Question: How can we become professionals of integral upbringing? What is it?

Answer: A professional of integral upbringing, firstly, is one who understands evolution, which we have undergone as the egoistic development of a person and humanity. From generation to generation, we have been developing until the point when our usual human egoism ceased to grow.

It has manifested itself almost in everything and now begins to become round; that is, more and more, we feel greater unity, integrality, and globality of all early affairs, absolute dependence of each other, and, in most cases, this is unwanted.

Corporations with global operations and markets understand what profit they have from this. And humankind, countries, governments, various organizations, and anyone in the world suddenly begin to feel constrained and interconnected with everyone.

Today, in order to provide myself with everything necessary, with what I am used to because I have developed to this level and cannot imagine a normal existence below it, as an ordinary citizen of any country, city, or region, I need to be fully connected with the whole world and feel dependent on everyone.

For example, China supplies special elements, rare metals, to all the countries. But what can we do if it no longer wants to supply them. We will have no computers, no phones, nothing. If somewhere the development of oil fields and all kinds of chemical materials is stopped, we will be left with nothing. That is, the world has been divided into sectors, which become so intertwined that it’s impossible today to imagine a normal existence without proper integral work of the entire world.

Billions of people live in cities, in an artificial society, which they have created and which would be very easy to destroy; it’s enough to break a few links and people will no longer be able to exist in the stone jungles they have built.

Our current state, in general, is clear to many, even to the simplest people, because it’s easy to explain from where we get everything and to whom in turn we deliver it. And from this mutual dependence, which emerged in the era of subsistence farming, first in the family, then in the cities, in factories, and then within the nation, now, no one can isolate himself, and this forces us to think differently.
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” 5/20/12

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A person doesn’t have the power to aspire to correct his egoism, but being around people who aspire to correct themselves, if these people are pleasant to him, then he receives from them the force to overcome his egoism and becomes imbued with their desires, aspiration, and the power of spirit. But thanks to his attitude to and respect for these people, he gets new desires and aspirations.
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From Baal HaSulam, Shamati #99

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In the News (from BBC News): “The eurozone crisis is the single biggest threat to the global economy, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. …

“Failure to act today could lead to a worsening of the European crisis and spillovers beyond the euro area, with serious consequences for the global economy.’ …[said OECD chief economist Pier Carlo Padoan]

“‘Reform fatigue is increasing and tolerance for fiscal adjustment may be reaching a limit. …’

“’Rising unemployment and social pain may spark political contagion and adverse market reaction”, with countries outside the euro also at risk of being hit,’ he added.”

My Comment: This is the opinion of the most competent EU authority. But no one has the levers of influence because the process turns from the linear (individual egoistic) development to the integral (round) one, which we cannot control. We have been creating all our economic and social tools in the state of linear egoistic development (evolution) of humanity for thousands of years.

But today, when our egoism has reached its maximum linear (individual, independent) development (as seen by the general crisis and depression, that is, the absence of new desires) and turned into “round” in the global and total (integral) egoism, we discover that we cannot understand it and moreover manage it by the methods, developed in the past.

Only Kabbalah, as the science of our nature, desire, its change and fulfillment, can give us the tool of influence over everything that happens to us. Kabbalists are called to convey this knowledge to humankind. There is a hope that people will be able to discern the truth through their preconceived notions.
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Question: Even if we gather all the information about the development of the crisis and the rapidly changing world, most people aren’t able to perceive it. They don’t want to hear it or to change anything, and they continue to live as before.

Answer: This is natural; they exist in their individual egoism. All this information is foreign to them, which is why they shut themselves off from it. They have, if not aggression, at least a defense mechanism against something that isn’t simply new but completely opposite to their internal properties.

For that reason, we need to choose a very soft, simple, and, perhaps even in some ways, a playful approach to entice and engage them, and to clothe the integral knowledge in attractive forms.

These can be videos, movies, and various acting scenarios that illustrate the history of humanity and tell about our current states, not directly scientifically through tables and graphs, but conveying the information emotionally in a way that is close to a person using examples from life’s situations. Through that, they will learn.

People perceive information quite differently through the examples of others rather than themselves. This approach allows one to overcome one’s personal barrier; he or she learns from this and gradually begins to understand that what is said in general is talking about him or herself.

