Baal HaSulam, “The Arvut (Mutual Guarantee)”: Hence, only the members of the Israeli nation were admitted into the required Arvut, and not the nations of the world at all, because they did not participate in it.

This is how the desire to receive began to split. In ancient Babel, one nation lived that later began to split up into separate groups that spread all over the globe since the upper force didn’t hold them together anymore. This dispersion meant that the desires to receive discovered the differences between them. The different desires which belong to different levels like “Syria,” “the trans-Jordan,” “the Land of Israel,” “Egypt,” etc. began to appear. To the extent that they were revealed, we felt ourselves more and more separated until we discovered to what extent we are still connected to each other internally.

Today we are forced to connect since we depend on each other, and we cannot exist without each other. Thus Babel returns and obliges us to rebuild “a tower that reaches Heaven,” but not the egoistic one this time. We don’t challenge Heaven now, but rather rise to bestowal, to love, to equivalence with the Creator. This is called the true “ascent to Heaven.”

Today, in a time of total destruction of the old tower of Babel, we discover how destructive our ego, the source of all our troubles, is and how separated and distant we are from one another. Thus the dispersion of the Babylonians ends—each one wants to live separately without any obligations to others, and at the same time, it turns out that in order to survive we will need a general mutual connection. Because of our dependence on it, we feel that we have to reconnect, but how?

By feeling the necessity to build a new tower of Babel, we build it by correcting ourselves to bestow. Eventually we will become one nation again and will build the “tower that is full of good” and reach Heaven.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 6/04/12,“The Arvut (Mutual Guarantee)”

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Opinion (Martin A. Nowak, Professor of Biology and of Mathematics at Harvard University and Director of Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics): “Martin Nowak, one of the world’s experts on evolution and game theory…turns an important aspect of evolutionary theory on its head to explain why cooperation, not competition, has always been the key to the evolution of complexity. He offers a new explanation for the origin of life and a new theory for the origins of language, biology’s second greatest information revolution after the emergence of genes.”

My Comment: Recently, there is a surge of materials produced by scientists from various countries and areas of expertise about the revision of the driving force of evolution, about its original direction towards integrality. Just today, when this integrality reaches us, humanity, civilization, we began to pay attention to it because before that we had not been able to perceive the world as integral.
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In the News (from Euronews): “Greece’s financial crisis is exacerbating racial violence according to a report by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

“It is sounding the alarm over attacks on immigrants for whom the country has long been a gateway into Europe.

“Giorgos Tsarbopoulos, head of UNHCR Greece, said, ‘The economic situations created a climate where slogans and xenophobic rhetoric and easy solutions that are not solutions of course, of ‘kick them out, let’s take the law into our own hands’ can more easily be propagated in a population which faces problems regarding security and public order.’

“Over recent weeks, the government has been herding illegal immigrants into new detention camps. But a shortage of funds is making it harder to either repatriate them or process asylum requests.”

My Comment: The growth of the Nazi organizations and parties is becoming common. Everything is going according to the Kabbalistic scenario, although it is according to its bad option—the path of suffering—rather than the path of Light, likeness to the Light, through the education of humanity for integration and unification.
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In the News (from Workers World): “As of the last count by the Census Bureau, there are almost 19 million EMPTY housing units in the United States.

“Many are brand new but have no buyers; people can’t afford them. Others have been lived in for years, but now lie empty after their occupants were chased out and their belongings dumped on the street by foreclosure enforcers.

“Allowing an average of only three people per housing unit, the statistic above means that at least 57 million people in the U.S. who are now homeless, in shelters, doubled or tripled up with relatives or friends, or living in trailers, campers or other vehicles, could have a real home to live in.”

My Comment: This will only grow more and more until humanity decides that it is necessary to change its attitude to the world from reception to bestowal, from egoism to participation, unity, love.
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Opinion (Tim Jackson, professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey): “Productivity — the amount of output delivered per hour of work in the economy — is often viewed as the engine of progress in modern capitalist economies. Output is everything. Time is money. The quest for increased productivity occupies reams of academic literature and haunts the waking hours of C.E.O.’s and finance ministers. Perhaps forgivably so: our ability to generate more output with fewer people has lifted our lives out of drudgery and delivered us a cornucopia of material wealth.

