Education Can Fix The Addicted Brain

Dr. Michael LaitmanReport (from the Science Magazine, University of Cambridge): “Addiction to drugs is a major contemporary public health issue, characterized by maladaptive behavior to obtain and consume an increasing amount of drugs at the expense of the individual’s health and social and personal life. We discovered abnormalities in fronto-striatal brain systems implicated in self-control in both stimulant-dependent individuals and their biological siblings who have no history of chronic drug abuse; these findings support the idea of an underlying neurocognitive endophenotype for stimulant drug addiction.”

My Comment: Everything depends on upbringing, even the development of Man, meaning Adam (from the word “similar” to the Creator) from Homo Sapiens, or rather Homo Erectus. It’s because upbringing summons an external influence. But education through Kabbalistic sources attracts the influence of the upper Light that changes the program of thinking and connection.
[68900]

Related Material:
How To Renounce Destructive Desires
Remembering The Congress
I Can’t Live With Or Without Them

It’s Time To Live Within Our Means

Dr. Michael LaitmanOpinion (Stephen Harper, Prime Minister of Canada): “…In the developed world too many of us have in fact become complacent about our prosperity, taking our wealth as a given, assuming it is somehow the natural order of things leaving us instead to focus primarily on our services and entitlements?

“Is it a coincidence that as the veil falls on the financial crisis, it reveals beneath it not just too much bank debt, but too much sovereign debt, too much general willingness to have standards and benefits beyond our ability, or even willingness, to pay for them?”

My Comment: To live within one’s means suggests that we consume as much as necessary and no more because Nature cannot endure giving more. It strives towards relative equality of income, as the interconnected world requires of us.
[68904]

Related Material:
A Letter To Capitalists From Adam Smith
There Is Only One Way: Towards A Society Of Spiritual Growth
2012 Forecast

Exalt Personality

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: It is one thing when I’m incidentally telling a person about my system of values while he or she simply listens attentively. It’s an entirely different thing when all of us together are building an ideal picture, like communists who sat around and imagined the ideal future. The problem was that this future proved to be too removed from real life.

Answer: Communists lacked a system for people’s upbringing. And upbringing, especially in Russia during that time, and in today’s Russia too, is an enormous problem because to this day people retained the psychology of slaves. It needs to be slowly restructured to exalt personality. Russia has all the prerequisites for that.

Even though the movement upward towards the human level, toward Adam, assumes a person’s complete dissolution in society, it simultaneously involves his or her growth as a personality. This is the contradiction that they tried to destroy during the Soviet regime because they couldn’t create a system of people’s education and upbringing where a person could be a personality, have their own opinion, and could realize all their potential. They tried to simply make a little screw out of a person: “You don’t have a head, the Party will do your thinking for you; you don’t have anything other than your two hands, so you just work and we will tell you what to do.”

This isn’t the image of Adam towards which we are striving. The attempts to neutralize egoism, to annihilate it, and to artificially implant altruism and self-sacrifice in its place—that is against nature.

Here we are talking about teaching a person to utilize all of his or her egoistic motives and impulses correctly.
[67233]
From a “Talk on Integral Education” #6, 12/14/11

Related Material:
Coercion Or Realization?
Aren’t We Slaves?
For Each The Right Environment

Don’t Wait Until We Get Old

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Let’s say that a man and a woman in a group begin to discuss an integral future, the way they imagine this integral picture…

Answer: In order for them not to fantasize about an ideal picture hinging on material prosperity that they wouldn’t be able to secure for themselves, it is better that they proceed from the principle summarized in a Russian saying, “love makes a cottage a castle”: “Let’s build our own beautiful ‘castle.’”

Question: But “love makes a cottage a castle” is a purely psychological notion.

Answer: Of course! Nothing else is necessary. They will see that they can satisfy themselves with a minimum and at the same time be perfectly happy. They won’t keep destroying themselves in this pursuit of phantom abundance and instead will be able to build their happiness immediately. But for that they need to be very smart. To achieve that, it’s necessary to educate people and seriously pursue their upbringing, to pull them up to a very serious level.

Usually, a lot of the couples get to this point, except that it happens at a very old age. A state of mutual understanding, concessions, and permeation into one another emerges between them. They know each other’s weaknesses and habits; they understand that there are things that we cannot change about another person and thus, it isn’t necessary to try to do that; they begin to love each other’s weaknesses. But all this occurs with age, in other words, though the path of suffering because decades pass before it happens (if they pass without ending in divorce first).

