In the News (from PressTV): “The childlessness rate among women nearing the end of their childbearing years in the United States is among the highest in the world, according to the latest World Fertility Report by the United Nations, which also shows that 41 percent of all US births occurred to unmarried women.

“Among 118 places for which comparable data is available, only six have rates of childlessness higher than the US rate of 19 percent, Pew Research Center noted Friday in its analysis of the World Fertility Report 2012.

“Women between the ages of 40 and 44 in the US have, on average, about 1.9 children in their lifetimes, which is one of the lowest levels of 171 countries analyzed, with just 19 places having an equal or lower lifetime fertility levels.

“However, US women fall squarely in the middle range when it comes to the age at which they first become mothers, which according to the UN is 25 years for US women.

“In the area of non-marital births, the US ranks 49^th among 91 places with comparable data. The UN report shows that 41 percent of all US births occurred to unmarried women.

“Fertility has declined worldwide to unprecedented levels since the 1970s, the report noted. ‘Total fertility fell in all but six of the 186 countries or areas for which data are available for all three periods considered in the analysis. In the most recent period covered, 80 countries or areas had a total fertility below 2.1 children per woman, the level required to ensure the replacement of generations in low mortality populations.’ The Christian Post.”

My Comment: The problem is not in this crisis, but in the loss of orientation in life; it is not clear: “What do I live for?” And hence the question, “Why give birth, grow, work, and …?” As a consequence, and with the lack of an answer to these questions, consumption of antidepressants, drugs, and alcohol is continuously growing.

Thus, the low birth rate is just one of the consequences of the general crisis—the lack of understanding of the meaning of life. This question subconsciously sits in everyone’s mind, even if we do not feel or automatically cover it with various activities.
[124945]

Related Material:
A Successful Woman’s Career Jeopardizes Marriage
Will We Go Extinct Like The Dinosaurs?
French Teachers Strike Over Job Cuts

Filed under: Crisis, Health - No Comments →

In the News (from France24): “G8 health ministers met in London on Wednesday to tackle what experts warn is a dementia time-bomb, with cases set to soar as the world’s population ages.

“Ministers from the Group of Eight wealthy nations gathered for their first-ever conference on the incurable condition, which afflicts some 44 million people worldwide — most of them elderly.

“They hope that by forming a common front, the summit will prove the turning point in tackling the disease.

“Sufferers of dementia, of which Alzheimer’s disease is the most common form, often end up needing full-time care as it attacks their memory, reasoning and other brain functions.

“Alzheimer’s Disease International warned in a report last week that the number of sufferers is set to surge, trebling to 135 million by 2050, as life expectancy rises around the globe.

“Dealing with dementia cost the world an estimated $604 billion (440 billion Euros) in 2010, according to the World Health Organization.

“The European Union’s health commissioner Tonio Borg announced a 1.2 billion euro budget for health research in 2014-2015, including dementia and neurodegenerative diseases.

“Dementia causes mood changes and problems with reasoning and communication as well as memory loss.

“Most types grow progressively worse and cannot be cured. Medication and therapy are used to alleviate the symptoms. …

“’As life expectancy goes up, our generation has a unique challenge: will those extra years at the end of our lives be ones we can look forward to with anticipation — or will they be ones we end up dreading?’ British health minister Jeremy Hunt said.

“One in three of us will get dementia. And if we don’t do better, for one in three those later years could be years of agony, heartbreak and despair — not just for those of us with the condition, but for our families, friends and loved ones too.”

