Question: Some people have already started practically implementing the method of integral upbringing. They have gained the first experience and made the first mistakes. I would like to discuss this aspect using an example of a specific situation.

An acquaintance of mine started raising her daughter using this methodology. She breastfed her daughter until the girl was almost two years old. Then she raised her according to the  developmental phases: zero to three, three to six, and from six to nine years. Everything went well until the child started school. The girl stood out from everyone; she was more open, uninhibited, and more positive, and she quickly ran into powerful resistance from the regular environment. Later on schoolteachers joined this opposition as well.

A very serious situation arose, where the mother and child were forced to struggle against the system because the creation of a separate environment, the kind that we spoke about, is currently unfeasible. What would you recommend? How do we help these people?

Answer: If you’re talking about Russia, I have a few examples in this country of working precisely according to the principles of the integral system. This isn’t our system, but they are all very similar.

Their classes are more like extracurricular activities, where a child doesn’t sit in front of blackboard and teacher, but develops through free movement and discussions. He or she grasps the world through examples and not through dry lesson explanations that he has to memorize to pass the test the next day, and forget right after. There are many such examples in Russia, and they are well known there. But all of them are still just little “sheep.”

Undoubtedly, if you breastfeed a child until they’re two years old, as has been instilled in human nature since ancient times, then he or she receives all the necessary nutrients and micro-elements that help them resist all the problems that could exist at that age.

We are afflicted by many illnesses, not because they are particularly virulent, and not because we need to build immunity to them,  but because we don’t receive enough mother’s milk in infancy. Today a baby is separated from the breast practically a week or a month after birth, if it’s even breastfed at all. That’s why all the problems begin precisely with not nursing.

Since the goal of integral upbringing is to establish maximum closeness to nature, in our family, in our domestic order, we need to adhere to the same natural state that we observe in the natural interaction among animals. We don’t have this instinct, but we have to awaken it in ourselves on the basis of scientific information about what existed in previous centuries, instead of considering them anachronistic. That’s first.

Second, an absolute majority of parents are unhappy with scholastic education because of the problems that currently exist in schools, classrooms, and society. A vast majority of children would gladly not go to school and instead would arrange a completely different method of upbringing and education for themselves.

Try to discuss with the children the fact that over the course of the year they will have to learn a little more about the way the world works and the way we and our society’s laws are structured. After all, in the course of 10-12 school years, we are preparing a human being for life. What should he or she know? How should they learn to interact with others? First and foremost, it is necessary for them to be able to help themselves, to help others, and know who to receive help from others. That is, everything is practically built on unification, on correct involvement and interaction with one another. Does school teach that? No!

We are preparing common craftsmen so that they could graduate from some vocational school, acquire some occupation or specialization, and earn a living for themselves. We don’t think about what’s next besides a salary.

Even about earning an income we don’t think much because we don’t morally prepare a person for that. He strives to evade any responsibilities that are related to society, parents, and family; he doesn’t wish to build one.

We need to think about how to transform the school. Our goal shouldn’t be to subordinate a child to the school, to such despotic or old German system, like when peasants became factory workers and nothing more, but to completely transform the school!

Aside from our integral approach, there are many similar methods. I won’t go into their comparative analysis, but they are all alike in that first and foremost, they think about the person, and not about what you need to cram into him, what mass of quickly forgettable knowledge.

That’s why today many are leaning towards their children not attending school at all. There is the Internet, distance learning, and home schooling. And anyway, a mother should stay at home with her children and not be away at work. A father has to provide for the family, and a mother should care for the home and raise children. Then it would be a normal family.

In other words, we should slowly climb down from the tree of the “realization of evil” and return to normal and balanced systems of mutual interactions. And we should stop crippling poor children! First, parents drag their children to kindergarten, then send them off to school, and they come back bruised from the battle for leadership instead of socializing with the collective. It’s not a collective but an endless battle!

We need to transform schools into something completely different, something humanistic. The state in which it exists today has so outlived itself that it’s painful to look at it.

But since a large amount of money has been poured into education, and enormous masses of people involved have a vested interest in it, they will not give it up easily. And they cannot change either. The educational system is the most ossified system. Educators are people who only know their own lesson and aside from it, no other lessons. That is why this is a very big problem.

