In the News (from Zawya): “Global trade is likely to remain sluggish for many years, and emerging economies that have depended on exports to fuel their transformation will have to find new sources of growth, says a UN report.” (Source: inagist)

“’Developing and transition economies are likely to face sluggish import demand for their goods as a result of a protracted period of slow growth in developed countries,’ said The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in a report published September 12. ‘Thus, for policymakers in the former set of countries, reverting to the pre-crisis policy stance with its emphasis on export-oriented growth is not an option.’

“The report suggests that exports from developing and transition economies to developed economies before the global recession seemed to justify the adoption of an export-oriented growth model.

“But the expansion of the world economy, though favorable for many developing countries, was built on unsustainable global demand and financing patterns. Thus, reverting to pre-crisis growth strategies cannot be an option. Rather, in order to adjust to what now appears to be a structural shift in the world economy, many developing and transition economies are obliged to review their development strategies that have been overly dependent on exports for growth. …

“The way the crisis has affected global trade patterns also calls into question the future value of the export-oriented growth model that fuelled the emergence of China and other developing world champions over the past three decades.”

My Comment: Before us there is not a long-term decline, which is then replaced by a rise. It is necessary to find a solution to this progressive fall. But to find it, you first need to make the correct diagnosis, to discover the true cause of our deteriorating condition. Talking about the nature of the periods of crisis and repeating that the crisis is already passing is naive. They did not even want to admit it at all for many years, not until 2008. But this does not solve the problem itself.

It is proposed to create a permanent international unified forum that will accept all the explanations, sort, and publish them. Thus we will attract people’s attention to our common problem. This alone would be its partial solution, because it would unite people. Further, selecting the proposed solutions, addressing their respective authors, asking them to explain (with all this to be shown in the media, our TV, and website). And thus gradually we could select the options to work out the method of Integral Education (IE).
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Opinion (David Goldman, author of How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too)): “Population decline is the elephant in the world’s living room. As a matter of arithmetic, we know that the social life of most developed countries will break down within two generations. Two out of three Italians and three of four Japanese will be elderly dependents by 2050. If present fertility rates hold, the number of Germans will fall by 98% over the next two centuries. No pension and health care system can support such an inverted population pyramid. Nor is the problem limited to the industrial nations. Fertility is falling at even faster rates – indeed, at rates never before registered anywhere – in the Muslim world.

“The world faces a danger more terrible than the worst Green imaginings. The European environmentalist who wants to shrink the world’s population to reduce carbon emissions will spend her declining years in misery, for there will not be enough Europeans alive a generation from now to pay for her pension and medical care. For the first time in world history, the birth rate of the whole developed world is well below replacement, and a significant part of it has passed the demographic point of no return.

But Islamic society is even more fragile. As Muslim fertility shrinks at a rate demographers have never seen before, it is converging on Europe’s catastrophically low fertility as if in time-lapse photography. …  By the middle of this century, the belt of Muslim countries from Morocco to Iran will become as gray as depopulating Europe. The Islamic world will have the same proportion of dependent elderly as the industrial countries – but one-tenth the productivity. A time bomb that cannot be defused is ticking in the Muslim world.

“Imminent population collapse makes radical Islam more dangerous, not less so. For in their despair, radical Muslims who can already taste the ruin of their culture believe that they have nothing to lose.

“Political science is at a loss in the face of demographic decline and its consequences. The wasting away of nations is an insoluble conundrum for modern political theory, which is based on the principle of rational self-interest. At the threshold of extinction, the political scientists’ clever models break down. We “do not negotiate with terrorists.”…

“A good deal of the world seems to have lost the taste for life. …  In the past, nations that foresaw their own demise fell to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: War, Plague, Famine, and Death. Riding point for the old quartet in today’s more civilized world is a Fifth Horseman: loss of faith. Today’s cultures are dying of apathy, not by the swords of their enemies.

