In the News (from The Wall Street Journal): “We like to believe that a few bad apples spoil the virtuous bunch. But research shows that everyone cheats a little—right up to the point where they lose their sense of integrity. …

“Over the past decade or so, my colleagues and I have taken a close look at why people cheat, using a variety of experiments and looking at a panoply of unique data sets—from insurance claims to employment histories to the treatment records of doctors and dentists. What we have found, in a nutshell: Everybody has the capacity to be dishonest, and almost everybody cheats—just by a little. Except for a few outliers at the top and bottom, the behavior of almost everyone is driven by two opposing motivations. On the one hand, we want to benefit from cheating and get as much money and glory as possible; on the other hand, we want to view ourselves as honest, honorable people. Sadly, it is this kind of small-scale mass cheating, not the high-profile cases, that is most corrosive to society. …

“Knowing that most people cheat—but just by a little—the next logical question is what makes us cheat more or less. …

“One thing that increased cheating in our experiments was making the prospect of a monetary payoff more ‘distant’ … Another thing that boosted cheating: Having another student in the room [in the experiment] who was clearly cheating. …

“Other factors that increased the dishonesty of our test subjects included knowingly wearing knockoff fashions, being drained from the demands of a mentally difficult task and thinking that ‘teammates’ would benefit from one’s cheating in a group version of the matrix task. …

“The results of these experiments should leave you wondering about the ways that we currently try to keep people honest. Does the prospect of heavy fines or increased enforcement really make someone less likely to cheat on their taxes, to fill out a fraudulent insurance claim, to recommend a bum investment or to steal from his or her company? It may have a small effect on our behavior, but it is probably going to be of little consequence when it comes up against the brute psychological force of ‘I’m only fudging a little’ or ‘Everyone does it’ or ‘It’s for a greater good.’…

“This experiment has obvious implications for the real world. While ethics lectures and training seem to have little to no effect on people, reminders of morality—right at the point where people are making a decision—appear to have an outsize effect on behavior.”

My Comment: Egoism lies consciously and unconsciously because it needs to see benefits for itself in everything, and only this counts. The correction is to change values. The value of honesty and the possibility of spiritual elevation, must become valued more highly than normal cheating. However, only striving for the highest reward, to become closer to the Creator, can protect from natural egoism.
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The model for the exchange of information between teacher and student emerged in the industrial era. Although the world has changed, schools continue to pretend that they still are preparing the workforce for factories. The primary skills learned are discipline and obedience.

The main structural component is the classroom. One teacher lectures a general lesson to all the students that everyone needs to grasp simultaneously. Such a system is suited for preparing people to work on an assembly line. Since then, it hasn’t changed.

Today, the old system no longer works. We need drastic changes, but any department of education is entirely restricted within a framework of laws. Teachers are afraid of losing their jobs. Parents believe that, at least in school, their children are in a safe state. Thus, the only ones who still have the possibility and the potential to change the situation are us!
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Baal HaSulam, “Messiah’s Shofar”: And because of that, Rashbi permitted himself and disclosed the wisdom of the hidden in his books, The Zohar and the Tikkunim. However, it was with great care, since he only permitted Rabbi Abba, who could disclose with intimation, so only the sages of the children of Israel would understand, and the sages of the nations would not understand.

The reason for that is that if people driven by egoism find something in this wisdom, they will not be able to advance. In another article, Baal HaSulam brings the example of an unripe fruit that can harm a person. Answers that are received without exertion, without self-advancement, only block a person’s way.

The wisdom of Kabbalah is revealed gradually, so that a person would understand more according to his internal spiritual growth, and thus advance. However, if he received the answers in advance, without growing and developing a vessel, it would stop him and not allow him to advance. Then he wouldn’t need to change and to acquire new attributes, and it would prevent him from discovering the way to the spiritual world by himself.

This is why Kabbalists took great care not to reveal things that people are not yet able to understand. The wisdom is acquired according to a person’s readiness. We study in order to summon the Light that Reforms, and when it corrects us, we begin to understand and to feel the material that we study.

