Question: In the past, at the time of the transition from one system to another, did the ego also require altruism or not?

Answer: Egoism nourishes itself by always conquering something. It is like a cancerous tumor that gradually grows while not yet being apparent. And now it is grown to the last stage and is beginning to devour itself.

Until the ‘80s, all of the systems that we constructed served to extend and expand a particular goal. We flew into space, to the stars; we went deep into the bowels of the earth; we built great cities, and we created new technologies. We developed under the influence of one and only one force, and we thought that this would continue forever.

If we were to continue to develop further in this way, we would advance ourselves only externally and not internally. Human development was done in a mechanical, technological manner: Instead of two hands, I would have had twenty; instead of seeing for a distance of two kilometers, I would have seen two hundred thousand kilometers ahead.

In this case, the human became an appendage of a machine, an appendage of a computer. So today the egoistic system begins to work more and more against him. The human has become unnecessary to it.

We have grown to such a state where we must discover the meaning of our existence. Now, for many people, in particular among the youth, the reason for living, the aspiration for some kind of goal, has disappeared. “What is there to strive for? I exist comfortably, I don’t need children, a family, or serious work; what will this give me? It is better if I sit somewhere with friends, have fun. What else is there to live for; what is the reason for living? I will play a little and die, like everyone”.

Therefore the question now is, either to give a person a motivation for living, or drugs. And here Kabbalah or the method of integral education show people a completely different way: to get from nature a second anti-egoistic power. It is precisely this power that created and developed the ego so that we would consciously get it from nature and could mutually manage the two forces of our development.

One of them can inspire us forward with good, through the goal that shines from afar. And the second is like a developmental steamroller that chases me, and I flee from it like that poor coyote in the cartoons.

Question: But even the altruistic force requires egoism, at least in this stage?

Answer: Yes, for this, the ego develops. And now it shows that if we don’t balance it through the altruistic force, it will devour us, like a cancerous tumor in the human body that devours the body and in the end kills itself.

What does a cancerous tumor mean? This is a disrupted program of the development of the body, of the functioning of its cells, where they begin to proliferate beyond their contained space and have an opposite effect.

In principle, every cell has the possibility of cancerous development, but they are always found in harmony between them, in a relative balance between positive and negative forces. But when one of them becomes greater, then another either disappears or there is a disruption in the polarity between them, and in this imbalance destructive development appears.

It is the same thing in society as well. We should begin quickly, through a second positive force, to balance the entire human society that has become a cancerous tumor. And this is the remedy for its recovery.

Unfortunately, at the time of healing cancer, we are satisfied with suppressing the egoistic development of the cells through various kinds of short radiation, thereby killing them. This is not a cure. It is not necessary to kill human society or to do anything else with it. You just need to add the second developmental force to it.
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From Kab TV’s “An Integral World” 10/24/2013

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Question: What role does the ego play in the transition to a new formation, considering that it has finally evolved?

Answer: It will help us in that it shows us where and how to add the opposite force of good so that they will develop in a mutually balanced manner.

The ego is our leader in that it shows what must be done. The egoistic desires in every case will determine the activities of the person, we don’t remove anything here in any way, and we don’t discard what we created. We only add a positive component to everything that is now gradually dying and animate.

Question: You said that the altruistic force is a creative force. Can the ego also create?

Answer: It can create in a wonderful way. See what it did with us? All this is for the good. There is nothing wrong in nature.

This is the program of nature that we carry out unconsciously under the influence of its forces. Every time that we feel it is bad for us in a given state, we begin to move towards the next state, towards a better state. The ego subconsciously shows us that it will be good for us here, and there, no. It directs us from within, telling us what to do.

The ego manages all of our strength, all the characteristics, and leads us forward precisely and sharply. Sometimes we fall into something, suppose in the building socialism or something else, but this is only to understand the ramifications of the blind alley, and after that we continue to develop further.
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From KabTV’s “An Integral World” 10/24/2013

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Opinion (Michael Khazin, economist and political research analyst): “Today, there are no forces in the world that are ready to take on responsibility to develop and implement solutions. There are no new concepts, no resources to impose them and to punish those who depart from them.

“The modern political world consists not of politicians, that is, people who are ready to assume political responsibility, but administrators who are just ready to irresponsibly apply standard solutions. An exemplary embodiment of this policy is to make decisions collectively – so that none of the administrators is responsible for anything.

“In the conditions of hard crisis, this trick will not do, and this will inevitably lead to a situation when the rats flee the sinking ship. A modern administrator will never agree to take responsibility, and that is why we will inevitably see the return of real politicians who will begin to work on the development of new ‘rules of the game.’”

“But since in the last decades no one prepared these people, then the quality of their first decisions will be very far from ideal.”