My Comment: Nature is a global, integrated, closed system, and if we wish to receive from it more than we are supposed for rational existence, we pay for it with something else. Only bringing ourselves to the integral form—with rational instead of greedy consumption and with good connections between each other—will bring the entire system of creation into balance and will eradicate the problem of all diseases.
[124941]

Related Material:
The Maddening Of America
Nearly 40 Percent Of Europeans Suffer Mental Illness
Depression: The Disease Of The Century

Filed under: Crisis, Health - No Comments →

In the News (from The Guardian): “Japan’s under-40s appear to be losing interest in conventional relationships. Millions aren’t even dating, and increasing numbers can’t be bothered with sex. For their government, ‘celibacy syndrome’ is part of a looming national catastrophe. Japan already has one of the world’s lowest birth rates. Its population of 126 million, which has been shrinking for the past decade, is projected to plunge a further one-third by 2060. …

“The number of single people has reached a record high. A survey in 2011 found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of romantic relationship, a rise of almost 10% from five years earlier. Another study found that a third of people under 30 had never dated at all. (There are no figures for same-sex relationships.) Although there has long been a pragmatic separation of love and sex in Japan – a country mostly free of religious morals – sex fares no better. A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 ‘were not interested in or despised sexual contact.’ More than a quarter of men felt the same way. …

“Marriage has become a minefield of unattractive choices. Japanese men have become less career-driven, and less solvent, as lifetime job security has waned. Japanese women have become more independent and ambitious. Yet conservative attitudes in the home and workplace persist. Japan’s punishing corporate world makes it almost impossible for women to combine a career and family, while children are unaffordable unless both parents work. Cohabiting or unmarried parenthood is still unusual, dogged by bureaucratic disapproval.

“The sexes, especially in Japan’s giant cities, are ‘spiraling away from each other.’ Lacking long-term shared goals, many are turning to what she terms ‘Pot Noodle love’ – easy or instant gratification, in the form of casual sex, short-term trysts and the usual technological suspects: online porn, virtual-reality ‘girlfriends,’ anime cartoons. Or else they’re opting out altogether and replacing love and sex with other urban pastimes.”

My Comment: A lack of purpose leads to all negative consequences. The question about the meaning of life subconsciously undermines us, and the absence of the answer to it forces us towards a more passive behavior.
[124847]

Related Material:
Are We United By A System Of Connections?
The Virtual Space For The Inner Connection
“Loneliness Epidemic”

Filed under: Crisis, Man and Woman - No Comments →

Opinion (His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet): “The planet’s resources are being depleted; the number of natural disasters is increasing. This poses new challenges for people. To solve them, we must learn to see the entire humanity as a whole.

“In today’s world with its global economic and environmental problems, the state borders become secondary. The same can be said about religious differences. Global challenges, rising before us, go beyond the framework of countries and religions. They relate to the entire humanity, and therefore we must act together.

“Through education, we can change people’s thinking, so that their priority becomes not self, but the global we. Each of us is part of a greater we. Conversely, the whole world is part of each of us. So, it is in our own interests to seriously take care of the welfare of the entire humankind and the environment.

“The idea of socialism is founded on the welfare of society as a whole, but not of one individual. Marxist economy talks about the equal distribution of wealth. And in capitalism, everyone pursues only his own profit.

“We can change the world only by relying on people’s goodwill, through education, rather than by force.

“The modern education system is focused on material values. As for spiritual values: love, compassion, forgiveness – various religious traditions talk about them. We must teach children the basics of morality. But it is difficult to do, relying solely on religion. We need a secular ethics.”

My Comment: The conclusions are correct, but there is no solution, only wishes. But it is also good—if it is heard. Usually, people nod in agreement to those like the Dalai Lama and then forget. But they need to hear, and then, with appropriate suffering, they will remember not only wishes, but also will find the solution: integral education.
[124760]

Related Material:
The Dalai Lama
Dalai Lama: To Rise Above All Differences!
The Salvation Of Humanity Is Its Unity

Filed under: Crisis, Religion - 1 Comment →

Opinion (Francis Fukuyama, American political scientist, political economist and author): “Many political institutions in the United States are decaying. This is not the same thing as the broader phenomenon of societal or civilization decline, which has become a highly politicized topic in the discourse about America. This is the result of intellectual rigidity and the growing power of entrenched political actors that prevent reform and rebalancing. …

“Institutional reform is, however, an extremely difficult thing to bring about, and there is no guarantee that it can be accomplished without a major disruption of the political order. So while decay is not the same as decline, neither are the two discussions unrelated. …

“Ordinary people feel that their supposedly democratic government no longer reflects their interests but instead caters to those of a variety of shadowy elites….

