Opinion (Lars Seier Christensen, CEO of the SAXO Bank): “It is difficult to describe the weekend bailout package to Cyprus in any other way. The confiscation of 6.75 percent of small depositors’ money and 9.9 percent of big depositors’ funds is without precedence that I can think of in a supposedly civilised and democratic society. But maybe the European Union (EU) is no longer a civilised democracy? …

“Depositors in other prospective bailout countries must be running scared – is it safe to keep money in an Italian, Spanish or Greek bank any more? I don’t know, must be the answer. …

“This is a major, MAJOR game changer and the fallout will be with us for a long time to come. I believe it could be the beginning of the end for the Eurozone as this is an unbelievable blow to the already challenged trust that might be left among investors. Talk about a possible own goal.

“Market reaction? it must be very good for gold – and for safe-haven countries like Switzerland, Singapore and economically more healthy non-Euro countries in, for example, Scandinavia. I would think the EURO and associated markets will be undermined by increasing lack of confidence when the full implications become clear for investors.

“This is full-blown socialism and I still cannot believe this really happened.

“Be careful out there…”

My Comment: We are being forced to change all the rules, then the game itself, and then the players, that is, it will force people to correct their nature because they will become convinced that there is no other way out.
[103181]

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Opinion (Dani Rodrik, Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a leading scholar of globalization and economic development): “Nothing endangers globalization more than the yawning governance gap – the dangerous disparity between the national scope of political accountability and the global nature of markets for goods, capital, and many services – that has opened up in recent decades. When markets transcend national regulation, as with today’s globalization of finance, market failure, instability, and crisis is the result. But pushing rule-making onto supranational bureaucracies, such as the World Trade Organization or the European Commission, can result in a democratic deficit and a loss of legitimacy.

“How can this governance gap be closed? One option is to re-establish national democratic control over global markets. This is difficult and smacks of protectionism, but it is neither impossible nor necessarily inimical to healthy globalization. As I argue in my book The Globalization Paradox, expanding the scope for national governments to maintain regulatory diversity and rebuild frayed social bargains would enhance the functioning of the global economy. …

“But the trouble is not just that these global institutions remain weak. It is also that they are inter-governmental bodies – a collection of member states rather than agents of global citizens. Because their accountability to national electorates is indirect and uncertain, they do not generate the political allegiance – and hence legitimacy – that truly representative institutions require. Indeed, the travails of the European Union have revealed the limits of transnational political community-building, even among a comparatively limited and similar set of countries.

“Ultimately, the buck stops with national parliaments and executives. During the financial crisis, it was national governments that bailed out banks and firms, recapitalized the financial system, guaranteed debts, eased liquidity, primed the fiscal pump, and paid the unemployment and welfare checks – and took the blame for everything that went wrong. In the memorable words of outgoing Bank of England Governor Mervyn King, global banks are ‘international in life, but national in death.’

“But perhaps there is another path, one that accepts the authority of national governments, but aims to reorient national interests in a more global direction. Progress along such a path requires ‘national’ citizens to begin viewing themselves increasingly as ‘global citizens,’ with interests that extend beyond their state’s borders.”

My Comment: Since national governments depend on their citizens, integral education will lead to an understanding of global connection and responsibility, causing pressure on national governments.
[102967]

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The global crisis leaves more and more people unemployed. This is not just for economic reasons. The consequences of over consumerism are becoming evident: How many more new products can appear on the market? How much more do we need to buy? There is an end to everything, including consumerism. The desires are changing and people don’t want all that any more.

In the next phase of our evolution, humanity will move on to spiritual work. Everything that we need corporeally will be easily provided by modern technology, scientists, engineers, and a small amount of service people who, by their nature, will be happy to deal with such things. But most people will have to make inner efforts and this will become their “occupation” on the next level of humanity. On the next spiritual level people will connect, be incorporated in one another, and our fictitious world will gradually “evaporate” and disappear, like a cloud on a clear day, until we will be left in a reality of true feelings. This is our evolution and there is nothing we can do about it.

So the world will have to be reorganized. We mustn’t ignore the unemployed. There are already quite a few studies that show how dangerous it is when a person has nothing to do. It leads to conflicts in the family and to divorce; we lose our humanity, and we lose the incentives and the commitments for things that need to be done. When a person doesn’t have to make any efforts, he becomes less than an animal.