We need to educate people about that.
[67238]
From a “Talk on Integral Education” #6, 12/14/11

Related Material:
Our Friend, Egoism
The Secret Of An Integral Family
Down With Loneliness!

The Future Lies In Integration

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Let’s assume that after certain preparation, people in a group of ten proceed to verbally build some shared ideal image of an integral future. And afterwards they begin to clarify which of their qualities hinder the realization of this image in reality.

Answer: First of all, I would take not just ten people but, say, a hundred. From this hundred I would select completely different individuals, simply a cross-section of society, top to bottom. I would constantly diversify the questions, answers, and discussions between them. I would give a lot of attention to scientists participating in this forum so that they, from their perspective, would constantly fortify us, regular people, with their conclusions that we have no choice and nature obliges us.

First and foremost, we should act on the premise that there is no other way out: We are obliged to arrive at this state! Otherwise we’ll still get there, but it will happen through the blows.

There are two paths towards the same goal: either through force or through our conscious realization. Moreover, the conscious path is short and comfortable.

The path of force means wars and annihilation. In the end, suffering will have to be so great that I will willingly wish to renounce my egoism. But this is a subconscious development, and moreover, egoism will continuously manifest more and more. In other words, I will have to go through unfathomable lifetimes, not just one life—both within myself, in my parents, and in my children—before humanity will realize, as a result of a few generations of tremendous suffering, that it must change its nature and become integral.

This is a path that awaits us if we proceed under the influence of the coercing force of nature. Scientists need to uncover, to illustrate with examples, with experience that this is in fact a law of nature and there is no way to evade this law.

This law is actualized in us with every passing day with greater and greater force. Its movement is accelerating, so we shouldn’t delay and put it off on our children. No way! In the upcoming few years, our state will fall short of tolerable if we ourselves won’t strive towards this.

On the flip side, these same scientists are saying that as soon as we change the vector of our development to a desirable one (which would be an integral society of the future), we will immediately begin to sense nature’s benevolent relationship towards us on all levels. This includes climate, health, family relationships, financial and psychological issues, and so on.

Positive and negative statistics can be collected here, taking two societies for comparison: one which continues to pressurize itself with its egoism and the other that develops integrally.

It certainly isn’t easy, but if we did that, we would make this discovery. Scientists are revealing these laws in practice even without any such experimental group. We need their help. We need psychologists, sociologists. After all, we develop by putting people of science on the front lines, and here it should be the same way.

We absolutely need to rely on scientific data and correspondingly, to invest financial means specifically into this research that is not yet being done today. This is why we don’t have sufficiently precise data and we cannot operate with numbers.

I know many people who think like us, who understand or are capable of understanding at least a part of the overall idea. The vast majority of them are scientists: biologists, physiologists, sociologists, and psychologists.

But we cannot yet translate this idea into numbers, into something explicitly evident, with which we could approach economists, political scientists, and so on. But among them there is a large number of people who understand that the future lies in absolute integration.

Question: A person performs many destructive acts that literally wreck their life. This is a destruction of oneself, of the children, and of those around him. I can converse with people in the group only in the aspect of psychology so that their connection will become kinder and they will be happier. The same thing can be done by, say, an economist or many other specialists. Is this materialistic knowledge sufficient for building an integral field within a group?

Answer: A person will be convinced, will have grounds to believe that it is necessary to ascend. I see a danger ahead of me, and if I continue to act this way, if the surrounding society stays the same, it will be even worse. It is necessary for me to change myself and society.

People move from place to place, change careers, change everything, all only to transition to a better state. While here we are demonstrating that we don’t have any other choice, we need to simply run away from ourselves. That is why I keep saying that the most important thing is to show a person that this is a challenge of nature from which there is no escape.
[67068]
From a “Talk on Integral Education” #6, 12/14/11

Related Material:
Create Your Own Self
Transitional Process And Fashion
Is It Possible To Befriend A Mother-In-Law?

Daily Kabbalah Lesson – 02.07.12

Preparation to the Lesson
Download: WMV Video|MP3 Audio

Writings of Rabash, “Come to Pharaoh,” Lesson 2 
Download: WMV Video|MP3 Audio

The Book of Zohar – Selected Chapter “Beresheet (Genesis,” “A Prayer for the Poor,” Item 194, Lesson 56
Download: WMV Video|MP3 Audio

Talmud Eser Sefirot, Part 6, (Starting with: “We find that because of…”), Item 26, Lesson 18
Download:WMV Video|MP3 Audio

Introduction to the Study of Ten Sefirot,” Item 79, Lesson 37
Download: WMV Video|MP3 Audio