Integral education is not a collection of some kind of rules, laws, conditions and states that you learn, are tested on, and thereby you are brought up. Unfortunately, we really do not have upbringing anywhere, since it provides the rise of a man to the next level, and humanity has no such means. If you go to the army, there they teach you instinctive actions, to react automatically, and nothing else; similarly are astronauts and others.

In integral education it is understood that you need to show a person and teach him how to extract from nature such forces that will allow him to rise to the next level, above the level of self of today. This means that if today you are an egoistic individualist, then tomorrow you need to transform into an integral, altruistic component of all of nature and humanity. Where do we get such forces?

This is what integral education teaches: how you can extract and transform the integral force that is basic to nature from within a nature of for oneself; how you can attract it in such a way that it will change you, and then you begin to enter the integral system, “at my command, according to my desire,” and not in opposition to my desire.

The great integral force of nature, which is in its foundation, this force of bestowal, force of love, force of mutually shared activity, will begin to influence you. You will suddenly begin to change and will naturally yearn for unity with others. Suddenly a completely different relation to everything will appear in you: Your opinions will change, the paradigm by which you will begin to act.

This means that integral education specifically anticipates this change in a person. That is why it’s different from any other. Thus we always feel that in our world upbringing isn’t found at all. There are exercises, coercions of some kinds of instinctive actions, warnings, limits, and rewards, which in principle are not different from how we train animals.

Integral education is the one thing that we can give to a person; we call it “integral” because this is its goal. However in principle, it’s “Upbringing” with a capital letter when a person changes himself.

No one can change a person, thus there exists a system that indirectly brings a person to this education, “by way of the stick to happiness.” He can’t change himself instinctively: “Here it’s bad for me, so I escape. There it’s good, so I run there.” Is this called, “by way of the stick to happiness”? No, “by way of the stick to happiness” is when, in any case he is brought to education, he should understand: “I need to change myself,” and then he enters this education.
[90989]
From KabTV’s “Building the Social Environment,” 9/25/12

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