In the News (from GALLUP): “In the U.S., one’s marital status appears to have an impact on one’s wellbeing. Americans who are married have higher wellbeing than those who are not married, with those currently separated or divorced lagging far behind. …

“Clearly, marriage has economic benefits and ending a marriage can have serious economic consequences, which helps explain part of the gap in wellbeing by marital status. …

“Marriage also brings companionship, emotional support, and partnership in dealing with life’s ups and downs that can foster a higher level of personal wellbeing. Social interaction is inherently part of marriage, and Gallup analyses have clearly shown that time spent socially and social networks themselves are positively associated with high wellbeing.”

My Comment: According to Kabbalah, the institution of marriage is the basis for sustainable development and existence of a person, protecting him from stress and creating a special kind of inner stability. Throughout time, Kabbalists did not accept unmarried students, considering a man who has no family underdeveloped, at least socially, and that doesn’t let him fully realize himself in this world, for what Kabbalah is intended.
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Divorce has become very common today. There is an upsurge in the number of the divorced couples lately and their age is going down. Some of the married couples divorce in the first years of their marriage. There is a theory that marriage may have run its course. After all, life is full of temptations and it’s very hard to live with the same person for a whole lifetime.

A woman who has a family and children suddenly feels that she doesn’t love her husband anymore. He may be a good husband and a good father, yet it doesn’t matter; she simply doesn’t love him. There is a new natural phenomenon that is common among many women who suddenly lose the internal feeling of dependence and connection with their husband.

This was never typical of women. A woman who lived with her husband always got used to him and felt that she belongs to him. Suddenly all this is gone. This is a natural result of our development. We mustn’t blame the women if this is a natural phenomenon. First we have to study the phenomenon and see what to do about it.

It’s a result of our development: We leave the animate level and rise to the level of human, Adam, who resembles (Domeh in Hebrew) the global nature. Since we have to connect with this general nature now, with all of humanity, it breaks our personal private connections. Nature wants to “open our eyes,” to take us out of the family framework so that we will return to it later, but on a different level.

Everyone remembers the feeling of being in love, the strong unusual emotions, the excitement, inspiration, and the wholeness for which it was worthwhile to be together and to build a family. But with time this feeling disappeared. So why do we naturally fall in love that later disappears, forcing us to look for it all our lives?

Nature wants us to reach true love and to break off the beastly, egoistic love that doesn’t last. We have to change the instinctive attraction to the other sex, caused by natural passion and hormones, to a more purposeful connection.

The ordinary connection is formed because we are living for the children or for a shared household. In addition, it is convenient to be together since we can help each other and support each other when we grow old. But today we have to find the higher, internal connection. It’s impossible to keep a person in the old frameworks: He may throw away everything and leave. The children grow and leave the home and there is nothing to keep us together; so we’ve split everything that we have and get divorced. We see this everywhere.

In order to keep the unity of the family, we need a more sublime motive. It’s just as we have to reach peace and understanding all over the world since we won’t survive otherwise. But when we connect with the whole world because we have no choice, we suddenly discover that the main profit is not economic success at all! It was just an excuse to push us into building up better connections.

Suddenly, we actually discover that there is a totally new feeling in this connection that detaches us from corporeal life. We feel a fuller, more spiritual life. All of a sudden we discover a filling that we haven’t felt our whole life. We simply float in the air, feeling the extraordinary lightness of being without feeling death.

Before, I had to connect under nature’s pressures that set the condition: “You either connect or here will be your burial place.” But later I am surprised to discover that these relations are totally different. I simply couldn’t imagine that this will receive a higher filling, above this whole life.

It doesn’t matter how much you tell a person about this, he won’t understand. Therefore, nature pushes us from behind by suffering, obliging us to connect before we destroy one another. We connect since we have no choice only to eventually discover the beauty in this connection.