Transformation needs to begin with the educators. We need to organize humanities courses and, first and foremost, mandatory integral courses for the body of educators with the aim of transforming them. In parallel to that, we should introduce psychologists and integral upbringing specialists into the school, who will then pursue discussions with students.

Furthermore, we need to introduce classes for instructors who would only be a few years older than their future students, and consequently, could easily develop contact with them and exert a positive influence on them. All this needs to be prepared. Without that our future generation will become the lost generation.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #5, 12/13/11

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If all the evidence shows that man is the result of his environment, it follows that organizing all kinds of models of a good and correct society for all humankind is critical. This way any person, depending on his inclinations and personality or by following the advice of his friends and family, would always have the opportunity to connect to such a society, to develop himself in the most effective way possible, and become a genuinely perfect human being. Therefore, in our education we must also focus on establishing such groups and other opportunities for people to unite.

If we continue to study this issue further, we will see that a person is formed by the influence of his inner qualities, the genes he was born with, the various inclinations he acquires early in life at his parents’ home, and then by the influence of society.

We must therefore focus on kindergartens and the various circles for little children, and then on schools and clubs for older kids. We need to ensure that every person has a wide array of opportunities to reveal his potential and develop into a well-rounded individual.

Even the qualities that don’t appear to be particularly strong or promising in an individual ought to be developed anyway, as that will enrich his inner world, as will teaching him to appreciate music, literature, theater, art, and culture: All these things depend on a person’s environment as well.

People must have a family and bring up children; they must learn how to properly act toward his or her spouse, toward friends, in the company of strangers, and at work. We must teach the person by applicable examples how to behave and how to become a person in the full sense of the word, one that’s appreciated by society, which will in turn allow him to reach success and prosperity himself.

To this end, there are only two factors that aim and correct me every minute: my own natural qualities and the environment’s influence upon them. My ability lies in choosing an environment that would constantly develop me in the right direction, bring me closer to good and advanced states that give the sensation of greater security, confidence, and comfort. This is how we continue to develop.

From this we need to understand the task that lies before us, what we need to do to make sure that our children have a good life  and that the next generation is better off and more confident in its future.

This can only be done if we manage to surround our children with these kinds of teachers and create for them the kind of environment that would influence them to reinforce their good qualities and to transform their negative qualities into positive ones rather than suppress them.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” Episode 3, 12/29/11

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Question: What should be the structure of the integral upbringing? How should we start the education of an adult person?

Answer: Certainly we should be engaged in the education of adults, but we still have to put the maximum attention on the education of children because changing the adults is very hard. On one hand, they feel the entire corruption of the society where they live, and they would like to change it. However, changing the society means changing a person. It’s very difficult to change a person. By taking care of our children (something which is important to us), we will be changing ourselves as well.

Most of us are someone’s parents. When we are involved in building a completely different society for our children, as it is said, “If not for us, then for our children,” when we take care of the next generation and educate it, we will simultaneously start re-educating ourselves.

Question: Does it mean that the course for adults should include a course for the preparation of educators for the kids as well?

Answer: This is a must! The course should include the topics on interaction between the spouses, interaction of a person with the society, with the boss, with employees, and with the children, as well as child education. A person should be connected with everyone in the integral way.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #5, 12/13/11

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Question: When we talk about education for adults, there is a fear that people will accuse us of offering something impractical, too detached from reality.

Answer: I totally disagree with you!

Today’s world and the one we propose are absolutely opposed. We must face the truth! It is actually true. There should not be partial solutions! I cannot create a school half-humanistic and half-egoistic, the way it is today.

When a young child comes to school, he could be beaten and robbed; he could be made into anything, compelled to do anything by force, pressure, influence, and some values. He is forced to be the same as everybody else with the worst examples. He can become attached to smoking and drinking alcohol, not to mention the threat of drugs! School is a school of depravity, a school of vanity! One is driving a car, the other gets there on foot.

All the evils of modern society are manifested in children at school in the cruelest way. We need to fight against this! We should start doing something about this. They are our children!

Since we have become insensitive egoists, we treat children likewise, pushing them away as if saying: “Go to your school. They should deal with you there.”

Instead of raising a child as a normal person and creating a future for him, the next society, we neither create society nor make a person a human being.