“But the relentless drive for productivity may also have some natural limits. Ever-increasing productivity means that if our economies don’t continue to expand, we risk putting people out of work. If more is possible each passing year with each working hour, then either output has to increase or else there is less work to go around. Like it or not, we find ourselves hooked on growth.

“What, then, should happen when, for one reason or another, growth just isn’t to be had anymore? Maybe it’s a financial crisis. Or rising prices for resources like oil. Or the need to rein in growth for the damage it’s inflicting on the planet: climate change, deforestation, the loss of biodiversity. Maybe it’s any of the reasons growth can no longer be safely and easily assumed in any of today’s economies. The result is the same. Increasing productivity threatens full employment.

“One solution would be to accept the productivity increases, shorten the workweek and share the available work. …

“But there’s another strategy for keeping people in work when demand stagnates. Perhaps in the long run it’s an easier and a more compelling solution: to loosen our grip on the relentless pursuit of productivity. By easing up on the gas pedal of efficiency and creating jobs in what are traditionally seen as ‘low productivity’ sectors, we have within our grasp the means to maintain or increase employment, even when the economy stagnates.

“At first, this may sound crazy; we’ve become so conditioned by the language of efficiency. But there are sectors of the economy where chasing productivity growth doesn’t make sense at all. Certain kinds of tasks rely inherently on the allocation of people’s time and attention. The caring professions are a good example: medicine, social work, education. Expanding our economies in these directions has all sorts of advantages. …

“The care and concern of one human being for another is a peculiar ‘commodity.’ It can’t be stockpiled. It becomes degraded through trade. It isn’t delivered by machines. Its quality rests entirely on the attention paid by one person to another. Even to speak of reducing the time involved is to misunderstand its value. …

“In short, avoiding the scourge of unemployment may have less to do with chasing after growth and more to do with building an economy of care, craft and culture. And in doing so, restoring the value of decent work to its rightful place at the heart of society.”

My Comment: Namely, by building mutual support, passing many functions of the state, the service sector and industry, to the mutual aid organizations, leaving only the necessary part of production within the enterprise, we will get rid of the concept of “work to live” and “live to work” and will be free to create the new integral society.
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In the News (from the European Commission): “The European Commission has proposed that 2012 be designated as the ‘European Year for Active Ageing.’

“The initiative aims to help create better job opportunities and working conditions for the growing numbers of older people in Europe, help them take an active role in society and encourage healthy ageing. …

“The EU is in a process of significant population ageing. From 2012, the European working-age population will start to shrink, while the over-60 population will continue to increase by about two million people a year. The strongest pressure is expected to occur during the period 2015-35 when the so-called baby-boom generation will enter retirement. …

“Active ageing includes creating more opportunities for older people to continue working, to stay healthy longer and to continue to contribute to society in other ways, for example through volunteering needs to be supported by a wide range of policies at all levels of governance.”

“The financial crisis has intensified what has long been a simmering problem; what to do about ageing populations with ever fewer workers supporting ever more pensioners, living longer?

“Trying to defuse the demographic timebomb and cut budgets to avert a financial meltdown, governments are further raising the retirement age and reining in benefits. …

“As unions threaten more strikes in the New Year the showdown over pensions is not likely to go away any time soon.” (Source: Euronews)

My Comment: Here, instead of explaining in the process of integral education and upbringing when the same retired and unemployed people could become conscious participants in what is happening now—the process of transformation from an individual egoistic society into an integral society when a person himself changes—the change comes from above, which triggers protest.

Integral education encourages understanding of what is happening now as a natural process of human development, which aims to change today’s humanity as a society of individualists to a society of mutual responsibility and care. Integral education and upbringing of the masses is intended to begin this change consciously (easily, quickly, gently).
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Opinion (Peter Schiff, CEO & Chief Global Strategist, Euro Pacific Capital): “I first came to national attention back in 2008 and 2009 when the housing and credit markets imploded. I became known as the guy that other market “experts” laughed at when I warned of trouble brewing in the seemingly indestructible American economy. After the wheels ground to a halt in mid-2008, people noticed that my book Crash Proof, originally released in early 2007, read like a detailed preview of many of the events that eventually unfolded. …

“However, they mistakenly assumed that the crash I was warning about was solely a housing led credit bubble. While that was part of it, I never saw it ending there. The crash that most concerned me was the one that would result from the government’s response to the initial crisis. My concern was not that our economy would succumb to the disease that I had diagnosed, but instead would be taken down by the ‘cure’ that the government unleashed to combat it.

