Question: While studying in the group, people feel a kind of embarrassment because new tools, mechanisms, and experience are required in the mutual integral cooperation. A person has gotten used to living and working according to a certain program.

Suddenly he discovers that the program has changed. People remain in the circle and their role is simply to carry on a conversation between them, to get to know one another, to see other people. A person begins to worry and to ask: “Tell me what to do? Where are we headed?”

Answer: The point is that they find themselves closed among themselves, and we must develop a new approach to a new integral dialog with one another.

A person really feels concern and uneasiness. He suddenly sees that he isn’t ready for the mutual integral cooperation because he was taught differently.

The interesting thing about the mutual cooperation is that we don’t just discover our interdependence, but that there can be no hierarchy here, and this is very complicated. We are used to thinking that someone is a bit above me and that I am a bit lower, I can hide and when the time comes, I can come out and declare that I don’t exist. This is our ordinary social communication.

Here, however, we have to establish a new infrastructure that has to be among us and not in each of us. We don’t have to arrange people hierarchically, as each one represents a small individual part, which together make up all of society. In the mutual integral cooperative society, it is what we form outside ourselves, something that is around us, that is external, among us. Each one enters this society as a small integral part and dissolves among the others.

Therefore, people find it very hard to experience this exit from themselves: I am in society, as part of it; “I” and “they” are the same thing. There is no such thing as “I,” and later there is no such thing as “we” either, because “we” is just a sum, a number, while an integral is the sum in which all the elements add up so that they are not separate entities that come together, but rather a totally new whole in which the individuality disappears and the unity appears.

This is a difficult experience and not everyone can easily become accustomed to it, or shall I say, bear it. One must go through much pain, because you seem to be cutting yourself off of yourself. You enter a group and lose yourself inside it: “Where is the ‘I,’ where are all my elements, my basic inclinations?” It is as if you don’t exist and the result is something general. Moreover, it isn’t our “sum,” we don’t arrive at some common opinion, but suddenly there is a partnership born in us, which exists on its own.

I understand the people who reach that and who feel a little bad, you have to get used to it.

They need a serious theoretical preparation and practical studies. We have to show them that this is what our society that was born of one element, of an initial drop of semen somewhere in the past generations, should be like. It has grown to several billion people who now have to reunite. They don’t destroy themselves and their functioning on the corporeal level, but they should all come to the state in which they will all be one image of one single creature.

Nature compels us to precisely this closeness, to where we feel everyone else as one whole, including ourselves of course. There will be no integrals, no differentials, and no sums. It will be something that is totally new, a new society that grows from the terrible separated state of the global crisis.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #17, 02/28/12

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