It does not matter what will be. That is why we do not want to bear children. We simply exist and go with the flow, which carries us to a huge waterfall, to fall into the abyss.
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From a “Talk About Integral Education” #5, 12/13/11

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The modern education “molds” everyone according to a fixed template. We can’t even call it “education” anymore because we don’t discover the creativity in people and don’t help them develop individually.

Being unique makes a person seem “weird” and the educational system destroys these “eccentricities.” A child comes to school and receives standard material, standard questions, standard problems… and eventually, we get a standard, stenciled form, like mud cakes in the sandbox, regardless of his individual tendencies.

Our education treats a person like a machine that needs to perform certain functions in society and at work. This is reflected in science too: Few scientists become true pioneers. After all, a unique personality is needed for that, a new perspective, a new perception, like Einstein or Friedman.

Today there are millions of scientists and in the past there were no more than a dozen. The point is that today’s scientist is a “technician” who performs a series of experiments until he stumbles upon something new. He doesn’t penetrate the nature of creation, he doesn’t see how things grow from the inside, and doesn’t discover the new layers and new dimensions as a result of a special vision.

No, he simply performs experiments. He tries one thing and then another thing and eventually gets some result. Of course, scientific thinking is required here, but it isn’t discovery in the true sense. These aren’t results of a person’s inner intellectual efforts. Usually they are just statistically predictable successes of repeated lab routine.

Therefore, we must draw a clear line between today’s mass education and the true education that molds the human in us.
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/10/12, “The Freedom”

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Question: Why didn’t the education system evolve with the changing world? Why do we teach children the same way we did a hundred years ago?

Answer: It’s because in reality, humanity has not changed. Only now it may come to the realization of evil, and only with our help.

Many critics passionately berate education, but nothing happens. In fact, they simply state that they feel bad, but do not see the real reason. It’s because to see it, they need to be able to compare one with the other. Here, we need the Light that Reforms.

In our world, we reveal only evil, but not its relationship with the good. This is not the realization of evil yet; something else is required as a criterion. Yes, I feel bad, but I cannot detect the reason because to do this we need to attract the Reforming Light.

As a result, people have been talking about the problems of education for at least 50 years, and so far nothing has been fixed. This area consumes huge budgets and resources and involves a vast number of people. Parents suffer, teachers suffer, students suffer—and all are helpless.

In fact, the system itself is rather conservative and unwilling to change. However, even knowing that they need changes, no one can carry them out. There is no clear, accurate, modern program of actions. In contrast, it does not require much to simply destroy what exists. Today, it is clear that it is necessary to raise a child as a human being. To do this there are many different techniques: It seems that we are nearly there, but where are these human beings?

In the end, we cannot manage without the Light that Reforms. But how can a person get it, without having a point in the heart? To do this, he needs to be connected with those who do have it. Therefore, only we can bring a new method of education to the world. Nothing else will help; there must be connection with the Light that acts in desires.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/10/12, “The Freedom”

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Question: A modern person has accumulated a wealth of various limitations: He was prevented from expressing his feelings, they were trivialized, and so on. That is why his standard reaction to something new is negative. Initially a battle within a person always takes place between an interest towards something new and a fear of it. How can we maintain a person’s interest despite his fear and resistance?

Answer: When starting to talk about a person, his physiology, psychology, sociology, family relationships, and so on, we need to do it objectively, abstractly, not relative to the person himself. And only afterwards should we gradually include examples: Here is a man, a woman, and children; here is a person as he is, he reacts to himself in a certain way and is composed of certain images of vision, perception, and so on. In other words, we begin to talk about some abstract object and gradually bring that object to the person himself. I think this way we won’t encounter a problem.

The fact of the matter is that a modern person doesn’t know any of this. We hide our nature, we are ashamed of ourselves, ashamed in front of others; we are afraid to show any sort of weakness because we think that others could take advantage of it. I have to show that I stand firm like a wall behind my immutable opinions, which I do not actually have at all.

When we gradually reveal what man, society, and nature in its global and general form are, little by little we get used to the fact that we are the way we are created: It isn’t me, and everything in me works independently from me.

Then what exactly is this “I”? I is only the one who can research what in him or her is created by nature.

Like doctors who aren’t ashamed in front of each other or their patients, or psychologists who can express their own and other people’s feelings without embarrassment, understanding that all of this is an objective reality, we, too, are the way we are. Likewise, we also need to bring a person to such a state.