The process is as follows: We connect in a group of about ten people, and then by the power of our unity we can raise MAN to the upper force. As an answer, we receive the Light that Reforms, which means the Surrounding Light (Ohr Makif – OM). This is what changes us, meaning, truly unites us (∑) and corrects us, and thanks to this correction we discover the upper world in our corrected attributes.

So these are the stages of the process:

1. We unite
2. We raise MAN for correction
3. The Surrounding Light corrects us
4. We discover the upper reality.

If we don’t perform the two initial steps, connecting and raising MAN, then nothing happens. Therefore, Kabbalists wrote their books in stages, according to our advancement in our study. When we read it for the first time, we discover our ego. Then we understand that there is only one choice, to rise to unity (∑), and then we discover that it isn’t enough either and that we have to raise MAN. If we do that then the Upper Light, the Surrounding Light (OM) completes the work.

The Kabbalistic books are revealed to us according to these stages, and it is all by the study. In the first stage, I discover the evil, in the second stage, I see that I cannot do anything and that I have to connect with the friends, and in the third stage, I understand that we will not manage without a request that the Light will connect us because we cannot do it by ourselves. Then the Light comes and completes the work. The first half of the work is our responsibility and the second half is fulfilled from Above and it is called “the work of the Creator.”
[80985]
From the 1^s part  Daily Kabbalah Lesson  6/20/12 in Toronto, “Messiah’s Shofar”

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Question: Should we offer supporting study materials for the courses in integral upbringing?

Answer: I think that the basic course should teach people to unite practically. And, the next course, which prepares instructors, should include everything.

We need to provide a future instructor with various systematic materials on every topic with a bibliography and other data. Everyone needs to have a folder from which he could draw solid, compelling information at any given moment to demonstrate, convince, talk about, and teach. He has to be able to use this.
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” 5/22/12

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Question: I am actually only an animalistic body and I don’t have a “soul” yet. How do I acquire it?

Answer: A soul is part of the Creator from above. It is bestowal; it is the level of Bina, the level of general love.

If you acquire this attribute, it means that you have received a part of godliness from above. “From above” means that you consider the value of bestowal and love as higher than all your other beastly desires.

If you acquire this part of the attribute, it means that you have received a soul. Why? It is because, with this part, you will be able to love others and to bestow upon them. You will feel a different world, the next world, something that is external to what you are feeling now. Every sphere that you are feeling now, as if you were in it and which surrounds you, is a sphere that you feel inside your ego.

If you acquire the attribute of bestowal, it is as if you exit this sphere and enter an upper sphere that is external to you. You get an extra corporeal feeling, a special emotional state (extra sensory), and then you begin to discover the upper world, thoughts and desires that are aimed fully at bestowal and love. This is called an “addition” above the five senses with which you currently depict this world: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and feeling.

You add extra senses to these five senses, which operate in bestowal, called Keter, Hochma. Bina, Zeir Anpin and Malchut in which you feel something else that is totally in bestowal. The new structure that you have acquired begins to take on the form of Adam, which resembles the Creator.

Now, you exist in an egoistic sphere called “this world,” you feel everything only within your ego, and this is your life. Suppose you expand yourself all the way to some external sphere. What you would feel in it is called the upper world.

So, the vessels that you acquire along with that, the desires and the thoughts, are called Adam, the one who resembles the Creator. The Light that you attain in these vessels, the filling, is the Creator, the attribute of bestowal and love.

Then, you attain an even greater world, the next level, and thus you advance up 125 degrees. However, there, you already have an upper mind and feelings that help you understand what is going on. The main thing is to exit the first sphere because its nature is aimed totally inward, and it is opposite to all the other spheres whose nature is aimed outward.
[80887]
From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 6/15/12, The Zohar

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Listen to an Audio Version of the Blog
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Question: Can we bring scientists into the system of integral education?

