Money Pours Into European Crisis

Dr. Michael LaitmanIn the News: “European banks borrowed enough cash from the European Central Bank at its first three-year offering to refinance almost two-thirds of the debt they have maturing next year amid concern that markets will remain frozen.

“The 523 euro-area lenders took a record 489 billion euros ($638 billion) from the Frankfurt-based central bank in 1,134- day loans… That equals about 63 percent of the European bank debt maturing in 2012, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. analysts.” (Source: Bloomberg)

Felix Salmon, Reuters’ columnist, quotes Fitch’s analysis that concludes that “‘a comprehensive solution to the Euro zone crisis is technically and politically beyond reach.’” (Source: Reuters)

The Wall Street Journal notes that “the unexpectedly heavy demand from 523 banks for the three-year loans highlighted the severity of Europe’s financial crisis, while also stirring some hopes that the action could help defuse it, or at least prevent it from getting worse. Investors didn’t seem convinced that the loans would drastically improve banks’ prospects.” (Source: The Wall Street Journal)

My Comment: Europe is facing a slow agony! But that gives time to realize the need for a paradigm shift through implementing integral upbringing.
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Eurozone Debt Web: Who Owes What To Whom?

In the News (from BBC News): “The circle below shows the gross external, or foreign, debt of some of the main players in the eurozone as well as other big world economies. The arrows show how much money is owed by each country to banks in other nations. The arrows point from the debtor to the creditor and are proportional to the money owed as of the end of June 2011. The colors attributed to countries are a rough guide to how much trouble each economy is in.”

Click here to see the graph.
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Anomalous Cooling Is On The Way

Dr. Michael LaitmanIn the News (from Rambler.ru): “Moscow meteorologists record the anomaly that confirms the theory of global warming. But there is another opinion: A group of scientists from the Oceanographic Institute and the Russian Academy of Sciences predict the imminent fall of temperature in the Northern Hemisphere. According to their calculations, the “Great Salinity Anomaly,” which will lower the average temperature and bring cold winters in the next few years, is on the way.

“The graphs show a warming of the planet, which leads to the melting of glaciers and increases Siberian rivers discharge. As a result, a lot of fresh water has been accumulated in the Arctic Ocean that is about to begin to pour through the Canadian and Greenland Straits into the North Atlantic. And the Gulf Stream, the “hot water bottle” of Europe, comes there. Its warm, salty water will be covered by cold fresh water that will not allow heat to come out, which means that it will become colder in Europe and throughout the Northern Hemisphere.

“Apparently, the Earth switches on a climate control system. Warming turns on the Arctic water mechanism, leading to cooling. Then, it will become warmer again. Quite possibly, it may not happen in our lifetime.”

My Comment: Of course, these periods of alternating heat and cold always happened on the planet, but we can mitigate them by means of achieving balance in society and humanity because the greatest and most hidden forces of nature, which operate on the lower levels of nature: animate, vegetative, and still, are concealed at the “human” level.
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Don’t Be Ashamed Of Yourself

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: A modern person has accumulated a wealth of various limitations: He was prevented from expressing his feelings, they were trivialized, and so on. That is why his standard reaction to something new is negative. Initially a battle within a person always takes place between an interest towards something new and a fear of it. How can we maintain a person’s interest despite his fear and resistance?

Answer: When starting to talk about a person, his physiology, psychology, sociology, family relationships, and so on, we need to do it objectively, abstractly, not relative to the person himself. And only afterwards should we gradually include examples: Here is a man, a woman, and children; here is a person as he is, he reacts to himself in a certain way and is composed of certain images of vision, perception, and so on. In other words, we begin to talk about some abstract object and gradually bring that object to the person himself. I think this way we won’t encounter a problem.

The fact of the matter is that a modern person doesn’t know any of this. We hide our nature, we are ashamed of ourselves, ashamed in front of others; we are afraid to show any sort of weakness because we think that others could take advantage of it. I have to show that I stand firm like a wall behind my immutable opinions, which I do not actually have at all.

When we gradually reveal what man, society, and nature in its global and general form are, little by little we get used to the fact that we are the way we are created: It isn’t me, and everything in me works independently from me.

Then what exactly is this “I”? I is only the one who can research what in him or her is created by nature.

Like doctors who aren’t ashamed in front of each other or their patients, or psychologists who can express their own and other people’s feelings without embarrassment, understanding that all of this is an objective reality, we, too, are the way we are. Likewise, we also need to bring a person to such a state.