Animals are busy doing something from morning to night: looking for food, for a mate, for a place to dwell, and taking care of their offspring. They use the “recreation time” for useful games by which they establish the right connections in the flock, the herd, etc. Have you ever seen an ant doing nothing like a football fan lying on the couch with a bottle of beer and a cigarette?

Today a person has to move to massive spiritual work, to establish the general mutual connection, and to reorganize society, and yet, in the meantime, we do nothing, preferring idle contemplations.

This terrible fall will cost us dearly. It will bring a heavy feeling of bitterness and a person will lose his mind and go wild. The lack of obligations prevents him from acting and leaves him empty, poisoning his consciousness. Besides, he loses his professional skills and the skills to communicate with other people. It’s as if everything in him sinks, disappears, and he turns into a “ghost,” a “zombie,” and not a human being.

This is what will happen to people who would remain idle if we don’t start dealing with them in an organized manner. The modern world believes in democracy and free elections, but what can we expect of the voters? Can they be rational and see things correctly in this situation? Eventually it will force the governments to make changes…
[102783]
From the 3^rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/14/13, The Study of the Ten Sefirot

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In the News (from The Christian Science Monitor): “A stunning report by a US digital-security company accuses China’s military of conducting more than 100 cyberattacks on American corporate and government computers. If accurate, the report by the firm Mandiant only adds to the urgency to develop international norms in cyberwar and cyberespionage.

“Each new tool of aggression requires its own rules of war. Cyberwarfare should be no different. Without a code of ethics for conflict in the digital universe, nations could eventually bring down each other’s water supplies, electric grids, military defenses, and vital institutions. And key values, such as privacy and a right to intellectual property, could also be lost.

“Global rules now restrict the use of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. They also help safeguard civilians and prisoners of war. What the Mandiant report shows is that the world may be losing the struggle to come up with rules for cyberspace behavior.”

My Comment: The problem is not in the desire to adopt new rules for new weapons of war, but that the enemy can easily disguise himself and strike without exposing himself to retaliatory attacks. So, a lack of complete control, as in the case of nuclear weapons, is the cause of the ongoing cyberwar.

The solution lies in the unity of all the systems into one, when everyone attacking the enemy will bring a blow to himself at the same time. Either we ourselves will create this system or nature will bring us to this system of mutual dependence in which there will no other choice but to establish such ties or perish.
[102792]

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Baal HaSulam, “The Peace”: Rabbi Akiva tells us about that, “All is in deposit.” This means that everything that God had placed in Creation and given to people, He did not give to them licentiously, but secured Himself with collateral. And should you wonder what collateral He was given?

He responds to that by saying: “and a fortress spreads over all of life.” This means that the Creator has cleverly devised a wonderful fortress and spread it over all of humanity, so no one will escape. All the living must be caught in that fortress and necessarily accept His work, until they attain their sublime goal. This is the collateral by which the Creator secured Himself, to guarantee that no harm would come to the deed of Creation.

“All is in deposit” means that whether I want to or not, I will have to pay my “debt” to the Creator. I was given life not because I asked for it and without my consent, and still I have to pay the debt. It doesn’t matter that I didn’t ask for it. If I received life, I have to pay for it, and I can only pay by attaining the goal of creation.

We see that the sufferings we have been through throughout history are gradually becoming more “spiritual” and “virtual,” and detached from reality. Today many people don’t want to live although they have everything. Once a person was happy if he had half a kilo of bread a day and was satisfied with that, but about fifty years ago the “shopping” era began. Today it is coming to an end and not because of a shortage of money but because people lack the desire to shop. This is the problem—the desire is changing. Even if you offer a person a million dollars, it will not spur him like before; he doesn’t want anything anymore.

This is the natural inclination of our evolution that brings us to ask about the meaning of life. So what is left of life if not food, shopping, and recreation? There is nothing else that we can enjoy. It isn’t by chance that football and all sorts of distractions other are being promoted so much these days. This is the policy: to provide people with “tranquilizers” and other nonsense to give them something to fill their inner emptiness with. Otherwise, they would express their rage in the streets instead of in the stadiums.

