Question: What quantity of information is actually useful to a person, and what information could cause him or her harm?

Answer: If we teach a person a correct perspective of the world and nature, he will easily absorb any information because he will always attribute it to the general, global picture of the world. Consequently, he will have no problems with the stream of information.

Let’s say that today from morning to night I am reading and consuming a truly enormous amount of information on different topics related to the problems of modern society, science, finances, and the like. As I do it, my main task is to integrate that information into one integrated picture of the world.

How can I discern in all of that a manifestation of one single law—the aspiration of all possible egoistic forces towards unification into a single altruistic force in similarity to nature? How are today’s society and individuals being transformed as they involuntarily move towards integration under the influence of negative forces, referred to in our world as the crisis? In reality, the crisis is kindness unto us.

This worldview gives a person an opportunity to pass enormous flows of information through himself or herself, which supplement within him this overall picture and enter into the general harmony.

This is similar to listening to some symphony and sensing that some musical instruments are missing from the orchestra. Being an expert, you perceive that something is lacking; you don’t feel quite right, and then suddenly the missing element, harmony, appears.

Therefore there are no problems here. A person can truly be a walking encyclopedia, he is capable of absorbing all information that exists in nature. The most important thing is that all of it gets woven in him into a single picture. And then the more information he will receive, the more desirable it will be for him, and the more easily he will be able to absorb it. He will complete those blank spaces that he sensed inside him as a lack, as an absence of perfection.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #5, 12/13/11

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Kabbalah for the Nation Introductory Lecture Series, “To Be A Man, Social Psychology”
Download: WMV Video|MP3 Audio

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Our attitude towards nature, towards that one law which obliges us to connect with each other into one whole, is manifested within the environment. That’s why our attitude towards the environment, building it on the basis of this law, is more important than the attitude towards Nature itself. The main thing is to build one’s environment.

It’s not for nothing that thousands and millions of people are forced to leave their jobs and become unemployed; we need to open courses for teachers, educators, and facilitators. In fact, in this work, each of us is a teacher, an educator, and an assistant in relation to others. Therefore, everyone will have to go through this learning process and acquire a new “profession,” meaning to become a “Human Being” in a new society. Each of us should rise to a level where we’ll be able to understand what happens in Nature, and what is going on inside of us, what forms of relationships we can build with each other.

According to research, if a person finds himself in an environment where there is mutual influence, he can’t escape. This compels him, envelops him, and unwittingly or not, he changes. We see how the environment raises our children just by examples. The environment educates us, and in our life, we acquire new forms of behavior, relationships, and a new scale of values.

That’s why we don’t even count our desires, be they the desires for food, sex, family, money, power, knowledge, or hundreds of other things. We should look not at how to use these desires, but at their direction (and this is the most important!). In other words, the most important thing is solely my intention in the use of my “I” with all of my desires. I must transform the use of all my abilities for the benefit of society, and then my “I” will turn into “we.” And from the notion of “we,” which is like the gathering of individuals, we will arrive at the concept of “One.” And this “One” is already in balance, in unity with the only Law that governs us.

Then, a person becomes a Human Being, and begins to understand his nature and general Nature. On this path, he studies a lot of inner laws, the laws of psychology and the universe, and he absorbs everything that exists in nature, reaching its highest degree, the degree of that single force that affects us, and in the form which today we perceive as the crisis, it invites us to approach It. This course is designed to teach a person how to become a Human, how to reach the best, safest, and most comfortable, healthy state. Therefore, we should be thankful to this situation that leads us to a new era, to the world full of goodness.

However today, we have not yet begun this process and are not yet aware of it; our lives seem pointless; we are fearful of what awaits our children and grandchildren. So people don’t want to bear children and don’t even understand their place in this world. But everything is just the opposite! In the real sense of this word, “crisis” means a new birth, the threshold of a new humanity. The realization of our greatest hopes lies ahead of us.

We have to begin to realize this single law, and in a very short time, within a few weeks, we’ll feel how much it works, how “habit becomes second nature,” how much we can’t live without showing a good attitude towards each other. And if by chance we forget about it, we must remind each other while we’re together, united, when everyone feels the others, what a warm and desired state this is so that we want to return there again.

