Opinion (Dani Rodrik, Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a leading scholar of globalization and economic development): “Nothing endangers globalization more than the yawning governance gap – the dangerous disparity between the national scope of political accountability and the global nature of markets for goods, capital, and many services – that has opened up in recent decades. When markets transcend national regulation, as with today’s globalization of finance, market failure, instability, and crisis is the result. But pushing rule-making onto supranational bureaucracies, such as the World Trade Organization or the European Commission, can result in a democratic deficit and a loss of legitimacy.

“How can this governance gap be closed? One option is to re-establish national democratic control over global markets. This is difficult and smacks of protectionism, but it is neither impossible nor necessarily inimical to healthy globalization. As I argue in my book The Globalization Paradox, expanding the scope for national governments to maintain regulatory diversity and rebuild frayed social bargains would enhance the functioning of the global economy. …

“But the trouble is not just that these global institutions remain weak. It is also that they are inter-governmental bodies – a collection of member states rather than agents of global citizens. Because their accountability to national electorates is indirect and uncertain, they do not generate the political allegiance – and hence legitimacy – that truly representative institutions require. Indeed, the travails of the European Union have revealed the limits of transnational political community-building, even among a comparatively limited and similar set of countries.

“Ultimately, the buck stops with national parliaments and executives. During the financial crisis, it was national governments that bailed out banks and firms, recapitalized the financial system, guaranteed debts, eased liquidity, primed the fiscal pump, and paid the unemployment and welfare checks – and took the blame for everything that went wrong. In the memorable words of outgoing Bank of England Governor Mervyn King, global banks are ‘international in life, but national in death.’

“But perhaps there is another path, one that accepts the authority of national governments, but aims to reorient national interests in a more global direction. Progress along such a path requires ‘national’ citizens to begin viewing themselves increasingly as ‘global citizens,’ with interests that extend beyond their state’s borders.”

My Comment: Since national governments depend on their citizens, integral education will lead to an understanding of global connection and responsibility, causing pressure on national governments.
[102967]

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Chyngyz Aitmatov (a Russian and Kyrgyz writer whose works were translated into more than 150 languages): “In one popular science magazine I recently read a story that exotic flowers in Paris suddenly began to die. Those flowers were once exported from Latin America. Meanwhile, there was perfect weather.

“Scientists did not find any reason that could explain what had happened. What did happen? There was extraordinary drought at the homeland of these flowers, and there, the same flowers died …

“What would be the history of humankind, our today’s life, if people, who think themselves ‘the crown of nature,’ could feel each other in the same way and respond to the suffering and joy of another person?!”

My Comment: This is an example of the universal interconnection of Nature. And the mutual sensation of other people’s feelings like one’s own is called love!
[102948]

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Question: Would you say that the quantity and quality of our exertion depends on our envy of the friends?

Answer: Yes, it also depends on your envy. It says, “Envy, lust and honor take a person out of this world.”

We may ask ourselves what is so good about these attributes, what can be worse and more reprehensible than losing your human form? A person who is envious can harm others and enjoys stepping on others and destroying them.

In short, we are talking about negative attributes, but they are actually the ones that take a person out of this world into the upper world. After all, they show me the real ego.

How else can I establish my connections with others if I don’t feel envy, lust, and a desire for respect? If I don’t have such attributes, I don’t need anything; I can live somewhere in the suburbs and sometimes go out shopping or doing different errands to provide my basic necessities and come back home.

But suddenly, in this peacefulness, I discover that I envy others; I want to attain the same things that they have and even more in order to seem higher than them. Then I move to live in the city and start a “career”…

It is impossible to advance without revealing my own bad attributes. We should only understand that they are “help against.” We shouldn’t block them but rather let them come out, as Baal HaSulam says, “I am happy with the revelation of the evil.”

Question: How can we combine feeling envious of the friends and requesting not for me but for them?

Answer: The envy of the friends is a great catalyst for my advancement, but advancement towards what? Towards bestowal. I don’t mean to reach greater achievements than them on the corporeal level; I want to succeed on the spiritual level. In spirituality, success depends on how much I annul my “self.” When I want to advance, I organize everything that I have received from the friends by envy, lust, and the desire for respect, and then I begin to understand that spiritual advancement is actually transcending myself.

