The current crisis includes all of nature’s levels. Recently there was a TV show about natural phenomena that appear as total surprises to people. Among other things, they spoke about an island in the Pacific Ocean whose inhabitants livelihood is based on fishing.

Now when they go out to sea they are afraid to get further than a few kilometers from shore. The climate has changed so much that violent storms suddenly appear and it is impossible to forecast them. Very experienced fishermen who have lived their whole lives at sea relate these happenings; the ocean, which they knew so well, has suddenly become a stranger.

Such is the scale of the general human crisis. After all, man is the upper part of nature and so he has the most destructive power, much more than all the other creatures.

There are revealed and concealed forces in the world. It is hard not to notice the explosion of a bomb. On the other hand, radioactive radiation can only be felt by its effect. There are even finer radiations whose effects can be a total surprise for us. Their source is concealed from us; this is man’s mind power, the power of human desire.

We have reached the end of our egoistic development: The world population produces such powerful negativity that we are simply suffocating one another, and at the same time destroying the levels that are below us. They are great in quantity but weak in quality, and we by our qualitative potential can simply destroy them, which is actually what is happening. This is where the “ocean surprises” and many other phenomena stem from.

So if it is all about our thoughts, let’s correct them. Kabbalists speak about two ways of development: the good path and by suffering. Apparently at the moment we are advancing by suffering. How can we advance in the same direction in the good way? After all, we have one goal—adhesion with the Creator. This is the fate of all the people, of all the nations. This means that we have to explain to them how to follow the good path, and to adapt to the uniqueness of their development.

Man’s mind power is destroying the world. We are causing ourselves and the other parts of nature harm. Today it is possible to openly show people scientifically based examples of this. Therefore, we must treat each other well or we will all be destroyed. So let’s improve our lives with the help of the one force that can help us.

If people ask, “So what is that force?”, we will answer that it is the force of the good mutual connection among us, which is actually another definition for the term “Creator.” Today we must use this force worldwide. After all, there is no distance for thoughts, and they don’t weaken as they draw away from the source and reach even the most distant stars, which are thousands of light-years away.

How can we do that? The time has come in which we will not get anything without the right request. You won’t succeed in anything if you don’t ask for the Creator’s help. Just turn to Him “in the right way,” like a good boy and then you will get your “box of candy.”

What should you ask for? Bestowal.

–          I want to give out these candies to everyone.

–          Great. Take them!

At first it isn’t so attractive, but then you learn. At first you will also be allowed to taste from the general box, but gradually you will begin to enjoy bestowal by taking only what you need.

The danger of destruction threatens you by sufferings if you don’t reach the request for others: “I want to receive pleasure only by seeing that others feel good. Let me enjoy this; give me the power for that! Make it possible!”

This is how the correction is done.
[65309]
From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/4/12, “The Freedom”

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According to the scientific research, the trend of our development is determined by a general law that develops us and brings us to one form. We will have to achieve connection between us that will allow us to feel that all of humanity is interdependent.

Many scientists agree that this is the overall trend of our development. The reason why we aren’t ready to accept this law is because it conflicts with our nature.

Each person is accustomed to thinking only of himself and doesn’t understand that he is dependent upon others. However, if a person realizes, feels, and sees with his own eyes that he is dependent upon others, his first priority would be to ensure the well-being of others so that they would do the same in turn!

Our problem is that we don’t see how round the world is and the extent to which everything is interconnected. Essentially, this is why we’re in the situation we are today. We are in a state of crisis, which is forcefully tearing us away from the life we’ve become accustomed to in the last few decades.

We are accustomed to working a lot, earning a lot, and spending a lot. We produce useful and useless things just for the sake of selling them. We all try to acquire a safety belt: a bank account, retirement fund, medical insurance, good home, and all the things that provide one with a sense of security that he and his children will be taken care of until the end of their lives. This was our goal.

Now it appears as though our set-up was incorrect! Nature is breaking all of our plans. Now even rich people, let alone the rest of the population, the so-called middle class and the poor, are unable to obtain this dream.

Nature is leading us toward the opposite state where instead of chasing the good life for ourselves alone we would acquire confidence, prosperity, development, and well-being from the connection between us.

We are able to see all this thanks to the general crisis, which is breaking all the rules of the past. We are now entering a new era!
[67166]
From KabTV’s “A New Life” Episode 4, 1/4/12

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Nature is leading us toward a perfect state. Up until this point we have advanced by compulsion. From this point forward, we can advance only by adding our understanding of how we develop.