“When the government’s delaying tactic, which involves continuous borrowing and money printing is no longer tenable, the dollar could collapse, interest rates and consumer prices could soar and the U.S. economy could implode. That’s the real crash that I was warning about, and the one we all need to be worried about now. …

“When looking back from a point in the future, I believe that the years immediately after the credit collapse of 2008 will stand out as a period of dangerous economic negligence. We have bought ourselves some time by sweeping enormous problems under the rug. Through a combination of political cowardice, economic ignorance, and false confidence, we are digging ourselves into a hole so deep that it may take generations to crawl out. …

“Immediately prior to the crash, the United States economy was experiencing unprecedented consumer debt levels, persistently high trade deficits, historically large government budget deficits, high-energy prices, and a moribund manufacturing sector. Four years later, all of these problems have gotten worse. And unlike four years ago, we are now saddled with the highest unemployment rate in generations and levels of public debt that would have been unimaginable then. Yes we are no longer technically in recession. But I believe that is just an illusion created by perhaps the cheapest, and most obvious, trick ever devised. …

“I felt certain before writing Crash Proof that the government would never let the economy contract far enough to restore balance and sustainability. I knew the spending and deficits would head off the charts. I thought those realities would push down the dollar and cause foreign creditors to shun American government debt. However, I did not factor in the reprieve we have gotten from the false perception that Europe is in even worse shape than we.

“As the curtain eventually falls on the drama unfolding in Europe, the world will refocus its attention on the more spectacular events in the U.S. The sovereign debt crisis that is now playing out in Europe will cross the Atlantic, and when it opens here The Real Crash may indeed finally begin. The average American will have a front row seat but will hardly enjoy the show.”

My Comment: This time is given to us to organize worldwide centers of integral education and upbringing, to prepare specialists (lecturers, course teachers, tutors, and organizers) to carry out explanatory work. And then we will meet with a distraught society, next to the shattered economy, family, education, and other “achievements” of humanity.
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Politics, finances, culture, science and actually everything today is only built on communication, on mutual connection, while a person is not internally matched to these systems. It follows that all of our systems have reached this kind of state, but a person hasn’t and so it is very difficult. We are not able to manage anything correctly. So our economy, arts, science, childrearing, and the rest of our systems are in crisis. In principle, they aspire to be integrally connected, but the person who manages them, is not yet that way. So what can be done with him?

Human ego remains individualistic. We see how a person wants to withdraw, detach himself, be alone, and hide from others. He needs a separate apartment. He is, as if, ready to become connected to others, but only by phone and computer as if they guard his individualism, his immunity. And we don’t need to destroy this, but to at least adjust to those systems in which we already exist.

Nature itself is global and finds itself in complete mutual dependency in all its parts. We created our sciences, and assume physics, chemistry, biology, and zoology are separate investigations of nature; this doesn’t exist in nature. It is unified and everything in it is mutually connected. This means that the approach needs to be general and holistic, but it isn’t.

An identical, general approach needs to be taken for all of common global existence, but it doesn’t exist. Man doesn’t adjust himself to the world he lives in, while from the side of nature, those same systems suddenly changed themselves, without any connection to us, to be integral. Evolution brought us to this state.

We can’t continue to exist in this way; the crisis will continue. Its goal is to invite the need for change within a person.

And a person needs to independently and consciously go through all of these changes. He needs to bring himself to the form of being integral, to be compatible with all the systems: social, political, financial, cultural, etc., and to nature as well.
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” 5/20/12

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Baal HaSulam, “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah”: This wisdom is no more and no less than a sequence of roots, which hang down by way of cause and consequence, by fixed, determined rules, interweaving to a single, exalted goal described as “the revelation of His Godliness to His creatures in this world.

All the other things that we would like to attain by using the wisdom of Kabbalah have nothing to do with it. It is like using a physics book with the hope that we may learn medicine from it or going to chemistry lessons in order to learn political science. Here, too, it is the same thing: The wisdom of Kabbalah is only meant to help us reach the revelation of the Creator, period. If you want that, this wisdom will serve as a means for you; if you have no such need, do what ever you like.

