Question: Does a person really know what he wants?

Answer: He never knows. Ask older people and they will tell you, “We didn’t even notice how life passed by and what we did with it. And suddenly it slipped by. I remember myself at 20 and a little at 30, and the last three or four decades I don’t even remember.”

Question: But it’s possible to live in awareness. What prevents us? Let’s suppose that when I was a child my parents would have told me, “Pay attention to yourself, you are made of desires”?

Answer: If only they would have prepared us how to grasp the world in the correct way! If only the family and school would have prepared us, then it would have been different! Where are that family and school? They don’t exist.

My parents didn’t know how to educate me, they weren’t taught that at school, and they didn’t teach me either. The results are: I lived my life without knowing how to live it, and I educated my children also without knowing how to educate them, and they are educating my grandchildren also without knowing how.

In this way we go from generation to generation. If you look at humanity from the side, you see that our behavior doesn’t at all match our intelligence, our inner ability! Look at how we waste ourselves!

Thus, the main problem with humanity is education. If we would educate one generation correctly, then we would correct all of humanity, we would change all life upon the face of the earth.
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From KabTV’s “Talks with Michael Laitman,” 11/3/12

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Filed under: Children, Education, Integral Upbringing, Q&A, Society - 1 Comment →

In the News (from The Guardian): “A lost generation of 14 million out-of-work and disengaged young Europeans is costing member states a total of €153bn (£124bn) a year – 1.2% of the EU’s gross domestic product – the largest study of the young unemployed has concluded.

“The report, by the EU’s own research agency, Eurofound, has discovered that Europeans aged 15 to 29 who are not in employment, education or training (known as Neets) have reached record levels and are costing the EU €3bn a week in state welfare and lost production. …

“Since the global downturn in 2008, there has been a 28% increase in associated Neet costs across the EU, with Italy facing an annual bill of €32.6bn a year, France €22bn, and the UK €18bn. …

“The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said Europe was ‘failing in its social contract’ with the young and rising political disenchantment could reach levels similar to those that sparked North African uprisings during the Arab spring.”

My Comment: Of course, something will force governments to change their attitude to the crisis and instead of trying to go back in time, to understand that the future is in the integration of the world, and first of all this requires re-education, that is why the younger generation is released and this should be taken as advantage. (See “Integral Education“).
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In the News (from LiveScience): “Even 5-year-olds know to protect their reps. Children are more generous when they know their actions will be seen, according to a new study.

“The findings, published Oct. 31 in the journal PLoS One, suggest that even kindergarteners have learned to play the social game and strategize ways to burnish their reputation. …

“Leimgruber’s team gave 5-year-olds stickers and told them they could share one to four of them with another child of the same age. Some of the children could see their sharing partner, while others were hidden from view. The team found that the children were stingier when the other youngster was hidden from them. The kids also hoarded more loot when they had to give stickers in an opaque box rather than a transparent one that showed what they were giving.

“Overall, the kindergarteners were pretty selfish: Only those children who saw their partners and gave their stickers in a clear box consistently donated the maximum of four stickers. Interestingly, past studies showed children were more generous than the current study.

“’Previous studies that observe high levels of generosity may have inadvertently included the same audience and transparency cues,’ that motivate kids to share, the researchers wrote in the journal article.”

My Comment: Well, children are like grown-ups; nature does not change but only evolves and adapts. In any case, we have to become aware of this evil with our minds or through suffering and correct it; in any case, we will have to. Kabbalah calls us to do this quickly and easily through by “Achishena” (hastening).

Let’s discuss our nature, reveal its flows, and expose our natural thoughts and desires up to the point of becoming aware of them as the only evil in the world. It is so much so that it is killing us. In the realization of our common evil, we will discover its creator—the Creator; we will find how to turn to Him so that He will correct what He has created. Studying Baal HaSulam’s main articles helps us become familiar with our nature as evil.
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Opinion (Peter Gray, Ph.D., research professor of psychology at Boston College): “Most children in our society protest going to school. Am I telling you something new? They protest in many ways—by feigning illness, by dragging their feet in the morning, by doing the least they can to meet the school’s demands (or not doing even that), and by violating school rules when they can get away with it. …

“Are these kids just spoiled ingrates? If so, then you and I—and essentially everyone else who ever attended school after schooling became compulsory—were also spoiled ingrates. We all protested it. In fact, back in the days when schools first became compulsory kids protested it even more than they do now, even though there was much less of it then. They had to be beaten with birch sticks to get them to stay in school and do what the teachers told them to do. …

“As I pointed out in one of the first essays in this blog, the means by which children became educated in hunter-gatherer cultures were the opposite of the means by which we try to educate children in our schools today. One of the most cherished values of all band hunter-gatherer societies that have ever been studied by anthropologists is freedom. Hunter-gatherers believed that it is wrong to coerce a person to do what the person doesn’t want to do—and they considered children to be people. They rarely even made direct suggestions, because that might sound like coercion.