“Ordinary Americans express widespread disdain for the impact of interest groups and money on Congress. The perception that the democratic process has been corrupted or hijacked is not an exclusive concern of either end of the political spectrum. Both Tea Party Republicans on the Right and liberal Democrats on the Left believe that interest groups whose views they happen not to like exercise undue political influence and feather their own nests. As it turns out, both are correct. As a result, trust in Congress has fallen to historically low levels, now barely above single digits.”

My Comment: There will be full integration of the elite and those in power that will maintain the state and control the people as they find necessary, as long as the people allow them. The lower classes will become interested in integral education for transformation of society. Perhaps, this will pass upward, similarly as religions seized the elite through slaves and the masses. Or there will be a threat of civil or world war. In any case, it is either the method of integral education or suffering.
[124756]

Related Material:
“Is There A Revolution Coming?”
“U.S. Empire Will Suddenly Collapse Like The Soviet Union Did”
“US National Debt Is Actually $70 Trillion”

Filed under: Crisis - No Comments →

Question: Suppose a person studying the integral method suddenly and painlessly experiences a change in direction of his flow of negative energy. When he encounters people he formerly hated, will he no longer feel this quality towards them? Will it be directed only towards his ego now?

Answer: The idea is that we can change all of our negative, egoistic characteristics into their opposites. If we create the appropriate atmosphere around a person, this will happen rapidly and easily. A small community of the like-minded surrounding him will always encourage him. With his new world view, there will not be any reason for him to see people as enemies; now he will look at them as fragments of his own soul; he feels himself and them as a single whole.

But if he disregards the integral method, then nature will strike him with hard sufferings, disasters ,and extreme situations, and still will oblige him to change, but this is the way of very great suffering. Not much time will pass until a person begins to think: “Why did sufferings like this fall upon me? Where did they come from? What is to be done? Where is there to turn?! It would be better for me to die than to live!”

But he will not be allowed to die until he understands that all the disasters, the epidemics, famine, floods, volcanic eruptions, and the disastrous civil wars, come from his egoism. He will not know how to fend off everything that has befallen, where to hide from it.

Therefore we propose people learn the integral method as long as nature doesn’t begin to take care of them, as long as they don’t aggravate its two forces (the positive and the negative), since it will not be very easy for humanity to balance the two forces in their natural appearance, in fact it could be totally eradicated. In this case, a small handful of people will survive on the face of the globe and under the influence of the forces of nature, they will include within them all of humanity with all of their suffering, they will understand that they must change themselves. What we suggest to people cannot be compared to this possibility.
[124407]
From Kab TV’s “An Integral World” 10/26/13

Related Material:
Avoiding Fatal Destiny
Comprehend The Higher Power Of Nature
Two Partners: Egoism and Altruism

Filed under: Crisis, Dissemination, Education - No Comments →

Opinion (Gordon Brown, former British Prime Minister and Leader of the Labor Party from 2007 to 2010): “In the patterns of borrowing today, we can already detect parallels with the pre-crisis credit boom. We’re seeing the same over-reliance on short-term capital markets that ultimately brought down Northern Rock, Iceland’s banks and Lehman Brothers. …

“International rules are needed for international banks. Without them, as the International Monetary Fund has warned, global banks will evade regulation ‘by moving operations, changing corporate structures, and redesigning products.’ …

“Political expediency, a failure to think and act globally, and a lack of courage to take on vested interests are pushing us inexorably toward the next crash. We will have another crash soon … because absolutely nothing has been fixed. Indeed, things have only gotten worse since the last crash.

My Comment: As long as we have not defined our own restructuring as a necessary and sufficient condition for the solution to all our problems, we will inexorably approach new problems.
[124605]

Related Material:
The World Crisis: Worst Yet to Come
Apocalypse Attacks Humanity
The Two Possibilities To Exit From The Crisis

Filed under: Crisis, Economy, News - No Comments →

Question: I think a contemporary person needs to have a clear understanding of what is happening in the world. He is absorbing a stream of information about natural disasters, tragic events, and social problems, yet has no clear picture of what is going on.