Now we can sweeten and speed up our development through our environment. Both adults and children develop with the help of their environment. Groups like Alocoholics Anonymous, animal rights activists, or weight loss programs are all based on the society’s influence on a person. We have to do the same.

By developing in a good society we’ll be like good children, and in addition we’ll create a similar framework for our children so that they will be good. Ultimately, humanity has but one concern: creating a good environment.

Any parent would be glad to bring a child into a warm, friendly environment, where kids are being taught to unite. This unity provides them with a sense of confidence and rids them of fear of poverty, suffering, pride, and other problems inherent in human nature. It’s nothing out of the ordinary, simply a good environment that provides a “gentle place” for development.

Such an environment allows a person to open up and to better perceive and take things in because he’s not feeling that he’s constantly on the defensive in a hostile environment. We adults don’t even understand what it means to be in a good environment. Just like a newborn baby in the arms of the mother feels nothing except her embrace. This sensation gives him the strength to develop.

We lack this sensation and that’s why we’re facing a global crisis. In all areas where we previously were successful, we now find ourselves at a dead end.

The crisis can on one hand be a catastrophe and on the other hand a rebirth. The word “crisis” comes from the Greek word “krisis”, and means a new beginning. However, we use it incorrectly. Also, the word “crisis” in Hebrew means a place where new life emerges.

We have to explain to people that they need a good environment in order to be happy. The good environment will simply make our lives happy.

Thanks to the good environment for all of us, “I feel confident, I have friends, the whole world treats me well, and I just want to be good.”  All are taking care of me, and I care about everyone. We live in a world imbued with warmth, confidence, and kindness. It’s all love.
[66309]
From KabTV’s “A New Life” No. 2, 12/28/11

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Question: During one of the programs, when speaking about a system of higher education, you emphasized that it’s very important for an individual to attend various courses in person and to choose the one that feels nearest to him or her.

Let’s say that in the course on integral upbringing we formed groups based on people’s inner properties. Should we provide them an opportunity to visit other groups and to find the one that truly suits them? Or conversely, should we set a condition from the onset that it is better for him or her to study precisely in a given group and not another?

Answer: I think that the composition of physical groups for in-person study be fixed. But of course, it’s also possible to have special cases when a person transitions from one group to another.

But I doubt that the transition to a different group would be easy for a person who already joined and is interacting with a group in which studies are combined with practice, discussions, and role-playing exercises. He would not be able to do that until he begins (which will take a certain period of time) to understand integrality and the correct and easy interaction with others, independent from their level of perception, whether emotional or intellectual.

I think that the initial phase, which gives a person the freedom from his or her own self through the influence of the group, should be strictly fixed.
[65531]
From a “Talk on Integral Education,” 12/13/11

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Question: During one of the previous programs you mentioned that it’s better to begin a course on integral upbringing with the history of the development of egoism and only after that to introduce the courses on perception of reality and psychology. From your point of view, in what order should these disciplines be added?

Answer: I think this also depends on the people that we enroll. We should arrange these groups by types. After all, a mass of people has its own laws: One individual influences another. Sometimes one person among fifty could easily shatter our entire system with his or her remarks and divert everyone to a completely different direction, either with nihilism, fanaticism, or something else.

That is, primarily we should form groups of people considering who they are, their general worldview, understanding of life, and philosophy. They could be either simple ordinary people, or housewives, or engineers and technical workers, or scientists, or people of the arts.

That’s why groups need to be arranged according to people’s makeup and their inceptive perception of the world, even though that perception is imposed, evoked, and accumulated in them through distorted relationships in their occupation, their society, and so on. But we need to take this into account because that’s the material that we have to work with. Our task is to bring it to a common denominator since ultimately, we expect that all these people will be connected together through a common base of knowledge, feelings, and understanding.

In the end we will get several group prototypes, which we need to bring to some kind of a common form through the process of studies. And each of these groups will have their own path towards that common denominator.

Naturally, some groups will perceive the study material more emotionally, while others more dryly, scientifically, and technically. Some groups will perceive it on the level of their egoistic development, without rising beyond their current benchmark (although by no means do I mean to diminish this part of humanity), while other groups will strive exactly towards analysis, attainment, and realization of this process to the full measure both in themselves and in others.

That is, the set of disciplines should be practically the same for all groups, but in different groups each discipline needs to be developed to varying depth. Courses need to follow one another, with the exception of the one on development of egoism, which will continue throughout the entire study to its very end and will remain with the person upon completion of studies.

