Europe Goes On Strike

Dr. Michael LaitmanIn the News (from The Voice of Russia): “Unwilling to accept cuts in wages and social spending, the Europeans go on strike almost every day. Obviously, in the coming year we will see many more strikes in Europe. The EU will have to save in order to overcome the crisis, but the measures to reduce budget spending and market reforms are very painful for the population.”

My Comment: Humanity must switch consciously or through wars and crises from the economy of (unlimited) consumerism to the economy or reasonable (necessary, balanced) consumption. This will free up to 70-80% of the workforce. According to the law of nature, we need to distribute the remainder of work in the most ecological (with minimum cost) and effective way among all the workforce.

We, all the inhabitants of the Earth, must dedicate the time freed from extra (harmful) work to our integral education and upbringing, the method of homeostasis (balance with nature), until we achieve integral connection between us and feel the upper level of the governing forces of Nature.
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Couples Spend Less Than 30 Minutes A Day Together

Dr. Michael LaitmanIn the News (from the Mirror): “The daily grind is leaving stressed-out couples with just 30 minutes of quality time together each day.

“A survey found 30% of people thought their relationships suffered as a result.

“And 89% felt they would get on better if they saw each other more, by having dinner or going out, for example.

“Eatwelshlamb.co.uk, which carried out the poll, said: ‘We encourage couples to make sure there is at least time for a meaningful conversation.’”

My Comment: Nature will force us to restore order in our lives. Through penalties, we will find out that there is no way other than balance with nature. Through suffering, we will realize that we need to comply with the law of nature, rather than invent our own. It is a pity that humanity learns by long and bitter experience.
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Life Began With A Planetary Mega-Organism

Opinion (Gustavo Caetano-Anolles, from NewScientist): “Once upon a time, 3 billion years ago, there lived a single organism called LUCA. It was enormous: a mega-organism like none seen since, it filled the planet’s oceans before splitting into three and giving birth to the ancestors of all living things on Earth today.

“This strange picture is emerging from efforts to pin down the last universal common ancestor – not the first life that emerged on Earth but the life form that gave rise to all others.

“The latest results suggest LUCA was the result of early life’s fight to survive, attempts at which turned the ocean into a global genetic swap shop for hundreds of millions of years. Cells struggling to survive on their own exchanged useful parts with each other without competition – effectively creating a global mega-organism.

“It was around 2.9 billion years ago that LUCA split into the three domains of life: the single-celled bacteria and archaea, and the more complex eukaryotes that gave rise to animals and plants. It’s hard to know what happened before the split. Hardly any fossil evidence remains from this time, and any genes that date that far back are likely to have mutated beyond recognition.

“That isn’t an insuperable obstacle to painting LUCA’s portrait, says Gustavo Caetano-Anollés of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While the sequence of genes changes quickly, the three-dimensional structure of the proteins they code for is more resistant to the test of time. So if all organisms today make a protein with the same overall structure, he says, it’s a good bet that the structure was present in LUCA. He calls such structures living fossils, and points out that since the function of a protein is highly dependent on its structure, they could tell us what LUCA could do.

“To reconstruct the set of proteins LUCA could make, Caetano-Anollés searched a database of proteins from 420 modern organisms, looking for structures that were common to all. Of the structures he found, just 5 to 11 per cent were universal, meaning they were conserved enough to have originated in LUCA.

“By looking at their function, he concludes that LUCA had enzymes to break down and extract energy from nutrients, and some protein-making equipment, but it lacked the enzymes for making and reading DNA molecules.”
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Questions About The Studies And Amalek

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Why do the daily lessons start at 3 A.M. Jerusalem time? Is there a special reason for it?

Answer: This is how we studied with my Teacher Rabash.

Question: Many of your students come from the orthodox Judaism and follow its main principles: observe Shabbat (Saturday), eat kosher food, and so on. So when in one of the morning lessons you said that “the orthodox cannot be my students,” it confused us.

Answer: I do not have a single orthodox student! Many of them listen to the lessons from home, but are not in direct contact with me.

Question: What is Amalek: a historic personality of a force within us?

Answer: Everything is within man, including history.
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Pictures From The Arava Convention, Part 1

Here are some pictures from the convention in the Arava Desert, February 23-25, 2012.


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Should Pain Be Endured?

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Suppose that during the time of our interaction we are singing, having put our hands on each other’s shoulders, and someone accidentally squeezes my shoulder until I feel pain. Can I tell this person that he is hurting me? Or must I endure it and work with this pain?

Answer: In this specific example, I would say that you need to endure it.

I must understand that this person is expressing himself in this way. I must rise above my feeling so that my kind relationship towards him would result in the neutralization of pain.

We know that all of these are perceptions, and I would not have felt pain if a person close to me would cause me this, for the sake of saving him. Isn’t it so? I would not have felt pain then. I would understand the necessity for this and it would neutralize the pain, meaning that the goal would justify the means.

This is how one needs to come to this. However, since we are still talking about the levels of our development, then in the process of interaction, perhaps, it is possible to somehow tell about one’s feelings.