Answer: Of course, we have to see the entire system in general. But a contemporary person doesn’t yet feel the universal fear for the future. For this, he has to be on a completely different level, have a wider world-view, and be able to see distant horizons. In my opinion, this fear will appear in simple people when nature will begin to awaken us through serious disasters that will shake a person: Something unprecedented is approaching you and you are unable to avoid it.

It’s possible to somehow soften, conceal, run away or hide from what happens in a society. A person still doesn’t feel like a cornered rabbit that sees an approaching boa. In this state, we won’t be able to do anything because nature itself will shake us in order to bring awareness that all this is fatal, ruthless destiny. It’s desirable that the person realizes this picture not at the time of the action itself, when the disaster is already unavoidable, but beforehand, in order to describe it and to understand how to avoid it.

We have to show all this in the Integral Education textbook, talking about the nature of egoism itself and how in our world we cannot fix it by any means for we don’t possess the tools for this. We are driven by the desire to fill, to satiate ourselves, even at the expense of others. Or we simply want to humiliate others since when we rise above them, we feel more comfortable. This is an immense egoistic force that works in all directions.

The ego is the only force of nature. All the physical, chemical, biological, and genetic laws are only derived from the ego. Our entire world is one big ego. This is the desire to receive, to be filled, the desire to absorb, to be strengthened, to reach maximal satisfaction, and so forth. In addition, I constantly feel and measure my state relative to the environment. If I have one stick in my hand and my neighbor has two, I already feel hurt.

It follows from this that there is no power in the world that can somehow curb the ego. So where is the second force that will be ready to balance it? That is specifically what we must now find.

One can find this force only in a society organized in the right way. When such society is looking at the approaching tsunami, it begins to unify so that within the right connection between them they will discover the general altruistic attribute, whereby everyone is included in the others and becomes one collective whole. And this force will oppose and stand up to both the individual and collective ego. When we hold in our hands the two forces and can use them correctly, we will attain the balanced system, the right relationship in regard to ourselves, society, nature, and the world.
[122968]
From a TV program “An Integral World” 10/24/2013

Related Material:
Life Demands
The Process Of Societal Decay
The World Must Know The Truth!

Filed under: Crisis, Integral Upbringing, Q&A, Society - No Comments →

In the News (from The Voice of Russia): “The standoff between Christianity and Islam in European countries is becoming more and more dangerous each year. According to some experts, today the European community is facing a harsh choice: if the Islamization of Europe continues, one might soon have to say good-bye to Christianity in the countries of the Old World.

“For a number of years on the eve of Christmas various European countries are shaken by scandals. In an increasing number of states the authorities refuse to put up in public places that integral attribute of the holiday, a Christmas tree, decorated with a nativity scene. The politicians explain their actions by their fear to insult the religious feelings of those who don’t believe in the Biblical stories. The demand to take off the Christian attributes primarily comes from Muslim communities, which are more and more aggressively trying to impose on the West their moral and religious values and view of the world. …

“If in the past Muslims living in the EU did not like the presence of dogs in the streets and public places in Europe, they demanded the authorities to issue special laws that would limit the breeding of such ‘impure animals,’ now they are demanding that Sharia Law be introduced at the state level. Some laws of Islamic law are already used in Belgium and the Netherlands in reviewing civil cases. …

“A spark of grudge slowly but surely turned into a real fire. … According to preliminary calculations, by 2025 about 40 million Muslims will live in the EU. In some countries the number of mosques has already surpassed the number of Christian churches. The Old World has no longer the opportunity to choose one or the other. …”

My Comment: There is no place for comment because the facts are cited. The tiredness of old Europe and the energetic youth of Islam are not comparable—and there is no choice. It is said in the Torah about Ishmael, the son of Abraham and Hagar, from whom Islam originated: “His hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him,” the entire world will deal with it.