After a person is “released” into life, he will not stop working with the information that he received, meaning that it’s as if he will still be continuing our coursework. These courses are practically endless because we have to reach a complete unity with nature. A person’s work on himself isn’t restricted to a defined segment of time, where he just passes his exams and that’s it. He is taking exams on his own every minute of his life, finding the point of equilibrium with himself, his environment, and nature, in which he feels complete comfort.

We need to continuously aid a person in that and to accompany him his entire life through mass media, education via virtual systems, television, and radio.

That is why I cannot name the exact sequence in which to arrange the courses and to what extent each of them should be subject to elaboration or truncation, for example, a course on psychology or on mechanics of egoistic development. There must only be one result: a common form in each group that initially is composed of people who are more or less similar in their social status, development, and attitude towards the world.

Naturally, even within that commonality they will still differentiate based on the level of their participation in the integral process of unification and mutual support. There are lower groups that participate on some small egoistic and, consequently, emotional and mental level of development. There are more advanced groups. And then we cannot exclude the existence of such groups that could be considered not only by their level of egoism, but also by their sensitivity and intelligence.

We have a lot of statistical and diagnostic work ahead of us in the analysis and synthesis of all the groups. In and of itself, this is a very interesting psychological challenge. I believe that one day this large field will be included in the science of integral concord of humanity.
[65533]
From a “Talk on Integral Education,” 12/13/11

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Question: Where can we find specialists who will connect different subjects together, such as psychology, sociology, and so forth? We can invite a psychologist who will tell about his subject, but where can we find people who can see the bigger picture and are able to connect all the subjects together?

Answer: I think that a student who studies these subjects simultaneously will start connecting them into one. However, of course, there needs to be another subject that connects everything into one, especially through discussion.

I think that we can adapt Baal HaSulam’s articles, leaving out everything to do with Kabbalah or religion, so that we get a large amount of material that connects everything into one picture. It contains such inner power that it would allow a person to apply all previously acquired knowledge.

This is the same way that I use all the knowledge I previously acquired even though I studied it without knowing anything about Kabbalah. Now, using the tools given by Baal HaSulam, I see the same principles in electronics, physics, chemistry, and medicine. This allows me to connect all these sciences together. I think that we can achieve this by abridging our materials.

It’s clear that if a chapter in a book about integral education is dedicated to history, we need two people to work on it: an historian, a specialist in this subject, and a Kabbalist, someone who can see the whole picture. All study materials and programs must come from us.

Even a course in physiology and psychology should be studied in the framework set by us because nobody needs to study the human skeleton simply for knowledge. We must extract only the basic, general knowledge from these sciences.
[65204]
From “Lessons About a New World” 12/1/11

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Question: Israel is facing the question of free preschool education, which will require great cutbacks in other areas. Each time we are faced with a choice between one thing and another and it is always one at the expense of the other. How can such conflicts be solved?

Answer: We don’t see things correctly. Actually there are such surpluses that we could build another state of Israel, but we don’t see them. The point here is not how to save, but to distinguish where our resources are being squandered uselessly and wasted.

On the whole, we shouldn’t touch the budget and increase the deficit. We only have to find the billions that are wasted, go nowhere, and help no one. It all stems from negligence and carelessness, from the fact that we aren’t concerned about the situation as a whole. Each one considers and loves himself and as a result great wealth is being squandered.

There is no secret here. Observe yourself and how you use electricity at home and somewhere else, how organized and thrifty you are when it comes to your property for which you pay dearly, and how indifferent you are to wasting at the expense of strangers. In another’s place we are happy to splurge, but at home we are happy to save. So if we treat the whole national economy like the home economy, we will find such excess that we didn’t even imagine.

If you really check things in the Ministry of Education you will find such breaches into which not just some but a great percentage of our resources are pouring. Sift everything that isn’t for the benefit of the students, shake the system, and you will see how much will “fall” out.

On the whole, the attitude is that we don’t have to sacrifice one thing for another. No aspect of life should be deprived in order to strengthen others. If our major concern is mutual concern for the state like as for our family, then by changing our attitude and as a result of our desire to be efficient, we sill discover such great surpluses that we will have to think of how to spend them.

But since we don’t do that, the crisis will do it for us. It will “shake” us against our will. If we don’t put things in order, it will be done for us.
[65848]
From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/9/12, “The Freedom”

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If we examine human development, it becomes clear that it stemmed entirely from our desire. Time after time, man desired more and more. Long ago we had small desires, like simple village folk: a few cows, a small piece of land to grow food to eat, a spouse and kids, and that was quite enough. The desire was small.

