In the News (from The Republican): “Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin took the extraordinary step of devoting his entire State of the State message earlier this month to highlight what he described as a “full-blown heroin crisis” in his state. …

“Timothy W. Purington, director of prevention services for Tapestry Health in Northampton, applauded Shumlin’s heroin message. The crisis, he said, is not just in Vermont; it’s throughout New England. …

“Some of the numbers that Shumlin offered in his message from Montpelier are especially grim. Since 2000, Vermont has seen a 770 percent increase in treatment for all opiates; last year the state’s number of deaths from overdoses nearly doubled from the previous year. …

“Shumlin said the heroin crisis got its start in Vermont as an OxyContin and prescription drug-addiction problem.

“Delaney said it’s much the same in Western Massachusetts and that those who get hooked on OxyContin or oxycodone down here often move on to heroin because it’s cheaper.

“‘It’s a lot cheaper buying a bag of heroin than it is to buy an 80 mg “oxy” for 50 to 80 bucks,’ he said.

“The appeal for heroin has increased because of the OxyContin problem. People are resorting to heroin because they are addicted to this drug.”

My Comment: The elite is interested in sedating the masses, both physically and psychologically. Drugs are designed to lull the masses, to trigger their dependence, and thus, the opportunity to set the conditions for distribution of drugs. It is a new form of slavery.
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Opinion (F.F. Wiley, Cyniconomics blog): “Wars and political systems are the two most basic determinants of an economy’s long-term path.

“Military spending requires a different evaluation because it succeeds or fails based on whether wars are won or lost…. In any case, military spending isn’t our focus here.

“There are 11 countries in our analysis, chosen according to a rule we’ve used in the past – GDP must be as large as that of the Netherlands. We start in 1816 for four of the 11 (the U.S., U.K., France and Netherlands). Others are added at later dates, depending mostly on data availability.

“Not only has the global, non-defense budget balance dropped to never-before-seen levels, but it’s falling along a trend line that shows no sign of flattening. The trend line spells fiscal disaster. It suggests that we’ve never been in a predicament comparable to today. Essentially, the world’s developed countries are following the same path that’s failed, time and again, in chronically insolvent nations of the developing world.

“In much of the world, the Great Depression triggered a gradual expansion in the role of the state. Public officials failed to establish a sustainable structure for their social safety nets, and got away with this partly by sweeping the true costs of their programs under the carpet.

“Central bankers suppressed normal (and healthy) market mechanisms for forcing responsibility, by slashing interest rates and buying up government debt. Regulators took markets further out of the equation by rewarding private banks for lending to governments, while politicians and central bankers effectively underwrote the private bankers’ risks.

“Monetary policies also encouraged dangerous private credit growth and other financial excesses, resulting in budget-destroying setbacks such as stagflation and banking crises.

“Budget decisions were made without consideration of the inevitability of these setbacks, because economists wielding huge influence over the budgeting process assumed a naïve utopia of endless economic expansion.

“On the bright side, a fiscal disaster should help trigger the needed changes.”

My Comment: Or it can happen by realizing the need for fundamental restructuring of the whole of society—its re-education. And it will lead to the restructuring of the entire life: economic, political, social, family, and so on. In our world, there is no other means of changing our life and avoiding disasters, but transforming the human being himself.
[127707]

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Opinion (Roman Nosikov, lawyer, journalist): “How to be a man correctly. How to develop such a great human quality as maturity. The world of the future is a world of powerful children, the children who never grow up. The human being acquires maturity by dealing with difficulties, in fight against evil. But evil and difficulties, troubles and misfortunes do not exist in today’s world.

“People do not understand how to respond to evil; they cannot even recognize it. People are engaged in free creativity, game, entertainment, powerful super-children. Humanity has forgotten about the dirt from which it has come. Humanity has turned into a child who does not care about the prose of life.

Comment (the author’s opinions): The main thing is the process of turning an infantile, spoiled person into a real human being. The problem is that a person is not his world outlook, not his humanism, nationality and set of tastes and preferences. The human being is a connection with his own kind. The human being is not a point. The human being is a line connecting the points.