European apathy is the opposite side of the coin of Islamic extremism. Both apathetic Europeans and radical Muslims have lost their connection to the past and their confidence in the future. There is not a great deal of daylight between European resignation to cultural extinction at the hundred-year horizon. …

“Situations of this sort have arisen frequently in history, but never as frequently as today, when so many of the world’s cultures are not expected to survive the next two centuries. A people facing cultural extinction may well choose war, if war offers even a slim chance of survival.

“That is just how radical Islamists view the predicament of traditional Muslim society in the face of modernity. The Islamists fear that if they fail, their religion and culture will disappear into the maelstrom of the modern world. …

“A wealthy and successful Jewish state next to a poor and dysfunctional Palestinian state may imply the end of the moral authority of Islam, and some Palestinians would rather fight to the death than embrace such an outcome. Rather than consign their children to the Western milieu of personal freedom and sexual license, radical Muslims will fight to the death.”

My Comment: That’s why all of humanity is becoming able to accept the method of integral education so that even in this existence and gradually implement the exit to a new dimension of immortality and perfection. Humanity has no other way out . By disseminating the method of integral education, we are accelerating, revealing the only possible solution, and strengthening awareness of the need to make this transition before the forces of nature compel us to do this.
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Opinion (Michael Schuman, correspondent for TIME, author of The Miracle: The Epic Story of Asia’s Quest for Wealth):“Asia in the latter decades of the 20^th century witnessed perhaps the most remarkable record of poverty alleviation in human history — all thanks to the very capitalist tools of trade, entrepreneurship and foreign investment. … Marx theorized that the capitalist system would inevitably impoverish the masses as the world’s wealth became concentrated in the hands of a greedy few, causing economic crises and heightened conflict between the rich and working classes.

“A growing dossier of evidence suggests that he may have been right. It is sadly all too easy to find statistics that show the rich are getting richer while the middle class and poor are not. … But the consequence of this widening inequality is just what Marx had predicted: class struggle is back. Workers of the world are growing angrier and demanding their fair share of the global economy. From the floor of the U.S. Congress to the streets of Athens to the assembly lines of southern China, political and economic events are being shaped by escalating tensions between capital and labor to a degree unseen since the communist revolutions of the 20^th century. …

“So far, though, Marx’s revolution has yet to materialize. Workers may have common problems, but they aren’t banding together to resolve them. … Protesters, says Jacques Rancière, an expert in Marxism at the University of Paris, aren’t aiming to replace capitalism, as Marx had forecast, but merely to reform it. ‘We’re not seeing protesting classes call for an overthrow or destruction of socioeconomic systems in place,’ he explains. ‘What class conflict is producing today are calls to fix systems so they become more viable and sustainable for the long run by redistributing the wealth created.’

“Despite such calls, however, current economic policy continues to fuel class tensions. … That leaves open a scary possibility: that Marx not only diagnosed capitalism’s flaws but also the outcome of those flaws.”

My Comment: Egoism will grow to such a size that the force to rise above it —people will feel themselves in it, like in the Egyptian bondage, and will be obliged to get out of it —to switch to a life in the property of mutual bestowal, care, equality, and then to “love thy neighbor as yourself.” Nature leaves us nothing else! The question is only in the transition to a new level of existence—through awareness (integral education and upbringing) or through hard struggles.
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It is common knowledge that valuable raw materials are not renewable and eventually will run out. If oil resources are depleted or the price for oil skyrockets even more, it will trigger an immediate and complete collapse because the majority of goods that we use are made from  oil products.

Even the food we eat is comprised of oil, 90% contains petroleum products. Machines, manufacturing, the delivery of goods, etc. run on oil. In other words, a deficiency of oil will lead us to hunger and misery.

That’s why we must transition to a model of responsible consumption and cease producing and consuming only in order to generate sales of products for short-lived use, quickly throw them away, and buy new things. This kind of consumption contaminates oceans, pollutes land, and depletes the Earth of its finite resources. Eventually, we will arrive at complete devastation.