My Comment: The problem is that it is impossible to prepare future leaders in any modern systems because the future will be built on completely different principles of integral interaction. These managers can be trained only by the method of integral education.
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The global mess we are in today stems from the fact that people are doing things that are totally unnecessary for attaining the goal. This is the uniqueness of our time and I hope that this destructive trend will soon come to an end.

Fifty years ago people followed a simple principle: “A person who doesn’t work will have no food.” But this was followed by the development of democracy, liberalism, welfare, and other “progressive” concepts whereby we have reached the opposite situation: A person cannot work or earn an living and still live on unemployment benefits, welfare, food stamps, and other “generous” benefits.

Suddenly there are millions of people who don’t work but eat. These people are becoming a great mass, and they unite and begin to invent different professions. For example, I saw a whole stadium of law school graduates who came to receive their diploma. What do we need so many lawyers for?

Suddenly there are so many professions that were very rare or didn’t even exist 50 years ago. These latter-day “craftsmen” have launched massive operations and think that they are very important people.

In fact, there aren’t really any important people these days. On the contrary, people who were outcasts in the past have come up with specious professions and university faculty positions and have suddenly become “important people,” experts, in fields for which there is really no need.

The modern media plays another role here; swollen to epic dimensions, it claims for itself the right to determine our lives. So who is to decide what is beneficial or not? I don’t want to generalize, of course, but when you speak with someone who comes from this field, you see that he has actually appeared out of nowhere and that he has no basis, no foundation, to form the public opinion. What is his education? Is he prepared for this role? What can he do besides make a lot of noise about nothing?

In short, these “experts” have begun a process of diffusion and have begun to replace the great people that used to be the spiritual or governing elites. One day we will discover that we depend on nonentities and that we don’t know where they came from and what they actually do. They are everywhere; they determine what we should read, what we should watch or listen to, what we should do, and how we should think.

Suddenly everything has been turned upside down: Those who were nobodies and who couldn’t find a decent job have suddenly invented different professions and different academic degrees and have become the leaders of society. It is a state of “a slave that rules” now, and as a result our world is becoming grayer day by day…

So what can we do? Disseminate the wisdom of Kabbalah and the method of the integral education, but by no means by the help of these “experts”, since they don’t understand a thing. Our message is for the “poor,” for the lower classes, since it is there that we will find the readiness to develop peacefully.

The “experts” will soon fall. But until then, they will continue to confuse people, but this is also the beginning of their end.
[122950]
From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/12/13, Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Disclosing the Secrets“

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In the News (from The Guardian): “Limitless growth is the fantasy of economists, businesses and politicians. It is seen as a measure of progress. As a result, gross domestic product (GDP), which is supposed to measure the wealth of nations, has emerged as both the most powerful number and dominant concept in our times. However, economic growth hides the poverty it creates through the destruction of nature, which in turn leads to communities lacking the capacity to provide for themselves.

“Thus nature’s amazing cycles of renewal of water and nutrients are defined into nonproduction. The peasants of the world, who provide 72% of the food, do not produce; women who farm or do most of the housework do not fit this paradigm of growth either. A living forest does not contribute to growth, but when trees are cut down and sold as timber, we have growth. Healthy societies and communities do not contribute to growth, but disease creates growth through, for example, the sale of patented medicine. …

“Both ecology and economics have emerged from the same roots – ‘oikos,’ the Greek word for household. As long as economics was focused on the household, it recognized and respected its basis in natural resources and the limits of ecological renewal. It was focused on providing for basic human needs within these limits. Economics as based on the household was also women-centered. Today, economics is separated from and opposed to both ecological processes and basic needs. While the destruction of nature has been justified on grounds of creating growth, poverty and dispossession has increased. While being non-sustainable, it is also economically unjust.”

My Comment: Our evil inclination, egoism, plays with us and drives is into crisis and a dead end, so that we recognize its evil and begin to seek the way to correct it, until we find the wisdom of Kabbalah and take over its realization and goal. This happens according to plan: “I have created the evil inclination, I have created the Torah as a spice. This refers to the Light in it, since the Light in it reforms it.” First, there is the recognition of evil of our nature, and then search for the means to correct the evil.
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In the News (from ScienceDaily): “Writing in the current special ‘peace psychology’ issue of American Psychologist, lead author Bernhard Leidner, Linda Tropp and Brian Lickel of UMass Amherst’s Psychology of Peace and Violence program say that if social psychology research focuses only on how to soften the negative consequences of war and violence, ‘it would fall far short of its potential and value for society.’

“’In summarizing psychological perspectives on the conditions and motivations that underlie violent conflict,’ says Tropp, ‘we find that psychology’s contributions can extend beyond understanding the origins and nature of violence to promote nonviolence and peace.’ She adds, ‘We oppose the view that war is inevitable and argue that understanding the psychological roots of conflict can increase the likelihood of avoiding violence as a way to resolve conflicts with others.’…

“The authors acknowledge that conflict and violence between groups persist because they often give people ways to address psychological needs, for identity, safety, security and power.”

