Entries in the 'Integral Upbringing' Category

Everybody Needs Integral Knowledge

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: There is official science and all sorts of other trends like New Age, psychedelic practices, shamanism, and so on. Science is supported by governments, but doesn’t interest the masses. Only a small group of people work in the field of science, “cooking” in the same pot, whereas millions of people are involved in the other practices. What can we do to prevent a similar rift when teaching the integral method so that not only scientists, but regular people with their interests, connect to this process?

Answer: I think that this is possible because both groups, the scientists and the so-called “shamanists,” have reached a dead end.

Of course, both boast great armies of followers who make money, careers, power, and fame in their respective fields. The same is true for philosophers. Philosophy has long outlived itself, and yet philosophy faculties continue to exist and thrive, defend dissertations, and issue academic degrees.

Generally speaking, all of them can be connected to integral education. We need to try to address all of them individually, in a way that’s convenient for them, and explain where evolution is taking humankind, the kind of society we find ourselves in. Society is integral, while man is individual. The opposition between man and society begets the crisis, which can lead us to highly undesirable consequences, and this needs to be explained to everybody: philosophers, psychologists, and shamanists alike.

Somewhat detached from all this are religious figures for whom it is taboo to keep contact with just about anyone. However, I think even they gradually will connect to the integral movement because the same theories of unity lie at the foundation of all religions, and this doesn’t contradict their worldview. At the very least, they will not be able to openly oppose the integral method.

Therefore, the first step is disseminating to people in all trends the knowledge of where we’ve come to. That’s on the one hand. On the other hand, we must independently develop a massive international institute where we can train people to explain and disseminate this idea, this method, throughout all the layers of the population, from small children to the very elderly.
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” 5/24/12

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When Did The Integration Begin?

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: What is the history of the appearance of the integral system? Where did the interest in it come from? And how did it evolve?

Answer: When you explain to people about the appearance of the integral system, you must lean on scientific research.

Take, for example, psychology, it was created from behavior patterns in the new world, in a new society, which didn’t exist on the previous level of the ego, and only after did they become apparent in the growth of their new aspects. This drew the attention of the scientists, who immediately began to research them. From this psychology was born.

In the same way, in the beginning of the middle of the last century, integration and cooperation began to appear. In principle, it had already begun in the days of Columbus, from the discovery of the new continent and mutual cooperation that indicated the end of the period of the Middle Ages and progress towards our times.

Thus, our explanations must be based on the data of scientists, on their research, on their importance and value in the eyes of the society, and on nothing else.

Today all kinds of scientists are beginning to explain the facts about integration. Thus, it isn’t worthwhile to pull out the sources of the integral system from the past. It really was discovered in the ancient world, but it waited until our times, until the beginning of this century, the 21st century, when man’s ego had ended its growth and become integral.
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” 5/24/12

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Freud Is Not My Consultant

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Why is it that scientists such as William James and Freud are not seen as part of our generation?

Answer: Because recently our desires have begun developing very quickly, rising so rapidly that each generation simply doesn’t understand the previous generation; we can see this very clearly.

In the past children were like their parents. A son stayed at his father’s home and worked at the same place that his father worked. If a father was a blacksmith, then his son was a blacksmith too. If a father was a weaver, then so was his son. When the son got married, he built his home next to his father’s, or they lived under the same roof. This means that everything developed in a simple linear way.

Technologies like the printing press developed from one generation to another, but they didn’t lead to any great changes, they were only simple machines.

In the 20th century we were suddenly part of a technological breakthrough that released our inner desires. Indeed, our desires, our perspective of the world, changed rapidly with every generation in the previous century. If a generation referred to a whole lifetime in the past, then today it refers to periods of 15-20 years and in such a length of time everything changes completely!

People see me as a dinosaur, and it is really so since the perspectives and flavors of my childhood, in the 50’s, the previous century, are all ancient history today. Time is so condensed now that it is simply beyond the limits of modern man’s understanding. Besides, in my days there was a totally different approach to science, technology, and culture. We had to read a certain number of books, to know musical pieces, and art. You were not considered a man if you didn’t absorb everything that was created by humanity, if you didn’t visit about 20 museums. It was embarrassing if you didn’t know something or didn’t understand.

Today it isn’t so. Today all this is put aside from the beginning. If you have a modem and a computer, you don’t need anything. A person doesn’t process the centuries old human culture through himself anymore. There is a totally new approach. I’m not criticizing anyone; I am simply stating a fact.