Thus I receive a desire to ascend from the friends, but I don’t interpret it correctly: to ascend means to rise above myself, and to be incorporated with them. Thus the group is “help against”; it evokes a negative awakening in me, which I turn to positive in order to eventually return to the connection with the friends.

Here I have a problem again, the desire grows again, and I repeat the whole process…

Question: How can I aim the envy, the lust, and the desire for honor in the right direction? After all, it is very easy to justify myself in pursuing the right goal and finally fall into the darkness and distortion along the way. How can I build the internal boundaries that direct me, in addition to the teacher, the group, and the books?

Answer: You have to annul yourself before the friends. As a result of the annulment, you evoke the envy, the lust, and the desire for respect inside you; you open your eyes and begin to examine things and don’t just let them go on.

Otherwise, you find yourself in corporeal envy, lust, and desire for respect; you want to be different, to rise above the friends. But the group is built in such a way that it won’t let you fall into this. You will change in any case since the atmosphere here is special and people are dealing with inner search, and so your attitude towards the friends gradually takes on a more correct form. So even new friends here receive the right direction and aspire for the truth and not for the usual profit for themselves.

Question: But each of the friends was given the optimal conditions to advance, so what is there to envy?

Answer: I want to include them inside me. In each of them there is something special since otherwise he wouldn’t be here. So I want the same thing, this means that I want to be Adam, a human being.

The optimal conditions are not reason to relax, but rather a reason to bring the good out of everything, from all the states and the friends.
[102762]
From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/10/13, “Introduction to The Book of Zohar”

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Question: What does it mean to exit my body and treat the world outside me, rocks and flowers, with love?

Answer: It is about a state in which a person has already entered the spiritual world, not simply loving nature, plants, animals, and people who are close or distant to one’s self. In order to really be able to exit your ego, you were given friends, a group, and you have to use this means. If you establish the right attitude towards the group, then you will see how it can help you and take you out of yourself.

Only then will you understand who you were, what was on the outside, and why the Creator has created this world that we see as external to us. You will understand why you have a special body in this world that is meant to help you perform this exit.

Only after you begin to come out by all the external help of the good environment, will you feel that your attitude towards the still, vegetative, and animate nature is also changing. You will treat all of humanity differently since you will see everyone in the Light of bestowal and will start judging everything differently.

The ultimate goal is to reach equivalence of from with the Creator, after which you will certainly justify Him in every way; you do all that not in order to better your personal state, but because you want to bring Him contentment so that He will enjoy you.
[102819]
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/13/13, Shamati #36 

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A person cannot exit his ego by himself. Only the group can help him by throwing a lifeline to whoever wants to join it. The group is external to a person, so when he wants to exit himself, he cries out to them, “Save me, I have fallen into a deep well! Throw me a rope so that I can tie it around me and then pull me out of here!”

Only the group can offer such help to a person who needs help, by wanting to be with everyone. The rope is an invitation to connect with the friends, with their love. If a person tries to hold on to this invitation and tries to be in equivalence of form with them, then the friends will begin to pull him up. He has to overcome his ego more and more, on his part, which means that he rises from the well towards the friends.

Each time more problems and new interruptions that hold him back will build up on that rope, but he will overcome them and hold on more tightly to the rope, climbing it until he comes out of the well.
[102816]
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/13/13, Shamati #36 

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Preparation to the Lesson

Writings of Baal HaSulam “Matan Torah (The Giving of the Torah),” Lesson 3

The Book of Zohar – Selected Excerpt, Parashat “Va’etchanan (A Plea),” Item 26, Lesson 2

Talmud Eser Sefirot, Vol 3, Part 10, Item 44, Lesson 21

“Introduction to The Book of Zohar“

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Listen to an Audio Version of the Blog
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A Virtual Lesson on Fundamentals of Kabbalah

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The global crisis leaves more and more people unemployed. This is not just for economic reasons. The consequences of over consumerism are becoming evident: How many more new products can appear on the market? How much more do we need to buy? There is an end to everything, including consumerism. The desires are changing and people don’t want all that any more.