Everything needs to be based precisely on the fact that the next stage of our development is complete integration of everyone into everything, when all parts of nature get incorporated into a person, a person into them, and people into each other, and together with nature we represent one organic whole.

In such a case there is nothing here that I have to conceal, be embarrassed of, and attempt to hide from others. I must ultimately reach a state where, conversely, I am obliged to fully reveal myself and be connected to everyone.

It’s like an infant who lies in his mother’s arms: He is nothing and nobody, yet she concentrates all of her attention on him, and from the point of view of nature, relative to his mother he has absolutely no barriers, borders, or screens; on the contrary, an absolutely complete connection exists. We too, as a result of our integral education and upbringing, need to reach such a connection in the future.

That is why our flow in teaching, experiencing these courses, in their structure and interconnection (where one course begins and another ends, or a few of them go parallel to each other) needs to be structured precisely so: along the axis of time. Courses should supplement one another and follow either consecutively or overlap with each other so that people gradually develop a correct attitude towards themselves, to other students studying in the group, and towards the whole world.
[65538]
From a “Talk on Integral Education,” 12/13/11

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Question: In the courses on integral upbringing and education, we intend to first of all educate people who lost their job. The majority of them is disillusioned with life; many have difficulties with their family, self-actualization, and so on.

The first thing that you may encounter in such a group is resentment, frustration, and aggression. Would people in this state be able to perceive such distant, abstract, and theoretical information? What should we start with in order to find common ground with people?

Answer: We have no other choice. We, people, consist of two halves: heart and mind, and they have to balance each other. Then a person develops harmoniously, sees the world and himself within it. Perhaps he sees both himself and the world as unbalanced, but his worldview becomes more or less correct.

Therefore, first and foremost we have to counterbalance all of today’s problems with knowledge: From where did these problems arise, what is  their origin, their necessity for our continued development, what exactly we need to come to, and so on.

As the first order of business people must necessarily complete an educational course, and not the ones on upbringing, practical work, and game scenarios—they are still far from that. The practical work within such groups begins only when the state of all sorts of problems and crises is balanced. People begin to understand the essence of these problems; they can now discuss, decide, arrive at some kind of an opinion, object, and discern the truth. But it gets discerned when feelings are balanced by knowledge.

If right now we simply take 50 people from the street and start to talk to them about today’s problems, we’ll be confronted with complete lack of understanding of our point of view. Correspondingly, feelings prevail above the mind, and we won’t get anywhere.

This is what happens in today’s world. Without understanding the general system of nature, its development (beginning, middle, and end of this path), and the state of humanity (where we exist in this moment along the axis of time), we evaluate everything only on the basis of our small, worldly egoism that doesn’t allow us to obtain the correct result. Moreover, we make wrong decisions about the future and with that bring ourselves into an even more difficult state. That is why, personally, I have no doubts that first and foremost we need to pursue education.

Precisely with that we begin our interaction with children. We always need to take our natural attitude to children as an example.

Everything begins with explanations. A child develops and feels: I sense this and that. A correct upbringing lies in supplementing a child’s feelings with explanations and with a system of correct attitude towards what he feels and how he perceives everything. This has to be balanced in adults as well. Without this we cannot advance.

Only to the extent that a group adapts this knowledge into itself does it realize and understand the causality and consequences of the feelings, their cause and effect development, and is able to see itself from the side. When a person rises above his self, he can separate his own “I” and see himself and society from the side.

The same way in psychology: You look at a person not as an individual, but from the side, trying to imagine him as a certain psychological object. Then, exploring him, you begin to give him some concrete recommendations, fragmentary explanations without even explaining who and what he is. But in principle, these explanations too are based on some kind of balance between knowledge and feelings. You cannot do without that.

That’s why in the first place we will have to introduce the courses that we spoke about in the last talk. It is a great amount of knowledge.

In the process of study, this knowledge gradually gets absorbed by people, and a person then starts to internally assimilate it along with feelings. At this point we need to start fortifying it with practical exercises that help a person balance knowledge and feelings.

A person can receive an initial sensation of that state by studying the material first-hand. We need to tell him about the origin, evolution, and properties of egoism and to present it completely objectively as a certain existing reality independent from and having nothing to do with us, so that a person could absorb everything in the form in which it exists in nature.