The search isn’t from ancient times till our days since the time axis is suddenly broken and has become round and  integral. The world is different and so the knowledge of the past is useless in the present. For the first time we begin to experience this in every aspect of life: in our professions, our family life, etc.

I can’t read books that were written 20 or 30 years ago, which advised us in the past, because the advice is irrelevant today. So every couple of years there is a reformatting of all the experts in the field of medicine, science, and technology in everything. The world today has not only accelerated, but it is also locked in a round integral system.

Although those psychologists were great innovators, they discovered the linear egoistic development of humanity, so we cannot use their advice today. Freud based his theories on man’s sexual urges, but today they take on such a form, such a change that I doubt whether we can use them to solve the problems of modern man or modern society.
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” 5/24/12

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Total Disappointment

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: On one hand people find psychology very interesting today, but on the other hand, there is a growing resentment of it. What are the roots of this phenomenon?

Answer: People hoped that a new field of science that discovers our inner world, the inner mechanism that operates us, the nervous system, the internal balancing system, the cooperation between man and the world around him, would enable us to receive a quick, natural explanation that would help us feel comfortable in this world. But eventually, a person comes to psychologist who tells him that he needs a certain number of sessions, he needs to pay for them, to make certain efforts, and he doesn’t know what all this would lead to.

Besides, a person comes to psychologist when he is so tense that he naturally directs all his anger and frustration at him. Generally speaking, it is undoubtedly a great disappointment.

The psychologist isn’t the one to blame here. He is only trying to do whatever he can. I believe that most psychologists do not focus only on making a profit, but they also want to succeed, to see that their efforts really help.

But today they will not succeed in doing that. They have to change because a person needs to become an integral person, so naturally a psychologist should first practice this on himself and change, then he will succeed in his work.
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” 5/24/12

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Psychology As A Mirror Reflecting The Development Of Ego

Dr. Michael LaitmanHuman evolution occurs as a result of the development of the ego. By existing within inanimate, vegetative, and animate nature, a person constantly and dynamically develops under the influence of the egoistic desires that overcome the simple primitive desires and become more and more complex.

The desires are divided into physical ones for food, sex, and family, and into human ones for wealth, respect, control, and knowledge, and spiritual needs.

If we divide the time axis on which humanity develops into sections, then since about the 5th century BC until the 5th century AD people aspired for wealth. Of course, the exact time is debatable since it all depends on which civilizations we are looking at.

From the 5th century until the 15th century, the desire for power and respect grew. The Middle Ages isn’t just a period of time in which humanity froze, but a period of deep internal development that is typified by very serious events, such as the Crusades, etc.

The next stage in the development of the desire is from the 15th century until the 20th century and it is typified by the yearning for knowledge.

After that, everything began to wane and from the beginning of the 20th century we started a new era, the era of the conscious necessity of attaining the meaning of life.

Although we come across the first psychological quests in the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt, Plato, and the ancient Greeks, it was all on a level that doesn’t yet touch the inner essence of man, since it wasn’t revealed in ordinary people yet and not in great personalities that could be studied.

Only after fulfilling the physical desires and the human ones did we enter the area of the spiritual needs that belong to a person’s soul, which means not the way he lives, what he invents, and how he manages in life, but the essence of his existence, his personality, and the meaning of his development. Then the serious question regarding knowledge appeared. Here psychology was born. It happened at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, but on the whole it all leads to our times.

After the first phase of the development of psychology, its gradual waning and the disappointment in its abilities began. The shift from research and new discoveries to mere psychological work made people feel tranquil instead of showing them the process of their development and raising and developing them.

By understanding how much we don’t understand this process, by perceiving to what extent we don’t perceive the goal of our development, psychology seems to have turned to a narrow practical area, shrinking and limiting itself to practical applications, limited by the training of different experts, by publishing different articles, and by calming people using different methods. The result was that psychologists began to serve people instead of taking people and raising them to the next level of development, which was actually expected of psychology.
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” 5/24/12

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“Fat Cat” Bankers Cause Hunger

Dr. Michael LaitmanOpinion (from AlertNet, Thomson Reuters Foundation): “Speculation on food prices played out on the trading floors of the Chicago Board of Trade and other commodity futures exchanges are to blame, critics say.

“’People are starving because the markets are out of equilibrium,’ said Yaneer Bar-Yam, director of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), a research institute, which has analysed the impact of speculation on food prices.