But in general as people develop, they arrive at such a state, when any relationship, however it may be on the outside, is perceived by them correctly.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #10, 12/16/11

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Let Us Please Each Other

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: There was a psychological experiment in training sessions for couples: A person was supposed to give the most pleasure to their partner with a single touch of the hand. There were three options: The first option was to try to please the other. The second was to touch hands without intention. And the third option was to receive the most pleasure from touching the other person.

The experiments concluded that the person receives the most pleasure by pleasing their partner, and when another tries to please him, it feels very unpleasant. What is this phenomenon? Is this something that has to do with integrality, egoism?

Answer: First of all it doesn’t matter who is sitting before me: whether it’s a woman, a man, a child an elderly person, a girl, an old woman, or even an animal—I should completely separate myself from any difference between us. I have to imagine an object before me with whom I have to establish contact.

Moreover, this contact is above our animal existence where I absolutely don’t care who and what the other person is in terms of their animalistic essence. Only one thing matters: What their current position in relation to me is, what they generate from themselves despite their nature.

It’s not contact between two animal objects, but two desires that want to integrate, give pure and abstract pleasure and fulfillment to one another. In other words, regardless of what and who you are, I come from a feeling of only wishing you good. In this case, when we rise above our animal inclination, our beastly state, the conditions set by nature, and begin to interact between us, this is where the experiment begins.

Either I wish to receive pleasure from an object (there is just an “object” before me), or I wish to convey my good attitude to this object, to fulfill it, wanting it to feel it, even if it’s through touch. By abstracting ourselves from our own ego, we want to suppress our sensations so as to make them neutral, meaning turn them into abstractly-egoistic, abstractly-altruistic, and abstractly-neutral states.

This is the beginning of our experiment, the primary purpose of which is a state whereby we rise above age, sexual, racial, national, and other differences and start contacting the essence. You are a desire and an intention (mind), and I am the same. This is how our mind and desires for integration can interact between them, independent from our external shell. This is what we try to do.

This is the initial direction for working in the group, especially a mixed group. At first we work a little with mixed groups, but then, once the people begin to understand that the opposite sex impedes them from concentrating on the level above our world, above our natural qualities, we can separate them. People will no longer have preconceived opinions regarding our actions towards them, and then we will divide them into a men’s and a women’s group.

And afterwards, once they are able to rise above it and work on purely integral level, we can once again combine them. But this is not a simple moment and requires many months of serious effort.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #10, 12/16/11

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Another Group As An Exercise Machine

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: When we record a group video training session and then have the group watch it, people start pointing a finger at each other, laughing, and so on. When we discuss a person, should everyone be their own judge or should other people judge them?

Answer: If people are not yet ready to see themselves from an abstract perspective, objectively, and do not understand that we are all little animals, then you need to show them complete strangers, even a group they do not know, and train them this way, use others to form an objective view.

You can assign numbers to the participants in the video and then discuss every one of them in order, talking about how to advance them towards unity, towards mutual guarantee.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #10, 12/16/11

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A Final Accord

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Feedback is very significant in psychology. I might have an idea of what is happening to a person, so I ask him: “How do you feel? What do you like?” This dialogue helps me learn about him or her. Can elements of dialogue be included in groups of integral education, or integrality actually operates there?

Answer: In our groups, individual development is connected to integral because the individual level is being adjusted to the integral one.

There is no individual level. My individual development depends on how integrated I am with the others, how much I complete them. At the same time I must understand and feel how I complete every one of them. In other words, I sense people and our community, I constantly feel and measure where I can add something to make it perfect, and I try to complete it with my participation, with my desire and thoughts. The essence of every participant, the general total power of their desire and thoughts suddenly begin to manifest in relation to me, and I become the group’s balancing element.

This is the way every person feels during the process of common studies. Moreover, the state of the group does not matter; what matters is how a person perceives it. The group can be in totally different states, but a person understands it one way or another and constantly changes himself according to it.

In other words, there is an opportunity here for constant inner movement. A person goes through so many changes that he becomes a general integral element of the entire group. He is obligated to constantly change as he feels all the nuances of the changes in the group. He is like its collecting element. And every person in the group is like this.

Moreover, this absolutely does not depend on the objective state of the group. We cannot speak about objectivity here because every person sees the environment only through his subjective prism.

This way we make every person equal to this small common society. The person and the entire group come to such unification when every person becomes equal to everyone. Inside him a person gradually accumulates a certain volume, a sum of different changes, sensations, and thoughts, which exist in everyone. This way we reach a state when the general and the particular are equal, and reach complete group unity. When every person becomes equal to everyone, all the “singles” add up to a single whole.

And this one single whole already exist as if outside of them. This is the final accord of all the transformations they undergo together and individually.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #10, 12/16/11

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A Long Journey Of Spiritual Development

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Your students are very open people who treat each other with a lot of care. But the people whom we will invite to learn will only reach this state in the future.

Answer: Our groups are groups of people who willingly strive towards integral interaction. But if we are speaking about the masses whom we will be lucky enough to involve in integral interaction, these people will not come very willingly, that is, not in full consciousness, but instead, it will happen to the extent of the social or personal need. Of course, there will be very big imbalances and an ascent.

This is why the first stage of their development, which includes the preliminary study of the material, training, and the understanding of everyone’s inner psychological process, will take a long time.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #10, 12/16/11

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