Even though we are different, we still get along somehow like in one family. True, it’s not easy. Let’s say that I have a mom and dad, my wife does too, and each of us has brothers and sisters on both sides, their kids, our kids. We have to take each other into consideration since we’re mutually dependent both in the positive and the negative way. This is why we have no intention of changing and reforming each other.

It’s understandable that if in the past I met a woman who possibly differs from me in her personality, but according to other considerations, we decided to be together, then in this decision to be together, we essentially accepted and agreed without even talking about it that we would be leading a shared life that wouldn’t always go smoothly. We will need to make concessions to each other, to agree with the other’s opinion, either partially or fully, and so on. But we connect with one another, having no other choice, because we want to create a family, to raise our offspring, and to support each other.

Young couples lack this kind of upbringing, which teaches how to get along with each other despite the differences. Even though we think that we choose the most suitable life partner for ourselves freely, in reality, we are still very different. For animals, mating happens instinctively, but people, since their calculations are corrupted, seek something special, perhaps even rare, not realizing that precisely because of that they will have communication difficulties.

The lack of education, understanding, and upbringing related to shared life, as well as the inability to yield to each other lead us to a crisis of the family institution. In our day, more than half the population of the earth, especially young people, are single. They aren’t ready to get married and don’t want to have children because they feel unable to take care of someone.

This crisis has been going on for decades now, and today we are forced to solve analogous problems between countries as well. After all, each of us, at least relative to the neighboring countries, is both giving and receiving, just like in a married couple. This is why it’s also necessary to learn on an international level how to make concessions and to connect above all the differences and disagreements. Yet, we were never taught how to do this either.

So how can this actually be done? What is the technique of making concessions since only through conceding do we demonstrate our good intention?

For lack of any other options, we currently find ourselves in the crisis that teaches us the most pressing things. And people feel this urgency in such a way (and therein lies our hope) that they refuse to accept “divorce” since divorce between countries means war.

I hope that we’ll realize that we don’t have a choice and we need to exercise restraint. This is why we created the UN, a place where supposedly everyone can gather and discuss peaceful cooperation, as well as many other organizations that handle education and healthcare.

For example, in Geneva there are international organizations which I never even realized existed. There is a commission on broadcasting frequencies that ensures that each television and radio station in the world has its own frequency and does not interfere with others. There is a council on manufacturing drugs, medical products, and services, which determines standards in this field. This allows us to understand each other, and thus a doctor, when sending his or her patient for treatment to a different country, is able to explain to their colleague all the nuances of the required procedures.

There are even organizations that monitor flags of every country so that suddenly two identical flags wouldn’t appear. There are standards in every field because we’re becoming so interconnected and close to one another that we need to establish laws to regulate all areas of our interaction.

And just like a parliament of every country that sets laws for the interaction of its citizens, it is done on a global scale today for the entire world too. These kinds of organizations have been in existence for a few decades now, and without them things would be very difficult for us.

But today the problem is not in establishing a place for everyone. The current situation requires us to build some common “roof” that consists of mutual understanding and feeling that we are in the same room, so to speak. In these circumstances it is very difficult for us to be together if we don’t have a good connection between us.

We should feel not only closeness but an interdependence that will necessitate everyone to change their attitude towards others. Whether we want to or not, we are interdependent, connected, and united on different levels: food, clothing, upbringing, culture, technology, energy supplies, water, and even air.

If someone’s industry pollutes the atmosphere, we have nothing to breathe. We are all familiar with the Kyoto Protocols that set limits on emissions of waste byproducts and atmospheric pollution.

I think that it’s worthwhile to provide a list of such international organizations and the issues they work with. Then we’ll feel the scope of our connection. A portion of these organizations is located in Paris, London, and New York, but most of them are in Geneva.

This is very important because it gives people an idea of such mutual dependence that is hard to believe. It is much greater than in a family. In a family, I can stop talking, quarrel, and even distance myself for some time.