A person who feels empty asks himself more and more: “Why was I given a life that I didn’t ask for, why am I being forced to do something that I don’t want to?” Why? He feels as if his hands and feet are chained.

This is why we need integral education today. Thanks to it people will understand that everyone is connected and that we depend on one another and that by using this integral connection correctly, we will be able to solve all our problems.

Good relations are generally the key to our success in every aspect. We could have machines replace physical work in every field and provide everything we need. But we don’t want that since it isn’t clear what a person would enjoy then. Even now, most people already have everything they could imagine except for a deficiency. A person is absolutely full, so what’s next? He can either kill himself or start killing others otherwise he won’t feel any pleasure.

We enjoy only when pleasure fills a deficiency. But the pleasure immediately neutralizes itself. So how can we prevent this? We have to constantly renew the desire.

This is exactly what the world leaders tried to achieve by building a modern economy and inserting new desires into people and satisfying them. But this is impossible, since our corporeal desire is changing in quality and eventually doesn’t want anything on the previous level. To chase our own tail in order to buy a new washing machine and a new television every year and to change the wall paper…? How much longer can we take that? A person suddenly discovers that his desires are gone.

Thus a whole philosophy of evolution has come to an end. It wasn’t just a way of making money but a way of making people happy. At the top people thought about getting richer providing all the basic necessities and keeping them in a close circuit so that people would buy light bulbs that burn out after a short while, printers with an integrated chip that stops working after a while, and other low quality products. They continued to supply incentives so that people will feel it is worthwhile to work, to live, and to buy. They continued to renew the deficiencies since without a deficiency that receives pleasure, there is no feeling of happiness.

They were right about that. It was indeed a time of prosperity in the West. The Americans saw that their new philosophy justified itself and everyone followed them happily. But in the meantime the desire grew, not only in quantity but also in quality, so a person doesn’t need all that anymore. He doesn’t see any point in investing his whole life in that. In the past people bought things without any advertising, but today more than half the cost of a product is due to advertising costs. On the other hand, in countries that are more economically developed, depression, suicide, and drug abuse are becoming more prevalent.

So where are we headed? A person cannot go on living without feeling happy, excitement, and the “ecstasy” that is felt when the deficiency meets the pleasure. But they immediately neutralize one another if there is no Masach (screen) between them. This is what the wisdom of Kabbalah is about, the wisdom of how to receive correctly, since without a Masach, a person discovers only darkness.

If the decision makers were a bit wiser, they would accept that. But in the meantime, we are in the middle of the process, so in any case there is no other choice. The deficiency has to be in contact with the pleasure, but only if it doesn’t stop. Otherwise, it isn’t worth it. We are ready to renew only our animal deficiencies over and over again, but anything that is beyond that is questionable. So what we see on almost every TV channel today is mainly cooking programs or sex, because people are so narrow minded…

We hope that we will manage to explain the need for a Masach between the deficiency and the pleasure. Then the infinite pleasure will give us a feeling of eternal life.
[102338]
From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/8/13, “The Peace”

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In the News (from CNN): “Global warming has propelled Earth’s climate from one of its coldest decades since the last ice age to one of its hottest – in just one century.

“A heat spike like this has never happened before, at least not in the last 11,300 years, said climatologist Shaun Marcott, who worked on a new study on global temperatures going back that far.

“If any period in time had a sustained temperature change similar to what we have today, we would have certainly seen that in our record,” he said. It is a good indicator of just how fast man-made climate change has progressed.

“A century is a very short period of time for such a spike. …

“If not for man-made influences, the Earth would be in a very cold phase right now and getting even colder, according the joint study by Oregon State University and Harvard University. Marcott was the lead author of the report on its results.

“To boot, the range of temperatures from cold to hot produced since the industrial revolution began are about the same as the 11,000 years before it, said Candace Major from the National Science Foundation, ‘but this change has happened a lot more quickly.’

My Comment: The cause for all the changes is to encourage people to correct themselves. But a person arrives at this decision only when, after many misfortunes and sufferings, he finally becomes convinced that there is no other way—he has to change himself. How much and what kind of suffering we have to go through to accept this decision is unknown.