Before the desire to reveal the Creator was evoked in people in the course of our evolution, the wisdom of Kabbalah wasn’t revealed so as not to confuse people. Today, when this desire is expressed generally and demands an answer, Kabbalists say that it is time for the wisdom of Kabbalah to be revealed to the world as a means, as a solution.

If you are looking for miracles, or for recipes of how to succeed in life, or how to make the world a better place, or for some secrets, holy water, red strings, or different promises, the wisdom of Kabbalah will be of no help to you in any way. It is a waste of time and you’d be better off going to a fortuneteller or a psychologist. The real wisdom of Kabbalah, and not the mysticism that is sold under this label, is only the revelation of the Creator to the created being and nothing more than that.

Baal HaSulam puts it very simply: If you have the right desire for it, go ahead. Then you have to ask Kabbalists: “How should I use the wisdom of Kabbalah in order to reveal the Creator?” They will tell you that there is the condition of “Love thy friend as thyself.” You should organize a group and in it fulfill this condition by studying and the mutual work against our ego in order to rise above it and to reach the goal.

But first I must clarify whether the goal of my life is adapted to the goal of the wisdom of Kabbalah. This should be clearly explained to people, leaving no room for confusion. Of course, everyone checks himself openly for everyone’s sake, but if the desire a person has isn’t ripe yet, if he isn’t ready for the revelation of the Creator yet, he mustn’t be drawn inside forcefully.

Our approach should be tough and clear cut: We treat everyone with respect and consider those who have a desire aimed at the Creator as members, friends. If you don’t have such a desire, Kabbalah isn’t for you—enjoy this world.

Today it is a new era: On the background of the global crisis and helplessness, the whole world is becoming aware of the fact that we have to discover the upper world, the Creator, because otherwise we will not survive and will not be able to exist. This is already a different situation in which we gradually have to tell everyone about the method to some extent. So, we begin to teach people about the principles of mutual guarantee, showing them that it is possible to transcend the troubles of the current crisis and to rise to a life of prosperity through unity and the love of others.

We don’t mention the revelation of the Creator to the general public, but rather present the good life in the world as the goal. By that we are already following the same path: On our part, it is the principle of the unity of Israel, the Torah, and the Creator, and for all the others accompany us, they want to fix their corporeal life. Eventually, thanks to the mutual support, we will all connect with the upper force and reveal it, so today we are taking a course with all of humanity.

The problem is that the masses only see the survival from the crisis and the material prosperity, while we see before us the revelation of the Creator. The goal is different, but the direction is the same.

So the wisdom of Kabbalah is revealed to one percent of humanity, and the method of mutual guarantee is meant for the other 99 %. Mutual guarantee is the same wisdom of Kabbalah but without the details and the forces that operate on us. As Kabbalists tell us, people who are not ripe for that should receive what is right for them.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 6/01/12, “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah”

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In the News (from BBC News): “The eurozone crisis is the single biggest threat to the global economy, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. …

“Failure to act today could lead to a worsening of the European crisis and spillovers beyond the euro area, with serious consequences for the global economy.’ …[said OECD chief economist Pier Carlo Padoan]

“‘Reform fatigue is increasing and tolerance for fiscal adjustment may be reaching a limit. …’

“’Rising unemployment and social pain may spark political contagion and adverse market reaction”, with countries outside the euro also at risk of being hit,’ he added.”

My Comment: This is the opinion of the most competent EU authority. But no one has the levers of influence because the process turns from the linear (individual egoistic) development to the integral (round) one, which we cannot control. We have been creating all our economic and social tools in the state of linear egoistic development (evolution) of humanity for thousands of years.

But today, when our egoism has reached its maximum linear (individual, independent) development (as seen by the general crisis and depression, that is, the absence of new desires) and turned into “round” in the global and total (integral) egoism, we discover that we cannot understand it and moreover manage it by the methods, developed in the past.

Only Kabbalah, as the science of our nature, desire, its change and fulfillment, can give us the tool of influence over everything that happens to us. Kabbalists are called to convey this knowledge to humankind. There is a hope that people will be able to discern the truth through their preconceived notions.
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