Let’s hope that due to our mutual support, we’ll be able to come to this state where a game, a habit, will help us achieve the good nature of love.
[67347]
From KabTV’s “A New Life” Episode #4, 1/1/12

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Question: If a person goes down the wrong path, say, plunges into alcoholism, then as a rule he either hits rock bottom, or destroys himself, or some inner transformation takes place. Essentially, the entire humanity is going down this path right now. Our task in the integral education courses is to provide a person with a tool that would keep him from destroying himself, from breaking his life into pieces. Can a turning point occur in the middle of the process and not in its end?

Answer: One of man’s qualities is empathy. If we show someone who is setting out on a vicious path (say, of drug abuse) another individual whose life hangs by a thread due to these very drugs, I think it will have a strong impact on him, regardless of whether or not he wants to quit.

If we take people through a hospital’s cancer ward, they will see what smoking does. Personally, I smoke, quite moderately, in my opinion, but nevertheless I do. So I know for myself that had I walked through such places in my time, it would have affected me strongly. And if I found myself in an environment that disdains smoking and expresses its contempt towards smokers, I would naturally have a sensation that would force me to realize the vice of this action.

That is why everything depends on the extent to which I can absorb from my environment the missing quantity of the realization of evil that I’m lacking in order to break from the transitional state, where I am still receiving pleasure and still haven’t fully destroyed myself.

For that I need a serious environment, community, group, or a class in which I study. We know that if the public opinion of a group of people follows a certain trend or adheres to some special principles, everyone is involuntarily obliged to follow that. The herd instinct is inherent in people because a person evaluates himself or herself only relative to others. One cannot allow oneself to be better or worse than the rest. What matters to people is their importance in the eyes of society, but whether this importance is positive or negative makes no difference to them. Therefore, if we create a certain social standard, all people will be obliged to obey it—this is how we are created.
[66418]
From a “Talk on Integral Education” #5, 12/13/11

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Question: Modern economy is based on the waste of resources. If we begin to save, many people will be unemployed. Will this be a right step towards the goal?

Answer: First, I don’t think we should call these people “unemployed.” We are in a new era now in which we are experiencing a change in the evolutionary paradigm. Today we have to see what is happening as a return or an ascent to the world that should exist in this way according to nature.

In this world we only live in bodies and everything besides the body’s basic necessities should be aimed at the correction of the soul. Accordingly, the concern for corporeal needs should amount to living a normal, comfortable life and not more than that. Of course, there is no need to return to the caves. A person needs a place to live, heating, food, a health system, security and everything that is related to desires like: food, sex, and family. Yet we should understand that all this is only the essential corporeal basis for the primary mission. The body exists so that we can develop the soul.

We turn to the whole world: The poverty line should become the baseline above which we should raise everyone. What for? So a person will be freed from worrying about their daily bread and will start dealing with the development of the soul. Anything beyond the necessities no longer applies to our world anymore, only the correction of the soul.

This should be our approach, although it’s still impossible to explain it in these words. If we approach things this way, we won’t produce surpluses, but will focus all the forces and the extra resources above necessity at integral education, meaning the system of correction. Accordingly, we place culture, education and science at the service of the development of the soul. After all, there is nothing else to live for in this world. We will finish with the soul and this world will disappear.

We should understand that the technology we develop should also provide us with free time for the main goal and not for entertainment and pampering. Ages ago, prehistoric man used to hunt for two or three hours a day. Only later, the growing ego brought certain people to control others and force them to work all day.

So we have to return to our natural state. Therefore, we mustn’t call people who don’t work in the traditional sense “unemployed.” They are not slackers, they were simply freed to deal with the main thing, they are returning to normal life. They can be employed for a few hours a day, and all the rest of the time they need to be working in the human field, above the beastly level, in a place that a person learns to be human.

We need the integral study in order to understand how to connect to one another. Thus we’ll reach a state of balance with nature and be rid of all troubles no matter what they are, whether in ecology or finances. Everything will calm down thanks to the balance.
[65844]
From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/9/12, “The Freedom”

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Question: At the beginning of the 20th century, in Russia in particular, there was a widespread campaign to eliminate illiteracy. What seems perfectly natural today back then was received with hostility. Many people refused to send their children to schools and didn’t wish to learn themselves because they considered it a pointless waste of time. Today a similar situation may arise, when the integral education that we are offering could be perceived as something useless, unnecessary. How can we overcome this resistance?

Answer: I think that today a large number of educators, psychologists, and sociologists understand the brewing problem, except they don’t know how to deal with it. It means that it’s necessary to approach them as broadly as possible with explanations.

