Question: Which connectable parts should be highlighted in man and in nature? Is it possible to deal with the division of the whole into parts in order to focus our efforts on them?

Answer: First we have to see nature as a totally integral system in which everything is mutually connected. There is no particle, atom, force, or field that is not connected into one system, no matter whether it is on the still nature level or on the vegetative, animate, or speaking levels, or whether it is conscious or not. It mustn’t be divided into parts.

We divide it into parts because we cannot understand and grasp all of it, just as we divide all of nature into different sciences. There is no physics, chemistry, biology, zoology or all the other sciences. It is more convenient for us to study nature this way—in some concrete discoveries. It only displays the weakness of our recognition and of our awareness.

Nature itself is totally integral and no part in it can highlighted. It is mutually connected.

But we can attain it as egoistic parts that are detached from one another intermittently. Then we can reconnect them gradually by building the original mosaic. But this is only relative to us, since nature itself is integral. By creating this mosaic, we gradually discover not just the particles that compose it but the elements that connect, thus forming the general picture. So at the same time this picture receives its next upper existence. It is just as if we could put our body together from different organs and systems and it would begin to function and life would be appear in it.

We must understand that by getting closer to the integration in our recognition of nature we eventually attain the life in it, which can be called the only upper force in nature. It has a plan for our development, its beginning and its end. But we can only approach it if we constantly aspire for integrality.

We will start to feel it gradually, gradually guess, and then more and more clearly reveal it. And I think that we will begin to discover it not after we assemble all of nature’s parts into one picture, but even as we get closer, we begin to get a foretaste of the completed picture.

We see that as we get closer we begin to perceive the integrality and we will gradually attain its upper thought, not in the absolute revealed state, but in stages.
[89015]
From KabTV’s “The Integral World: The Formula of Integral Society” 7/1/12

Related Material:
The Next Phase Of Human Development
The Discrepancy Between The Two Systems
That Loud Word “Nature”

Filed under: Integral Upbringing, Q&A, Society, World - No Comments →

In the News (from TD Waterhouse): “World trade will grow by a mere 2.5 percent this year, dragged down by Europe to less than half of the previous 20-year average, the World Trade Organization (WTO) said on Friday [September 21, 2012]…

“‘I see the risk more on the downside than the upside,’ WTO Director General Pascal Lamy said at a news conference in Singapore. ‘What could be surprising is that you have a volume of trade that is lower than world (economic) growth.’ …

“‘The main reason for the growth slowdown is of course Europe,’ said Lamy… ‘We also know U.S. growth is lower than expected, (and) Japan is not in great shape.’”

My Comment: It is left only to discover how much we are connected not only economically and politically, but also spiritually. We, all of humanity, are a single whole in nature and completely dependent on each other in everything. The development of nature and human evolution are intended for us to reveal this fact in the near future, either through suffering or awareness, and thus evoke in us the need to unite as one family, contrary to and above all our contradictions “by love above hatred.”
[89046]

Related Material:
The Crisis, When Will We Become Aware Of Your Cause?
The Global Recession Will Accelerate
The Discrepancy Between The Two Systems

Filed under: Crisis, Economy, Love, News, Politics, Unity - No Comments →

Opinion (Jose Manuel Barroso, President of the European Commission): “He explained he wanted to see Europe develop into a federation of nation states, while at the same time sharing sovereignty between EU members. He also spoke of the need to focus on growth in order to bring sustainable employment, especially for young people.

“He denied the single currency was the cause of Europe’s problems, but admitted not being institutionally prepared for the euro crisis.”

My Comment: While Europeans are planning their “national” and “state” sovereignty, the crisis will worsen.  No other path but suffering is seen. It is difficult to become aware of the need to follow unified nature in human community especially for Europeans.
[89043]

Related Material:
The Reassuring Message
The Task For The Next Six Months
“Eurozone Crisis Will Last For 20 Years”

Filed under: Crisis, News, Politics, Unity - No Comments →

Question: Where is the borderline between suppression of material desires and gaining spiritual ones?

Answer: We do not suppress our desires! We only discuss them and immediately assign more weight, greatness to the next, higher level of desires, the ones that drive us to unity and integrity, since they are far more important, better, higher, superior, and valued than our egoistic inclinations. It’s so even if our egoistic desires are seemingly of a positive kind, such as wanting to listen to a certain type of music, or read some kind of literature, or go to the ballet, or watch a football match, or go to a men’s club, or eat a special type of food—whatever it might be.

In other words, at this phase, with the help of the group I must receive a very serious and strong impression that these collective integral global standards are of a next level. They are not one step up, but incomparably more advanced than our aforementioned animal instinctive desires that nature automatically aroused within us and we, like slaves, tried to realize them quickly.
[88220]
From a Talk on Integral Upbringing 3/1/12

Related Material:
In Order To Rise And Connect
Smoothing Out the Imbalance
The Days Of Awe Before The New Year

Filed under: Education, Group Work, Integral Upbringing, Q&A - No Comments →

Question: A person comes to an integral group from the “outside.” He already has certain worries related to the material world, conflicts, problems with children, and so on. How can one transition from his routine predicaments to integration?