The same thing happens in the family. Now we hate one another and don’t want to be together, wanting to get divorced. But if each of us discovers in the world the lack of love, the need, and the desire to love, and if each of us understands what a sublime filling love brings, we will want to have these relations in our family. We will return to the family after we learn to love the whole world! Then we will want to reach an inner, personal connection with a spouse.

Then it won’t matter that we grow old in a number of years and are not as attractive as we used to. We won’t even pay attention to that. We’ll feel the same first love, but in a totally different way, and only after we learn to build internal relations by connecting with the whole world.
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From a “Talk About a New Life” #19, 2/02/12 

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Question: It isn’t clear how a modern person who doesn’t want to have children will suddenly have this desire.

Answer: It is thanks to the fact that we begin to connect mutually all over the world. By forming connections based on love above the repulsion and the unpleasantness, we begin to understand the internal power that is concealed in these relations. We will see to what extent bestowal upon others fills us.

Then a woman would want to be in such a relationship with her husband, with a certain husband and not some random partner, as we see these days. Then they will be able to establish a mutual relationship and to build a family, not on the biological, sexual level, but on the level of the spiritual connection. In such a family they will feel that it is possible to expand the relationship, fulfilling it through children. This is all the result of a person’s learning to connect with the world.

We’ve always lived egoistically. We gave and received egoistically, but now the whole world will reach an altruistic connection. First it is in the form of to bestowing in order to bestow, and then it is in the form of to receiving in order to bestow. We will understand that it is worthwhile to reach such a form of receiving in order to increase our bestowal.

It may seem like lofty language, but according to the pace of our development this future is very near. Of course, it is very hard to understand this, as long as a person doesn’t change. But by changing gradually, we begin to understand the level we are on and a bit above it.

I think that the more a person corrects himself, by becoming more integral and connected to others, by treating others with love, bestowal, concern, mutual understanding, and mutual guarantee, his attitude towards the other sex, towards his or her partner, will also change and so will the attitude to family ties and to children.

After all, we’ve never felt what love is. We acted according to our natural instincts and accordingly we chose the right spouse. But now our close relationships will be based on an internal feeling after we’ve learned to live above our ego.

Nature obliges us to establish such global relationships around the world. Then we will not look at the other sex on the beastly, physical level where the family has already collapsed. We will create a family alliance on a higher spiritual level, and will establish connections of mutual bestowal.

By this mutual bestowal I will begin to feel differently about my spouse and he or she will feel the same way about me, so there will be a new connection between us, as it says: “a man and a woman, if they were granted, Divinity is between them,” which means a special connection. Thanks to this connection, we will begin to think about children. This will be a totally different family, we are not going back to what was in the past, but rather will raise our connection from the corporeal, physical level to the level of the souls, to the spiritual level.

The family will have the same form: a man, a woman, children, but the meaning and the goal will be totally different.

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From a “Talk About a New Life” #19, 2/02/12

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If I could peep out of my small envelope and see where I am in this global world, how I treat all of humanity, which as one soul goes through different changes, by approaching its perfect state, I would perceive my life a little differently. I wouldn’t look at my personal life, at a life that is as small as an ant’s life, that shouldn’t be taken into account at all.

If you are included in the great global process together with others, you will feel that you are in the infinite flow of life. In the meantime we should learn what to do in order to feel the eternity of nature and to be included in it. Then from this height you will be able to solve all your personal problems.

But if we try to fix them on the ordinary corporeal level, we will not be able to solve anything. The evidence for that are all the futile attempts to correct the current situation taken by governments. There is no other means to correct our personal state, except for integral education and upbringing.

Therefore, a woman who feels miserable today since she couldn’t find a partner with whom to build a family and have children should understand that this is how nature wants to compel her to be included in the whole world as a woman.

As a result of being included in the world, which is the result of the integral education, she begins to understand the connections she should have with others. She begins to feel how good this connection in mutuality with the whole world is.

Then she will meet the right man and they will begin to learn how they can support one another mutually, in order to rise to the spiritual level and to become one, although they can still be different and stay each in their own ego.