But here, this is impossible. It turns out that all the existing countries are already within one single mosaic, and nobody is able to exit it or behave they way they please. We see that any time someone attempts to make some independent motion, it never works out. After some time they come back, or perhaps it doesn’t even go beyond verbal attempts, never coming to any practical actions, because in our time it’s not feasible.
[67792]
From KabTV’s “A New Life” Episode 5, 1/2/12

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Transitions to new developmental levels have always been induced by small crises: Education, social, financial, and other systems gradually started to go out of order. Marriages started to fall apart, slowly but steadily illicit drug use spread and overpowered alcoholism. All of a sudden terrorism came into view.

Humanity’s nervousness reveals itself. It’s a result of weaknesses in all spheres of life, which were built according to egoistic rules that made everybody concentrate solely on themselves: This is yours, this is mine, don’t cross the line! Everyone defends his or her freedom and personal space. Now, Nature destroys boundaries between us, breaks walls, and drags us into some kind of community life that we try to avoid because we’re not yet ready for it.

When our egos were still too small, we were open to everything. At that time, we didn’t care whether we lived as one family in one village. People didn’t lock their doors and were very friendly with each other. A huge family (parents, children, and grandchildren) shared one room and were not at all embarrassed with each other.

Nowadays, thing are different. We are separated by our huge egoism: Everybody wants a separate room, strives to hide behind the computer or telephone, and tends to contact others as little as possible. People don’t unite into families any longer, but rather get together to have sex and then go away.

But suddenly, Nature starts to destroy partitions and by doing so cancels our severance. The current crisis is the biggest of all we’ve experienced so far. We do everything to delay, to misrepresent it, but it manifests on lower levels at which we all are still interconnected.

Currently, there is no such thing as a family crisis since families are simply broken. More than half of families cannot be considered families per se and have no desire to revive and reconstruct themselves. The number of people who don’t wish to marry has reached 70%! Today, it’s normal, a  good family where its members treat each other with love and respect has become an anachronism.

The second major problem is drugs. We comply with this ugly phenomenon; our fight with it is mild and gentle. We realize that it’s a terrible thing which we can’t avoid because the society we live in and this life itself force us to look for ways to escape.

The next problem is how we raise our youth. Currently, demographics are poor, the population doesn’t grow much, and people don’t know how to take care of their children. Parents agree to leave children both overnight and during the day. Children are not attached to their parents any longer; the gap between generations grows. We are about to lose the next generation, but nobody worries too much about it. We say: “What difference does it make whether our children’s upbringing is good or bad; what does it change?” This is how we think, not even remotely realizing the essence of the problem.

It looks like all prior crises were not too big of a blow for us, nor did they trigger our understanding that we have bankrupted ourselves in all aspects of our lives. The developmental process always flows from the small and weak to impacting the big ones. This is similar to the punishment of children, meaning at first we start convincing them and then progress to threatening with bigger trouble. At this point, we all are going through a very serious process; it’s a matter of life and death.

We are going through two serious cycles of discrepancies between us and Nature. Integrality allows us to realize that we are opposite to Nature and contrary to all its systems, meaning that originally we were supposed to be completely interconnected, but we do everything we can to avoid staying united.

We understand that staying together would be good for us, but we don’t know how to achieve this state. Everybody in the world realizes that if people unite for educational, technical, pedagogical and cultural purposes, it will facilitate the whole situation. But how can we act against our ego? We are not capable of doing so!

Here is the problem: If we are unable to unite, we will stay hungry. Very simple! We won’t be able to provide for basic necessities: food, safety, heat, dwelling, and physical health. These are five basic needs that have to be satisfied in order to survive.

At this time, Nature is pressing upon us so much that if we don’t correspond to its requirements, we won’t be able to provide for our five major necessities. Such a notion as ecology is part of our requirement for safety. We will fail to provide food and keep good ecology; both are intertwined since one influences the other.

