Transitions to new developmental levels have always been induced by small crises: Education, social, financial, and other systems gradually started to go out of order. Marriages started to fall apart, slowly but steadily illicit drug use spread and overpowered alcoholism. All of a sudden terrorism came into view.

Humanity’s nervousness reveals itself. It’s a result of weaknesses in all spheres of life, which were built according to egoistic rules that made everybody concentrate solely on themselves: This is yours, this is mine, don’t cross the line! Everyone defends his or her freedom and personal space. Now, Nature destroys boundaries between us, breaks walls, and drags us into some kind of community life that we try to avoid because we’re not yet ready for it.

When our egos were still too small, we were open to everything. At that time, we didn’t care whether we lived as one family in one village. People didn’t lock their doors and were very friendly with each other. A huge family (parents, children, and grandchildren) shared one room and were not at all embarrassed with each other.

Nowadays, thing are different. We are separated by our huge egoism: Everybody wants a separate room, strives to hide behind the computer or telephone, and tends to contact others as little as possible. People don’t unite into families any longer, but rather get together to have sex and then go away.

But suddenly, Nature starts to destroy partitions and by doing so cancels our severance. The current crisis is the biggest of all we’ve experienced so far. We do everything to delay, to misrepresent it, but it manifests on lower levels at which we all are still interconnected.

Currently, there is no such thing as a family crisis since families are simply broken. More than half of families cannot be considered families per se and have no desire to revive and reconstruct themselves. The number of people who don’t wish to marry has reached 70%! Today, it’s normal, a  good family where its members treat each other with love and respect has become an anachronism.

The second major problem is drugs. We comply with this ugly phenomenon; our fight with it is mild and gentle. We realize that it’s a terrible thing which we can’t avoid because the society we live in and this life itself force us to look for ways to escape.

The next problem is how we raise our youth. Currently, demographics are poor, the population doesn’t grow much, and people don’t know how to take care of their children. Parents agree to leave children both overnight and during the day. Children are not attached to their parents any longer; the gap between generations grows. We are about to lose the next generation, but nobody worries too much about it. We say: “What difference does it make whether our children’s upbringing is good or bad; what does it change?” This is how we think, not even remotely realizing the essence of the problem.

It looks like all prior crises were not too big of a blow for us, nor did they trigger our understanding that we have bankrupted ourselves in all aspects of our lives. The developmental process always flows from the small and weak to impacting the big ones. This is similar to the punishment of children, meaning at first we start convincing them and then progress to threatening with bigger trouble. At this point, we all are going through a very serious process; it’s a matter of life and death.

We are going through two serious cycles of discrepancies between us and Nature. Integrality allows us to realize that we are opposite to Nature and contrary to all its systems, meaning that originally we were supposed to be completely interconnected, but we do everything we can to avoid staying united.

We understand that staying together would be good for us, but we don’t know how to achieve this state. Everybody in the world realizes that if people unite for educational, technical, pedagogical and cultural purposes, it will facilitate the whole situation. But how can we act against our ego? We are not capable of doing so!

Here is the problem: If we are unable to unite, we will stay hungry. Very simple! We won’t be able to provide for basic necessities: food, safety, heat, dwelling, and physical health. These are five basic needs that have to be satisfied in order to survive.

At this time, Nature is pressing upon us so much that if we don’t correspond to its requirements, we won’t be able to provide for our five major necessities. Such a notion as ecology is part of our requirement for safety. We will fail to provide food and keep good ecology; both are intertwined since one influences the other.

Worry, fear, and trouble will eventually force humankind to take drastic measures. If we don’t do anything, our resistance and opposition to Nature will lead us to affliction, wars, devastation, and obliteration. At some point, we will re-evaluate our chances to survive and will arrive at the conclusion that we have to unite and reach the fourth level of development—the Human level.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #12, 12/16/11

Related Material:
The Four Stages Of Human Development
When Does Tranquility Come?
The Movement Towards Integration

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