In the News (from Business Insider): “The global economy is in the worst shape since the dark days of 2009. Six of the 17 countries that use the euro currency are in recession. The U.S. economy is struggling again. And the economic superstars of the developing world — China, India and Brazil — are in no position to come to the rescue. They’re slowing, too.

“The lengthening shadow over the world’s economy illustrates one of the consequences of globalization: There’s nowhere to hide.

“Economies around the world have never been so tightly linked — which means that as one region weakens, others do, too. That’s why Europe’s slowdown is hurting factories in China. And why those Chinese factories are buying less iron ore from Brazil. …

“For now, few foresee another global recession. Central banks in China, Britain, Brazil, South Korea and Europe have cut interest rates in the past month to try to jolt growth. European leaders have begun to focus more on promoting growth, not just shrinking debt and cutting budgets. …

“Many fear that Greece and perhaps other countries will default on their debts and have to abandon the euro currency, which could ignite financial chaos across Europe. …

“In the latest wallop to the global economy, China said last week that its economic growth fell to a three-year low. The world’s second-largest economy grew 7.6 percent in the April-June quarter compared with the same quarter last year. That was the slowest growth since early 2009. Countries like China need fast growth to serve growing populations and millions of people leaving farms to seek work in cities.

“Brazil also has a U.S.-style problem with consumer debt: Since 2003, about 40 million Brazilians have entered the middle class and brought a strong appetite for consumption. Brazilian leaders credited those consumers with invigorating the economy in recent years and helping protect it from external shocks.

“But most of the buying has been on credit. And those bills are adding up. In a report last week, London-based Capital Economics estimated that debt payments now eat up 20 percent of household income in Brazil. …

“Similarly, the outlook has dimmed for India, the world’s fourth-biggest economy. Its growth slowed to a 5.3 percent annual rate in the first three months of 2012, the slowest rate in nine years. …

“The slowdown in the developing world could make it harder for the economies of Europe and the United States to climb out of their ruts. And the weaker the rich countries get, the harder it will be for developing economies to regain their old fast pace.

“’In today’s interconnected world, we can no longer afford to look only at what goes on within our national borders,” IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said earlier this month. ‘This crisis does not recognize borders. This crisis is knocking at all our doors.’”

My Comment: This is how the “Law of our natural development” teaches us; evolution teaches us through small sufferings; it teaches us that the world is round and we are interconnected in it, and that is why we need to think not only about ourselves, but about everyone like in one family. If we continue to be stubborn, suffering will increase and in spite of everything lead us towards unity, in the bad or good way, depending on our behavior.
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Opinion (Vasily Klucharev, a neuroeconomics researcher at the University of Basel, Switzerland): “By studying the activity of neurons, neuroeconomists come to the conclusion that a human being is not free in making decisions: They are predetermined. If some information is given at the entrance (the brain), the output will turn out a quite predictable result. There is a certain predetermined decision-making mechanism.

“From the neurobiological point of view, a decision is a pattern of neuronal activity. Our brain receives very “noisy” information at the entrance; it makes sense to save it in time, integrate it, and only after a certain threshold to opt for the best solution. If we follow this neural model, which accumulates information, compares alternatives, and based on that decision makes our decision, the notion of “freedom” disappears. In this regard, every human being is a sort of puppet.

“In my opinion, the idea of freedom is a kind of social illusion. This is not a new idea. If we turn to the works of Spinoza, Kant, we find the same views, only presented from a philosophical position. I like Spinoza’s expression: ‘A man deceives himself, talking about freedom. He just does not know the real causes of his behavior.’”

My Comment: Kabbalah speaks of the illusion of freedom on the first pages of the textbook for beginners because its first task is to bring people to the condition in which a person develops freedom of decision and action. However, such conditions arise during the study of Kabbalah as a method of correcting our egoistic nature to the opposite, altruistic nature through awaking in oneself the force of bestowal—the Light.