All sorts of explanations in the form of movies, videos, and theatre skits are discussed. Here, a person gradually adapts everything to himself and realizes that this is talking about him, about our world, our life, our lack of correspondence to the external universal human and civilization systems. So, here, we need to find a new form of approaching people.

For the first time in our lives, we’re encountering a teaching that goes “against” a person. Previously, we always were taught: “You need to know this in order to succeed, to be strong, knowledgeable, sensible, to overcome, rise up, and win over the others.” And now, we’re teaching that a person needs to be the same as the others: “You need to be connected to them on the same level; the most important thing is not to be above them, but to be together with them.” In other words, here, we’re basically playing against our egoism, which means that we need to be much wiser and more cunning than our egoism in order to outplay it.

In principle, the integral method is “help against you,” that is, against your egoism, and nothing can be done. We must understand that the same approach must be taken here as with a small child who needs to be taught things that he has absolutely no desire to accept, that is to approach him with some alternative methods. Gradually, he himself will realize, “This is exactly how I need to behave; this is how I need to relate to something.”
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing”, 5/20/12

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Baal HaSulam, “Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot,” Item 138: Yet, you should know that the distance between the dresses of the Torah in this world and the dresses of the Torah in the world of Atzilut is immeasurable. …

“Dresses of the Torah” stand for imaginary pictures. In fact, there are no dresses whatsoever, but rather there exists the Light and a vessel that portrays its own “reality” against the Light to the degree of their similarity. The Light stands for absolute bestowal, and the sensation of the vessel depends on the level of its correspondence to the Light.

This is what is meant by dresses of the Torah, the wrappers that conceal the Light from the vessel, from the person. And of course, at the level of this world where one is maximally corrupt, these screens that cover the Light happen to be the greatest possible cover-ups.

Yet, the Torah itself, meaning the Light within the dresses, is unchanged at all between the Torah of Atzilut and the Torah of this world, as it is written, “I the Lord change not” (Malachi 3:6).

The Light constantly remains in complete rest; however, it descends to a person depending on one’s level. It goes through the “dresses,” which are intended to help in a way that a person acquires them, and covers his ego, and by doing so reveals the Light, since he manages to change the type of dresses from obscuring to revealing.

This is so because the concealment is the reason for the disclosure. After its correction, during the disclosure, the concealment is to the disclosure as a wick is to the light that grips it. The greater the concealment, the greater Light will cling to it when it is corrected. Thus, all these crude dresses that the Torah is clothed in, in this world, their value is not at all inferior to the Light that clothes it, but quite the contrary.

Let’s mark the Light with red and the dresses with blue. The lower we descend through the worlds of Atzilut, Beria, Yetzira, and Assiya (ABYA), the more dresses we find. The Light of Infinity is constant; everything depends on the place where the receiving person is. Of course, major dresses of the world of Assiya finally disclose the most powerful Light to a person. It is called “the opposite order of the Lights and vessels.”

Answer: Concealing screens. In spirituality, there is a law of similarity of properties: If you possess a certain negative potential (-), the Light will manifest itself negatively (-) so that there is equality between them (=). Otherwise, you are unable to stay alive.

The Light has to diminish itself to your degree. That’s why the system of worlds (Olamot) exists—the system of concealments (Alamot): The Light decreases to the extent that you can tolerate it.

Question: What turns concealing dresses into revealing?

Answer: A person does. By rising above reason, one makes a decision to create a dress and demands that it hide his egoism; at the same time, he strives to be above his ego and to rise to the level of bestowal. This is how a person acquires a screen and starts working “on top” of it.

In the same way, the fire clings to the wick: The depth of our desires, our separation from the Creator, and our aspirations eventually transcend into the Light. There is no Light on its own. Our efforts enhance the thickness of the desire, and the darkness starts to illuminate. Without the wick there is no fire since fire cannot burn in a void; it needs fuel, which will shine and illuminate as the Light.

Question: What do we need for that?