“They believed that people, on their own initiative, would learn to contribute to the welfare of the band, because they would see the wisdom of doing so and experience the joy of it. For hundreds of thousands of years, that was the organizing principle of human society.

“The hunting and gathering life required great personal initiative and creativity, and it required trust that people would share and cooperate because they wanted to. Hunting and gathering people seemed to understand that—and they also seemed to understand that children would best grow up to be free, trusting, cooperative, creative adults if they were permitted freedom throughout their childhood, in the context of the moral community and models that the band provided.

“Throughout our immense hunter-gatherer period, children were free to play and explore all day, day after day, and in that way to educate themselves. Education was always self-directed.

“In fact, the reason children are naturally so playful, curious, and social is because those traits were the motivating powers behind children’s abilities to educate themselves. Those ‘childish’ traits were promoted and shaped, by natural selection, precisely to serve the function of education, in conditions of childhood freedom.

“So, when we force children to sit in their seats and listen to a teacher and do just what they are told, every bone in their body, and every neuron and muscle, resists. Their body tells them, ‘This is wrong. I need to control my own actions; I need to play at the skills that seem to be important to me; I need to explore the questions that I’m curious about, not ones that bore me; I need to pay attention to what people in the real world are doing, not to what this teacher, who doesn’t even seem to be part of the world outside of school, is telling me. If I don’t do these things that I need to do, I will not grow up to be a competent, dignified human being.’ In hunter-gatherer times, a child who did not feel so strongly driven to run his or her own life and education would have grown up to be a misfit.

“So, our children have instincts that drive them to educate themselves through their free play, exploration, and socializing. But we have schools that insist that they give up that freedom and do what they are told to do. The schools have never worked well, and even in theory can’t work well, because they always put the school against the child and thereby evoke resistance.

“This radical approach is to let our children educate themselves, while we provide the conditions that make that possible.”

My Comment: This what integral education provides for children.
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Question: The newspaper Haaretz published data on the psychological status of adolescents and young adults: 18.5% consider suicide. How can we respond to this?

 Answer: The educational system does not bring them up, but only gives knowledge; the healthcare system is concerned not about patients, but about selling drugs, and so on. Our egoism has developed and turned into a cancerous tumor that is killing humanity. People do not have an answer to the question about the meaning of suffering and the meaning of life in general. Religion does not soothe the developed egoism and has outlived itself; a person wants not only to hear and believe, but also to see and feel.

This can be accomplished only through Kabbalah—the method of revealing the higher force of Nature (the Creator), its goal, and the management program during a man’s life in this world. We should quickly reveal this method to the world, and not only will suicide disappear, but the entire attitude of a person towards his existence will change to be positive and rational. There is NO other solution to the crisis and its particular manifestations!
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In the News (from BBC News): “Professor Sugata Mitra, from Newcastle University, wanted to know what happens when the adults stand back and allow children to use a PC unsupervised.

“This year, Professor Mitra is conducting a series of experiments in locations around the world including Brazil and India, in which children are given access to computers without a teacher to guide them.

“One location is a ‘suitcase school’ classroom, in Kiddapore in Calcutta, India. The school which is run by an ngo to give young people from disadvantaged backgrounds more access to education.

“In Kiddapore, Professor Mitra asked teachers are asked to stand back and let the mouse teach. Teachers observed impact on behaviour.

“In particular, a pupil who had misbehaved was helping younger children use the PC, and acting as their teacher.

“This is not the first time that Professor Mitra has asked academics and educators to think twice about a teachers role.

“In 1999, he launched a set of experiments known as ‘Hole in the wall’ in a slum wall in Delhi, India.

“Given access to computers, Mitra observed that children started to learn English and naturally fell into organised learning groups.”

My Comment: This is the ancient tradition of studying the Torah and Kabbalah: Students must first hear the teacher and then discuss the studied material together. The Talmud is studied by several students in a group discussing it without a teacher.

Our workshops (sadna) is arranged in the same way: The teacher or moderator sets a theme or question, which is then discussed by the group of two to ten students. If there are more than ten students, another group is created.
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In the News (from the Daily Mail): “Having close relationships with friends and family as a child makes people happier in later life, a new study has found.

“New research has shown how positive social relationships in childhood and adolescence are key to adult well-being, while academic achievement has little effect.

“Scientists do not know much about how aspects of childhood and adolescent development – such as academic and social-emotional function – affect adult well-being.

