Question: Let us say that the workday at a business is being cut in half. In other words, a person will work four hours and spend four hours studying. We will have to decrease people’s salary, but we will need to do it gradually and guarantee the minimum standard of living.

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Today we are facing a serious economic crisis that will help us discover that by our unrestricted yearning for wealth, control, and technological advancement, we have confused ourselves and placed ourselves in a trap. We run around like a hamster on a wheel feeling that we constantly have to manufacture more and more products for which there is actually no real need.

But nature, compressing us into one ring, shows us that we have to start living like one harmonious family that needs only the normal basic necessities and no excesses. This means that we will have to reach the level of rational, sensible consumption. Of course, a person needs clothing, food, medical care, security and a job. But he doesn’t have to follow every advertisement, which for the sake of someone else’s gain convinces him that he really needs meaningless products, by constantly offering him new things and igniting his appetite.

There must be an end to this chase, and we are already starting to feel that global production is slowing down. As a result, many people are losing their jobs and are being thrown into the streets. The number of unemployed is in the millions and is growing day by day throughout the world. This trend will continue.

I believe that the crisis will be reflected in the family causing an opposite process. After all, women will begin to gradually return to the home. Men too, will spend more time at home. Life at home will be more balanced and the mad chase in which we wish to swallow the whole world will stop.

Then we will feel the desire to live in a family again, not like in the past, but in a more balanced, tranquil way. A person will start dealing with his internal development! He will live a balanced life with nature.

First we must reach a balance among us in our relationships by forming better connections in society. We must do that or we will simply not survive. The external harmony will change us internally and make us more tranquil and patient and teach us how to build our families based on such connections so that “love will cover all sins.”

Then we’ll be able to be more tolerant and learn to live in a family where everyone is free, but at the same time internally connected to a spouse. We’ll want to have children in such a family and will learn how to treat them and give them the right education according to the spirit of this new humanity.

It may well be that not everyone has understood this yet, but the old world no longer exists. In the new world we’ll be filled, not by running around from one place to another chasing money, status, and fashion. We’ll feel what lies behind all this emptiness and the filling that is on a higher, perfect, sublime level giving us a sense of upper harmony.

We’ll begin to feel a more internal reality, the harmony that exists in nature, and all thanks to the fact that we connect with others in mutual concern and mutual guarantee.

None of us has ever felt what true fulfillment is! Have we ever succeeded to fill ourselves in the chase after wealth, honor, control, and knowledge? Did you ever stop and say, “Now I am happy and I don’t need anything else”? There was never such a moment. We only keep on running, but we can’t fill ourselves.

Now we are about to rise to the next level of existence and to find out: what can a person enjoy, what can he be filled by? We’ll be filled by reaching the right connections among us because in the right connections and the ties among us we will reveal the wholeness of nature. This is the feeling of love that no one has known until now. I will enjoy my good attitude toward others and my love of others, and my desire to bestow upon them. If everyone treats others this way, everyone will be filled with this feeling of love.

Very little is needed in order to achieve this—only to learn how to do it! We have everything that we need: the method and the system of the integral education that can teach everyone. It’s an ancient method that has existed for ages, but it’s revealed only in our times because the world has reached such a state that it has become crucial for its existence.
[77043]
From KabTV’s “A New Life” Episode19, 2/2/12

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Filed under: Crisis, Education, Integral Upbringing, Society, World - 1 Comment →

In the News (from DiscoveryNews): “The human population is growing at such a staggering rate that we are organizing ourselves more like ant supercolonies, with new research finding that we have more in common now with some ants than we do with our closest living animal kingdom relatives.

“The new study, published in the journal Behavioral Ecology, points out that both humans and ants (termites, too) live in societies that may consist of up to a million plus members.

“’As a result, modern humans have more in common with some ants than we do with our closest relatives the chimpanzees,’ Mark Moffett, author of the study, told Discovery News. ‘With a maximum size of about 100, no chimpanzee group has to deal with issues of public health, infrastructure, distribution of goods and services, market economies, mass transit problems, assembly lines and complex teamwork, agriculture and animal domestication, warfare and slavery.’

“’Ants have developed behaviors addressing all of these problems,’ added Moffett, a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History. He pointed out that only humans and ants have developed full-blown warfare.”

My Comment: We were given the mind in order, not to be guided by egoistic nature like ants, but to become conscious of the evil of egoism, to rise above it, and to change ourselves, and thus reach the level of the ruler, the Creator, His eternity and perfection.
[78083]

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In the News (from Cornell University Library): “A central question in our understanding of the physical world is how our knowledge of the whole relates to our knowledge of the individual parts. One aspect of this question is the following: To what extent does ignorance about a whole preclude knowledge of at least one of its parts?