Only to the extent of the manifestation in a person of the property of bestowal along with the property of reception, the two opposite properties, strengths, and qualities, does a person get an opportunity to act freely in their right combination, in the middle line.
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In the News (from The Christian Science Monitor): “But for as long as there have been arts, people have wondered what effect violent content has on behavior. Plato wanted to keep young people away from intense plays, which he felt skewed proper character development. His student Aristotle disagreed, arguing that drama had a cathartic effect, channeling off anger and aggression. …

“Conclusion: Media violence poses a threat to public health inasmuch as it leads to an increase in real-world violence and aggression. Every category of violent imagery had an effect: fictional TV and film, TV news, video games.

“At the same time, recent neuroscience experiments appear to indicate that prolonged exposure to violent and aggressive imagery decreases inhibitions about actual violence and aggression. While all such research remains provisional, the preponderance of evidence does seem to side with Plato, not Aristotle.”

My Comments: Only the environment (the influence of all kinds of people and the media) brings up a person, develops in him a scale of values and the level of restrictions. That is why, once in a certain environment, people can no longer resist its influence and become like it.
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In the News (from The New York Times): “Political scientists are defensive these days because in May the House passed an amendment to a bill eliminating National Science Foundation grants for political scientists. Soon the Senate may vote on similar legislation. Colleagues, especially those who have received N.S.F. grants, will loathe me for saying this, but just this once I’m sympathetic with the anti-intellectual Republicans behind this amendment. Why? The bill incited a national conversation about a subject that has troubled me for decades: the government — disproportionately — supports research that is amenable to statistical analyses and models even though everyone knows the clean equations mask messy realities that contrived data sets and assumptions don’t, and can’t, capture.

“It’s an open secret in my discipline: in terms of accurate political predictions (the field’s benchmark for what counts as science), my colleagues have failed spectacularly and wasted colossal amounts of time and money. The most obvious example may be political scientists’ insistence, during the cold war, that the Soviet Union would persist as a nuclear threat to the United States. In 1993, in the journal International Security, for example, the cold war historian John Lewis Gaddis wrote that the demise of the Soviet Union was ‘of such importance that no approach to the study of international relations claiming both foresight and competence should have failed to see it coming.’ And yet, he noted, ‘None actually did so.’ …

“Alas, little has changed. Did any prominent N.S.F.-financed researchers predict that an organization like Al Qaeda would change global and domestic politics for at least a generation? Nope. Or that the Arab Spring would overthrow leaders in Egypt, Libya and Tunisia? No, again.…

“The political psychologist Philip E. Tetlock began systematically quizzing 284 political experts — most of whom were political science Ph.D.’s — on dozens of basic questions, like whether a country would go to war, leave NATO or change its boundaries or a political leader would remain in office. His book “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?” won the A.P.S.A.’s prize for the best book published on government, politics or international affairs.

“Professor Tetlock’s main finding? Chimps randomly throwing darts at the possible outcomes would have done almost as well as the experts.

“These results wouldn’t surprise the guru of the scientific method, Karl Popper, whose 1934 book The Logic of Scientific Discovery remains the cornerstone of the scientific method. Yet Mr. Popper himself scoffed at the pretensions of the social sciences: ‘Long-term prophecies can be derived from scientific conditional predictions only if they apply to systems which can be described as well-isolated, stationary, and recurrent. These systems are very rare in nature; and modern society is not one of them.’”

My Comment: Indeed, our time is a time of insight, although, unfortunately, of gradual understanding and often belated. It remains to realize the biggest misconception, “the future is entirely predictable if we know how to build it.”

Humanity is inside the environment called “Nature.” Both Humankind and Nature are systems that have their own laws of behavior and development. Their mutual influence can and should be studied, and most importantly changed, by changing humanity.

This is possible by introducing the methods of “Integral education.” Even the limited application of this method will produce a clear positive response, both in society and in the surrounding Nature, and thus will become a distinct example and proof of the correctness and effectiveness of the “method of managing the future.”
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Research (Cameron Anderson, psychological scientist of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science): “New research suggests that overall happiness in life is more related to how much you are respected and admired by those around you, not to the status that comes from how much money you have stashed in your bank account. …

“‘One of the reasons why money doesn’t buy happiness is that people quickly adapt to the new level of income or wealth. Lottery winners, for example, are initially happy but then return to their original level of happiness quickly,’ said Anderson.”