Worry, fear, and trouble will eventually force humankind to take drastic measures. If we don’t do anything, our resistance and opposition to Nature will lead us to affliction, wars, devastation, and obliteration. At some point, we will re-evaluate our chances to survive and will arrive at the conclusion that we have to unite and reach the fourth level of development—the Human level.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #12, 12/16/11

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Question: We hope that the method of integral upbringing will be disseminated all over the world. How do you see the interaction of the Moscow group with the groups of South America, for example? Does it make sense for them to maintain a relationship with each other?

Answer: If we get rid of the language barrier through simultaneous translation, people will understand each other perfectly. They will understand the feelings, the songs, the dancing, and various expressions. You will see that suddenly they have the same body movements.

When we talk about integration, people begin to express themselves the same way, regardless of who they are. National, ethnic, and racial differences melt away.

For example, natives of South America and Africa, who have completely different dance moves, begin to move synchronously, trying to feel each other. Their dancing no longer resembles modern dancing, where everyone is six feet away from each other and no one sees anyone else while twisting and hopping on their own. On the contrary, they try to stay together, to come into contact, to be closer, maybe even to stop moving, but to feel each other physically, and most importantly, on the inside.

They acquire a completely new body language and, I would say, a new culture, communication, and behavior. But it’s not just a culture; it is a new form of art, the art of dance and expression that comes precisely from the integral sensation.

I hope that this culture emerges and is revealed, and maybe through it humanity will adapt itself to the integral world. This is shocking, and it shows us that we truly are coming closer to a single image of “Adam.”

This is a language that did not exist during the separation of people who lived in ancient Babylon, during their dispersal all over the world (if we accept the legend of the Bible as a fact). It is a language instilled in the foundation of our root even before human beings emerged, and it comes from our spiritual foundation before it materialized.

If we take all the songs, dances, any kind of music, or any other forms of expression of various groups from different continents, we will discover one common denominator in them all. And the differences between them will be very minor.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #11, 12/16/11

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Opinion (Natalia Shlemova, Moscow State Pedagogical University): “The main problem of the whole system of Russian education, from preschool to higher education, is that it does not teach people to think, does not teach to understand. Due to the absence of such methodology and dialogic structure, the education system is authoritarian, designed for passive acceptance of information by students. It lacks algorithms, mechanisms, and paradigms of understanding, creative awareness, and development of acquired knowledge.

“The collapse of the system of secondary and higher education reflects the final stage of the global crisis of human nature.

“The breakdown of the education system, the core of a developed society, indicates a serious failure in the mental evolution of the human race, while the development of the mental body of the entire humanity is the main task at this stage of its evolution.”

My Comment: The transition to a new stage of development involves the negation of the old, up to a state of being unable to exist in it, as well as a new vision: clear, obvious, not far-fetched, practically perceived, planned, calculated, not revolutionary and violent, but based on necessity. Almost everyone denies what exists, but does not see its replacement. Our dissemination of integral upbringing should become more specific.
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Kabbalah for the Nation Introductory Lecture Series, “Jerusalem at the Heart”
Download: WMV Video|MP3 Audio

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As of today, we are still on the level of the animate development. We have passed the still, vegetative, and animate levels of development and have not reached the level of “Human” yet. The level of “Human” is the collective image in which we are all tied together integrally.

What does the integral connection give us? Why does nature push us in that direction by its law of balance, obliging us to connect?

Today we perceive the world through our five senses: sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. If we are connected integrally, we will begin to feel both ourselves and others as if one integral whole, and a new sensation of “we” will appear in us.

This new integral sensation, this new sensor, will enable us to feel the integral nature. We will begin to feel the force of nature, which surrounds, drives, and manages us and which gives rise to all phenomena. It is the force that determines our future, our fate.

