In the News (from Newsweek Magazine): “The latest developments in cosmology point toward the possibility that our universe is merely one of billions.

“In Einstein’s day, the possibility that our universe could have turned out differently was a mind-bender that physicists might have bandied about long after the day’s more serious research was done. But recently, the question has shifted from the outskirts of physics to the mainstream.

“And rather than merely imagining that our universe might have had different properties, proponents of three independent developments now suggest that there are other universes, separate from ours, most made from different kinds of particles and governed by different forces, populating an astoundingly vast cosmos.

“The multiverse, as this vast cosmos is called, is one of the most polarizing concepts to have emerged from physics in decades, inspiring heated arguments between those who propose that it is the next phase in our understanding of reality, and those who claim that it is utter nonsense, a travesty born of theoreticians letting their imaginations run wild.

“Remarkably, mathematical analysis also revealed—and here’s where the multiverse enters—that as space expands the cosmic fuel replenishes itself, and so efficiently that it is virtually impossible to use it all up. Which means that the big bang would likely not be a unique event. Instead, the fuel would not only power the bang giving rise to our expanding realm, but it would power countless other bangs, too, each yielding its own separate, expanding universe. Our universe would then be a single expanding bubble inhabiting a grand cosmic bubble bath of universes—a multiverse.

“Through years of painstaking observations of distant galaxies, the teams collected data on how the expansion rate of space has changed over time. And when they completed the analysis, they all nearly fell out of their chairs. Both teams found that, far from slowing down, the expansion of space went into overdrive about 7 billion years ago and has been speeding up ever since.”

My Comment: Kabbalah says that everything is perceived in a person, in his property to receive, and to feel a different universe means to accept its qualities, to give, instead of the present one, to receive. Kabbalah presents us with this opportunity.
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Opinion (Smitha Mundasad, from BBC News): “Half a century ago, in the drug industry’s golden era, we were bestowed with countless pills to lower blood pressure, control blood sugar and get rid of infections. But today it costs about $1bn to bring a new medicine to market, a process that can take 15 years.

“The industry faces multiple crises as budgets are squeezed and tough scientific challenges loom.

“Academics and patients’ groups are concerned we will not have the drugs necessary to treat future ills.

“Last year, the World Health Organization’s director general, Margaret Chan, warned that the world was heading for a ‘post-antibiotic era.’

“She raised fears that many common infections might no longer have a cure and could once again ‘kill unabated.’

“Major problems, Dr Chan suggested, included growing resistance to antibiotics.

And as the population ages, many of us will battle with neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, where new drugs are also lacking. …

“Prof Paul Workman at the Institute of Cancer Research points to another pressing issue: “With the problems of the financial crisis there has developed something of a vacuum that many of us describe as ‘the valley of death’.

“This is the valley between basic research and innovation on the one hand, and patient benefit and commercial success on the other, with this chasm in between into which there is a lack of funding and a lot of failure.

“He points out that they don’t do the whole thing alone, often partnering with smaller and larger companies in later stages. …

“What all these newer models of drug development have in common, it seems, is collaboration – perhaps presenting a cultural change for an industry that many people believe has had competition at the centre of its working.

“But, says Prof Vallance, while there is need for more collaboration in the early stages of drug development for some of the more complex diseases, that will turn into competition at a later point.

“’There will be fierce competition to get the best drug first, to make sure you do the right trial and show you’ve got the best medicine.’”

My Comment: Medicine and the pharmaceutical industry appear as the largest commercial organizations, opposite to the Hippocratic Oath. What can you expect from them!? People no longer trust doctors, who prescribe medication profitable to their organizations but not helpful to the patient. In everything, egoism works against us!
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In the News (from GALLUP): “In the U.S., one’s marital status appears to have an impact on one’s wellbeing. Americans who are married have higher wellbeing than those who are not married, with those currently separated or divorced lagging far behind. …

“Clearly, marriage has economic benefits and ending a marriage can have serious economic consequences, which helps explain part of the gap in wellbeing by marital status. …

“Marriage also brings companionship, emotional support, and partnership in dealing with life’s ups and downs that can foster a higher level of personal wellbeing. Social interaction is inherently part of marriage, and Gallup analyses have clearly shown that time spent socially and social networks themselves are positively associated with high wellbeing.”