Everyone who understands the necessity of following the laws of nature, to become similar to it, and to become connected by the good ties of mutual guarantee should make every effort to disseminate the knowledge about it. By these actions we will definitely bring the correct decision closer and reduce suffering.
[102689]

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In the News (from Euronews): “It has been a day of industrial action all over Europe.

“In Belgium, hundreds of steel workers blocked border crossings to and from neighbouring countries, furious at plans by the steel giant Arcelor Mittal to slash production threatening more than a thousand jobs.

“In France, PSA Peugeot-Citroen workers occupied the offices of a steel industry managers’ organization as part of an ongoing protest against the planned closure of a car factory in Aulnay near Paris. The plant has been paralysed for eight weeks by a strike.

“Travelers using the airport serving Bonn and Cologne in Germany had delays and cancellations as security staff walked out. It’s part of a long running dispute over contract terms and pay. Dozens of flights were cancelled. Passengers using Berlin’s Tegel airport were also affected.

“There was disruption too at Madrid’s main international airport. About 2,000 workers protested against pay cuts and massive lay-offs at Spain’s national carrier Iberia.

“And tourists hoping for some ancient Greek culture found all public archaeological sites strike bound – including the Parthenon temple at the Acropolis. Workers are angry about a planned restructuring of the Culture Ministry.”

My Comment: The crisis is not in overproduction of goods and services, but in the over-production of people. We are moving into the world where everything will be done by machines, printers, and almost all the people will be unemployed. It will happen gradually, but steadily. There is a crisis of an abundance of goods and people.

Kabbalah described this state of the world a long time ago and offers the following: reduce all the production and services except those necessary for living, free all people who are not needed for the necessary production and services from working, provide mandatory education at open universities of integral education, pay stipends at the places of studies (like a salary adjusting for absenteeism), teach integral interaction, the structure of the world and its development, writing, drawing, singing, etc., and have workshops.
[102319]

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In the News (from USA Today): “Drug overdose deaths rose for the 11^th straight year, federal data show, and most of them were accidents involving addictive painkillers despite growing attention to risks from these medicines.

“‘The big picture is that this is a big problem that has gotten much worse quickly,’ said Thomas Frieden, head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which gathered and analyzed the data.

“In 2010, the CDC reported, there were 38,329 drug overdose deaths nationwide. Medicines, mostly prescription drugs, were involved in nearly 60% of overdose deaths that year, overshadowing deaths from illicit narcotics. …

“Anti-anxiety drugs including Valium were among common causes of medication-related deaths, involved in almost 30% of them. Among the medication-related deaths, 17% were suicides….

“Last month, a federal panel of drug safety specialists recommended that Vicodin and dozens of other medicines be subjected to the same restrictions as other narcotic drugs like oxycodone and morphine.”

My Comment: The problem is not in treatment, but in the eradication of causes, and it is in general depression, emptiness, and lack of meaning. If a person is filled with good mood and spirit, he will almost always be healthy.
[102324]

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In the News (from Los Angeles Times): “With decades ahead of them in the job market, more than half of millennials stay awake at night chewing over all manner of worries, according to a study.

“Those 18- to 33-year-olds actually stress out more than older generations, the American Psychological Assn. concluded in its new study. Slightly more than 50% said that overwhelming worries disrupted their sleep in the past month.

“A dour economy is top of mind for young people, with work and job stability sending their stress levels soaring. And no wonder — their unemployment rate is 13.1%, well above the overall nation’s 7.8%. …

“Nearly 40% of millennials said their stress shot up in the last year, compared with 33% of baby boomers and 29% of those 67 and older.

“Perhaps reflecting their relative inexperience with the working world, the study found young people were more likely to react to stress with anger or annoyance.”

My Comment: This is only the beginning of another great American problem: a big disappointment in capitalism and in the society of great and equal opportunities, and the collapse of the American dream. There is an urgent need to include the entire population in the “process” of correcting themselves by fostering a correct perception of the new world and society. Otherwise, all the energy of the masses will be aimed at destruction.