We begin to feel the flow of life—the past, the present, and the future—as one flow of information. This is what we can feel when we acquire an integral connection with others. By that a person rises to a level that is higher than his beastly body and begins to feel what exists beyond matter—the forces, the currents that exist outside us, above us.

This is called the level of “Human,” the level of additional information, that which determines our entire life. Nature pushes us towards this level so that we will know the meaning of our life and its purpose. This is what the integral connection between us gives us.

So, we face a very interesting problem that seems to have an easy solution. But although the solution is at hand’s reach, it totally contradicts our ego.

This is why we are concerned with spreading this knowledge that reduces suffering: We want to start feeling this necessity not by suffering but by recognition; we want to understand why everything happens the way it does in advance. When a person begins to see that the world is global, why and how he is interconnected, he already begins to foresee the events and to understand what and how should happen if we act one way or another.

We hope that this method will become the method of making new decisions, and that humanity will be able to come out of the crisis—not only the economic crisis but the general crisis as well.

The crisis is actually the birth of a new state. It is like labor pains, when the baby makes an effort to come out of the womb, into our world. We too are currently going through the same turning point in our awareness, in our understanding of the world and of ourselves.
[73525]
From the Vilnius Convention 3/22/12, Preliminary Lesson

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Question: The education process at a university is divided into semesters, and then there are exams. It is combined into receiving a diploma, further education, postgraduate studies, doctorate, and so on.

When it comes to the integral upbringing, does it make sense to go from one course to another or should this process be constant, smooth, without strict subdivisions into semesters?

Answer: Clear division only exists for beginners because we have to give them a feeling that they are advancing: first course, second course, certificates, diplomas, grades, rewards, and so on. But later all of this disappears.

A person becomes so much a part of the individual, common, and global generalization that it turns into his advancement, his greater inclusion into the integral system. And here special division into courses no longer exists.

People will spend their entire free time studying, and basically their entire work day will free up. In this case after about 2-3 months of intensive studies, a person will already imagine a certain common picture, its general form. And then, I think, at most after six months of studies, we will simply be able to combine them into one big class, one big auditorium, or a group because the best thing for them is to constantly communicate with each other.

And then, like in any society, an active core will appear in this group, with more passive and peripheral individuals connecting to it.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #11, 12/16/11

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Question: When film or theater directors or musicians, whose entire life is dissolved in their profession, come to the courses of integral upbringing, do we somehow take these individual traits into consideration? Do we unite them, use their knowledge? Or is this not necessary in our courses?

Answer: Together with education and upbringing, we also offer a very serious dissemination and teaching course. Every person studying with us must educate others himself. There is an entire industry of different education methods to do this.

Correction of the world is an enormous factory of development, editing, and creation of new types of media, information, entire layers of new cultures, and so on. For this we need writers, poets, songwriters, and musicians—absolutely everyone.

They start to be in contact with each other, to search for ways to express the feelings they experience during studying. We do not even obligate them to do it. Of course, we have an ability to present them the so-called platform, the stage to perform for us, we welcome them, and so on. But they do it on their own.

Creative people search for a way to express themselves, and they are able to do it. They “smell” each other out, unite, and immediately create music, arts, theater, and other groups. They make different clips, songs, and plays right away. They do this naturally. And we encourage them and then together enjoy their achievements.

I think that this will beget a completely new culture, which will be really needed and paid. At the end, it will fill all the virtual networks, which, hopefully, will soon begin to realize how empty they are. People are no longer capable of tolerating things like soap operas on their screens, and this is why all of it is collapsing.

Question: Do you think there is a place for a soap opera that develops a person’s integrality? If so, what should it be like?

Answer: These can be certain comedy or drama scenes, when a person searches for something, either finds it or not, does a number of scenarios “for” and “against,” discusses, and makes an analysis of whether he likes it or not. Just like in a movie: There is a beginning, a culmination, and the end. If this is a soap opera, then it ends in an incomplete way, and then it continues. These are the laws of the genre.