My Comment: According to Kabbalah, the institution of marriage is the basis for sustainable development and existence of a person, protecting him from stress and creating a special kind of inner stability. Throughout time, Kabbalists did not accept unmarried students, considering a man who has no family underdeveloped, at least socially, and that doesn’t let him fully realize himself in this world, for what Kabbalah is intended.
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Opinion (Barry Schwartz, Psychologist): “Barry Schwartz tackles one of the great mysteries of modern life: Why is it that societies of great abundance — where individuals are offered more freedom and choice (personal, professional, material) than ever before — are now witnessing a near-epidemic of depression? Conventional wisdom tells us that greater choice is for the greater good, but Schwartz argues the opposite: He makes a compelling case that the abundance of choice in today’s Western world is actually making us miserable.

“Infinite choice is paralyzing, Schwartz argues, and exhausting to the human psyche. It leads us to set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them and blame our failures entirely on ourselves. … Too much choice undermines happiness. …

“‘Clinical depression has exploded in the industrial world in the last generation. I believe a significant — not the only, but a significant — contributor to this explosion of depression, and also suicide, is that people have experiences that are disappointing because their standards are so high, and then when they have to explain these experiences to themselves, they think they’re at fault. And so the net result is that we do better in general, objectively, and we feel worse. …’

“‘If some of what enables people in our societies to make all of the choices we make were shifted to societies in which people have too few options, not only would those people’s lives be improved, but ours would be improved also. This is what economists call a ‘Pareto-improving move.’ Income redistribution will make everyone better off — not just poor people — because of how all this excess choice plagues us.’”

My Comment: In any case, rational integration and redistribution (equilibration) always brings benefits to everyone—even according to the laws of economics.
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Opinion (Bhaskar Patel, USA, General Director of Cybersoft Technologies, Inc., from the international research paper Models of Post-Crisis Development): “If we learn to cooperate and co-exist, all other progress is possible and becomes easier; it will also be easier to deal with natural calamities; otherwise we will consume unnecessary energy and resources for internal fights.”

Mustafa Badawy, Columbia, entrepreneur and founder of the company Colacom: “I believe the 21st century will be the spiritual century – to consume less, to live more happily. This earth can no longer take our consumption rhythm, I mean the consumption rhythm of the USA, China and the EU.”

Adriano Benayon, Brazil, professor of economics at the University of Brasilia, author of “Globalization versus Development”: “Spiritual values, if they correspond with the common good and are independent from established religions, seem most important to me, since technology is neither good nor bad in itself: it all depends on what technology is developed and employed for.”
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In the News (from Daily Mail): “More than a hundred years after noted historian Baron John Acton coined the phrase ‘power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ scientists claim the saying is biologically true.

“The feeling of power has been found to have a similar effect on the brain to cocaine by increasing the levels of testosterone and its by-product 3-androstanediol in both men and women.

“This in turn leads to raised levels of dopamine, the brain’s reward system called the nucleus accumbens, which can be very addictive.

“Cocaine works in a similar way, which can have varied effects from increasing alertness, confidence, energy, feelings of well-being and euphoria, but also anxiety, paranoia and restlessness.

“Power has almost identical effects to cocaine and too much of it can produce too much dopamine leading to more negative effects such as arrogance and impatience.

“The claims by Dr Ian Robertson may go some way to explain the outlandish and impulsive behaviour of city fatcats, tycoons and celebrities.

“Writing in the Daily Telegraph today, he said: ‘Baboons low down in the dominance hierarchy have lower levels of dopamine in key brain areas, but if they get ‘promoted’ to a higher position, then dopamine rises accordingly. This makes them more aggressive and sexually active, and in humans similar changes happen when people are given power.

“’Conversely, demotion in a hierarchy decreases dopamine levels, increases stress and reduces cognitive function.’

“He added that power has also been found to make people smarter because dopamine improves the functioning of the brain’s frontal lobes.

“Submissiveness and dominance also give similar effects through the same reward circuits of the brain as power and cocaine.”

My Comment: If, as Kabbalah says, the entire matter is a desire to receive the desired content, behavior, addiction, and human development can be explained in this way. Except for knowledge, the fulfillment by power is the greatest source of pleasure in the hierarchy of desires. Above knowledge, there is only the striving to know the Creator, not by means of the mind, but by means of the soul, the corrected desire.
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Opinion (Nicholas Christakis, MD, PhD, co-author of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives): “One of the key ideas about human social networks is that, in the addition of ties between people and specific patterns of ties that obey particular mathematical rules, the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. The collection of human beings have properties that do not reside within the individuals, and this collection of human beings is now able to do things that they previously were not able to do. And one of the illustrations or examples that I most like to give about this is something that most people are familiar with from high school or college chemistry, and that is the example of carbon.