We have no other choice but to turn to a very rigorous economic model of responsible consumption. In fact, we need much less than we have at this time. We have no need for constructing huge buildings, producing excess food, possessing extra clothes, and so forth. Neither do we need endless plane flights.

We must begin acting rationally; otherwise, we will deprive our children and grandchildren of the hope of leading normal lives. We simply will run out of energy sources. It’s our duty to restructure our modern-day economy. Changes can be achieved only through correct integral upbringing.
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” 5/22/12

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Humanity cannot reach the future before it destroys the old.

Much of the old has destroyed itself—family, culture, etc.—but what is advantageous for the controlling elite does not go away by itself; it remains, although it pulls back by all means.

If the elite recognize the need for transition, then the idea of the transition to the future is formed.

In the past, as a rule, transitions were accomplished by revolutions and social struggle.

This is due to lack of understanding the new state, the absence of vision, the causes and the forces to move towards it.

To make a transition, we need to know where we are going; we need to have a historical view that is consistent with the laws of social development, humans, and our thinking.

No historical and logical view is necessary for destruction; the mind is not required; on the contrary, one needs to be ignorant and blind, with no image of the future.

If there is no social consciousness, if everyone thinks in his own way, we are destroying, not creating, the future.

If we recognize that we need a new worldview to which we must come, our future state and how to develop to reach it, we are aware of the need for new knowledge.

Each new socio-economic historical stage in the development of humanity was based on the previous one, on the “fathers” because all the stages were different degrees of growing egoistic development.

Our state is special; it is the next stage of our development: integral humanity. Since we do not know this state at all, we are given the science of the next stage of our development. After all, we rise from the level of unconscious development (still, vegetative, animate social development) to the development of the “human” level. We were given the science of Kabbalah: how to move to the next stage. Contrary to previous transitions, this transition should be not automatic and instinctive, but conscious. We can achieve it only to the extent of our awareness, understanding, mastery, and control.
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In the News (from United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime): “The 2013 World Drug Report released in Vienna shows that, while the use of traditional drugs such as heroin and cocaine seems to be declining in some parts of the world, prescription drug abuse and new psychoactive substance abuse is growing. …

“Marketed as ‘legal highs’ and ‘designer drugs’, NPS are proliferating at an unprecedented rate and posing unforeseen public health challenges. The report shows that the number of NPS reported to UNODC rose from 166 at the end of 2009 to 251 by mid-2012, an increase of more than 50 per cent. For the first time, the number of NPS exceeded the total number of substances under international control (234). Since new harmful substances have been emerging with unfailing regularity on the drug scene, the international drug control system is now challenged by the speed and creativity of the NPS phenomenon.”

My Comment: I already wrote that the campaign against smoking is actually a prelude to the permission to use drugs: Drugs are cheap and calm the population.
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In the News (from DW.de): “Germany’s Bertelsmann foundation has compared 34 OECD and EU countries for social cohesion. …

“The study finds that social cohesion is strong in the wealthy Scandinavian countries Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland, whereas it is weak in the southern European countries hardest hit by the economic crisis, with Bulgaria, Greece and Romania at the bottom of the list… .

“Solidarity (social cohesion) is important for shaping the future of a society, ” said Liz Mohn, deputy chairperson of the Bertelsmann foundation, as she presented the study in the western German city of Gütersloh on Tuesday.

“Solidarity has a positive effect on individuals in society. More solidarity means a rise in subjective well-being,” she added.

Sociologists at Jacobs Bremen University gathered relevant data from 34 countries going back 25 years.

“The countries include European Union countries, as well as other members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), such as North America, Oceania and Israel.

“Germany is in 14^th place, just ahead of Great Britain and France and well ahead of the Baltic States, but below the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

In small European countries such as Switzerland, Austria and Luxembourg there is a strong feeling of togetherness.

