Question: During one of the previous programs you mentioned that it’s better to begin a course on integral upbringing with the history of the development of egoism and only after that to introduce the courses on perception of reality and psychology. From your point of view, in what order should these disciplines be added?

Answer: I think this also depends on the people that we enroll. We should arrange these groups by types. After all, a mass of people has its own laws: One individual influences another. Sometimes one person among fifty could easily shatter our entire system with his or her remarks and divert everyone to a completely different direction, either with nihilism, fanaticism, or something else.

That is, primarily we should form groups of people considering who they are, their general worldview, understanding of life, and philosophy. They could be either simple ordinary people, or housewives, or engineers and technical workers, or scientists, or people of the arts.

That’s why groups need to be arranged according to people’s makeup and their inceptive perception of the world, even though that perception is imposed, evoked, and accumulated in them through distorted relationships in their occupation, their society, and so on. But we need to take this into account because that’s the material that we have to work with. Our task is to bring it to a common denominator since ultimately, we expect that all these people will be connected together through a common base of knowledge, feelings, and understanding.

In the end we will get several group prototypes, which we need to bring to some kind of a common form through the process of studies. And each of these groups will have their own path towards that common denominator.

Naturally, some groups will perceive the study material more emotionally, while others more dryly, scientifically, and technically. Some groups will perceive it on the level of their egoistic development, without rising beyond their current benchmark (although by no means do I mean to diminish this part of humanity), while other groups will strive exactly towards analysis, attainment, and realization of this process to the full measure both in themselves and in others.

That is, the set of disciplines should be practically the same for all groups, but in different groups each discipline needs to be developed to varying depth. Courses need to follow one another, with the exception of the one on development of egoism, which will continue throughout the entire study to its very end and will remain with the person upon completion of studies.

After a person is “released” into life, he will not stop working with the information that he received, meaning that it’s as if he will still be continuing our coursework. These courses are practically endless because we have to reach a complete unity with nature. A person’s work on himself isn’t restricted to a defined segment of time, where he just passes his exams and that’s it. He is taking exams on his own every minute of his life, finding the point of equilibrium with himself, his environment, and nature, in which he feels complete comfort.

We need to continuously aid a person in that and to accompany him his entire life through mass media, education via virtual systems, television, and radio.

That is why I cannot name the exact sequence in which to arrange the courses and to what extent each of them should be subject to elaboration or truncation, for example, a course on psychology or on mechanics of egoistic development. There must only be one result: a common form in each group that initially is composed of people who are more or less similar in their social status, development, and attitude towards the world.

Naturally, even within that commonality they will still differentiate based on the level of their participation in the integral process of unification and mutual support. There are lower groups that participate on some small egoistic and, consequently, emotional and mental level of development. There are more advanced groups. And then we cannot exclude the existence of such groups that could be considered not only by their level of egoism, but also by their sensitivity and intelligence.

We have a lot of statistical and diagnostic work ahead of us in the analysis and synthesis of all the groups. In and of itself, this is a very interesting psychological challenge. I believe that one day this large field will be included in the science of integral concord of humanity.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education,” 12/13/11

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A Person’s Age Is Not An Obstacle In Studying

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