As for the relationship between Arabs and Jews, it is said there in the Torah: “And he shall dwell before the face of all his brethren.” The descendants of the two brothers Ishmael and Isaac will not mix with one another, but will live separately against each other in an unpleasant close proximity.
[124456]

Related Material:
“Why Islam Is Dying Too”
USA: The Rise Of The Anti-Islam Campaign
Autumn In The Countries Of “The Arab Spring”

Filed under: Crisis, Religion - No Comments →

Question: We have spoken about the state of our modern society and what it should be. But what happens between these two states? We know that a transition from one social state to another is preceded by dramatic circumstances for an individual because his life begins to fall apart.

Answer: In our case this process is even more difficult. The previous transitions have been jumps from one egoistic level to another because the ego continued to increase for thousands of years and accordingly the social configurations reformatted: slavery, feudalism, capitalism, post-modernism, and others, but now we have reached such a level where everything is beginning to fall.

When we are reminded of the past, we sometimes say: “The eighties were good.” In what way were they good? That the egoistic development of thousands of years of humanity had reached its peak of saturation? And this peak fell during the days of our youth. We felt some kind of freedom then, the need to survive did not bear down on us, the futility of our existence had not been discovered yet.

At the end of the eighties everything began to fall and gradual withdrawal began. In his day, Vernadsky and other philosophers had foreseen this, but nobody listened to them. And today people don’t want to accept this even though it has already been understood for many years. The same thing has been happening with the wisdom of Kabbalah, for the time being they don’t want to hear about it, but there is no way to refute it.

In the past these philosophers were sharply criticized; people didn’t accept the wisdom of Kabbalah at all and didn’t want to hear anything about it. But today it has become clearer that everything is sliding down to a new level, causing great personal and social problems, but there is no remedy for this; some kind of revolution must take place.

But not a physical revolution as there were in the previous stages: the Hundred Years War, the slave revolts, the protests of the landowners, the ruin of the peasants, and so forth. All these were indicators of evolution, but the egoistic evolution! The ego grew causing a need to restart the physical format: social, technological, familial, personal, etc.

Now, the transition from the system that developed under the pressure of egoistic forces is beginning to slide downward; that is, the egoistic forces are losing ground. We are beginning to see that the leadership doesn’t work, not in factories, not in the army, not in governmental institutions, not in schools, not in the family.

What restraint can hold a child? Where is the husband that listens to his wife? Where is the worker who hears his manager’s voice without question? Where is the government: the parliament, the head of state? Where are they? They don’t exist. The authorities “peep” from the television screen, yet nobody pays attention to their twittering. It is understood that the media tries to play along with them by creating an image of great leaders, but, in fact, nobody hears them.

Factory managers complain all the time that people don’t have the motivation to work; they cannot compel themselves and don’t want to work. When the ego descends, it doesn’t see perspectives. How is it possible to obligate a machine to work without electricity, energy, gasoline, and so forth? There is no way!

Now we are in a free-fall, and in the meantime we don’t see other forces that can replace the ego as the developmental force for us. But the ego is already expiring. And this is the downward slide. The ego is gradually getting smaller and is losing its attraction in our eyes. How much can we shop and run around? How long can you travel around the world? How much time can you spend sitting in bars and restaurants?

It’s not because the person is satisfied, but because the desire for this is lost for him; it disappeared somewhere. There is supposedly an immense world in front of you, but the youth are stuck on their cell phones, SMS, empty, and foolish talk. Where are the ideals? Where is art? Where is science? Where is the conquest of space? Where are the dreams of discovering new lands? All this is gone.

Question: Enthusiasm and excitement like this prevailed in society during the sixties.

Answer: And what was the excitement? The ego worked for our benefit. It pushed us towards great attainments. But today this no longer exists, and we cannot do anything. We require an absolutely different force to lead us forward.
[123814]
From Kab TV’s “An Integral World” 10/24/13

Related Material:
The Process Of Societal Decay
Beyond Time And Space
Quantum Entanglement Affects The Past

Filed under: Crisis, Education, Egoism - No Comments →