Answer: We need to accept concealment as the biggest help that allows us to gradually move on and approach the giving force.
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/20/12, “The Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot”

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In the News (from The Independent): “The crises in Europe and the Middle East are very different but they are beginning to cross-infect each other, creating a general mood of uncertainty and fear. In the Middle East, the Arab Spring was at first seen as wholly positive, as dictatorships and police states tumbled or came under democratic assault from Tunis to Bahrain. A bright dawn was breaking across the region. …

“In the past decade, the Muslim world had its grim reminders of the national egotism of great powers, notably that of the US. In Europe, people in states belonging to the European Union have had a different, less blood-soaked but no less compelling, demonstration of how little we have moved on from the Europe of contending nationalities. …

“The European and Middle East crises are in their different ways exposing as claptrap optimistic talk of European solidarity, globalisation being beneficial to all, and ‘humanitarian’ intervention. As mutinies against the powers-that-be spread across Europe, the natural conduit for political activism is strongly nationalist parties on the right and the left. Many voters may feel that angry nationalists may be able to cut a better deal with Brussels than their over-complaisant predecessors. The age of competing nationalities, which never really ended, is back with a vengeance.”

My Comment: Egoism has not been corrected, so what can we hope for? It will be manifested more and more, until it forces us to correct it by means of the method of integral upbringing.
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A ladder, which divides the worlds into levels and the Light into portions, descends from Above, from the whole state, all the way to our world, until the total concealment. The concealments were created so that we will grow and fill them with our recognition, our work, with our exertion and efforts.

Instead of working with the vessels of receiving, we should begin to work with the vessels of bestowal, which means with the desire to receive in the intention of in order to bestow and not with the intention of in order to receive. Thanks to that, a person acquires freedom and independence, knowledge and the feeling that he’s in the Creator’s world, in the upper world.

In order to bring a person to this state, he’s shown concealments from a certain point in his development, which is happening in our times. For selected individuals this already happened in previous centuries, but today the whole world feels the concealment, a kind of obscurity, confusion, helplessness, and disorientation. There’s a feeling that we can no longer advance with the old attributes and forces to calculate our exertion and our desires to make plans and achieve results.

There is nothing to yearn for since the world is covered by a shadow. But this shadow is the same concealment, which we have to balance and to fill with our exertion. We know that this concealment was given to us on purpose, not in order to divert us from the good goal, but on the contrary, in order to bring us to the good but consciously, by understanding and feeling it as grown-ups.

Accordingly we have to determine the right way to advance, by clarifying what is required from us and how to organize all the means we have and our vessel, so that they will raise us above the concealment. We don’t annul the concealment, but we rise above it.

Everything depends upon how a person accepts these states. It says: “and each man shall help his friend,” the group has to give each one the powers as well as to constantly remind him that “there is none else besides Him,” and that we must ascend the levels of bestowal in “faith above reason.”

Then all the concealments will turn into a shade of Holiness by which we acquire vessels of bestowal, which are called “holy.” If we forget that, both we and the group, it’s a serious problem because we no longer exert ourselves in order to rise above the concealment; we are not thankful for the concealment and don’t accept it as something that’s desirable, as a springboard to ascent. Instead, we are angry about the concealment and ask for it and all the unpleasantness in life to be removed.

The concealment can be very strong, but a person should remember that there is none else besides Him. A person is only required to determine his relationship with the group correctly in order to raise a request and to draw the Reforming Light, and then he will attain adhesion above the concealment. This is how he will advance.

Otherwise it will turn into a shade of the Sitra Achra, of the egoistic forces, which will lead to a greater fall, which won’t allow him to fulfill himself correctly. No matter what happens, he should rise again and start everything anew. The main thing is to determine a framework for himself: a schedule for studying and for working in the group, which will remind him in every state that his obligation is to differentiate between the shade of Holiness and the shade of the Sitra Achra.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/28/12, Shamati #8

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In our longing to rise above our ego, to correspond to nature, to its attributes of bestowal and love, we need to be careful not to postpone our correction until “later.” This is what our ego pushes on us in its resistance to be diminished. Whoever postpones his correction from “ today” to “tomorrow,” “That which changes today for tomorrow for you,“ will discover his mistake only after many years of lack of advancement, “And he that can wait until tomorrow will get lost after years, G-d forbid.”

The reason for such a loss is the negligence in relation to the efforts in loving his friends, in relation to the necessary and sufficient methods of correction of all our ego.