“People were asked a series of questions about their social networks, whether they had friends and got along well with their neighbors. They were asked how they felt about the justice system and fairness in society. …

“They found that an even distribution of wealth, a small income gap and high education standards are conducive to a feeling of togetherness. Economic hardship, however, has the opposite effect: It leads people to fend for themselves rather than close ranks, the researchers found. …

“Immigration, however, has no measurable impact on social cohesion. The researchers found no indication that a higher number of migrants affected the answers in any way.”

My Comment: The forces and connections that emerge in the process of integral education will be able to change any society quickly and bring it to cohesion up to the feeling of brotherly dependence and love.
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Opinion (Enrico Letta, Prime Minister of Italy): “It is becoming increasingly clear that if Europe is to overcome its crisis, business as usual will not suffice. …

“The European Commission’s recent decision to grant member states some flexibility for productive public investment linked to EU structural funds is a welcome step in this direction. … The second issue is the need to take further steps toward closer integration within the eurozone. …

“But, to do so, we will need to make EU institutions more efficient, with better regulation and a lower administrative burden. Common institutions are needed to ensure that all EU countries’ interests are protected, and to act as a bridge between eurozone and non-eurozone member states.

“Frankly, the functioning of the EU and its institutions during the crisis has been a part of the problem. For many people, EU decision-making is opaque, inefficient, and removed from democratic control.

“Most worrying, the crisis has challenged the very idea of European integration. … There is nothing worse than letting people believe that European integration is something that proceeds by stealth, a journey driven by invisible and uncontrollable forces. The EU cannot last unless it is built on its citizens’ explicit commitment.

“Today, we have a chance to remodel Europe. …The choice is clear, and it will have to be made sooner rather than later.”

My Comment: Nothing good will come from Euro-constructors; they will only deepen the crisis by directing it to the path of suffering instead of correction—the correction of human nature; only it must be corrected so that everything in the world becomes balanced, kind, positive… And they are still trying to deal with the crisis by external means, applying patches, which even before being attached fall apart and new patches are required.
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In the News (from The Washington Post): “The five-year anniversary of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy is this weekend, and the Treasury Department—where the response to the crisis that failure spurred unfolded—has issued a document that amounts to its take on what has happened since then. It includes some terrific graphs that add up to a visual history of the world’s financial palpitations over the last several years.

“On a number of measures of how the economy has done since then, there is considerable progress—but many key measures, like unemployment, commercial lending, and household wealth, are not back to where they were pre-crisis.

“Now, for a little economic perspective, we’ll add a couple of graphs of our own. First, here’s the employment-to-population ratio. As the graph in the upper right quadrant above shows, the unemployment rate has been coming down steadily since roughly the start of 2010. But a large portion of that is due to people dropping out of the labor force. If you look at the actual number of people with jobs, relative to the whole population, a different pattern emerges: It plummeted during the recession, and has rebounded hardly at all since then.”

My Comment: We have been evolving egoistically over thousands of years and have reached a matured society; social relations are in confrontation with the unified nature. Our egoism has reached the limit and has begun to degenerate. We treat the planet on which we exist thoughtlessly. And we believe this situation can continue and evolve, that is, society, the environment, etc. to worsen.

But our opposition to nature is like the private attitude of nature toward the person. When a person reaches the limit of his egoistic growth, he experiences emptiness, causing feelings of depression, even despair. A large part of humanity is already in this state, although we do not want to admit this.

Many people are in a subconscious sense of the meaninglessness of existence. Very few have a desire to find the meaning of life, caused by the “point in the heart.” We who have found the cause of the crisis and the path that nature shows us are required to disclose it to everyone.
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What is, in your opinion, the goal of education?

 The goal of education is to give a person an understanding of his mission in the world and the real means for its implementation. Such education today is called integral (IE) because it allows a person to become one with nature and thereby bring himself in the optimal condition. It’s much more important than getting an education in the form of profession or trade. The purpose of IE is to make people happy in their personal life and useful in public life.

What is an educated society?