The moment the personal perception changes, everything will immediately work out. They will want to be more strongly connected and to have children, so that the mutual connection can be implemented spiritually. This spirit will oblige them to build a family.
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From a “Talk About a New Life” #19, 2/02/12

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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.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” Episode 5, 1/2/12

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Question: You constantly speak about the family, but today the notion of family has changed completely and is gradually disappearing. What makes you think that we can return to the old family model?

Answer: I am absolutely convinced that after experiencing an enormous crisis, we will return to the old family model. The modern egoistic family will really cease to exist.

The birth of a new family will happen due to our movement toward the goal, the root. We will see that the only way for us to reach it is by being absolutely connected with others on all levels of existence, with the partner in the family, with children, and through one’s own family, to other families, society, and the world. In other words, we will return to the model of a regular family that will allow a person to reveal the Creator above our animal, corporeal existence.

We will not be ashamed of being little animals in a family because a special relationship called “real love” appears between a husband and a wife in addition to the animal attraction. It is a relationship where they reveal the Creator between them and really attain the higher goal.

People will create families for the sake of this higher goal and establish a physical and spiritual connection with their partner. In this way, the family will be reborn, both on the spiritual and physical levels. However, it will be mainly on the spiritual level and from there, on the physical level.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #12, 12/16/11  

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About 40 years ago, divorce was considered a dishonorable act; today, there is nothing unusual about it. People don’t understand why they have to get married, give birth to children, and why they should continue to live!

If the answer to this question is not found, a person won’t need to have a family or give birth to children. I can continue living by myself as comfortably as possible; what will happen later is not my concern. Today, this is the way our ego relates to life.

But if I discover a higher goal, how to open doors to another world, to eternal intention, moreover, if I know that it can happen here and now, then even though it takes more responsibility and imposes certain liabilities on me such as nullifying myself to attain this goal and reach its importance, it will force me to create a family.

Next, I marry a woman that I choose not because of my animal instincts, but rather as a result of my search for a spiritual partner! My wife stays with me all the time and becomes an indicator through which I trace if I am still on the right track.

Then, we actually achieve the goal, which connects us; instead of our merely tolerating each other, we join together as one whole! This is called: “A man and a wife and Shechina (Divinity) between them.”

We begin to relate to each other through the Creator since we are not alone: He always is between us. That’s why I perceive my wife through the prism of the Creator, that is, I see both the Creator and her. Accordingly, she sees the Creator and me.

If we don’t take into account the third factor we won’t be able to build a triangle (a man, a wife, and the Goal), nor will we be able to live together. At the animal level it is possible, but at the “speaking level” it is not feasible.

I won’t be able to identify the Creator if I don’t look at my husband or wife through this prism.

Originally, we were parts of one common soul: Adam and Eve. Now, we have to revive this “structure”, although the serpent (our huge ego) has split us. We have to correct this “serpent” and reveal the Creator between us.

Question: So, it’s useless to wait for a “prince on a white horse.” Should we rather search for the Creator?

Answer: The Creator is above anything else! Later on you should focus on who can replenish Him in your eyes.
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From a Lecture “About Femininity” 12/14/10

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In the News (from Daily Mail): “While unattached women are too busy enjoying their freedom to care about the absence of a companion on February 14, men feel lonely if there are no cards through the letterbox, according to a study.

“While more than half of unattached women say they are happy as they are, only 39 per cent of single men feel the same. And less than a third of women say they actively dislike being alone, while 70 per cent of men admit feeling this way.

“Traditionally, women were looking for love and the security provided by a man who was the breadwinner. However, women’s success in the workplace has led to increasing financial independence.

“At the same time, many men still believe women should take care of house and home – and so feel ill-equipped to do it themselves when they don’t have a partner.

“Single women said they can buy themselves more treats and more than half have plenty of time to spend with their friends compared to around one in three who are in a couple.

“Of those who are single, it is women who are happiest. Many put their education and careers first, and as a result, women are more financially independent and self-sufficient than ever before.