Answer: Everything has to be discussed in the group. However, it should be done specifically in the attempts to rise above corporeal problems. Various problems related to gender or character, to anything that might transpire between us have to be raised and discussed. We are a research group; we scrutinize ourselves. This is why we have to be ultimately sincere and interested in detaching from our animal “I” and rising above it into our integral “I,” which gradually is turning into “we.” So, there is nothing we should hide from one another.

At the same time, we shouldn’t concentrate on, dig into these issues too much: your personality against mine, somebody’s attractiveness, or animal, hormonal, drives… We have to discuss these things in brief in order to help each and everybody rise above them and keep ourselves specifically in this state while we continue understanding and sensing them in our animal body, as we know that they don’t exist at the next level.

We’ll constantly be “hanging” in the gap between our internal layers as if between the sky and the earth. This state will emerge in us and bother us for a long period of time: We’ll constantly be getting urges upwards and downwards. This is what our work is all about.

Within the inner states that we go through, we have to test our internal baggage of doubts, impressions, and aspirations in order to firmly position ourselves on the ground, to fly up as a balloon from earth to the “ceiling,” leaving behind our egoistic properties, ambitions, desires, and impulses. I am still aware of all of my problems, but internally I want to identify myself with the “ceiling,” meaning with my next step.
[88223]
From a Talk on Integral Upbringing 3/1/12

Related Material:
The Magnitude Of Spiritual Desires
A Flat Tire Or A Flat Desire?
Dividing The Spiritual Work

Filed under: Education, Integral Upbringing, Q&A - No Comments →

It’s not enough to simply connect with our friends’ sparks. We also have to study; knowledge will shape us and teach us how to connect with the sparks. So far, we have no idea how to unite, since we are not familiar with the system of spirituality. So, we read about it, listen, and study. We learn that we have to connect and form a system that consists of 10 Sefirot, Partzufim, worlds, Surrounding Light and Direct Light. All these names describe the connection between us that we need to achieve.

The main thing is to tune ourselves to receive help from Above. It’s not enough just to think of connecting with our friends’ sparks; we need someone else who will tie us together. We have to appeal to the upper force so that It does this work for us. We bring our broken connection to the higher force and complain to It about our inability to unite. It’s similar to a crying baby who approaches his mother and father complaining that he cannot do something because it is broken and doesn’t work anymore.

The upper Light deliberately broke the bond between us so that we would demand it be restored. When one appeals to the upper force with this request together with his friends, it means that one is already inside the corrected system. It is called “Israel, Torah and the Creator are One.”

Israel stands for all of us, for those who are oriented “directly to the Creator” (Yashar – El.) The Torah is the Light that we search for in order to get glued back together. We study its actions with the books. The Creator is the upper force, a source of the Light that returns to the benevolence and assembles us back together. That explains why it is called the returning to the source of the good state that existed before the shattering occurred. This is how we attain correction.

We have to clarify numerous phases at this point. Although, we should understand that one is totally unable to do it on one’s own because he will always tend to work internally and presume that he has enough power and qualities to appeal to the Creator and scream to Him on his own.

But, I will never be able to address the Creator without presenting the broken vessel that consists of at least 10 friends who want to reconnect. I will be one of them. And if there are friends who understand that they need to connect in order to reveal the Creator and if they try to appeal to the Creator, for bestowal and love to reign between them, it happens.
[88770]
From a Talk at the Meal Commemorating Rabash, 9/20/12

Related Material:
How To Win In The Struggle With Yourself?
The Egoistic Feast Goes On
A World Structured At My Request

Filed under: Group Work, Mutual Guarantee, My Similarity to the Creator, Q&A, Unity - No Comments →

Question: Let’s say that a woman, whose missing husband is still on a “spree,” managed to rise to the integral level with the help of the group. Will her problem be resolved by itself or will she just regard it from a different perspective?

Answer: You should understand that the world is the way we draw it in our minds. We cannot ascertain objectively what, in fact, is real and what is actually going on. Everything is subjective. It’s all about how we sense and imagine it.

As soon as the woman begins to understand that her husband needs more social interaction and she is willing and able to give him a replacement that is of a higher and better level, his family, social, and economic problems will cease to exist. He will stop burning money with his friends in a pub or at a football stadium since he will have a new, contented attitude toward the world he lives in and to his family.

But we have to fulfill him somehow. We have to show him what we offer, that it is a replacement.

For dozens of years, world governments have been investing in massive team sports since an enormous number of fans unite around them. It distracts them and gives them a chance to unite, according to their affiliation with various sport teams. Such unity bears an egoistic nature since they need an opponent in order to unite. Governments realize that they should distract people by providing them with outlets and letting them experience warmth from belonging to various groups, clubs, etc.