Teachers empathize with students, and moreover, at times they suffer even more than their pupils. After all, they are forced to exist under constant negative pressure from children, whose beastly egoism, unrestricted by any boundaries, is directed against the teachers. Every student tries to assert before them his or her own independence and striving for self-affirmation.

I think that teachers and educators need some training on this  to be able to discern in a new methodology at least something for their own benefit, something that would allow them to work with children normally.

The work of an educator today is rather difficult, serious, and I would even say risky. A person is subjected to such conditions, such moral pressure that this work could even be called “harmful.” Forty five minutes of being in the classroom with the children generates a lot of stress and enormous strain on the teacher.

Together with the educators, we need to prepare for them a methodological resource that would help them understand that first and foremost, we are concerned with the atmosphere in the classroom, without even changing the class itself yet.

Students cannot get used to integral discourse yet because right now it’s impossible to discuss anything with anyone—it will lead to shouting, shutting each other up, abuse, swearing, and who knows what else. Now the educator at least sits them down, holds them still in some way, and somehow, out of necessity, pacifies them. Meanwhile the pupils are sitting, all miserably, each in his own place, and they wait for this whole ordeal to come to an end.

A slow, smooth transition is needed here. I think that educators will gradually agree with this. They can already see that the current system is not one that has a right to exist in the new generation.
[66421]
From a “Talk on Integral Education” #5, 12/13/11

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Question: In the process of integral education a person begins to change, and as a consequence, his social environment changes too. Do we have to prepare him or her for that from the very beginning? After all, their previous environment might bombard us with accusations that we are some kind of a sect and that we corrupt people.

Answer: For this we need to precede our practical studies with a large campaign to disseminate the idea of integral education, a campaign that will be and already is based on scientific data, on the direct demands of nature, the surrounding environment, and of our own inner developing nature. After all, we are involuntarily moving towards an integral society anyway.

If we do not correspond to it, things will be bad for us. We have to learn how to be in sync with this new “round” framework that nature is creating around us; nature is driving us into a network of tight interactions. Resistance is useless here.

That’s why we must explain this idea, this opinion, this historical, social, and personal necessity to all of humanity. And afterwards, all our other actions will naturally stream from that and seem correct. People will begin to understand what we are doing and will strive towards it.

If we just demonstrate our actions without explanations, nobody would understand this, and people would greet us with hostility. We would be accused of sectarianism, perhaps of naivety, utopian thinking, and the like.

But if we begin to work with children and gradually instill in them elements of humanism (at least let’s call it that), I doubt that we’ll have any special problems here with society or with parents. And upon showing, after some time, certain positive results, we could then rely on public opinion. That’s why the most fertile soil for our activity is children’s organizations.

But on the other hand, it is the most difficult because access to them is regulated by the state. The government has a right to introduce different programs into schools and to forcefully impose on children whatever is desirable for itself, and not whatever is best for the children. It’s very difficult to fight against this conservative system.

Still, society is fighting, creating private schools and alternative educational methods. In our day, in many countries of the world a child can be educated at home, through the Internet, and take exams remotely. This is already a big plus. This was impossible in the past because laws forbade home schooling.
[66261]
From a “Talk on Integral Education” #5, 12/13/11

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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.
[66141]
From a “Talk on Integral Education” #5, 12/13/11

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Nature demands equivalence of form from us, balance. Nature is round” and we must build human society in the same round form as well. It will bring benefit to everyone and will lead us to a good state that is comfortable and balanced in all areas.

If we are united, nature will cooperate with us in everything: education, culture, every day life, home life and family, ecology, our relation to nature and its response to us, and in general in all of our activities. Only by correctly uniting integrally will we be rescued from nature’s disasters in the first stage, and then later, be successful in the second stage when completely new perspectives will open before us.

In this way we will, at least, escape the general, global crisis that we are experiencing today. This crisis was created as a result of our oppositeness to nature, which is an integral system. And this was revealed only in the last one hundred years.

Until then, there wasn’t a global crisis: humanity was developing and prospering. Only in this last stage, we see that nature, as it were, envelops us from all directions. In other words, nature shows itself as an integral network and we are not able to demonstrate this same unity. In this way, humanity is being revealed as opposed to nature, opposite from nature. And we feel our oppositeness as a crisis. This is exactly the problem.

