Did you think that your thoughts build or ruin the world around you? They do; they are our desire’s “brain” that designs the world we live in.

We’ve known for decades that humanity is destroying the planet, that our way of life is unsustainable, and that we are living on borrowed time at the expense of our children. We’ve known it, we’ve tried to stop ourselves, but we couldn’t. Only COVID-19 stopped our reckless conduct. If it goes away, we will destroy whatever is left of our planet and leave nothing for prosperity. We can’t help it since our actions are offshoots of our thoughts, and as long as our thoughts are negative, so will be our actions.

Kabbalists don’t deal so much with restricting CO2 emissions, recycling waste or saving endangered species, not because they don’t care about our world. On the contrary, they care about all of life and all of nature a great deal! This is why they focus on the core problem, the malfunction that generates all that is negative in our world: our thoughts. If we change our thoughts, we will change the world around us. If we change our thoughts from negative to positive, not a single problem will remain unsolved.

We could argue that we can’t control our thoughts, that they pop up in our brain without asking “permission.” It’s true that thoughts don’t “ask permission” before they emerge, but we can tweak the “factory” that creates them: the social environment we live in.

If we are born into an environment that says you’re only as good as your last conquest, then we will have no choice but to become ruthlessly competitive until we exhaust ourselves to death. In the process, we will destroy everything around us: people, animals, plants and minerals. Currently, this is more or less the way we all behave, which is why the world is such a mess.

We can change our world. If we start nurturing a different culture—embracing diversity, encouraging originality, supporting cooperation and rewarding displays of solidarity—our world will instantly change from bad to good. We won’t need to worry about what we should or shouldn’t do; we will need to worry only about what to think or not to think.

We cannot change our thoughts by ourselves. But together, there is nothing we can’t achieve. We can even transform our very nature from the negative attitude we are born with to a positive attitude that we will all have created together.

We are looking for a cure to COVID-19 but we’re forgetting that it comes from the same source that creates all our “sicknesses,” from viruses to hurricanes. Just as we don’t need to work on fixing our behavior toward the environment, but on fixing our thoughts, which make us mistreat the environment, we don’t need to focus on curing the virus but on curing its cause—our iniquitous thoughts. It would be great if we could find a vaccine for COVID-19, but unless we solve its root cause, more and worse menaces will come in its wake, so we might as well work on a systemic solution right now and truly transform our lives to what they can be instead of staying stuck neck-deep in the quagmire that our lives have become.

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