Then the desire began to grow. It pushed us to start selling our goods at the marketplace and in cities. And in return, we began to buy fine clothing and some special items that we didn’t have before. Man arrives in the city, sees some miracle machine for cultivating land, and begins to work even more diligently to acquire it. Or he borrows money from someone to first buy the machine and then returns the loan after he sells the harvest which is larger thanks to this machine. So we begin to develop and establish increasingly tighter bonds between us. Our ego grows and pushes us to develop.

This is the usual story of humanity based entirely on man’s developing desire: We want more and more, but why? Our desire grows. I don’t know why, but suddenly I feel that I want something more, and then more and more. I look at others and I see that everybody aspires to something. And I follow their lead because inside me there’s envy, lust, ambition, and the thirst to rule. I am interested in buying from them things that are useful to me, but I don’t want to be below them. After all, I have an ego of my own, and I don’t want to feel like I’m losing. I want to win!

If we consider human development in this vein, we’ll see that this is what drew us forward. We were always looking around us and learning from others. There were some among us with an active imagination capable of inventing and innovating technology, economics, medicine, and everything that could be used to benefit humanity and fulfill our desires. This is how we developed.

When the time came, we waged wars, conquered new territories and nations. Then the time came to discover new continents, develop technology and commerce. Then we went out into outer space and continued developing, until we found ourselves at a dead end. This is something humanity began to feel around 50-60 years ago.

Starting in the 1960s, intelligent people, engaged in the study of the environment, society, and the process mankind was undergoing, began to warn us that we have come to a dead end and were simply continuing to march in place. Something happened to us, and we could no longer see where to continue developing.

At the time, the space program allowed us to forget about it somewhat. But even the space program ended quickly. So what if we fly around the globe one more time, or fly to the moon again; we’ve done all that already, so what’s next? We’ve seen that it doesn’t help us much; all these things are on the still level, not even vegetative or animate. And we failed to locate any alien civilizations despite our hopes and dreams of finding intelligent life elsewhere.

And here is where we arrive at emptiness. We’ve developed to a point where we’ve got nowhere else to go; we don’t see any future prospects. Our inner nature, as well as the external nature, meaning the world that we feel around us, no longer opens itself for us. Whatever we’ve got, that’s it, and nothing more. And then the people that discovered this, such as sociologists and philosophers (Fukuyama and others) began to warn us and write many books about it, calling it the end of humanity. On the other hand, other scientists claimed that the world develops cyclically.
[65861]
“Talks About a New Reality,” Talk 1, 12.27.2011

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Question: A modern person has accumulated a wealth of various limitations: He was prevented from expressing his feelings, they were trivialized, and so on. That is why his standard reaction to something new is negative. Initially a battle within a person always takes place between an interest towards something new and a fear of it. How can we maintain a person’s interest despite his fear and resistance?

Answer: When starting to talk about a person, his physiology, psychology, sociology, family relationships, and so on, we need to do it objectively, abstractly, not relative to the person himself. And only afterwards should we gradually include examples: Here is a man, a woman, and children; here is a person as he is, he reacts to himself in a certain way and is composed of certain images of vision, perception, and so on. In other words, we begin to talk about some abstract object and gradually bring that object to the person himself. I think this way we won’t encounter a problem.

The fact of the matter is that a modern person doesn’t know any of this. We hide our nature, we are ashamed of ourselves, ashamed in front of others; we are afraid to show any sort of weakness because we think that others could take advantage of it. I have to show that I stand firm like a wall behind my immutable opinions, which I do not actually have at all.

When we gradually reveal what man, society, and nature in its global and general form are, little by little we get used to the fact that we are the way we are created: It isn’t me, and everything in me works independently from me.

Then what exactly is this “I”? I is only the one who can research what in him or her is created by nature.

Like doctors who aren’t ashamed in front of each other or their patients, or psychologists who can express their own and other people’s feelings without embarrassment, understanding that all of this is an objective reality, we, too, are the way we are. Likewise, we also need to bring a person to such a state.

Everything needs to be based precisely on the fact that the next stage of our development is complete integration of everyone into everything, when all parts of nature get incorporated into a person, a person into them, and people into each other, and together with nature we represent one organic whole.

In such a case there is nothing here that I have to conceal, be embarrassed of, and attempt to hide from others. I must ultimately reach a state where, conversely, I am obliged to fully reveal myself and be connected to everyone.