Accordingly, the solution is to attain balance with nature. Our program of integral education is intended precisely for this. After all, in any event, nature will win. It is clear that in comparison to it we are weak, small, and nothing. We see this from the disintegrating of all of our systems that we no longer can cope with, for example, rising unemployment in the Western world.

Question: We can imagine the unemployed person who knows that it is unlikely that he will find a new job because there are many like him. No one prepared him for this kind of situation and he is apparently disappointed with life. In addition to this he doesn’t know what to do with all his free time because no one ever taught him this.

Answer: Actually the so-called free time is the most productive hours, during which he creates a man of himself.

Let’s begin with all of humanity sitting at the desk to learn. Man doesn’t know where to place himself. He is used to working according to the schedule of a working day. So everything will stay that way. We will arrange the order of day and we will commit to implementing it. It is only that now we are speaking about introductory courses whose length are a few hours a day. In this way, we don’t disrupt the established framework and don’t try to change the model that the person is used to. No, we only tell the person that he is receiving a “stipend” or “allowance” (not unemployment compensation), and in parallel to this, he works part-time or doesn’t work at all if his main work is the study.

We must pass a course like this. How long will it take—a few months or years? It doesn’t matter. The most important thing is that from now on, it will be our main task and it has to be treated as a job in every respect. Man learned to behave according to a certain framework, and so he now also needs to come to learn, similar to elderly people who happily go to various courses at the university. In this atmosphere, a person feels that he is being renewed, like in childhood.

Today we can talk about this without hesitation. Until recently the media didn’t take the crisis seriously, and two years ago they even announced that it had ended. And today there is no shortage of disaster forecasts. Thus if we talk about retraining courses, of a continuing education program, then it will be accepted.

Then everyone is accepted to this “university,” with all its familiar characteristics, including examinations. People will be busy during the day, obligations are imposed on them, and they have nowhere to run to since success depends on the study. In this way we need to raise the people.

By the way, the curriculum of the integral education program will include general education subject: history, geography, household financial management and others, and the most important psychology, the science of man.
[65100]
From “Lessons About a New World” #1, 12/27/11

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Question: Let’s suppose that I am used to working 8-9 hours a day and I get paid for overtime. My thoughts constantly revolved around my job, pride in my professional achievements, and my income. That was my world. I spent very little time at home. I was really with the family only on weekends and holidays. And then suddenly I was fired and deprived of all the routine that was in my life.

Answer: They revoked it because there is no more money left in the world. In other words, the whole world needs to let out the air from “the inflated balloon” and descend to the level of basic needs.

Let’s say we need to take care of 5 essential things: shelter, food, warmth, safety, and health. This is our mission, to supply this for everyone. There are many in Europe who saved all their lives for their retirement and were sure that in their old age they could live like everyone else, and in the end they barely find money for food and medicines.

So we need to show a person that he will receive a real bonus in return for his participation in the program of integral education that the society offers him. For example, society sends you to work for a three-hour shift and to five hours of classes at the university, and someone else is sent to the university for all eight hours.

As a result, we fill man’s day without touching the framework that he already had. He feels that he is occupied exactly like before. It is good for him to continue in the same vein. It doesn’t matter that the kind of tasks are different or that his many dreams and plans dissipated, he nonetheless sees that the same thing is happening all over the world. The troubles of the many are in themselves a partial consolation especially since he sees also no other options exist.

Accordingly, study and learning become an essential condition for providing his basic needs.

Question: A person who loses his job, doesn’t just lose the income. He loses his identity, his self-esteem, his social position, and friends. He is left isolated from society and feels as though “demons” have burst out of the bottle, opening inner doors within him that previously he didn’t even know existed.

Answer: To avoid this, we advise him to make an honorable living like others. But also, the moment he comes to study the integral education, he will immediately begin to understand his personal situation and the situation of the whole world, and this understanding will become a kind of prop for him.

Now man understands where he is and why everything is happening especially in this way. The education gives him a new vision, a new approach to the world. He becomes a real man (Adam – human/man) in the full sense of the word, educated and oriented toward what is happening. He is not detached from society, he maintains relationships with others, he participates in various activities, and ultimately thrives in society.

After all, a person who loses his job wants to understand himself, to restore himself. He lost his way and wants to clarify what is happening to him. When he sees that it is a part of the developmental process that operates on everyone, and not just him, that will already bring him some relief. Thus our materials need to provide a person with friendly and tender support, which will help lighten his spirits.
[65095]
From “Lessons About A New World” #1 12/1/11

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