My Comment: The cause of all conflicts is our nature: egoism, the desire to fulfill ourselves at the expense of others. Until we correct it, we will fight for any reason, up to the point of causeless mutual destruction because the natural psychological need to conflict motivates us to action.

It is only left to head towards mutual destruction or to correction of our nature to the opposite so that connection, unity, and mutual concern become our psychological need. This transformation can be done only by the Upper Light.
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In the News (from Business Spectator): “A Pew Research Center opinion survey, conducted in 39 countries this spring, asked: ‘Will children in your country be better off than their parents?’ Only 33 per cent of Americans believed their children would live better, while 62 per cent said they would live worse. Europeans were even gloomier. Just 28 per cent of Germans, 17 per cent of Brits, 14 per cent of Italians and 9 per cent of French thought their children would be better off than previous generations. This Western pessimism contrasts strongly with optimism in the developing world: 82 per cent of Chinese, 59 per cent of Indians and 65 per cent of Nigerians believe in a more prosperous future.”

My Comment: Do we really need to wait until the deadlock is right before our eyes and there will be no escape from the deadly clash with it? Human egoism does not allow him to really see the future.

It is said that the angel of death offers a person a knife with a drop of poison on its tip, and a person inevitably opens his mouth and swallows the poison because he cannot refuse the egoistic pleasure contained in it. There is no other way to escape death but to obey the wisdom of those who foresee the future.
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Opinion (Sir Christopher Pissarides, School Professor of Economics & Political Science and Regius Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics, Nobel Prize winner for economics in 2010): “One of the world’s leading economists will today admit he was wrong to back the creation of the euro – and call for it to be dismantled.

“Sir Christopher Pissarides, who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 2010, was once a passionate believer in the benefits of the single currency.

“But in an extraordinary change of heart, today he will warn the euro is creating a ‘lost generation’ of unemployed youngsters and is ‘dividing Europe.’

“The Cypriot-British economist will call for action to ‘restore the euro’s credibility in international markets’ and to ‘restore the trust that Europe’s nations once had in each other.’

But, in a lecture at the London School of Economics, where he teaches, he will add: ‘Regretfully, I do not see either materializing.’ …

“Experts believe Europe will never be able to implement the policies required to boost growth and create jobs because of the huge differences between economies across the region. …

“He will say that unless there is a dramatic change of policy the euro should be broken up.

“‘The euro should either be dismantled in an orderly way or the leading members should do the necessary as fast as possible to make it growth and employment-friendly,’ he will say.

“‘We will get nowhere plodding along with the current line of ad hoc decision-making and inconsistent debt-relief policies.”

My Comment: Such views are increasingly heard among specialists. But how can this project be rolled out without destroying all of Europe and plunging it into a deadly conflict? Isn’t it better to accept the program of the integral education and transformation of the EU that should have been done before forming the EU?
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Opinion (Chris Hedges, American journalist specializing in American politics and society, best-selling author of several books, senior fellow at The Nation Institute in New York City): “As long as most citizens believe in the ideas that justify global capitalism, the private and state institutions that serve our corporate masters are unassailable. When these ideas are shattered, the institutions that buttress the ruling class deflate and collapse. The battle of ideas is percolating below the surface. It is a battle the corporate state is steadily losing. An increasing number of Americans are getting it. They know that we have been stripped of political power. They recognize that we have been shorn of our most basic and cherished civil liberties, and live under the gaze of the most intrusive security and surveillance apparatus in human history. Half the country lives in poverty. Many of the rest of us, if the corporate state is not overthrown, will join them. These truths are no longer hidden. …

“Popular revulsion for the ruling elite, however, is nearly universal. It is a question of which ideas will capture the public’s imagination.

“Revolution usually erupts over events that would, in normal circumstances, be considered meaningless or minor acts of injustice by the state. But once the tinder of revolt has piled up, as it has in the United States, an insignificant spark easily ignites popular rebellion. No person or movement can ignite this tinder. No one knows where or when the eruption will take place. No one knows the form it will take. But it is certain now that a popular revolt is coming. The refusal by the corporate state to address even the minimal grievances of the citizenry, along with the abject failure to remedy the mounting state repression, the chronic unemployment and underemployment, the massive debt peonage that is crippling more than half of Americans, and the loss of hope and widespread despair, means that blowback is inevitable.”