Everything needs to be based precisely on the fact that the next stage of our development is complete integration of everyone into everything, when all parts of nature get incorporated into a person, a person into them, and people into each other, and together with nature we represent one organic whole.

In such a case there is nothing here that I have to conceal, be embarrassed of, and attempt to hide from others. I must ultimately reach a state where, conversely, I am obliged to fully reveal myself and be connected to everyone.

It’s like an infant who lies in his mother’s arms: He is nothing and nobody, yet she concentrates all of her attention on him, and from the point of view of nature, relative to his mother he has absolutely no barriers, borders, or screens; on the contrary, an absolutely complete connection exists. We too, as a result of our integral education and upbringing, need to reach such a connection in the future.

That is why our flow in teaching, experiencing these courses, in their structure and interconnection (where one course begins and another ends, or a few of them go parallel to each other) needs to be structured precisely so: along the axis of time. Courses should supplement one another and follow either consecutively or overlap with each other so that people gradually develop a correct attitude towards themselves, to other students studying in the group, and towards the whole world.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education,” 12/13/11

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Feelings Balanced By Knowledge

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: In the courses on integral upbringing and education, we intend to first of all educate people who lost their job. The majority of them is disillusioned with life; many have difficulties with their family, self-actualization, and so on.

The first thing that you may encounter in such a group is resentment, frustration, and aggression. Would people in this state be able to perceive such distant, abstract, and theoretical information? What should we start with in order to find common ground with people?

Answer: We have no other choice. We, people, consist of two halves: heart and mind, and they have to balance each other. Then a person develops harmoniously, sees the world and himself within it. Perhaps he sees both himself and the world as unbalanced, but his worldview becomes more or less correct.

Therefore, first and foremost we have to counterbalance all of today’s problems with knowledge: From where did these problems arise, what is  their origin, their necessity for our continued development, what exactly we need to come to, and so on.

As the first order of business people must necessarily complete an educational course, and not the ones on upbringing, practical work, and game scenarios—they are still far from that. The practical work within such groups begins only when the state of all sorts of problems and crises is balanced. People begin to understand the essence of these problems; they can now discuss, decide, arrive at some kind of an opinion, object, and discern the truth. But it gets discerned when feelings are balanced by knowledge.

If right now we simply take 50 people from the street and start to talk to them about today’s problems, we’ll be confronted with complete lack of understanding of our point of view. Correspondingly, feelings prevail above the mind, and we won’t get anywhere.

This is what happens in today’s world. Without understanding the general system of nature, its development (beginning, middle, and end of this path), and the state of humanity (where we exist in this moment along the axis of time), we evaluate everything only on the basis of our small, worldly egoism that doesn’t allow us to obtain the correct result. Moreover, we make wrong decisions about the future and with that bring ourselves into an even more difficult state. That is why, personally, I have no doubts that first and foremost we need to pursue education.

Precisely with that we begin our interaction with children. We always need to take our natural attitude to children as an example.

Everything begins with explanations. A child develops and feels: I sense this and that. A correct upbringing lies in supplementing a child’s feelings with explanations and with a system of correct attitude towards what he feels and how he perceives everything. This has to be balanced in adults as well. Without this we cannot advance.

Only to the extent that a group adapts this knowledge into itself does it realize and understand the causality and consequences of the feelings, their cause and effect development, and is able to see itself from the side. When a person rises above his self, he can separate his own “I” and see himself and society from the side.

The same way in psychology: You look at a person not as an individual, but from the side, trying to imagine him as a certain psychological object. Then, exploring him, you begin to give him some concrete recommendations, fragmentary explanations without even explaining who and what he is. But in principle, these explanations too are based on some kind of balance between knowledge and feelings. You cannot do without that.

That’s why in the first place we will have to introduce the courses that we spoke about in the last talk. It is a great amount of knowledge.

In the process of study, this knowledge gradually gets absorbed by people, and a person then starts to internally assimilate it along with feelings. At this point we need to start fortifying it with practical exercises that help a person balance knowledge and feelings.

A person can receive an initial sensation of that state by studying the material first-hand. We need to tell him about the origin, evolution, and properties of egoism and to present it completely objectively as a certain existing reality independent from and having nothing to do with us, so that a person could absorb everything in the form in which it exists in nature.

Next in the same course, a brief explanation can be given about how egoism works in a person: how it manifests itself in our world, in connections with family, children, with one’s own self, and so on.

