Question: What criteria can help a person to control his wholeness and integrality?

Answer: The criteria are very simple and clear: for a human being to rise above his egoism and to relate to all members of society according to the principle of “love thy neighbor as thyself.”

Question: This criterion cannot be measured. What does it mean, “to rise” or “love”?..

Answer: This criterion can be measured indirectly. We can never measure our internal efforts that are oriented towards overcoming egoism, nor can we calculate to which extent we are able to include the desires of the other into ours and then try to fulfill them by using resources and aspirations of our own.

So far, it’s not under our control. We don’t penetrate into the essence of nature (the still, vegetative, animate, not to mention the speaking level) deep enough in order to sense the internal forces that govern us. We are speaking here about measuring man’s inner world.

There are some people who manage to rise above their egoism and thus can measure and accurately define both their egoistic and altruistic desires, the forces that act within these desires, the possibilities of transition, and the ways and methods that help them make all sorts of movements within their qualities. However, it’s available only to those who have gained control over themselves and their properties.

It can only be measured by somebody who has discovered the spiritual structure (one’s sensory world) and is able to easily move inside it. When this structure is revealed to him and all these qualities are already sorted, then he clearly sees correlations among them. He can measure his egoism. He comprehends the power and capacity of his personal properties, feelings, and so on, which are not that numerous after all. For him, they are not a secret anymore.
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From KabTV Program “Integral World: Formula of an Integral Society” 7/1/12

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Question: You are saying that the integral community is a closed system. From the courses on Cybernetics and Systems Organization we remember that a closed system is usually very unstable. A system is typically considered stable when it is open and free. Can this analogy be applied towards the integral community?

Answer: In this world, closed systems are unstable since they are under the influence of external factors. They have to be organized in a way that allows them to connect with external influences, neutralize them, maintain reciprocal connections, and interact with them one way or another. In other words, a living system cannot be confined to itself. It continues developing due to the impact of the environment to which it adapts to the best of its ability. That’s its advantage: Its environment expands, etc.

In the system that we are talking about, a person has to be constantly connected with his society; he has to widen his inclusion into his society and vice versa, of his society into him. So, it’s not about a closed system, but rather about a system that is constantly expanding. It’s simply that its growth and gradual development only happen to the degree of its ability to preserve its internal integration.

In all other aspects, all the system ever does is constantly prepare itself to even greater connections with the environment.
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From a TV Program: “Integral World: Formula of an Integral Society” 7/3/12

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Opinion (Peter Gray, Ph.D., research professor of psychology at Boston College): “Most children in our society protest going to school. Am I telling you something new? They protest in many ways—by feigning illness, by dragging their feet in the morning, by doing the least they can to meet the school’s demands (or not doing even that), and by violating school rules when they can get away with it. …

“Are these kids just spoiled ingrates? If so, then you and I—and essentially everyone else who ever attended school after schooling became compulsory—were also spoiled ingrates. We all protested it. In fact, back in the days when schools first became compulsory kids protested it even more than they do now, even though there was much less of it then. They had to be beaten with birch sticks to get them to stay in school and do what the teachers told them to do. …

“As I pointed out in one of the first essays in this blog, the means by which children became educated in hunter-gatherer cultures were the opposite of the means by which we try to educate children in our schools today. One of the most cherished values of all band hunter-gatherer societies that have ever been studied by anthropologists is freedom. Hunter-gatherers believed that it is wrong to coerce a person to do what the person doesn’t want to do—and they considered children to be people. They rarely even made direct suggestions, because that might sound like coercion.

“They believed that people, on their own initiative, would learn to contribute to the welfare of the band, because they would see the wisdom of doing so and experience the joy of it. For hundreds of thousands of years, that was the organizing principle of human society.

“The hunting and gathering life required great personal initiative and creativity, and it required trust that people would share and cooperate because they wanted to. Hunting and gathering people seemed to understand that—and they also seemed to understand that children would best grow up to be free, trusting, cooperative, creative adults if they were permitted freedom throughout their childhood, in the context of the moral community and models that the band provided.

“Throughout our immense hunter-gatherer period, children were free to play and explore all day, day after day, and in that way to educate themselves. Education was always self-directed.

“In fact, the reason children are naturally so playful, curious, and social is because those traits were the motivating powers behind children’s abilities to educate themselves. Those ‘childish’ traits were promoted and shaped, by natural selection, precisely to serve the function of education, in conditions of childhood freedom.

“So, when we force children to sit in their seats and listen to a teacher and do just what they are told, every bone in their body, and every neuron and muscle, resists. Their body tells them, ‘This is wrong. I need to control my own actions; I need to play at the skills that seem to be important to me; I need to explore the questions that I’m curious about, not ones that bore me; I need to pay attention to what people in the real world are doing, not to what this teacher, who doesn’t even seem to be part of the world outside of school, is telling me. If I don’t do these things that I need to do, I will not grow up to be a competent, dignified human being.’ In hunter-gatherer times, a child who did not feel so strongly driven to run his or her own life and education would have grown up to be a misfit.