Therefore, one cannot hide from people. This makes him less and less human. He begins to consider himself to be God.

The human being is not what he thinks of himself. The human being is his connection with others, his love and its manifestations.
[127838]

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Opinion (from vz.ru): “Negative selection exists in all capitalist countries because capitalism is based on the principle, ‘man is a wolf to [his fellow] man.’ And in order to survive in the pack of wolves, one has to be a wolf himself.

“Capitalists claim that the market will put everything into place and the invisible hand of competition will regulate everything; most important is not to interfere with markets.

“There is some truth to it: If you are a capitalist, you need to compete, and in order to compete, you need to be effective. That is, you need to get more profit than your competitors since those with higher profits have more competitive opportunities.

“But the more profit a capitalist makes, the worse it is for an ordinary worker. An example: Three capitalists want to produce the exact same product of the same quality under the same conditions and they sell it in the same market. To compete, they have to make production more effective, that is, to lower the production costs, preserving its previous volume. Eventually, they will transfer production to the Third World country, where the labor force is cheaper; start buying low quality raw materials, supplementing them with taste enhancers; lengthen the workday, and manage to pay less tax.

“But competition is perpetual and in order to survive, each one will have to do everything that they each did before.

“This is the system of negative selection. The fittest survive or, more precisely, the most cunning and mean ones, who are ready to disregard any moral values only to profit more. Life is a war, and at war, everything is fair.

“A capitalist couldn’t care less about the life of a worker, his family and children. Through exploitation, he acquired new equipment and now he can fire half of the staff to lower labor costs. If you don’t devour someone, they will devour you. Such system leads to monopoly in the industry, market, authority, truth, and the world. Hence, the most ruthless person gets monopoly. Then, something worse comes instead—fascism, and those who disagree are sent away to camps.”

My Comment: The law of nature doesn’t consider our desires, but rather changes them. Capitalism is replaced by its crisis. The crisis is external, in all spheres of our life, and also internal, manifesting as the change of purposefulness of man. A soft transition is possible provided the integral upbringing of the masses is successful, which is possible by disseminating the method of integral education. If not, the transition towards integral society will indeed happen through fascism, as Baal HaSulam wrote nearly a hundred years ago.
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Opinion (Anatoly Wasserman, writer, political consultant, scholar): “The concept of liberalism considers only dualistic relationships between individuals, not taking into account that further interactions affect each other.

“The desire to be limited by dualistic interactions is connected to the fact that the liberalistic concept is commercial. Production and trade are considered parts of a single process, but they constantly compete. You cannot sell what is not yet made, and it makes no sense to produce something that obviously will not be sold – from this point of view, the process is really unified.

“But in every confrontation, the position of sellers is stronger than manufacturers’ positions: $1- to the inventor, $10 – to the maker, $100 – to the seller. When the market is on the rise, the confrontation is small because there is something to share. But in bad times, sellers stifle manufactures to secure a greater prosperity for themselves.”

My Comment: It is necessary to eliminate the process of trade and to develop industry on a scale that allows equal distribution of essential products and services.
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Opinion (Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel laureate in economics and professor at Columbia University): “Soon after the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, I warned that unless the right policies were adopted, Japanese-style malaise – slow growth and near-stagnant incomes for years to come – could set in. While leaders on both sides of the Atlantic claimed that they had learned the lessons of Japan, they promptly proceeded to repeat some of the same mistakes. …

“Policymakers’ response to the crisis failed to address these issues; worse, it exacerbated some of them and created new ones – and not just in the US. The result has been increased indebtedness in many countries, as the collapse of GDP undermined government revenues. Moreover, underinvestment in both the public and private sector has created a generation of young people who have spent years idle and increasingly alienated at a point in their lives when they should have been honing their skills and increasing their productivity.

“Instead, our current difficulties are the result of flawed policies. There are alternatives. But we will not find them in the self-satisfied complacency of the elites, whose incomes and stock portfolios are once again soaring. Only some people, it seems, must adjust to a permanently lower standard of living. Unfortunately, those people happen to be most people.”