“’Food prices have nothing to do any more with the real price of food, or the availability of food,’ Bar-Yam told AlertNet. …

“’Deregulation of commodity markets has led to increased volatility and contributed to food price spikes that have caused massive harm to millions across the world facing hunger and poverty,’ said Christine Haigh, campaigns officer at the World Development Movement (WDM), an advocacy group.

“Before deregulation, agricultural futures markets were mainly used by farmers and food buyers to protect themselves from risks such as bad harvests. A futures contract provides protection by locking in a price for a promise to deliver a crop at a future date.

“But in recent years, investors have poured unprecedented amounts of money into agricultural commodities – spurred to hunt elsewhere for profits after the dotcom crash of 2000, the U.S. property market meltdown in 2006 and the 2008 financial crisis.

“They have become major players – in the past five years investment in food commodities by banks and hedge funds has risen to $126 billion from $65 billion five years ago, according to a report by WDM.

“A 2011 study by UNCTAD concluded that the commodities market had stopped to function ‘properly’ in a way where prices are shaped by supply and demand.

“’The activities of financial participants drive commodity prices away from levels justified by market fundamentals,’ the study said. …

“Wheat prices, for example, rose 46 percent between January and February 2008, fell back almost completely by May and increased again by 21 percent in July before falling again in August 2008. …

“There are signs some banks are listening to arguments that food price speculation harms millions of people. Germany’s DekaBank, last month said it was pulling out of investing in basic food stuffs, such as wheat, soya, maize and meat.”

My Comment: In the world, there is an excess of everything, including food. It is only the speculation of the “fat cats” that leads to the unequal distribution and hunger. The crisis, destruction, famine, and environmental catastrophe will compel us to decide to curb our egoistic nature. And the question of how to do this will lead us all to the method of integral upbringing.
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The Greatest Pleasure

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: In the last few years, we have seen a very interesting phenomenon in some European countries: 60% of the women set a physiological orgasm as a goal in sexual intercourse, which means that by and large they don’t actually don’t care who they are with, as long as they learn to experience this pleasure. This leads to the fact that men are afraid of behaving naturally and of cooperating with women, and the rate of divorce has increased sharply. Can integral education solve this problem?

Answer: The need for sex is one of the basic human necessities. And so in daily life, people are constantly drawn to it. This need is evoked in them, it motivates them, and people assess things and they form the basis of this need.

In principle, the need for sex is basic, not because it is “beastly” and allows us to give birth and ensures the existence of our species, but because it enables us to come in contact with one another, which brings us to a very unique state because this state is both our starting point and our ending point; we look at its final form, we see it as the moment of highest pleasure. I will call it sexual pleasure, but actually it is the fusion of all the people together into one unique desire and its fulfillment.

According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, it is called the upper coupling, intercourse. Different religions also speak about that, and many things are based in this. This refers to the maximum connection of all the parts of creation that complement one another, of all the parts that bestow and receive that are called masculine and feminine.

Now, the phase in which our previous, relatively small, mechanical and beastly connections and sexual desires that have provided us with certain attitudes to communication, connection, family, and in which people have played with one another or used one another reasonably well, is now coming to an end. It doesn’t exist today since we are moving on to a totally different level of need.

On one hand, people are losing the natural need for sex the way it used to be. On the other hand, the desires of the next level are revealed, and it doesn’t matter if they are sexual needs or other needs such as food, everyday needs, and so on. New needs from the new level appear, and people don’t understand them and cannot fulfill them. They think that they will manage to fill themselves by using the old methods.

This will continue to grow. These desires will always manifest in a more and more exaggerated form.

We must explain to people that it is the connection with others that will help them understand that they can be filled by everything, including the desires we call “sexual.” It very well may be that they will not take the form of sexual acts anymore and will have nothing to do with that. The greatest pleasure for a person will be his integral connection with others, and it won’t matter that it isn’t a sexual act. The emphasis will be on adhesion, while our sexual relations will gradually descend to the ordinary, beastly level since we actually are not worthy of anything else. However, the pleasure, the filling, will be felt clearly in the connection among us, and it will be called the coupling of opposites.

Question: So, this means that different deviations, not necessarily sexual deviations, but also overeating and overuse of other luxuries, are the result of a person’s inability to move on to the next level of fulfillment?

Answer: Yes, he tries to fill the new desire by using the old means. It is actually impossible to fill these desires with the same old methods, but only by using new, round means. This is the crisis.
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” 5/23/12

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Overcoming Indifference And Boredom

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: A man must structure the work time in his life very clearly. Today, this is a problem since most adults spend more of their time being idle than they do working. How do we bring up young people so that their day will be correctly planned?