“So, our children have instincts that drive them to educate themselves through their free play, exploration, and socializing. But we have schools that insist that they give up that freedom and do what they are told to do. The schools have never worked well, and even in theory can’t work well, because they always put the school against the child and thereby evoke resistance.

“This radical approach is to let our children educate themselves, while we provide the conditions that make that possible.”

My Comment: This what integral education provides for children.
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Question: A person can tolerate and adjust to the crises and stresses until he loses all his energy and clearly sees that he has passed a point of no return. Can it happen that all of humanity will encounter this problem and end up being at the point of no return?

Answer: A point of no return is a very good state. To what do you want to return? When I begin understanding that my mind, my intellect, is useless, I try to look for a way out of it. So I come to the conclusion that I am the one who has to change.

Question: How can we make a person understand that the entire pool of resources and energy are almost exhausted and that if we continue dragging a little longer, it will be impossible to change a thing?

Answer: For that, we have to “turn on” the system of upbringing, education, dissemination, advertisement, etc. We have to realize beforehand that it’s our duty to caution society that changes will lead them to the next, better state, whereas a passive advancement under the internal pressure of egoism will only bring us to affliction.

The problem is that we are currently in a state that doesn’t let us come to any solutions. I am talking from the point of view of regular people, as well as scientists, not to mention those who have the authority and who define, so to say, our social development. They don’t regard changing a person as a solution, and that’s why everything remains the same.
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From a TV Program: “Integral World: Formula of an Integral Society” 7/3/12

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Question: In the industrial approach for building an integral society, there are no clear management goals, and essentially, this whole system is totally dependent on an unstable element such as a person, human psyche, and human perception. Therefore, the industrial management system is not good.

Answer: Precisely because of this the system is in a crisis already. Since a modern person is incapable of managing a complex system, he put himself through his ego in such a situation that he uses everything that he produced for unnecessary and totally foreign goals. Look at what is happening! In what debt everybody is in, to what extent we impoverish nature! And all this is basically without any purpose.

Question: This is a paradox of the complex systems. The more complex it is, the more profit can be made from it with minimal investment for management and supervision, but along with that, the smallest failure in a complex system brings much more disastrous results than in a simple system.

Answer: I think that the issue is not in the system, but in man who wants to make profit not by using the system correctly, but in any other way. In any place and in everything, all sorts of inflating economic “bubbles” are expected. We are ready to invent anything possible just to sell and profit from it despite the fact that this money will just lie somewhere in the banks.

In other words, we basically ventured into some field entirely different from the path of development; we got lost. And if this development were for welfare, for fulfillment, for progress… But unfortunately, all this is just for the pocket or for war. Therefore, the crisis here is a purifying element. And it’s very good that it’s being revealed now.

Question: This is an indicator that shows that the society is sick.

Answer: We will not be able to do anything without changing a human being. It’s because this whole crisis and our whole global system is precisely in this state for almost a hundred years: A sick person manages nature and inserts his illness into it. We need to correct the person!
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From KabTV’s “Integral World: Formula of an Integral Society” 7/1/12

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Question: When it comes to building any new systems, the risks that arise during the building process must be considered. Do we encounter this risk factor while building the integral society?

Answer: I think that there is practically no risk here because a person begins to gain a greater and greater sense of being one, integral whole with his surroundings. A person gains a sense of safety, kindness, goodwill, unity, and a lack of anxiety—in short, he feels all those positive qualities he needs and that he only felt in his mother’s arms. Now he will experience these things while being embraced by the surrounding society. There isn’t a more comfortable state than it.

We are not used to this state. We can’t stand it because it’s too sweet and too unfamiliar to us. It’s something to which we have to get accustomed. But over all a person gets a sense of internal weightlessness.

It’s possible that some people would experience uncomfortable states because they are used to being in a state of constant tension, in readiness to attack and kill. However, here you are going for relaxation, for showing others that you are unarmed and that you are ready to embrace them. This isn’t easy. I would say that there is an element of psychological drama here, a revolution, and an inner bifurcation. But overall, I don’t see people having much of a problem with it. All of these things can be overcome and gradually get resolved.
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From KabTV’s: “Integral World: Formula of an Integral Society” 7/3/12

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Question: It’s quite difficult to introduce the formula of “love your friend as yourself” into the existing concepts and to explain it in scientific language.

Answer: Why? Say, if not for the present crisis that distracts us from further development, that is, if we continued to develop international commerce and economics, we would arrive at the completely interconnected integral system. In one place we produce something, in another place consume, manufacture, one thing is connected to the other—all the earth is entangled in the network of various mutual connections.

In this event, how could I predict or plan something, and in general, do something successfully? Suppose that we are two businessmen and want to sign a contract. Can we compose it if we don’t take into account the entire network of international connections?

Question: If I have a structured network and I concluded its laws of development, I can predict this development. Here contracts appear and anything else you like.