That is, education involves at the very least separation into two parts, when we objectively lay out what is taking place in nature and try to express that in a somewhat dry, scientific language, and afterwards, as a supplement to that, we utilize this. After that is when the practical training begins, where we try to investigate our feelings from the point of view of reason.

A theoretical study is always reason, and we study it, fill ourselves with all kinds of knowledge, data, graphs, formulas, images, discernments of relationships, and so on, while gradually adding a little bit of feelings to that. In other words, studying always proceeds from two directions, “reason and feelings”: feelings in reason and reason in feelings.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education,” 12/13/11

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A Thief In The Holy Brotherhood

Dr. Michael LaitmanIf I wish for the Light to influence me from above, I need to create my own desire from below, which would suit the upper Light. In other words, this desire must be directed specifically at bestowal, like the Light that comes from the Giver.

But we do not know what the desire to bestow is, and we could be wrong a thousand times without ever finding the right answer. The group is given to us so we could find it. The group is in opposition to everyone; it allows us to work from “the contrary” because I must love them, think about them, and care for them, which absolutely does not correspond to my desire. This helps me see how opposite to and how much I fail to correspond to the quality of bestowal, the Creator.

I can learn everything through this work. The main thing is to make sure to not become confused, and to strive towards the Creator through the group and then it will become like the Creator to me, evoking the same repulsion, hatred, and lack of desire.

This is because I will perceive the group as the place of bestowal, but I do not wish to bestow: I want to receive from it. I like being with my friends, helping them, and hugging them because I enjoy it. But I cannot connect with them in order to please the Creator; this would spread and would become consumed somewhere inside the group, in a concealed higher source there without bringing me any compensation in return. But this is the only way to achieve the right desire, which will eventually evoke awakening from Above.

The Creator must be my final goal, not the group. Only then will I discover how incapable I am of uniting with Him, and I do not even need the group. After all, the Creator is some kind of a disappearing upper root, which does not benefit me in any way.

I still feel like the group is somewhat beneficial: We get together, have meals, organize conventions, and have a good time. Many people in the world would pay a lot of money to be in this kind of a group, like a nice club, to embellish their lives; it is impossible to find a warm and spiritual circle like this anywhere else. [Read more →]

Lessons About A New World: Produce Fewer Nonessentials

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: What are the most important principles that any unemployed person should know so that he’ll be able to manage in the new world?

Answer: First, it is impossible to manage in the new world when each one thinks only about oneself. We have to think about everyone. There is no other choice. This is nature’s law that is being revealed in our times.

Second, every member of society should be concerned about others as organs in one body. In the global world we need not build egoistic systems: media, governments, social systems, health care, education, etc., which today do not care about what happens to others. What we need to be concerned with is how to build a healthy person in a healthy society. All the systems should be focused on this purpose. This means that there must be one general plan.

Only those who understand that we need integrality and mutual guarantee should have the right to lead society. Otherwise, each will continue with his protectionism, which will lead to opposition to and destruction of nature.

We should aspire for this same relationship to exist in the family, children’s education, neighborhoods, cities, nations, and the whole world. This means that we don’t have to develop separate, specific systems for education, culture, and health, but rather we need to work in circles, moving from a small circle to a wider one, and eventually encompassing all of humanity.

We have to organize all international organizations differently, so that this will be their goal and this is what they will aim all their activity at. All the laws in the world should be made as integral laws so that integrality will become the essential law of our existence. The leadership, courts, and systems for human rights should be aimed only at that.

What stems from the integral law influences all spheres of our lives, especially factories, companies, and businesses and whether or not they have the right to exist. If a business doesn’t match the essential production system, it is like a splinter that enters a body and infects and harms the whole body.

It must be taken out and only the healthy, necessary things should be left. This is a totally new perception according to which no one has the right to create something just for the purpose of trying to sell it. On the contrary, the less we produce and the less we sell, the better. This is a totally opposite from our present approach, and according to it everything will change.

Question: It seems this is a very advanced future state that will result from the integral education, when the government can decide if a business is in harmony with nature and therefore should operate?

Answer: In part, it will be the result of conscious change and partly a consequence of natural evolution in which unnecessary industries will shut down on their own.
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From “Lessons About  the New World” 12/1/11

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Daily Kabbalah Lesson – 01.10.12

Lesson Preparation
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Shamati #67 Depart from Evil
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The Book of Zohar – Selected Chapter “Beresheet (Genesis),” “The Two Great Lights,” Item 123, Lesson 32
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Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot,” Item 26, Lesson 18
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Writings of Baal HaSulam “The Freedom,” “Ancestral Heritage,” Lesson 21
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