“The researchers found that single men and women were more likely than those in couples to invest energy in their careers. Some 62 per cent said freedom was the main advantage of being unattached.”

My Comment: Our selfishness has reached its maximum. The indicator of this is the dissolution of the basic unit of society, the family, and its replacement with other egoistic surrogates. The systemic crisis will force us to change our attitude to the world, and we will have to rise above our self-interest to the connection between us. The family will return, but in a new image, with a new goal: To achieve an upper harmony, people will create connections above their egoism, both in the family and in society.
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Question: Should I, as a psychologist, paint a realistic picture for people and tell them that it will only get worse in the future, while we offer them a solution?

Answer: If you’re talking about a family conflict and its resolution, here everything is very simple. I would organize courses to educate couples about their mutual psychology and human psychology in general.

Comment: But people can’t tolerate the truth….

Answer: I disagree with that. Truth can in fact be tolerated if I know that I am this way by nature: I love to deceive, steal, cheat others, and use them for my own benefit; I don’t want to acknowledge my shortcomings, but automatically notice the shortcomings of my family members, wife, and so on. And she has the same problems, like any other person. We need to talk all that over, to clarify everything. Perhaps along with that we need to produce films and television programs showing examples of spouses’ sincere revelations, where people open up to each other in absolute objectivity, without any shame or discomfort.

These two biological organisms, two psychological entities live together. They tell each other how each of them perceives and senses their own self and the other person. Such conversation ultimately let them objectively view themselves, their partner, and something common between them. Now everything needs to be brought to the kindest possible state with an understanding that this is nature and there’s nothing to be done about it. And if you’ll keep resisting, there’ll never be an end to this.

I live with my wife for over forty years. Naturally, during this time we repeatedly tried to point out each others’ shortcomings, reproached each other, but in the end each of us held our ground. This “ground” remains within a person, and we need to rise above it since it is impossible to change our nature. We need to educate people about all that.

By rising above it, you begin to see that by “colliding” correctly, all that is negative, all the individual and general shortcomings unite into something good. And it turns out that there is a reason why you are brought together and are completing each other. Above all the disagreements and contradictions you attempt to create a comfortable zone of inner existence for each of you, as well as a comfortable zone for your co-existence, the kind where you cannot even imagine your new suddenly emerging family.

In other words, each of us has something that is our own and this is given by nature. Each spouse accepts what exists in their partner, and together they build a mutual agreement, having risen above themselves. I believe that their agreement—above egoism, which they don’t touch—is entirely achievable. For that it’s not necessary to transform their environment and all the rest. It’s simply regular work with any couple.
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From “Lessons About the New World” #6, 12/14/12 

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Question: Let’s say that a man and a woman in a group begin to discuss an integral future, the way they imagine this integral picture…

Answer: In order for them not to fantasize about an ideal picture hinging on material prosperity that they wouldn’t be able to secure for themselves, it is better that they proceed from the principle summarized in a Russian saying, “love makes a cottage a castle”: “Let’s build our own beautiful ‘castle.’”

Question: But “love makes a cottage a castle” is a purely psychological notion.

Answer: Of course! Nothing else is necessary. They will see that they can satisfy themselves with a minimum and at the same time be perfectly happy. They won’t keep destroying themselves in this pursuit of phantom abundance and instead will be able to build their happiness immediately. But for that they need to be very smart. To achieve that, it’s necessary to educate people and seriously pursue their upbringing, to pull them up to a very serious level.

Usually, a lot of the couples get to this point, except that it happens at a very old age. A state of mutual understanding, concessions, and permeation into one another emerges between them. They know each other’s weaknesses and habits; they understand that there are things that we cannot change about another person and thus, it isn’t necessary to try to do that; they begin to love each other’s weaknesses. But all this occurs with age, in other words, though the path of suffering because decades pass before it happens (if they pass without ending in divorce first).

We need to educate people about that.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #6, 12/14/11

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