Answer: No, because it still depends on millions of people like you, if you all cooperate with each other. You are sitting as if in a web!

Then completely different, integral laws operate, and we can’t control them. We don’t control them. Our egoistic mind allows us only to work between us: The third one is unnecessary, and that’s the only way. We can’t grasp the integral system since it’s an analog system where everything is mutually connected, and we can’t work out these kinds of systems.

It turns out that by signing a contract with you, I don’t know how much it will be implemented since at the same time all the others will also sign their contracts, and everyone will become antagonistic. So what should be done?

Only if we rise above our personal interests to one common interest and begin to feel it as personal to us (imagine what level we must reach), only then can we work together like ants in their society. They operate on pure instinct, the general force directs them.

If we come with our intellect to this kind of society, that would be ideal!
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From a TV Program: “Integral World: Formula of an Integral Society” 7/1/12

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In the News (from The Economic Commission for Latin America): “The weak global economy, mainly due to the difficulties faced by Europe, United States and China, has affected growth in Latin America and the Caribbean. In 2012, the region’s growth will be slower than in previous years, according to estimates presented today by ECLAC.

“In the Economic Survey of Latin America and the Caribbean 2012, launched in Santiago, Chile, the United Nations agency states that slowdown experienced by economies in 2011 carried over into the first half of 2012, and this has brought down the growth projection for the entire year from the 3.7% announced in June to 3.2%.

“According to the document, private consumption has been the main driver of regional growth, thanks to the growth in labour markets, increased credit and – in some cases – remittances. However, the dramatic slowdown in external demand and the downward trend in the prices of most export commodities have made foreign trade the main way in which international crises have been passed on to the region’s economies.”

My Comment: Until recently, Russia, China, Brazil and other countries gloated over the crisis of the “capitalists,” but the world is global and integral and that is why we are together in the same sinking boat, and we must be saved together. Our salvation depends on our mutual help. Indeed, thus Nature forces us to unite before it is too late because otherwise we are facing a world battle.
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Survey (from The European Depression Association): “One in 10 working people surveyed in Europe have taken time off work because of depression, with an average of 36 days lost per episode of depression, according to a new survey from the European Depression Association. This equates to more than 21,000 days of lost working time in this group of people. However despite the size of the problem, nearly one in three managers reported they had no formal support or resources to deal with employees who have depression, and 43% called for better policies and legislation to protect employees.

“Depression is the predominant mental health challenge among working-age people and more than 30 million European citizens will suffer from depression at some point in their life.1 The IDEA survey (Impact of Depression in the Workplace in Europe Audit) polled more than 7,000 people in Europe and found that 20% of respondents had received a diagnosis of depression at some point. The highest rate was in GB (26%) and the lowest in Italy (12%). Among workers experiencing depression, those in Germany (61%), Denmark (60%), and GB (58%) were most likely to take time off work, while those in Turkey were the least likely to take time off (25%).

“The costs of depression were estimated at €92 billion in 2010 in the EU, with lost productivity due to absenteeism (taking time off work) and presenteeism (being present at work while ill) representing over 50% of all costs related to depression.1 In the IDEA survey the average number of days taken off work during the last episode of depression was 36 days, with Germany and GB having the highest (41 days) and Italy (23 days) having the lowest.”

My Comment: In general, depression is the most common disease of our time. Just because it is not fatal and is hidden, it can be easily concealed, and it does not bother society. Where do the current and future unemployed belong? Undoubtedly, with the growth of individual egoism and its transformation into integral egoism that is shown in the interdependence of everyone and everything, depression will grow and turn into the epidemic.
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Question: What is an integral realization and what is an integral attitude?

Answer: We are speaking about a human being, about his internal work. Our attribute is the ego, the desire to be filled. A desire! Therefore we speak about feelings. These aren’t lyrical emotions as we are used to thinking. We are speaking about our essence.

When I work for industry, for banks or for something else, I want fulfillment, I want to gain something, I want to reach be recognized, I want to impress, it is all feelings.

What else can motivate a person if not feelings?

Having felt this, he begins to understand and to perceive what he feels. The mind develops only according to the development of the feeling and not otherwise. The mind has to develop in order to perceive what a person feels and what he doesn’t, what he still lacks. The mind operates when I feel that I need something; to what extent I am full and to what extent I am not. Here our mental tool develops—in order to attain what we desire.

By penetrating deeply into my emotions, I begin to develop the mind and I begin to feel my mutual system of connection with others and my oppositeness from others. Here I have the chance to rate these feelings and to evaluate them both qualitatively and quantitatively.

This means that a mathematical tool enters my work here, and I begin to measure things accurately.

But then again, these measurements are inside me. If I give certain numbers to someone, he will not understand me; he has to be part of this system. He needs to somehow fulfill it internally and then by this fulfillment, he will feel what I have passed on to him in numbers.
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From KabTV’s “Integral World: Formula of an Integral Society” 7/1/12

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