An educated society is a society that is constantly improving itself towards a greater likeness to a unified integral nature, revealing in its unity the single force of nature—the Creator.

How has the institution of higher education been changing over time?

Historically, education was generated by the social system of society based on the opinions of scholars and religious leaders. Since both authorities are losing their importance today, due to the internal changes within a person as well as the external pressure of integrated nature manifested now, there is a need for a new form of education aimed at the revelation of the plan and purpose of our natural (evolutionary) development. I call this education integral education, IE.

Do you think that wisdom has no place in today’s education that involves memorizing?

Wisdom was once in the past, and it was earthly wisdom, that is, within the limits of human speculation of the ancient philosophers. Lacking the possibility of revealing the true purpose and plan of nature, feeling the Creator, the scientists of all times tried to create the world’s view within the framework of the human mind. Their efforts deserve much respect.

Nonetheless, they can help us in nothing, except in craft, i.e.; the practical use of the results of their research because they can neither feel nor study the forces that govern our world.

Only one who reveals the Creator practically, whose qualities become similar to the Creator, has wisdom in an unlimited sense of the word. To him is included the definition of “understanding.”

Plato wrote that a book gives people a “semblance of knowledge” rather than a real understanding.

He meant that after reading a book, you can convince yourself and others that you know the subject. In Kabbalah, you discover the book to the extent that you comprehend what it describes, meaning, attain this level through your inner contemplation. Moreover, your attainment is individual, in the instruments, the properties of your soul.

What is knowledge?

It is a connection to the higher source, the Light, from where, to the extent of necessity and possibility, a person can draw any necessary information, like money from a bank. But the ability to get knowledge depends entirely on a person’s spiritual level, his screen, not on a successful Internet search.

How can we solve the problem of information?

Everything from search engines to social networks is aimed at ensuring that information is available instantly and for everyone. This leads to its depreciation because the importance of the carrier of knowledge is lost. This is good because what is important is not knowledge, but wisdom, the depth of understanding—insight into the hidden layers of nature. They are attained only by the law of equivalence of form between the researcher and material. Practical Kabbalah prepares a person for this equivalence of form.

But since only few people have a predisposition to Kabbalah, I would suggest the practice of workshops where under the leadership of Kabbalists, any person could be included into the discussion of the hidden knowledge of nature and thus gradually develop his latent ability to realize this, i.e., become a Kabbalist.

These workshops are not like ordinary widely practiced discussions, debates, or brainstorming. They are built on the principles of not opposition but additions; not division, but unity; not dispute, but agreement; as a result, there is a common and new feeling and the resulting knowledge.

How do you see the near future, what features of its development do you foresee?

 The Internet will turn us into inhabitants of non-geographic space. The problem of distance will not be felt by us both in connection between people and in connection with between state and social services, shopping, and so on. We can be constantly connected with everyone. Thus we erase the problem of time. The network becomes a field, free from any state, political, religious, and any other control. This blurs the boundaries of power.

Only the elite remains, which controls the network and manages the world through it: the media, the educational system, and so forth. But the upper governance controls the elite itself, as it is said: “The hearts of ministers and kings are in the hand of the Lord.” The result of the availability of all types of information will be in recognizing the “emptiness” and “Why do I exist?” In the end, everything leads us to the need for personal and public awareness of the need to reveal the upper governance, its cause, law, and purpose. And the method of integral education will be able to answer this.

What does it all mean in the context of the nature of work?

People will stop thinking about reducing the population of the planet. They will come to the need to consume what is necessary for bodily existence and receive other fulfillment from integral communication, through which higher fulfillment will come to them. They will work only if necessary for the acceptable existence of humankind. Work will be entrusted and considered socially necessary, unpaid.

Everyone, without exception from a young age and until his last day, will be in the system of integral education within which the entire personal and social life of humankind will take place. The state would wither away; we observe the disappearance of borders today; the influence of government disappears with increasing networking between people.
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