My Comment: Our nature, egoism, is above our mind, and we are in its power. It forces us to act irrationally, even under the threat of our own death. As it is said: The angel of death brings a sword to a man and the sword has a drop of poison at the tip, and he is forced to open his mouth and swallow it, to fulfill his egoism, a sense of life, although this drop kills him. The elite cannot limit itself in exploiting society, even under the threat of unrest, wars, and self-destruction.
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Opinion (Nouriel Roubini, professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business and Chairman of Roubini Global Economics): “At the same time, the Fed’s tapering of its long-term asset purchases has begun in earnest, with interest rates set to rise. As a result, the capital that flowed to emerging markets in the years of high liquidity and low yields in advanced economies is now fleeing many countries where easy money caused fiscal, monetary, and credit policies to become too lax. …

“But the short-run policy tradeoffs that many of these countries face – damned if they tighten monetary and fiscal policy fast enough, and damned if they do not – remain ugly. The external risks and internal macroeconomic and structural vulnerabilities that they face will continue to cloud their immediate outlook. The next year or two will be a bumpy ride for many emerging markets, before more stable and market-oriented governments implement sounder policies.”

My Comment: New government will bring nothing new; there is a need for a new society, brought up on the basis of integral education. Governments should be advised of this, even before they might be replaced. The key to their salvation is in the transformation of society!
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Before our world was created, the spiritual Kli was created, and now in our world, it is up to us to restore it, to connect it anew from the shattered parts. These parts are us, and the shattering is in the mutual rejection between us. Parts of the Kelim, meaning us, receive an awakening from above, and, in this form, we ask ourselves questions about the meaning of life.

The meaning of life is found above our lives because we don’t ask about this in the framework of this life. We think only how to get along better in life, and, when we begin to ask, “What is the reason for living,” this is already a question beyond the limits of our world. This is already a question directed at the source of our existence, at the Creator.

In general, all of humanity is in a movement toward unity, but in a most unpleasant way and not with the greatest speed. All of us have advanced in such a form and reached this moment where our development has brought us to the finish line where all of us must begin to connect.

There is a group, all whom received the awakening from above, and it is up to us to realize the method of correction in ourselves, to connect with the Creator minimally. This is because connection with the Creator is possible only to the degree that we accept shortcomings from the entire world.

We receive the usual shortcomings from the entire world; in other words, all six shortcomings that Baal HaSulam enumerated, desires that are relevant to a person, to his body, which are food, sex, and family, and in addition to this, there are desires that are related to the connection of the person with society directed toward money, respect and information.

All six desires are active in every person in our world, but they are discovered in each one differently, and in each one of them, there are a multitude of different components, smaller desires.

All of human development first was directed toward developing desires related to food, sex, and family in humans, leading them to the growth of desires for money, honor, and knowledge so that they would pass through them and discover lack of fulfillment in them. Yet, in the meantime, it is difficult to say that all of humanity is found in such a condition.

Food, sex, and family are corporeal desires that don’t require any correction, in principle. However, in the higher desires for wealth, honor, and knowledge, a greater ego is discovered within humanity. Also, this ego is generally only preliminary, required so that a lack of true fulfillment would be discovered in it as well. This is the crisis. The lack of true fulfillment is the feeling of the crisis.

Therefore, we now are in a stage where humanity is passing through different crisis phenomena, and these crisis phenomena change all the time. Some of them have more of an influence on the economy, others on ethics, and part of them on politics and on the family. In general, there will be many and varied crises, and, accordingly, we must understand how we need to work with people.

In principle, the method is the same method, but the approach to people must be according to their needs. In other words, for every civilization, for every culture that exists in the world today, there must be a unique approach. Therefore, desires are developed in different nations, in different people and areas, according to the place in which we must work.

Look, for example, at how Latin America leaped with a desire to realize spirituality and how much Europe lags behind it. There is no singular approach. We don’t know why it happens this way.