Next in the same course, a brief explanation can be given about how egoism works in a person: how it manifests itself in our world, in connections with family, children, with one’s own self, and so on.

That is, education involves at the very least separation into two parts, when we objectively lay out what is taking place in nature and try to express that in a somewhat dry, scientific language, and afterwards, as a supplement to that, we utilize this. After that is when the practical training begins, where we try to investigate our feelings from the point of view of reason.

A theoretical study is always reason, and we study it, fill ourselves with all kinds of knowledge, data, graphs, formulas, images, discernments of relationships, and so on, while gradually adding a little bit of feelings to that. In other words, studying always proceeds from two directions, “reason and feelings”: feelings in reason and reason in feelings.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education,” 12/13/11

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Question: What is the reason for taking the integral family course for the women who don’t have a family and possibly never will?

Answer: I doubt that in the integral society we would fail to reach such a state when everyone would have a family. On the contrary, a person will feel that a family is that primary instrument through which he or she influences the world. That’s one.

Second, we need to understand and realize that nature is designed in such a way that the number of men and women in the general population is going to depend on how we will conduct ourselves with each other. Through our relationships we will, so to speak, introduce our desired quantitative and qualitative inputs into nature, and we will receive precisely the kind of progeny that would create correct connections and units. It depends only on our harmony.

Since today we do not exist in a state of harmony with our own self, between us, and with nature, we give birth to children who struggle to find anything suitable for themselves. We do not imbue them with integrality, and that is why our world is falling apart today.

If we approach this question globally, through that we will instill into our children completely different informational records, new “genes.” They will be born in such a form that their common field of nature, one that drives all of us towards correct development and a particular goal, will gather them in mutual likeness. Each of them will quickly find their second half.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education,” 12/12/11

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Question: What other sections are included in the course on integral upbringing?

Answer: The most important part in our studies is to realize, in theory and practice, the integration of all people among themselves, regardless of age or gender: men, women, and children. Studies, psychological trainings, taking this message to the masses and smaller groups, and the creation of brand new means of mass media that would educate a person rather than deform him, all this should be our main and primarily practical course.

The other courses we discussed also include practical studies with children and adults conducted by a psychologist. But the courses mentioned above are the main ones.

Also included as a major component in children’s upbringing are excursions to plants, factories, planetariums, and other places. We introduce children to agriculture and the animal kingdom to show them how nature exists in its pure form and why the still, vegetative, and animate levels of nature develop the way they do with respect to one another. The tools we use to this end include educational films, excursions to the woods, the lake, the sea, and so on with explanations and very precise and correct conclusions about integration and interconnection in nature.

Then we continue with studying the human society: how it evolved from the animate part of nature, came out of the caves, came down from the trees, and what it achieved in its development, that is, what we built for ourselves to replace the lairs that were our homes, the enterprises we founded to no longer have to hunt mammoths, and how we established our interconnected, mutual assistance and support. We study the structure of all sorts of medical, financial, industrial, and research institutions, how supply and demand works, and how humanity is connected via all these systems. And, of course, we study the universe.

In our efforts to examine life and the world, we conduct very serious excursions, and not only for children. We see how excursions expand the children’s perspective and turn them into thoughtful adults. After each excursion we require the children to make a report including: where they were, what they saw, and why things work this way or that. That is followed with a discussion. All these things together ensure a very thorough grasp of the material. An excursion itself may happen no more than once per week because it takes time to discuss it, write compositions on the subjects, and so on.

The same applies to adults who are also of the opinion that pastries grow on trees, meaning that they are not familiar with production processes and have no clue as to what humanity does for them. Excursions for adults also lead to integrality and interdependence, which is why the understanding that you exist thanks to the entire world that works for your benefit is crucial from the standpoint of education, moral support, and the feeling of cooperation. If we present this information to the person in this manner, his outlook on everything in the world changes drastically.

The most important part that stems from these excursions is that we then scrutinize whether we need this particular enterprise or not, whether it’s a necessity or an indulgence that we can do without, not at our expense, but simply because we wouldn’t miss it if it were gone. Thus we gradually teach the person to pay more attention to the inner world, and not the external one.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” 12/12/11

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