“They define well-being as a mixture of sense of coherence, positive coping strategies, social engagement and self-perceived strengths.

“Researchers analysed data for 804 people, followed up for 32 years, who participated in the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Development Study (DMHDS) in New Zealand.

“They measured the relationship between levels of family disadvantage in childhood, social connectedness in childhood, language development in childhood, social connectedness in adolescence, academic achievement in adolescence and well-being in adulthood. …

“Results showed there is a strong pathway from child and teen social connectedness to adult well-being – showing the significance of positive social relationships over the lifespan to adulthood.

“Also, the Journal of Happiness Studies research revealed the pathway from early language development – through adolescent academic achievement – to adult happiness was weak.”

Tip: Lead by example and teach a child how to build relationships with others.
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Development means constantly limiting the desire, which is inevitable. Even the most advanced educational approaches that do not use punishments still limit children but in other ways. An embryo in his mother’s womb also develops by limitations. All of nature is based on this principle, and if we kept it in our development, we would certainly avoid troubles and sorrow.

But we followed the opposite path and removed all the obstacles: Free your ego, abuse others as much as you can, abuse the whole world for your own interests. A person sees himself as great when he manages to steal millions and is respected for it. We have totally distorted our way by giving up any form of restraint. Our desires are not limited by anything and we can also see that on TV, in modern cultural and educational forms. Judging by what is happening with children and the youth, we are cultivating a generation that grows by beastly models and not human models of behavior and thinking. What kind of models does advertising present?

We see the outcomes: Without limiting ourselves, we reach collapse and sufferings, and we begin to understand that we have to change. This is what awaits us since we are not really suffering yet.

If we were as flexible as babies who can be easily directed to develop in the right way, if we responded to what is going on with the same speed, with the same readiness they do, then everything would be just fine. We could see that the Creator is the perfect educator and we wouldn’t come to Him with any complaints.

But in order to do that, we have to respond correctly to His educations and to be sensitive. Kabbalists tell us how we can acquire this attitude; they say we should connect and be “good kids,” we should be sociable, kind, and responsible for one another, to create mutual guarantee, etc.

Clearly, children don’t want to listen to anyone. They only want to go in every direction. But the grownups impose discipline on them and so does the Creator, although He hasn’t started to treat us seriously yet. One way or the other, the same laws penetrate through all the worlds, but the point is that we have to learn from nature and not invent artificial limitations.

This refers to the educators of children too. Nature shows us how, when, and in what way to limit them according to the stages of development. Actually nothing depends on us, we only carry things out. If we studied well the laws of creation and children’s’ nature, we would know exactly how to act in every phase, now and in the future. Ideally, an educator carries out nature’s orders. He never invents anything new but only implements its plan. This is his obligation: to gradually, day by day, bring the little person’s nature to match the upper nature.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 8/9/12, “Introduction to The Book of Zohar”

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In the News (from The Christian Science Monitor): “But for as long as there have been arts, people have wondered what effect violent content has on behavior. Plato wanted to keep young people away from intense plays, which he felt skewed proper character development. His student Aristotle disagreed, arguing that drama had a cathartic effect, channeling off anger and aggression. …

“Conclusion: Media violence poses a threat to public health inasmuch as it leads to an increase in real-world violence and aggression. Every category of violent imagery had an effect: fictional TV and film, TV news, video games.

“At the same time, recent neuroscience experiments appear to indicate that prolonged exposure to violent and aggressive imagery decreases inhibitions about actual violence and aggression. While all such research remains provisional, the preponderance of evidence does seem to side with Plato, not Aristotle.”

My Comments: Only the environment (the influence of all kinds of people and the media) brings up a person, develops in him a scale of values and the level of restrictions. That is why, once in a certain environment, people can no longer resist its influence and become like it.
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Question: When we looked at the system of child development, the stages are defined from the age of zero to three years, from three to six, etc. Are there any steps in family relationships?

Answer: Before marrying, I would strongly advise that all girls and boys take special courses where they study anatomy, physiology, psychology, and integral education. I would give them time, no marriage until they receive a diploma. Let them deal with each other as they want.

It’s a pity how much people spend time, resources, energy, and their health on the unsuccessful attempts to create a family. Still, it does not go unnoticed.

No matter who I talk to, everyone felt wounded, especially if they had children. You can divorce, but the children remain. Children consider the father’s leaving as betrayal. Even if he spent more time with them than living with them under the same roof, even if he showered them with presents, they would still think of him as a traitor. But if he lives in the family, though not giving them a lot of time and even punishing them, he is their father.

It is necessary to explain all this to young people, to show them scenes from life so that they feel that. Then, they will develop a completely different attitude to the union they are entering.
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” 7/8/12

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