It’s like an infant who lies in his mother’s arms: He is nothing and nobody, yet she concentrates all of her attention on him, and from the point of view of nature, relative to his mother he has absolutely no barriers, borders, or screens; on the contrary, an absolutely complete connection exists. We too, as a result of our integral education and upbringing, need to reach such a connection in the future.

That is why our flow in teaching, experiencing these courses, in their structure and interconnection (where one course begins and another ends, or a few of them go parallel to each other) needs to be structured precisely so: along the axis of time. Courses should supplement one another and follow either consecutively or overlap with each other so that people gradually develop a correct attitude towards themselves, to other students studying in the group, and towards the whole world.
[65538]
From a “Talk on Integral Education,” 12/13/11

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Question: In the courses on integral upbringing and education, we intend to first of all educate people who lost their job. The majority of them is disillusioned with life; many have difficulties with their family, self-actualization, and so on.

The first thing that you may encounter in such a group is resentment, frustration, and aggression. Would people in this state be able to perceive such distant, abstract, and theoretical information? What should we start with in order to find common ground with people?

Answer: We have no other choice. We, people, consist of two halves: heart and mind, and they have to balance each other. Then a person develops harmoniously, sees the world and himself within it. Perhaps he sees both himself and the world as unbalanced, but his worldview becomes more or less correct.

Therefore, first and foremost we have to counterbalance all of today’s problems with knowledge: From where did these problems arise, what is  their origin, their necessity for our continued development, what exactly we need to come to, and so on.

As the first order of business people must necessarily complete an educational course, and not the ones on upbringing, practical work, and game scenarios—they are still far from that. The practical work within such groups begins only when the state of all sorts of problems and crises is balanced. People begin to understand the essence of these problems; they can now discuss, decide, arrive at some kind of an opinion, object, and discern the truth. But it gets discerned when feelings are balanced by knowledge.

If right now we simply take 50 people from the street and start to talk to them about today’s problems, we’ll be confronted with complete lack of understanding of our point of view. Correspondingly, feelings prevail above the mind, and we won’t get anywhere.

This is what happens in today’s world. Without understanding the general system of nature, its development (beginning, middle, and end of this path), and the state of humanity (where we exist in this moment along the axis of time), we evaluate everything only on the basis of our small, worldly egoism that doesn’t allow us to obtain the correct result. Moreover, we make wrong decisions about the future and with that bring ourselves into an even more difficult state. That is why, personally, I have no doubts that first and foremost we need to pursue education.

Precisely with that we begin our interaction with children. We always need to take our natural attitude to children as an example.

Everything begins with explanations. A child develops and feels: I sense this and that. A correct upbringing lies in supplementing a child’s feelings with explanations and with a system of correct attitude towards what he feels and how he perceives everything. This has to be balanced in adults as well. Without this we cannot advance.

Only to the extent that a group adapts this knowledge into itself does it realize and understand the causality and consequences of the feelings, their cause and effect development, and is able to see itself from the side. When a person rises above his self, he can separate his own “I” and see himself and society from the side.

The same way in psychology: You look at a person not as an individual, but from the side, trying to imagine him as a certain psychological object. Then, exploring him, you begin to give him some concrete recommendations, fragmentary explanations without even explaining who and what he is. But in principle, these explanations too are based on some kind of balance between knowledge and feelings. You cannot do without that.

That’s why in the first place we will have to introduce the courses that we spoke about in the last talk. It is a great amount of knowledge.

In the process of study, this knowledge gradually gets absorbed by people, and a person then starts to internally assimilate it along with feelings. At this point we need to start fortifying it with practical exercises that help a person balance knowledge and feelings.

A person can receive an initial sensation of that state by studying the material first-hand. We need to tell him about the origin, evolution, and properties of egoism and to present it completely objectively as a certain existing reality independent from and having nothing to do with us, so that a person could absorb everything in the form in which it exists in nature.

Next in the same course, a brief explanation can be given about how egoism works in a person: how it manifests itself in our world, in connections with family, children, with one’s own self, and so on.

That is, education involves at the very least separation into two parts, when we objectively lay out what is taking place in nature and try to express that in a somewhat dry, scientific language, and afterwards, as a supplement to that, we utilize this. After that is when the practical training begins, where we try to investigate our feelings from the point of view of reason.

A theoretical study is always reason, and we study it, fill ourselves with all kinds of knowledge, data, graphs, formulas, images, discernments of relationships, and so on, while gradually adding a little bit of feelings to that. In other words, studying always proceeds from two directions, “reason and feelings”: feelings in reason and reason in feelings.
[65541]
From a “Talk on Integral Education,” 12/13/11

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