My Comment: Indeed, even with all the sophistication of the police apparatus of the authorities, no one can predict the course of events when the masses are not provided with the basic necessities. To satisfy their necessities of life, it is necessary to educate people in the spirit of integral education and upbringing, reciprocity and to replace material values with the spiritual ones, fulfillment from unity, mutual support—and further from the revelation of the higher existence.
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Opinion (Shimshon Bichler and Jonathan Nitzan, interviewed by Piotr Dutkiewicz): “With the global crisis ongoing and the ruling class tittering on the verge of panic, there is a real possibility of a massive shift to the right, not unlike that of the 1930s. I think that such a shift will be difficult to prevent, let alone counteract and reverse, without a totally new theoretical alternative. …

“In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when capitalism was just taking hold, there was nothing apologetic about the market. On the contrary. The market was seen as the harbinger of progress – a powerful institution that heralded liberty, equality and tolerance. …

“The political system, by contrast, is wasteful and parasitical. Its purpose is not production, but redistribution. Its members – the politicians, state officials and bureaucrats – seek power and prestige. They eagerly ‘intervene’ in and ‘monopolize’ the economy. They tax, borrow and spend – and in the process stifle the economy and ‘distort’ its efficiency.

“The market became the chief ideology of the triumphant capitalist regime. It helped spread capitalism around the world, and it assisted in the fight against competing regimes, such as fascism and communism. In the Soviet Union, where production was besieged by chaotic planning and accompanied by tyrannical rule, organized violence, open corruption and restricted consumption, the market symbolized the ‘other life.’

“When economics first emerged in the late nineteenth century, capitalism was already victorious. But it was also highly turbulent and increasingly contested by critiques and revolutionaries, so it had to be defended; and the ideological part of that defense was delegated to the new priests of liberalism: the economists. In order to perform their role, the economists have elaborated an intricate system of mathematical models. This system, they claim, proves that a free, totally unregulated economy – if we could ever have one – would yield the best of all possible worlds, by definition.

“The conventional counterclaim, marshaled by many heterodox critiques, is that neoclassical models may be elegant, but they have little or nothing to do with the actual world we live in. And there is certainly much truth in this observation. But the ‘science of economics’ is besieged by a far deeper problem that rarely if ever gets mentioned: it relies on fictitious quantities.

“Every science rests on one or more fundamental quantities in which all other magnitudes are denominated. Physics, for example, has five fundamental quantities – length, time, mass, electrical charge and heat – and every other measure is derived from those quantities. For instance, velocity is length divided by time; acceleration is the time derivative of velocity; and gravity is mass multiplied by acceleration. Now, as a science, economics too has to have fundamental quantities – and the economists claim it does. The fundamental quantity of the neoclassical universe is the unit of hedonic pleasure, or ‘util.’ …

“Now, in the final analysis, all economic quantities are reducible to utils. The util is the elementary particle of economic science. It is the fundamental quantity, the basic building block everything economic is made of. The utils themselves, like Greek atoms, are identical everywhere, but their combination yields infinitely complex forms that economists call ‘goods and services.’ Every composite of the “real economy” – from the aggregate quantities of production, consumption and investment, to the size of GDP, to the magnitude of military spending and the scale of technology – is the sum total of the utils it generates. And the price magnitudes of the “nominal” economy – for instance, the dollar prices of an industrial robot (say $5 million) and a trendy iPhone ($500) – merely represent and reflect the util-denominated quantities of their respective ‘real’ quantities (whose ratio, assuming the reflection is accurate, is 10,000:1).

“And, yet, and here we come to the crux of the matter, this util – this basic quantum that everything economic is supposedly derived from – is immeasurable and in fact unknowable!

“Nobody has been able to identify the quantum of a util, and I very much doubt that anyone ever will. It is a pure fiction. And since all ‘real’ economic quantities are denominated in this fictitious unit, it follows that their own quantities are fictitious as well. To measure ‘real GDP’ or the ‘standard of living’ without utils is like measuring velocity without time, or gravity without mass. (I should note here that a similar critique can be leveled against classical Marxism. The elementary particle of the Marxist universe is socially necessary abstract labor. This is the fundamental quantity that all “real” magnitudes are made of and which the nominal spheres (should) reflect – and yet no Marxist has ever measured it.)

“The students, dazed by the endless drill of ‘practical’ assignments, do not even suspect that their ‘computations’ are practically meaningless. Most professors, having graduated from the meat grinder of neoclassical training, have had all traces of the problem safely erased from their memory (assuming they were aware of it in the first place). And the statisticians, whose job is to measure the economy, have no choice but to concoct numbers based on arbitrary assumptions that nobody can either validate or refute. The entire edifice hangs in thin air, and everyone keeps quite lest it collapse.”

My Comment: But today the edifice is crumbling, and we need a new economy: an integral interaction. Production is necessary only to meet the required needs. Distribution is equal, in accordance with everyone’s needs. Money is void. To receive necessities, it is mandatory for everyone to take part in the life of society and most importantly in integral education and upbringing. Thus, society will come to its natural balance, in itself and with nature.
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