I think they are created to fully match man’s egoism, when he needs to be teased, attracted, pushed away, inspired, made to relax, and then to feel tension again. All soap opera makers know this.

We also need to use this. Only the topic is different, but human essence basically remains the same for now. However, the materials shown, things advertised, and the main idea of the plot, all of it relates to our subject matter.

Question: Movies and soap operas have a main scene when the hero and the antihero meet and one of them naturally wins. How do you see the main scene from the point of view of integral art?

Answer: The main scene is when a person meets himself, his two opposite characters, and he must make a decision. He either makes this decision on his own, or with the help of a certain group, say his relatives, or through sudden circumstances that take place around him, and they direct him in the right direction. Or maybe he moves in the wrong direction—“to be continued.”
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #11, 12/16/11

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Question: How do you see the implementation of the course of integral upbringing? Should it be studied first in our groups?

Answer: The initial courses of integral education and upbringing already take place. We are about to open a Mutual Gurarantee learning center. I encourage absolutely everyone to participate in it. Those who sign up will be able to become teachers and educators after graduating according to their inclinations. There are people who will tend toward teaching, and there are those who are inclined to educate, create groups, monitor discussions, conversations, etc. These are two directions: They complement each other, but are in parallel.

We would like to see all our students worldwide as educators and teachers because humanity, I hope, will soon realize how much it needs them, and those people will be busy beyond their abilities.
[73566]
From a “Talk on Integral Education” #14, 12/18/11

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The correction that we are supposed to build above the animate level in order to reach the speaking level originates not only from our bodies but also from the human being within us.  However, we still implement the correction process through our bodies, since the body is a “tool” of correction. We relate to each other (both negatively and positively) through speech, thoughts and actions. The necessity to bestow leads us to the attainment of mutual love; it is a process that we all have to go through by all means.

Speech stands for self-persuasion. It can be referred to as inner dialog since a person constantly talks with himself; it can also mean “practical” (outgoing) speech that addresses others and conveys ideas on how and in what direction we should all change.

Thoughts go before speech and actions. First, we have to formulate a thought that stems from our inner calculations, which we obtain from within ourselves as well as from our surroundings, society, and teachers. So, thoughts should be built before anything else; then they have to be transformed into speech. Any kind of oral expression will always remain only “beautiful words” until we enable them with “force” by applying actions.

Actions mean the devoting of every single hour that is not spent satisfying our animate needs to integral education and upbringing, dissemination, and work for the sake of others. Our task is to lead people to at least a decent standard of life, have them live above the poverty line, arrange for just distribution, and make everybody feel that they are not deprived of their rights.

Thus, our thoughts and speech should be aimed towards building a new balanced society in which everyone will live on an integral level and stay within the analog system. As we build ourselves, we allow our thoughts to be influenced by our surroundings; we constantly submit ourselves to a stronger integral environment. After formulating internal thoughts, we implement them though speech, meaning we shape our concepts and informational systems. This is the point when actions come forward. It’s the time when we basically influence others through education, upbringing, and elevating worldwide living standards so that nobody suffers from hunger and affliction.

This is the essence of our work. This is how we approach balance with nature, which is the goal upon which we constantly focus. The equilibrium between us allows us to come to a state of overall balance with all of nature and with its universal laws. As a result, we create a “complete,” perfect system.

Here, our evolution stops: Our development started at the time when life emerged on the face of Earth and at this point it reaches its final equilibrium. It doesn’t mean that everything will be over and the sun will stop shining.  It’s not that we cannot wait several billion more years before it happens. We are talking about the end of correction of a human being: If we achieve balance with nature and reach perfect harmony, we won’t experience any pressure from nature any more, and our lives will become perfect.

Let’s hope that we’ll closely approach such a state within our sensations and that we will and by all means be able to prepare our children and grandchildren to attain this state. It’s within our power to do so.
From Kab TV’s “A New Life” Episode 11, 1/9/12 

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