Accordingly, it is up to us to be sensitive to the pulse all the time, to see where to invest more efforts, where there is a greater need, an opportunity for more exposure. The world is in a global connection. Yet, nevertheless, many changes are taking place in all the different parts of the world.

Therefore, it is up to us to concentrate on a place where there is a need for correction, for spirituality, for inner change, or, as Baal HaSulam writes in the Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot, where the question: “What is the reason for my life?” “How can I be fulfilled?” exists; when a question like this appears, people already are prepared for us to turn to them.

As we already have said, this question can expand into different areas, beginning with everyday problems in life to higher, more psychological, more internal problems. Therefore, this places a difficult problem before us.

The idea is that we cannot connect to the Creator if we don’t function as a conduit for His connection, for His bestowal, for His control of the entire world in order to pull all of humanity after us. You see, the entire system is undergoing a shattering only to be able to begin to feel the Creator through this shattering so that we will rise to His level. That is how the entire problem of His relationship with the creatures will be discovered and resolved. The “good and benevolent” is expressed in the creatures rising to His level and becoming like Him. This means everyone together, without exception.

In this way, it is up to us to have our hand on the pulse; and, besides this, it is up to us to be very sensitive to all changes, no matter how small. We now also are found in the higher world, in the world of Infinity (Olam Ein Sof), surrounded and penetrated with the Ohr Ein Sof, with the light of the Creator. There is no difference between our place now and in the future. Nothing changes except our feeling, our senses. The sensitivity is changed. It is up to us to develop and discover it in order to feel the Light. We are found within it, and nothing exists outside of it. So, all of the changes take place within us, and there is no need to travel anywhere. It is necessary only to work all the time on increasing sensitivity to the upper Light within us. This is our goal.

The problem is that, without movement, matter doesn’t exist. Matter exists only in constant motion, in change. Theoretically, if the movement were to stop, everything would disappear immediately. We see this with the atoms, with the elementary particles from which the atoms are composed. If we want to feel the upper world, we must increase our sensitivity to the changes that are taking place in us. Sometimes, it seems to a person that nothing is changing, that everything has frozen, has stopped, that there is no movement. The feeling that life has frozen is intended to show us that we must increase our sensitivity to all movement, and all the movements take place within desire.

At the moment that we begin to be integrated within a group that requires us to concentrate on the Creator through the connection between us, we immediately receive a countless number of changes at every moment. You will begin to feel that every second is an infinite unit of time, from beginning to end. During that second, we pass through a multitude of changes. This sensitivity to change is what we must discover.

I hope that the mutual integration between us through which all of us together are passing—among all of the various continents, civilizations and cultures—will embed in us the fundamentals of greater sensitivity to changes, and, inside of us at every moment, we will begin to feel tremendous changes in desire, direction, emotion, and perception. All the time, more and more, we will examine and direct them at every moment toward the Creator through the group, and, in this way, we very quickly will move the rest of the required way for the first discovery of the Creator.

Discovery of the Creator takes place specifically within these incessant changes because permanence or fixation doesn’t exist. The moment that you stop, everything disappears!

Therefore, the incessant changes guarantee that we are feeling the upper world, feeling the Creator. In our world, our feeling can be something permanent, but, in spirituality, this cannot be. Therefore, come, and let’s remember well that this condition can be fulfilled only if I am linked through the group, locked all the time on the Creator.

So, how do we raise sensitivity to the spirituality in which we are found? If I go out of myself and try to listen to what the friend says, suddenly I find myself in an empty void within the friend. So, within this empty void, how can I feel all kinds of changes and movements so that I will enter into his inner desires directed toward the Creator so that we will yearn for Him together?

We discover and attain the Creator to the degree that we are sensitive to Him; in other words, when the surrounding expanse is revealed to us and we try to feel its characteristics, the changes in it, its vibrations in regard to us, or more correctly, our vibrations in regard to it, our changes in regard to the characteristic of bestowal and love.