Society cannot be left unattended; it needs to be taken care of as if caring for a child; the country must bring everybody to study the behavior in the conditions of the new world: the environment (climate), our nature (the laws of society), and the required change in man’s attitude towards the environment (personal correction).
[102445]

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Question: Lately the price of shares on the stock market are sky high again, the Dow Jones has set a new record high. This of course has an impact on Europe and Japan. How can it be that a certain part in the general system is still getting richer while the others suffer from the crisis?

Answer: The stock market has been on the rise for a long time. The brokers have decided that the crisis that started in 2008 has come to an end. “Indeed, how much longer can we wait if it’s already 2013? Enough, it’s time to raise the new digits on the counter…”

Generally speaking, all the “bubbles” are false and unnatural. The whole modern economy is basically false. It has many indices and indicators, but it’s basically the same: First, the brokers lay the false foundation, and then they build their houses on it until the earth swallows them. After all, today’s economy is not a science; it’s not part of nature.

The real economy is the relationships between people based on the principle of “give and take.” As it says, “Go and make a living from one another.” If we were to establish the correct, true economy, then, in the connection with others, in bestowing upon them and receiving from them, I would discover the Creator, the upper world.

In that sense, the wisdom of Kabbalah can also be called “the economy,” since it explains how to receive correctly, how to make a great profit and fill the vessels, the desires to receive, and to bestow in the best way possible, to safely avoid all the damages, the loss of connection and filling, and in general of everything. To sum up, the optimal economics is the wisdom of Kabbalah.

At the same time, the brokers have no idea about nature and its plans, about how the human desires develop and about the relations between people. They have simply decided to create a certain mechanism and to force it upon others so that they will work and the brokers will get rich. Suppose I manufacture pens, and I don’t care if anyone needs them; by using different tricks, I convince people to buy them and by that bring myself pleasure in terms of money.

The traders don’t take into account the major factors; after all, people’s desires change, the conditions change, and the consumers are fed up. In addition to that, no matter how hard you try to curb the natural development of technology, you will not be able to stop it. Today those at the top want it both ways: They want to automate production, but this leaves people jobless and moneyless, so they cannot buy these products. They have to make a decision: If they want people to go on buying, they should give them money. But you cannot give them money since you are laying them off when you replace them with machines.

As a result of lacking the understanding of these processes and lacking a global vision, we come to the recognition of evil. So today, we have to understand the system that connects us all. Only if we are able to provide for one another correctly and safely, will everyone feel good. After all, what a person needs is pleasure.

So, the question is whether the mechanisms we have built can provide us with pleasure. After all, everything about these mechanisms is artificial and false. The highly lauded figures of the stock market have no basis. It’s all one big game of market players. They can also intentionally cause economic crises.

But there are phenomena that market players haven’t planned. Because they are so confused and have no coordination between them, different things are happening all at once, revealing the flaws in the system. It’s not even about being divorced from reality; this whole business had no real basis to begin with since it was never in conformity with nature. It’s impossible to call it capitalism anymore.

Question: It’s as if they have created a kind of virtual reality in which can impose artificial optimism interspersed with a bit of pessimism so that it will appear more real. As a result, the indexes are rising without having any real basis; optimism itself is enough…

Answer: That’s right; it’s a game that they are running according to their interests. It’s the same in every area, including politics: Those at the top pull the strings, and they are operated by the Creator.

Question: It seems that today the ego has become so sophisticated that it can take advantage of every situation. It is equally effective in taking advantage of the market rises and falls and the crises. Will it end?

Answer: It will come to an end when we are able to teach people the method of mutual guarantee and when they understand that they have no choice. Then the hopelessness will be revealed.

Even today it’s already clear that the stock market figures don’t mean a thing. What is worse is if we take into account the economic situation and the rise in unemployment, the stock market “bubble” can lead to an explosion that the real economy cannot create. After all, people are jobless and it’s a very dangerous situation…

The current rise of the stock market can be prolonged for a while. What’s more, from a spiritual perspective, I see it as a positive thing: Let them carry on since it helps us advance towards correction at our own pace.

On the whole, everything that happens means only one thing: We must hurry. We were given some more time to prepare the dissemination of the method of the true correction of the world. We have to try and be ready as soon as possible. Things are moving so that we will be able to advance and prepare ourselves, but the window of opportunity can suddenly close.
[102103]
From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/7/13, ”Introduction to The Book of Zohar”

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