“So, you can take carbon atoms, and you can assemble the carbon atoms into graphite, and here we put a particular hexagonal pattern of ties, and you get sheets of graphite, and this graphite is soft and dark. Or, we can take the same carbon atoms and assemble them differently into a kind of a perimetral structure with the ties between them, the bonds between the carbon atoms, and we get diamond, which is hard and clear, and these properties of softness and darkness, or hardness and clearness, first of all, differ dramatically, not because the carbon is different. The carbon is the same in both, but rather because of the ties between the carbon atoms. And second, these properties are not properties of the carbon atoms. They’re properties of the group, properties of the collection of carbon atoms. Therefore, when we take constituent elements and assemble them to a larger whole, this larger whole can have properties that we could not have foreseen merely by studying the individual elements and properties which do not reside within the individual elements.”

My Comment: Through the unity between us, we create the property that brings the upper energy (Ohr Makif) to us. Due to this influence, we become changed from obvious egoists to altruists.
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Opinion (Dr. Sandi Mann, a senior psychology lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire): “According to new studies, boredom in the workplace is growing, affecting everyone from the high-fliers to the drones.

“…boredom – after anger – is the second-most commonly suppressed emotion in the workplace. …

“What’s more, Dr Mann believes fewer of us are willing to put up with boredom as we expect every aspect of our lives to be fulfilling – an attitude that would have been far less common among older generations  with a more practical outlook. …

“A study on the link between counterproductive work behavior and boredom by Montclair State University and University of South Florida identified six ways bored employees might harm their organizations: by abusing others, by ‘production deviance’ (purposely failing at tasks), sabotage, withdrawal, theft and horseplay. The most common of which is withdrawal. …

“[Mark] de Rond, [from the University of Cambridge’s Judge Business School] also says there is a type of boredom where professionals get bored not because they don’t have enough work, but because they feel they have nothing worthwhile to do.”

My Comment: To the extent of the growth of egoism and, moreover, to the extent of it turning into a spiral, when it becomes globally integral, all the negative effects and emotions will be more and more manifested, and no psychological trick will help, except for the correction of egoism itself.
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In the News (from Bloomberg Businessweek): “It’s just after lunchtime on a drizzly day in the Amsterdam suburb of Bos en Lommer, and the line of people waiting to fill their bags with free rice, juice, potatoes and bread is lengthening.

“The market is one of 135 food banks in the Netherlands bailing out people trying to survive on less than 180 euros ($234) a month, the threshold to qualify for the aid. Organizers say demand for the service rose 20 percent in the first quarter…

“Europeans everywhere are changing jobs, homes and habits to accommodate lower pay, shifting markets and slowing economies. …

“The crisis is now at the door of nations previously considered invulnerable such as the Netherlands. …

“‘The lines will get bigger and bigger as more people lose their jobs and have trouble paying their rent or mortgage,’ said Piet van Diepen, a food bank board member.

“In the Netherlands, more than 23,000 people get aid from the food bank, he said. The numbers also are increasing in places such as Britain, where figures showed this month that the economy has slipped back into recession amid the biggest budget cuts of any of the 10 largest EU countries.”

My Comment: This could be an opportunity to send these people to courses on integral upbringing. In a few months, the face of Europe could change. Social relations, mutual guarantee, communication, and sense of community would lead to the similarity to the fundamental law of nature of unity and cooperation.

To that extent, we would feel that social and political tension decrease, and we would discover new mechanisms of the regulation of social life. As Baal HaSulam writes, the country that decides to implement the system of uniting society through the education of its citizens will become the most prosperous and exemplary country in the world in a few months.
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In the News (from Business News Daily): “According to a study of co-author Bryan Bonner, an associate professor at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, ‘for groups to be successful, they must exploit the knowledge of their (individual) members effectively.’

“The research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, proved this by looking at how both individuals and groups answered difficult questions. …

“’People find they often know more than they think they do. They realize that they might not know the whole answer to the problem, but there are a couple things they do know that might help the group come to a solution.’”

“Therefore, leveraging what individuals already know is the key to solving a range of problems, according to the research.

“According to Bonner and co-author Michael Baumann, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas in San Antonio, improving the ability to transfer old knowledge to new situations may be as simple as attempting to solve problems with others. This is because, when several people team up to solve problems, the group has several viewpoints to bring together in order to reach a solution.

“’Although the sheer amount of brainpower it takes to consistently and effectively transfer learning from old to new is beyond many individuals, groups of people working together can actually be very good at it,’ the researchers said.

“With that in mind, this research may not only change the way organizations go about solving problems, but also how organizations are constructed in the first place.”

My Comment: At all levels of unity, the likeness to the single organism of nature is good. Gathering separate people into a single organism immediately creates not only a simple sum, but more than the sum of them, precisely due to the force of the similarity to unity, the property of the Creator.
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