However, we must gradually show people that connecting around something that is against something or someone is flawed; it destroys society. We see that there is no room for friendliness in sports. Competition only leads to drugs, sales, and buying players. There is nothing to it except financial cunning, “Give me another couple of billion, and I’ll make a team for you that will defeat everyone out there.” This scenario really cannot serve as a foundation for those who aspire to unity. Who exactly am I supporting? Are a couple of Africans or South Americans bought for money and brought to my favorite team supposed to defend my city or my country?

The same egoists do not want to look at all this because it really is not what they want to see in their passions.

We can raise the level of awareness of people to where they won’t abide such an attitude to sports. When we become a member of a club in order to unite with others, we generate a sordid type of connection. We beat our neighbors in order to somehow satisfy our dormant herd mentality that comes from ancient times, instead of one that leads us forward.

Therefore, there must be a serious explanation. We are quite capable of providing this explanation using humor and satire and showing how it is constructed, from football to beer to any teams or sports clubs, no matter if it is a local or national team, from the primal, underdeveloped nature of man, from his need to unite. And then, little by little, we can bring him to another level
[88214]
From a Talk on Integral Upbringing 3/1/12

Related Material:
Which Desires To Fulfill
The Task For The Next 6 months
The Priceless Science

Filed under: Education, Integral Upbringing, Q&A, Society - No Comments →

Listen to an Audio Version of the Blog
Download: MP3 Audio
[audio:http://files.kabbalahmedia.info/audio/eng_o_rav_2012-09-27_declamation_blog-rav_full.mp3 title=’27.9.12′]

Filed under: Audio Version of the Blog - No Comments →

Thanks to mutual guarantee a person reaches a state in which he feels that everyone supports him in order to provide him everything that he needs. Then he can think about others. It is only under this condition that he rises above his ego.

There are no other forces. The ego is the only force that dominates us and only in a group can we neutralize it.

If the group doesn’t neutralize and annul my ego, I will never be able to do it myself. I will be buried in it forever and will not be able to be born, to exit it. Mutual guarantee is the law of life for me, it is the precondition for my spiritual birth.

Unless I receive from the group the secure feeling of full protection and of the provision of everything that I need, I will not be able to rise above myself. In fact, it is mutual guarantee that gives birth to this feeling in me, and it isn’t up to me any more. If the friends influence me by their mutual guarantee, I will not stop thinking about them at all. That’s the way it works.

It is like a baby in his mother’s arms who feels that he has no troubles. He feels instinctively safe, and that he will be provided with whatever he needs. This is how I should feel, like a baby in the arms of the group, who feels that all his troubles are gone, all the thoughts, the anxieties, and the questions.

There is nothing that is connected to me; it is as if I am floating in the air. From this moment on I can begin to think about others.

We are talking about unchangeable laws, about forces that operate on us. It isn’t my fantasy or a guess. If the force of mutual guarantee operates on me, then I detach myself, and it makes no difference whether I want to or not. If the friends operate on me with this force, I am free of the ego’s domination. From that moment on I can think about others.
[88945]
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/24/12, Writings of Baal HaSulam

Related Material:
Upward On The Balloon Of Mutual Guarantee
Don’t Make Us Carry You On A Stretcher!
The Hands That Hold You Up Over The Abyss

Filed under: Daily Kabbalah Lesson, Egoism, Group Work, Mutual Guarantee - No Comments →

If you don’t perform the right action during a descent, you are creating a double Machsom (barrier) before you. You should have overcome one Machsom during the revelation of a new void, but you postponed it and said that it wasn’t in your powers to do so. Now you’ll have to wait until the Creator turns to you again, which means that the new conditions for correcting that phenomenon will be revealed in you again, but differently. The Creator changes one angel, one force, with another and gives a person another chance to advance.

A person cooperates within a whole system in which he has to complete his part, which depends solely on him, in order to ensure the existence of the whole system and to advance it towards the goal. This movement takes place in the whole system, where every part is spurred and depends on others according to the order of correction from the bottom up in the chain of the Reshimot (informational genes).

What will happen to a person who doesn’t fulfill his Reshimot? Others will have to do his work. So a person damages everyone seriously if he doesn’t carry out the tasks that are revealed to him. By that he harms the whole system, the whole group. He doesn’t allow the group to advance and makes it work on extra corrections in order to complete what he couldn’t do. They have to carry him on their backs, like in a battle, when you have to carry a seriously wounded soldier on a stretcher. It’s a very sad situation for the group.

Since the whole system is whole, and the emergence of the Reshimot determines who should act first and who should act later, and how we are connected to one another, then all our actions depend on one another and complete one another. By not carrying out your task on time, you immediately condemn yourself and the whole world instead of judging yourself and the world to the scale of merit. You are standing on the scale tilting them to one side or to the other by being responsible for the whole world.
[88939]
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/24/12, Writings of Baal HaSulam

Related Material:
Mutual Guarantee Is The Precondition For Our Spiritual Birth
Upward On The Balloon Of Mutual Guarantee
The Internal Network: The Access Is Through The Desire

Filed under: Daily Kabbalah Lesson, Group Work, World - 1 Comment →