“Relying purely on classical intuition, one would certainly be inclined to conjecture that a strong ignorance of the whole cannot come without significant ignorance of at least one of its parts. Indeed, we show that this reasoning holds in any non-contextual hidden variable model (NC-HV).

“Curiously, however, such a conjecture is false in quantum theory: We provide an explicit example where a large ignorance about the whole can coexist with an almost perfect knowledge of each of its parts. More specifically, we provide a simple information–theoretic inequality satisfied in any NC-HV, but which can be arbitrarily violated by quantum mechanics. Our inequality has interesting implications for quantum cryptography.”

My Comment: From the perspective of Kabbalah, there is no paradox because the part and the whole are equivalent. Everything from micro to the whole is built on the principle of a hologram where any part contains information about everything. In other words, any part and the whole are made up of ten Sefirot. Our egoistic mind cannot connect the parts and the whole, recognizing that a part is equal to the whole. However, in the spiritual world, this condition is fundamental and understood on the first spiritual degree.
[78026]

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Question: Let us say that a big factory has closed down in a small town of fifty thousand people, and people have been left without work. What should we do? Should we inform people information that qualitative changes are coming on a global scale, or just put them before the fact?

Answer: What do you want the population to do, panic? Confusion, alcoholism, crime, collapse of the family unit, and so on, all social relations, even the concealed ones, immediately become aggravated.

You must first warn people, give them the remedy, and then tell them about the illness. We must have mercy on the poor population. This comes first.

Second, how do we do this? Imagine the horrible state of fifty thousand people who gradually will descend to the poverty level and degradation. How can this be prevented?

Question: We do not stop the factory. Instead, we begin to gradually cut down work hours by one hour a week. We offer people the option to spend this hour studying, without leaving the plant. We make an announcement that the corporation is introducing a special service, and now everyone must attend lessons as if it were work.

Answer: Our explanation can be in accordance with the common condition of the nation and the world, the common crisis, the common problems. This is why we want to enlighten the population and even make our city special, exemplary. This is the reason that we are introducing common, anti-crisis education and upbringing.

We can speak about the fact that the crisis is not only taking over the city, but the entire world. We really must justify it in the press and everywhere else. People must understand that there is a “tsunami” heading toward the entire planet. The only thing is that the population must be enlightened gradually, not with a harsh blow.

As the crisis continues to grow, we must educate the population and change social relations and our life into a form, a system, that could serve as a buffer to live through the crisis peacefully and well, without conflicts, perhaps even with a certain benefit. In other words, the crisis does not have to be presented as a crisis, since the word actually means “the birth of something new.”

We can explain all this to the population gradually. We must study all this so that we understand where the world and the country are, with us inside them. This will help everyone survive and succeed to the extent of his or her understanding.

All this could be realized through different public services, local television, newspapers, and presentations by local celebrities. We must do everything we can. We can invite professors and organize something very presentable, respected, and convincing. All these presentations will make it clear that the world really is at a bifurcation point.

Question: Instead of grief, “All is lost, we are closing the factory,” we can make it a celebration, giving people a chance to create a good, positive emotional background. In reducing the workday by one hour, we could say, “This is a very good thing.”

Answer: We introduce a system of integral learning not only at the factory, but also for all in general as a mandatory system, up to retirees.

Question: There is a category of people, entrpreneurs, who are very difficult to engage in studying. They are economically independent. How can we influence them to learn?

Answer: We can do it, for example, through the taxation system. A certain decree obligates a person to attend a course. Only then, will he be allowed to file his tax return.
[77656]
From KabTV’s “Experimental City – Soultion to the Crisis” 3/2/12

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The movie “There’s no Tomorrow”

(“There is no Tomorrow” is a half-hour long movie about the depletion of natural resources and energy and about the impossible limitless life in a limited planet. Inspired by the capitalist caricatures of the 40’s, the movie is an introduction to the energy dilemmas we are facing today).

My Comment: Our problem is that although the message in this film is true, it isn’t the whole truth. Nature has its own plan according to which it develops us, not to live modestly, but to understand the meaning of our life. So our wandering and wondering in the endless search for the right way to live on earth brought us to a general crisis, to a crisis in every aspect of our life, even if we could multiply beyond the earth’s carrying capacity.

The crisis is in us because we’ve developed until we reached the question about the meaning of life, and it doesn’t exist in our current existence! All the problems we encounter in everything that we do are called the “general crisis,” it is our own crisis, as we consume ourselves and nature, living in order to “live.”

