Baal HaSulam, “600,000 Souls”: And when a single soul from Israel is purified from all its filth, it will draw onto itself the whole of the soul of Atzilut, and through it, all the souls of its generation will be completed. This is the meaning of one being dependent on the other, as it is written (Sanhedrin, 11), “It was befitting that Divinity would be upon him, but his generation was unworthy of it.”

There is the matter of individual success and there is the matter of the success of the group, and there is also global success of all of humanity. These three components have to be arranged together. It is like in an eclipse of the moon, where the moon the sun and the Earth are arranged in the right position. The soul also has to be in the same line with the generation (the group) and with the world. They have to be synchronized in some way and then the action is possible.

This is the time we are living in: There is already a crisis in the world; there is a crisis between people; there is great confusion and a great deficiency. In addition, the wisdom of Kabbalah and the necessary means are revealed. Everything is arranged the same way just like during the eclipse of the moon when the Earth conceals the light of the sun, or the other way around when the moon conceals the sun and then the world becomes dark, which is an eclipse of the sun.

The special current era is characterized by the fact that all these relative forms operate for the sake of the general advancement. If in the previous generation the world wasn’t worthy of that, now the generation is already ripe.
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From the 3^rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson, 10/10/13, Writings of Baal HaSulam

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In the News (from nakedcapitalism): “Over the past few years, I have written a series of articles arguing that the ageing of populations across the globe would have major adverse implications for consumption spending, asset values, and government revenues and taxation.

“I have also argued that the impacts from ageing would likely be most acute in Western Nations, although some developing countries, most notably China, would also be negatively affected.

“The problem stems primarily from the coming end of the demographic ‘sweet spot. ’That is, where there is a high proportion of working age people supporting only a small pool of dependents. Such an advantageous age structure has affected almost all of the world’s major economies and produced a population structure optimal to economic growth – that is, where the largest segments of the population were neither young nor old, but in the middle (i.e. working age). …

“The danger is not in the slower growth. Slow growth is not a bad thing. It’s still growth. The danger is in an expectations gap, in which we consider slower growth unacceptable….

“The high growth rates experienced in the decades leading-up to the global financial crisis were an anomaly and growth is likely to be far more sedate going forward as the population ages and dependency ratios worsen.”

My Comment: Growth will not happen; the world will nonetheless come to equilibrium when we produce exactly what is necessary not to enrich, but to provide everyone with the necessary goods and services and no more. Nature will destroy everything manufactured in excess of this by any means at its disposal: epidemics, natural disasters, wars. Indeed, the plan of nature is to bring all its parts, including humanity, in balance.
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Opinion (Michael Khazin, economist): “The word crisis is losing its original meaning. In fact, the crisis is a tangible change in the quality of life, a decent apartment, a car, clothing, home appliances – a middle-class standard.

“The problem is that the society of welfare of the middle class has encountered a problem called ‘massive credit.’ Today, the average citizen in developed countries spends 25% more than his real income. Equilibrium is achieved by the drop in the level of income of the middle class. Consumption should reach a new equilibrium point – when the mass consumer’s spending will fall by 50% from the current level, that is, will fall twice as much.

“The whole world that stands on the middle class awaits the painful disappearance of the middle class – that will be a real crisis.

“They will become the lumpen, and as a consequence, there will be increased drug abuse, falling birth rates, lowering of cultural level. So, the real crisis is not the economic but social problem.”

My Comment: When we now turn to the middle class, we are met with a complete misunderstanding and inattention to our ideas about the re-education of society and individuals. After all, they still do not feel any threat, and due to their shortsightedness, of course, they do not wish to take part in changing themselves and society.

But the blow will come, and we need to prepare for their readiness to get closer to us. In the meantime, we need to work with part of the lower-middle class, which already feels the crisis and despair.
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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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