My Comment: Our essence is the desire to enjoy, no matter from what it comes, but among all the desires the highest one on the scale of pleasures, the most powerful and long-lasting is approval, respect, honor, fame. That’s why, in the integral community, the whole economy and the calculations will be based upon receiving non-monetary rewards and social approval.

The standard of living will be one and will be determined only by natural characteristics of each individual, and the reward for effort in bestowal to the public will be “paid” by the attitude of society towards a person; thus, competition will be many times more than the desire for material reward. See Baal HaSulam’s article “The Last Generation.”
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In the News (from The Atlantic, Psychological Science):

“PROBLEM: Happiness makes us smile, but can smiling make us happy? Even if it’s a fake smile because your mouth is propped open by chopsticks? There’s the standard smile which remains located in the muscles surrounding the mouth, and the genuine (or Duchenne) smile which spreads to the eyes, and at least anecdotally, they both look and feel warmer and more natural. Does one work better than the other?

“METHODOLOGY: In an experiment that was smile-worthy in its own right, researchers used chopsticks to manipulate the facial muscles of their 169 participants into a neutral expression, a standard smile, or a Duchenne smile. In addition to the chopstick placement, some were explicitly instructed to smile. Then, they were subjected to a series of stress-inducing, multitasking activities, which they struggled to perform while continuing to hold the chopsticks in their mouths. The subjects’ heart rates and self-reported stress levels were monitored throughout.

“RESULTS: The participants who were instructed to smile recovered from the stressful activities with lower heart rates than participants who held neutral expressions, and those with Duchenne smiles were the most relaxed of all, the most positive affect. Those with forced smiles held only by the chopsticks also reported more positive feelings than those who didn’t smile at all.

“CONCLUSION: When a situation has you feeling stressed or flustered, even the most forced of smiles can genuinely decrease your stress and make you happier.”

My Comment: Also the method of bringing people to the perfect state is based on the conscious correction of our nature, work on ourselves, when a new habit becomes a new nature, and repetitive actions show our qualities hidden from us.
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Opinion (Larry Lang, professor of finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong): “Larry Lang was reported by The Epoch Times as saying that China’s economy is on the ‘brink of bankruptcy’ and that ‘every province is a Greece.’ …

“According to the Chinese government website (www.gov.cn), the audit found 10.7 trillion yuan of local government debt at the end of 2010, a result of easy loans made possible by the government’s 2008-2009 stimulus injection. …

“The audit discovered that 1033 such companies have problems such as false-financing, the registered capital being unpaid-in, illegal provision of funds and the withdrawing of them by local governments and departments, involving a sum of 244.15 billion yuan,” the audit said in its findings. …

“In a controversial series of claims, Lang said that overall debt in China was as much as 36 trillion yuan (US$5.68 trillion), official inflation figures of 6.2% were as high as 16%, domestic consumption represented only 30% of economic activity and that there was ‘serious excess capacity.’ He added that despite government headline figures of 9% growth in GDP, production had actually shrunk in China.

“‘Once the economic tsunami starts, the regime will lose credibility, and China will become the poorest country in the world,’ Lang concluded in the lecture.”

My Comment: Everything is just unfolding, but since the script is already open, it makes no sense to talk about it. We are facing either a new understanding and correction of people and social relations or a world war, after which we will repeat evolution and nonetheless come to correction.
[84288]

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In the News (from DailyMail): “British children as young as seven are taking ecstasy and cannabis, it was revealed today.

“Nine-year-olds are also trying cocaine and often it is because their parents are failing to control them, experts say.

“The Government’s annual crime survey has shown for the first time the youngest users of the most popular drugs in Britain – cannabis, ecstasy and cocaine.

“They found almost one in three who have ever smoked cannabis first tried it when they were under 16.

“Around six per cent of those who had ever taken Class A cocaine took it first at school and 8.2 per cent had taken ecstasy before they turned 16.