In the next phase of our evolution, humanity will move on to spiritual work. Everything that we need corporeally will be easily provided by modern technology, scientists, engineers, and a small amount of service people who, by their nature, will be happy to deal with such things. But most people will have to make inner efforts and this will become their “occupation” on the next level of humanity. On the next spiritual level people will connect, be incorporated in one another, and our fictitious world will gradually “evaporate” and disappear, like a cloud on a clear day, until we will be left in a reality of true feelings. This is our evolution and there is nothing we can do about it.

So the world will have to be reorganized. We mustn’t ignore the unemployed. There are already quite a few studies that show how dangerous it is when a person has nothing to do. It leads to conflicts in the family and to divorce; we lose our humanity, and we lose the incentives and the commitments for things that need to be done. When a person doesn’t have to make any efforts, he becomes less than an animal.

Animals are busy doing something from morning to night: looking for food, for a mate, for a place to dwell, and taking care of their offspring. They use the “recreation time” for useful games by which they establish the right connections in the flock, the herd, etc. Have you ever seen an ant doing nothing like a football fan lying on the couch with a bottle of beer and a cigarette?

Today a person has to move to massive spiritual work, to establish the general mutual connection, and to reorganize society, and yet, in the meantime, we do nothing, preferring idle contemplations.

This terrible fall will cost us dearly. It will bring a heavy feeling of bitterness and a person will lose his mind and go wild. The lack of obligations prevents him from acting and leaves him empty, poisoning his consciousness. Besides, he loses his professional skills and the skills to communicate with other people. It’s as if everything in him sinks, disappears, and he turns into a “ghost,” a “zombie,” and not a human being.

This is what will happen to people who would remain idle if we don’t start dealing with them in an organized manner. The modern world believes in democracy and free elections, but what can we expect of the voters? Can they be rational and see things correctly in this situation? Eventually it will force the governments to make changes…
[102783]
From the 3^rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/14/13, The Study of the Ten Sefirot

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Reality is fixed; the Creator is good and benevolent and the world of Ein Sof (Infinity) is fixed. I, HaVaYaH, have not changed; the upper Light is in absolute rest, and everything depends only on the vessels, on our desires. So we shouldn’t wait for something to change in life.

Such an approach is only relevant for the general population who are under the domination of time. But the particular—who need to reveal the good and the benevolent upper force by themselves, that He is good and benevolent to the good and the evil, and that He is fixed and eternal—were given a chance to discover this not “in its time,” not in the natural course of the evolution of humanity, but above it by “hastening time.”

It says that “Israel is above the stars and the zodiac, by sanctifying (hastening) time.” Israel refers to a person who yearns for Yashar – El (straight to the Creator), for His revelation, and is already invited to discover the fixed, eternal end of correction that already exists.

In order to do that, he has to rise above all the interruptions that tie him to time, above all the states that are revealed in the chain of Reshimot (spiritual genes) in order to raise them all, to “sanctify” them and to transfer them to wholeness. He should see every corrupt state that is revealed to him as an opportunity to work in order to turn it into a perfect state in which there is none else beside Him, the good and the benevolent, and where everyone exists as one bundle in connection, in mutual guarantee, and in unity.

Imagining this reality and living according to this approach is called working in “faith above reason.” This is all our spiritual work. This is why we were given the study, the group, and the books in order to correct our perception through them and to see the real world instead of the fictitious world that intentionally seems to us as real so that we will have a chance to make an effort and to build the truth out of this lie.

If we take this mission and build the whole of reality from every state, it means that we are following a straight line to the goal, called “adhesion.” Every new problem makes us yearn for adhesion with the Creator in another point and then another. Then all these points connect into a straight line that leads to our end of correction.

So we shouldn’t count on time and wait for the changes. Every moment is an opportunity for us to add to the whole picture and thus advance.
[102779]
From the Preparation to the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/14/13

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