We must understand what a huge force is hiding in the unity of the group and in each one of the friends. After all, we are not dealing with friends or a group, but with the huge force of nature. Each one of us is in unity with it, only the illusion of this world around us and all of its parts confuses us and hides from us the great forces and attributes of nature, of its system of governance regarding us so that each one of us will attain the attributes of bestow and love.

If we connect our forces to each of nature’s representatives, then in the assembly of friends, in love and friendship, we will discover forces that change us to be similar and to become equivalent to the upper force of nature.
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From Baal HaSulam, Pri Hacham (Fruit of the Wise), Letter 13, 1925

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Question: Conventions where we actively were using the workshops as a way to unite produced the astonishing results.

Some friends, who in the past couldn’t find the common language, suddenly, by rising above personality differences, were able to unite. However, at the same time there were people who could not enter this process, they could not force themselves to sit in the circle.

Answer: The reaction of rejection is taking place. These people have a good and healthy egoism. They will too go forward, but we have to be patient for a little while and not push them! Gradually it will happen in them as a result of the influence of the common field. I know these problems many of which I experienced myself in different ways. Generally this is all legitimate.

In any condition, in any combination, in any possible form these friends should participate in common events; they can do it purely in the mechanical way, they can help do some work, sit at the computers, help with the general connection between the groups during that time. It doesn’t matter what they do. Gradually it will come.

There are such types of egoism, which have a very hard time establishing a contact. Even sitting together in a circle and talking about something only in the mechanical way is not so easy. In this regard we have to always raise another person and try to justify him.
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From the Virtual Lesson 5/20/12, “Fundamentals of Kabbalah”

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From the article “Concerning the Love of Friends,” by Rabash: And so it turns out that if one has love of friends and the attribute of love, the law is that one should want to see the virtue of his friend and not his shortcoming.

So it turns out that if he sees any shortcoming in his friend, it is a sign that it isn’t a shortcoming in his friend but in himself. This means that he has damaged the love of friends and so he sees shortcomings in his friend.

Therefore, he needs to see not that his friend corrects himself, but that he himself needs correction. And when he corrects himself, he will only see the virtue of his friend and not his shortcoming.

It says: “The Lord made an honest man, and they looked from many accounts.” (Ecclesiastes 7; 29). If we perceive the world according to our attributes, thoughts, and desires, we will not be able to get rid of the endless claims and will not be able to reach an agreement, a common denominator. There are egoistic accounts constantly going on in our mind, which do not let us rest and make us run around unnecessarily.

Aiming towards the truth begins from the point in which we feel that we are in the world of Ein Sof (Infinity), meaning in “there is none else besides Him.” And if I see anything else, it means that my attributes are not adapted to Ein Sof.

There is concealment from Above, the diminishing of the Light according to the 125 degrees. Therefore, I am not in the Light of Ein Sof but on some level of its concealment considering the next higher level as Ein Sof, because I cannot perceive it in my desires. If I perceive such a difference between the ideal and the possible, I understand that instead of the world of Ein Sof, I see this world before me in which there is both good and evil, but this is merely an imprint of myself on the background of the white Light. It turns out that there is nothing to correct but myself, and this is the second point that determines my direction.

This means that I am in the world of Ein Sof and I only need to correct my perception, as it says: “One judges according to his own flaws.”

In order to help us attain correction, there was a very serious preparation called the shattering of the vessels. Because of that, each of us feels that he is detached from others, as if they exist without any connection to him and are strangers to him. This is why we feel that the world is full of details: the inanimate, vegetative, animate, and speaking, each of which has its own way of existence, its own fate and purpose, and I am just one of them.

But if I want to attain the world of Ein Sof, I must connect everything to myself, which means to correct my perception to such an extent that I will be able to see that everything is actually in my hands. Everything depends on me, and I have to tilt the whole world to the scale of merit. If I correct myself, I will see that I have corrected everyone.

The world is depicted to me as full of different attributes and differences, but this is because I haven’t attained inside me the agreement and the connection of all my attributes, desires, and thoughts.

Therefore, we see such a big, wide, and complicated world, so looking from the side will help us connect all the matching details inside me, because everything I see on the outside is actually inside me. I perceive everything through my different egoistic thoughts and desires, and so I see so many components in the world. But if I unite all these attributes inside me, then all the attributes will merge in harmony into one whole, as one integral global world, as one system. We all have to reach such a perception of the world.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/25/12, Writings of Rabash

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