Answer: I think so, but the problem is that it is rather difficult to work with well-known people: to pick a time convenient for them, provide transportation, and create special conditions. That is why the best and most practical solution is to make clips with them that will be accessible to instructors and could be shown on screen whenever needed.

It is preferable to make everything portable and easy. Today, you can put any amount of information in a small notebook and use a little overhead projector because everything there is processed and organized clearly, concretely, with all the data about the people whom you present. That’s enough.
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” 5/22/12

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Question: Is it possible to organize serious roundtables where our teachers, students, and scientists would participate in preparing our experts?

Answer: Try whatever you can. A roundtable is a tool for an action of mutual integration. Around the roundtable, you create a new integral force that no one has had before and which isn’t just the sum of all the desires and thoughts of the participants, but a much higher force.

They don’t just converse and reach some collective conclusions. They also annul themselves emotionally in order to connect with others, in order to create a unique integral person, to create a new personality. The emotion that is created among them is a totally new tool for solving all the problems, questions, and fantasies, for everything.

You can take this new integral tool everywhere, and you will solve any questions correctly since the world is integral, and by that, you are putting yourself in a balanced state with nature. People who have joined in this constantly yearn for it. They feel that there is a special inspiration here, an elevation; it is the next level of our development where you can actually detach yourself from your body and feel that you exist not in the detachment, but in much more sublime mind and feelings than when you were on your own.

So, bring more people along. They instinctively will yearn for such groups, for such opportunities. I believe that roundtables can be broadcasted through TV channels and different virtual channels. We simply must cultivate them.
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” 5/22/12

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Opinion (Takeshi Fujimaki, former adviser to billionaire investor George Soros): “‘Japan is likely to default before Europe does, which could be in the next five years,’ the president of Fujimaki Japan, an investment advising company in Tokyo, said in an interview yesterday [June 14]. Japanese should hold foreign-currency products, such as those denominated in the greenback, Swiss franc, sterling, Australian and Canadian dollars, Fujimaki said.

“Should the Japanese government default, the yen may weaken to 400-500 per dollar, and the yields on benchmark 10-year bonds could surge above 80 percent, according to Fujimaki. …

“Japan’s public borrowings, the world’s biggest, will balloon to 245.6 percent of its annual economic output in 2014, up from 67.3 percent in 1984, an estimate by the International Monetary Fund shows. …

“‘There’s no way out of Japan’s crisis,’ Fujimaki said. ‘The only option left for Japan is either default or print money into hyper-inflation.’”

My Comment: There is a way out of the crisis for every country and the entire world if we understand its cause—the hyper-egoism of managers—if we begin to transform the world community from antagonistic to fraternal, and if we start to transfer the economy from over-consumption to reasonable consumption through a realistic reduction of infrastructure. Otherwise, the crisis will bring us to this through the destruction of the entire infrastructure.
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Opinion (Peter Thiel, billionaire Facebook investor, former PayPal CEO, and Palantir co-founder): “For most of recent human history—from the invention of the steam engine in the late 17th century through about the late 1960’s or so—technological process has been tremendous, perhaps even relentless. In most prior human societies, people made money by taking it from others. The industrial revolution wrought a paradigm shift in which people make money through trade, not plunder.

“The zenith of optimism about the future of technology might have been the 1960’s. People believed in the future. They thought about the future. Many were supremely confident that the next 50 years would be a half-century of unprecedented technological progress.

“But with the exception of the computer industry, it wasn’t. Per capita incomes are still rising, but that rate is starkly decelerating. Median wages have been stagnant since 1973. People find themselves in an alarming Alice-in-Wonderland-style scenario in which they must run harder and harder—that is, work longer hours—just to stay in the same place. This deceleration is complex, and wage data alone don’t explain it. But they do support the general sense that the rapid progress of the last 200 years is slowing all too quickly.”

My Comment: All the years of development after 1960 have not been beneficial for mankind. We need to rise to the next level and strive to achieve goals other than the material ones that no longer can satisfy and benefit us.
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