Nature pushes us out of the crises to “turn on our brain,” so that we will think about that and discover the next level of our development, in another dimension, in the attribute of bestowal, above our current feelings and mind. We will discover another space instead of the earth and our bodies, which are felt in the attribute of receiving (the ego); we will discover a field of forces of bestowal, the dimension of the quantum state!
[78020]

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Question: A person needs to open slightly to feel the taste of exiting himself, the taste of integrality. How is it possible to do that? Where do we begin?

Answer: In the beginning, we use games in the process of teaching. They show how much we lose in our interaction from being individualists and how much we gain if we participate together.

When we mutually participate, we don’t connect our efforts or our knowledge, but rather give birth to something new: a new force, a new knowledge, new opportunities, and most importantly, a new sensation that exists between us. And we all exist in it together.

From within this new participation, we do not begin even to feel the “we” since it is the total of the individualists who assemble together. When we exit ourselves, the individualists, we go to the next state of integrality that is called Adam (Man or Human). We must try to begin to feel it. But this is fine tuning.

Question: What is the first step to begin to feel this?

Answer: I think it is built on conversation, on communication, on understanding and mutual participation. A kind of commonality is gradually created, a kind of deep, internal, non-verbal mutual understanding, when they begin to feel what ties them together, what is common between them.

It is a shared goal. But it is not an individual goal of each of us; this goal is above us: harmony with nature that we must understand, grasp its meaning, its characteristics, its relationship to us, and the way we enter it and exist in it.  However, we only exist in it thanks to the connection between us. It is specifically the connection between us that creates the “lining,” the background, our integral sensor. With its help we feel integral nature revealed in our mutual sensation, as if within us.

Then, we begin to feel its thought, intelligence, the goal, the plan, and gradually, we begin to attain it. Besides feeling that it exists, I begin to attain it, to discover it, but I discover it inside, through our shared feeling. Together with everyone, I begin to discover this more and more.

We begin to share our emotional impressions and discuss it from a logical point of view: What is this plan? What is this force that operates on us and others? How does our perception of our world change when we begin to feel the inner force of nature, which, apparently, exists here inside, and all of our world as if lies on its platform, while it constitutes a network of forces that holds up the entire world and manages it. So, what is this force? What is this energy?

When we begin to clarify this between us, among the friends, each one of us arrives, first of all, at this shared knowledge and receives from everyone additional feelings and intellect. And through these shared sensations and intelligence we begin to attain the harmony and the integral force of nature, which can never be discovered and attained alone.

This discussion should take place for a few hours in a group of ten people and two instructors, in a calm environment, with specific reading materials.
[76926]
From a “Talk on Integral Education” #17, 02/28/12

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Question: The purpose of our work at the workshop is clear: We open the heart to each other, we draw closer, connect.

Answer: You are learning to understand what a group means. Before that you only heard what it is. But here, I hope, you began to feel that special properties are embedded in the group, which you won’t be able to scrutinize alone. By listening specifically to your friend—and it doesn’t matter what he is saying for he may not know anything (he may be in the group for one or two months), you will hear in his words what you need to hear.

Question: There is also another form of group work, when the text is simply read and no commentaries are given. What’s the difference? When do we apply this kind of work?

Answer: It is a very serious question.

In general, how do you discuss something between yourselves when you stand in a big circle and say something? You also speak about yourself, from yourself, about the greatness of the group, the greatness of the goal, of the gathering, or about why you came to the convention.

Most important is not to talk about what’s in your heart at the given moment. You do not give vent to what you feel at the moment. As in our world, you do not want to tell anybody about your deepest feelings, personal secrets, and the same is here. That is, I do not talk about my relationship with the Creator as it concerns only me. All the rest—it makes no difference.

Question: When we work independently in the group, who will help us stop on time and talk from the heart, not from the mind?

Answer: Don’t be afraid to err. It’s not important. It’s completely unimportant!

Those who study for a month or two can gather into the group and try to discuss something between themselves, to mumble like children—it’s not important. They will nevertheless grow, if they only do what’s needed. No preliminary knowledge is required from a person, nothing. Most important is to act simply, open heartedly, and naively, and then everything will work out.
[76899] 
From Vilnius Convention 3/25/2012, Workshop 4

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Preparation to the Lesson

Lesson: Talk About Past Conventions 

The Book of Zohar – Selected Excerpts “Beresheet (Genesis),” “The Separating and Connecting Firmament,” Item 368, Lesson 99

Talmud Eser Sefirot, Part 7, Item 3, Lesson 4

“Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot,” Item 138, Lesson 62

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