Answer: The problem is that a person is bored today. He cannot captivate himself with work. Everything in life seems to have no meaning for him. This is a problem for all workers, especially office workers, up to the managers. The manager locks himself in the office, “I’m busy!” But actually he is languishing.

There is the same pretending to be busy with the employees and officials of all levels at work. This is natural. People are losing the desire to create, produce, and do something. They cannot force themselves to work. A person is lying around, sitting, fiddling with something.

It’s good that the Internet is there today. It is simply a panacea against boredom because people are busy with something at least; otherwise, there would be a more rapid degradation. Although in this case, it would have been much easier, we would quickly feel like a wilted plant. All of this is a consequence of the evolution of our desire, which has grown to its maximum and can no longer be fulfilled with anything.

This started back in the sixties of the last century with the generation of “flower children,” “Beatles,” the hippies who “went” into meditation, used drugs and so on. This was the first signal.

Now, working on integral communication with people, we are using quite a simple tactic. First, you must see how much the society works on a person; how much it excites, captivates, and rules over him; how much his personality begins to become inspired by the opportunities, desires, and goals of the environment; how much the environment influences his personality, and that is why, depending on the games we carry out, we begin to awaken in everyone, good or a bad relationships, all kinds of changes, transitions in perception, in thoughts, in decisions, in evaluations and so on.

The point is that if we correctly include a person within the surrounding society, then his desire, being the base of all of his existence, the desire, which earlier was very small (because he did not want anything, he could not move a finger) now becomes ten times greater because it is in a group, which is beginning to stimulate him, constantly shaking him up.

Finally, he becomes permeated with the desires of everyone else and, most importantly, he is awakened, he gets some kind of a small internal stress. And this takes him out of the state of indifference.

I think that this should be adopted by all work groups if they do not want to sleep throughout their lives. After all, they do actually have to do something for the good of the society. Therefore it is necessary for them to come and unite, so that even though one may be sleeping, they would be mutually stimulated by each other. And then they will have additional desire, the urge, and growth, and they will begin to live and work effectively.

It is the same with children. Meaning that the environment performs such a tuning on the personality with which it begins to receive the desire of all of the surrounding people and becomes much more energetic than before.

In addition, such a strong desire creates the environment for the person for further development. This is not simply heightened attention, but the possibility to rise above others and to lower oneself before them, to absorb information from the surrounding people and most importantly, to achieve coming out into the center of the circle and feeling the commonality through which we would be looking at the world and solving all of the problems correctly.

It is a higher desire, higher thought and mind, which does not relate to me or others. It is something, which we have created now by our own effort and incentive. And this common thing, which was born between us, is our next level, which is more developed. Looking through this level, approaching the world through it, each one of us brings himself to the correct solution.
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” 5/23/12 

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Money Or Elation?

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: In the corporeal world, a person who makes great effort into working on something gets a reward, for example, in the form of money.

Answer: Money is a fulfillment. This is how a person depicts his greatness, power, and domination. Money itself has no smell, but it is these images and descriptions within our desire that draw us to money as to something that is equivalent to all the fulfillments. In an equal, integral society, the equivalent of fulfillment is elation, the sensation.

Question: How should society give us this feeling? Does it happen automatically?

Answer: Of course, society is already on this “round” level, just like all of nature that is now revealing itself actively. It was always round, but we looked at it through our linear ego. Today, when the ego is becoming round, we are becoming more like nature that surrounds us, and eventually we discover an infinite source of energy and fulfillment.
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” 5/23/12

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Europeans In Crisis Started Drinking More

Dr. Michael LaitmanIn the News (from Reuters): “People in Europe drink more alcohol than in any other part of the world, downing the equivalent of 12.5 litres of pure alcohol a year or almost three glasses of wine a day, according to report by the World Health Organisation and the European Commission. …

“In a breakdown of drinking by sub-region, the heaviest drinkers were in central-eastern and eastern Europe – consuming 14.5 litres of pure alcohol per adult per year compared to 12.4 litres in central-western and western Europe, 11.2 litres in southern Europe and 10.4 litres in Nordic countries.”

My Comment: Humanity will certainly plunge into any means that help to disconnect from reality, especially those who are ruined and unemployed, and only the quick organization of the courses in integral education and upbringing will help not only to prevent falling, but also to raise people to the next level of development, a “Human Being,” to what the crisis pushes us.
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