Our entire world was given to us in order to direct ourselves toward a particular wave, toward the characteristic of bestowal and love, like in a radio receiver. In the beginning, a rough, approximate tuning is made between the friends. As we continue, we connect to greater and greater external circles of our world, and, as a result of this, we direct ourselves more and more precisely, emotionally discover more of the characteristic of bestowal and love, and in such a form, we begin to feel the Creator more and more clearly.

For our entire world, all of the creatures, the fragmentation and the corrections are required only in order to direct ourselves toward feeling the characteristic of bestowal and love, the Creator, and as long as all of humanity has not entered into this system of mutual feeling—of mutual vibrations, of the tuning of the self—we cannot discover the Creator at all, not any person in the world.

The Kabbalists carried out great work in the past, but they reached a very limited range of attainment because humanity was not at all ready to begin to feel this yet.

However, as of today, we already have been able to determine that humanity is ready to integrate into clarifications of feelings of mutual bestowal and love and from them, to become aware of the Creator. In other words, today, the general rule, “From the love of man to the love of the Creator,” is being actively realized specifically by tuning into a high sensitivity to bestowal, to mutual connection, mutual integration according to the principle, “That which you hate, do not do to your friend,” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

Our mutual tuning leads us toward the Creator, and, through gradual expansion of our circle of sensitivity, to all of humanity, in this way, we discover the Creator within this new sense of bestowal and love.

That is how the general rule of “From the love of man to the love of the Creator” is realized, but it is specifically through feelings, through increased sensitivity.
[127064]
From the World Zohar Week “Integral Education Convention” Day One 2/2/14, Workshop 4

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In the News (from The Huffington Post): “Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity. For the past two decades, the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth. The world already produces more than 1 ½ times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That’s enough to feed 10 billion people, the population peak we expect by 2050. But the people making less than $2 a day – most of whom are resource-poor farmers cultivating unviably small plots of land – can’t afford to buy this food.

“In reality, the bulk of industrially-produced grain crops goes to biofuels and confined animal feedlots rather than food for the 1 billion hungry.”

My Comment: This situation will not change until humanity realizes that it itself has to correct inequality created by our egoistic nature, and that only by reaching equality, first among ourselves and then with the Creator, can we achieve prosperity for everyone.
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Opinion (John Hassler, Professor of Economics and Per Krusell, Professor of Economics, Stockholm University): “There now is widespread consensus that the key driver of climate change is the emission of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels. Since climate change affects the global economy, this is a textbook example of what economists label a ‘pure externality.’ There is substantial uncertainty about how large this externality is. Yet, available knowledge can be used to provide an estimate of the externality that is surprisingly robust. In this note we argue that this provides a strong case for using a carbon tax rather than emission caps.

“Given the fact that there is now around an extra 200 gigatons in the atmosphere, the total flow loss is around 0.5% of global GDP.

“We see a more promising future in striving to agree on a uniform global carbon tax. We have argued that its optimal value can be robustly computed and its main subjective element – the intergenerational discount rate – should not be a cause of significant disagreement across countries.

“Our formula can calculate the discounted value of damages that will occur in the future due to all the fossil carbon emitted so far. To us it appears reasonable that the countries responsible for past emissions – largely the developed world – should acknowledge this debt. It also appears reasonable that mortgages on the debt be paid to a fund aimed at helping poor countries deal with adaptation.

“The practical implementation of a global tax may be challenging, especially in countries that rely less on markets than does the developed world. But using the tax as an explicit extra cost, or price tag, in any decisions to use fossil fuel represents a practical mind-set. Similarly, any investments in carbon capture and storage that, per unit, cost more than the tax should not be undertaken. In short, the plan to introduce a global carbon tax seems to have a chance of succeeding, while the current attempts to agree on a two-degree warming cap have, for understandable reasons, proven rather futile.”

My Comment: No fair agreements between countries and especially agreements that try to compensate for the “destruction of the planet” can be accepted and implemented—egoism will not allow to do it. The crisis will inevitably lead to the need to change our nature from hate to love because otherwise we will continue to destroy the planet and ourselves along with it.
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