“Jeremy Todd, chief executive of the charity Family Lives, said: ‘We speak to thousands of families every year and evidence shows that parents are the main influence on how children approach drugs and alcohol. …

“But it appears that drugs are getting less attractive to young people. (…) Cannabis use has dropped the most, while there have been reductions in ecstasy and cocaine compared with the 1990s.

“High school children taking drugs is down 12 per cent and the number of under-16s trying cigarettes is at its lowest for 30 years.”

My Comment: Drug use goes; the desire to reveal the meaning of life comes. This is the next form of desire that a person will have to satisfy. It begins to appear also in those who don’t use drugs. It is the desire to understand what makes life worth living, what the purpose of nature is, and what it wants from us. The very existence no longer gives people force to live. The struggle for life will become so severe that if not for drugs, then suicide. The sharp decline in birth rates, the general reluctance to start a family, the lack of goals will force people to find it.
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In the News (from The Guardian): “Although the world was hoping for a good US harvest to replenish dangerously low grain stocks, this is no longer on the cards. World carryover stocks of grain will fall further at the end of this crop year, making the food situation even more precarious. Food prices, already elevated, will follow the price of corn upward, quite possibly to record highs.

“Not only is the current food situation deteriorating, but so is the global food system itself. We saw early signs of the unraveling in 2008 following an abrupt doubling of world grain prices. As world food prices climbed, exporting countries began restricting grain exports to keep their domestic food prices down. In response, governments of importing countries panicked. Some of them turned to buying or leasing land in other countries on which to produce food for themselves.

“Welcome to the new geopolitics of food scarcity. As food supplies tighten, we are moving into a new food era, one in which it is every country for itself.

“The world is in serious trouble on the food front. But there is little evidence that political leaders have yet grasped the magnitude of what is happening. The progress in reducing hunger in recent decades has been reversed. Unless we move quickly to adopt new population, energy, and water policies, the goal of eradicating hunger will remain just that.

“Time is running out. The world may be much closer to an unmanageable food shortage – replete with soaring food prices, spreading food unrest, and ultimately political instability– than most people realise.”

My Comment: I have repeatedly written that according to the program of nature, revealed by Kabbalah, we face a general crisis. Nature must lead us to a change—the correction of ourselves from individualists-egoists to altruists who strive to unite everyone like in one family—because this is the entire system of nature, and we have developed to the state when we must match it consciously. That is why the blows of nature on society and individuals will not stop, but on the contrary, they will increase to the extent of our resistance, not wanting to understand and accept a different path of development, the path of mutual bestowal and love instead of individual receiving and hatred.

There is no doubt that a person has to overcome his egoism, but it is possible to acquire new properties easy and quickly under the influence of the correct environment (a group, society). Otherwise, nature will force us to do this by immense suffering. See Baal HaSulam’s article “The Freedom,” chapter “A Path of Torah and a Path of Pain.”
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Opinion (Ana Tajadura-Jiménez, Stephanie Grehl, Manos Tsakiris, Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom): “Psychologists at Royal Holloway, University of London, have discovered that sharing a synchronised experience with another person may change the perception we have of ourselves and make strangers appear more familiar and similar to ourselves. …

“Dr Ana Tajadura-Jiménez, one of the researchers: ‘… synchronized events between individuals might act as a form of social glue that makes people feel closer and more similar to each other.’

“The researchers point out that several of our everyday social interactions involve synchronised events, including walking alongside people where we tend to synchronise our steps and the power of dance, sports and rituals seems to rely, at least in part, in synchronised sensory experiences. ‘Our participants shared a simple sensory experience with another unfamiliar person, and yet we show how this experience changed their representation of how they look, and made this other person appear more similar to themselves. This finding shows how the sense of who we are, our sense of identity, is given to us by our interactions with others, and is, eventually, reflected back to others,’ says lead researcher Dr Manos Tsakiris.”

My Comment: The source of this is that we are all connected by one inner network of connections in which our complete internal communication occurs. We are one whole, filled with the upper Light. But this state is hidden from us by our egoism, and that is why even in external similarity to our egoism we find pleasure: the illumination of the upper Light.
[84022]

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