The other commandments, according to Baal HaSulam, are not separate from this principle. They help us understand and implement it.

The famous story of Hillel makes the point even more sharply.

A person came to Hillel and asked him to teach him the entire Torah while standing on one foot. Hillel answered, essentially: What is hateful to you, do not do to another. The rest is commentary; now go and learn.

The challenge is obvious.

It is relatively easy to say that we should love others.

It is extraordinarily difficult to actually place another person's needs on the same level as our own.

Baal HaSulam pushes the idea even further.

If I have one chair and you have none, what does “love your neighbor as yourself” actually require?

It is not enough for me to say that I love you.

If I keep the chair for myself while you remain standing, my actions reveal that my needs are more important than yours.

The principle therefore demands something much more radical: that I learn to regard another person's needs as seriously as I regard my own.

This is why the teaching is not merely about kindness.

It is about transforming the operating system of human nature.

Can human beings actually change?

Our natural tendency is toward self-preservation and self-interest.

We instinctively ask:

What's in it for me?

How does this affect me?

What will I gain?

Kabbalah proposes that this is not the final state of human development.

We can learn to reverse the direction of our attention.

Instead of constantly pulling everything toward ourselves, we can begin moving outward—toward other people.

And this is where the idea of freedom enters.

If our behavior is completely determined by our desires, fears, habits and social conditioning, how much freedom do we actually have?

The Kabbalistic answer is that there is one fundamental choice available to us: whether to remain completely inside our egoistic nature, or to make an effort to move beyond it.

That effort begins in our relationships with other people.

This is why the group and the connection workshop are so important in Kabbalistic study.

We don't develop this quality by thinking about it abstractly.

We practice it with other human beings.

We listen.

We try to understand.

We put another person's perspective before our own.

We discover how difficult it is.

And precisely because it is difficult, we discover something about ourselves that we could never discover alone.

The real experiment

“Love your neighbor as yourself” can sound unrealistic.

Perhaps it is.

If we interpret it as an instruction to suddenly stop caring about ourselves and sacrifice everything for everyone else, it becomes impossible.

But if we understand it as an experiment in human development, it becomes extraordinarily interesting.

Can I make another person's well-being important to me?

Can I temporarily step outside my own perspective?

Can I learn to perceive what another person needs, even when it conflicts with what I want?

Can a group of people practice this together?

And if we can do that, what happens to the way we experience ourselves, other people and the world around us?

These are not merely philosophical questions.

They are questions we can test through experience.

Perhaps this is why the principle has survived for thousands of years.

It points toward a possibility that modern humanity desperately needs to explore: that our next stage of development may not come from acquiring more power over the world, but from learning how to change our relationship with one another.

The transformation begins with a deceptively simple shift:

from “What is good for me?”

to “What is good for the other?”

And according to the wisdom of Kabbalah, that small shift can ultimately change not only the way we treat others, but the reality we are capable of perceiving.