Question: According to the method of integral upbringing, men and women should have a warm, good, and kind relationship. But in experience we see that the woman is never satisfied and is always pressuring the man. What is the right way to work with this state?

Answer: During workshops, it’s necessary to discuss how men and women properly complement one another on different levels. I think that as a consequence of integral upbringing, they will reach a level of mutual understanding when they will no longer separate things into “this is your responsibility and this is mine.” Gradually, people will mutually begin to combine and redistribute responsibilities and mutual help, and then everyone will clearly see how easy it is to do it.

There is no place here for demands. Demands appear when one of the sides lacks understanding of what its part is and what it ought to do.

Personally, even though I, in general, understand human nature, I had problems with my wife until we started doing 40 minute morning walks, during which we calmly discussed all our issues. Talking during walks helped us better understand one another. In addition, we have an agreement not to argue and not to demand anything from one another. We are constantly moving above our natural qualities and, in this way we reach the proper understanding of any circumstances.

However, the problem is that people do not have time for this. I think that, during the workshops, we need to teach people how to find time for this type of communication. Let us hope that people will have enough free time for this in the near future. But we will still need to organize them.

Even my teacher compelled all of his students to spend at least fifteen minutes a day calmly discussing the method and the conditions of their mutual development with their wives. This is very serious, social work. If we also did this with children, if we were to hold round tables in our families, the world would be a different place.
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From a Talk About Integral Upbringing 4/4/13

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Question: During the process of integral education for married couples, very interesting processes happen. In the beginning, a new feeling of closeness, euphoria develops between the husband and wife. But after two to three months, they feel anger or even hatred for one another.

Answer: They need to discuss this problem. After all, mutual repulsion is the most natural subject because our egoism grows. Through our attempts to connect we develop our ego, and it begins to grow specifically against the unity. This is a new ego, which didn’t exist previously—it hadn’t manifested in people in any form. And it’s being revealed now.

Today, each couple needs to learn how to work with their shared ego. Each one needs to understand his partner since in each of them manifests the ego and the anger towards the spouse, and they need to help each other through their mutual connection.

When a couple dances, the right side of one of the partners is facing the left side of the other partner and vice versa. This is how we need to help, to complement each other, and then we will have a harmonic dance. And if you annoy me, then all right, let’s both of us rise above that. If from my side comes rigidness, then from the other side needs to come tenderness. This is how it happens: The right hand against the left, and in this way we complement each other. After all, embracing is also similar to this.

A person is built in such a way that he constantly interacts with others not by the same but rather opposite attributes. Then the “convex” part fits into the “concave” part and contact is made; that is, the male and female parts as if connect with each other. The contact can be only between the plus and minus since the pluses and minuses repel one another. This is something that has to be learned.
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From a Talk on Integral Education 4/4/13

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Question: I really would like the world to be a better place after the convention, a place where no one takes advantage of others, where there is no more pain, my bank account is fine, and life is good. Is that possible?

Answer: I think that it is in our power. Just imagine that many of our friends all over the world unite around this convention. These are the people who have the spiritual sparks, the particles from the upper world. If we connect them all, we can do anything!

Since our entire world is still, it doesn’t have the power to change anything. Now, when this becomes so clear, we see that no one can manage the world, and no one knows how to manage it either.

A century or two ago, we could do so since our ego was not so developed yet, and we could change the way we used it. However, now it is impossible. The ego has become closed, it has become round, and so no one in our world knows what to do with it.

Only we can take advantage of the fact that it has become round, which means connected and tied with others, while the egoists cannot since they are all separated. So, when the world becomes global, strongly connected, and mutually interdependent, everyone throws up their hands in despair, and no one knows what is going on. We see that they cannot manage even financial systems, not because they aren’t knowledgeable enough but because the rules in the world have changed.

The integral connection, the analog system that is now taking over, won’t let an individual or an egoistic group manage things. Only if you establish an analog system between several people can you change the world somehow, by using it like a management panel. The egoists cannot do that. Only we can, and this also includes your bank account.

So, everything is in your hands. If you ask us to connect to you, you will see how this happens. It isn’t mysticism or magic but real spiritual laws, which means that they are above our world. If you positively change the way the system works, you will see to what extent things change in the corporeal world since our world is an outcome of the spiritual forces. Nothing happens on its own. Everything is managed by an inner force to which you will have access.

Thus, you will understand why we need suffering in this world, including an overdraft in your bank account and everything else that is happening in the world. All this is meant to awaken us to rise to the upper force, even if it is in order to manage our corporeal life. From the height of this force, we really can do something; but as long as we don’t do that, the problems and troubles in our world will only grow. Therefore, the ball is in your hands.
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From a Talk On Preparation for the Congress in New Jersey, 5/10/2013

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Question: People who are seriously involved in the integral method feel a need for a similar society because they cannot manage these things individually. They want to communicate with others more. Is it possible to do this virtually?

Answer: In order to solve integral problems, we need to feel, hear, and as if “smell” the person. We are similar to animals and perceive a person in his physical dimension. Thus virtual communication is not enough.

It’s certainly possible that one day there will be virtual connection that will create the illusion of everyone’s presence but, until then, it’s not possible. We need to ensure that people will feel complete communication. This is the way we have to create even an interior space and all that helps people, until it doesn’t matter to them where and how. And afterwards they will also feel this at a distance, just like a mother feels her child.
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From a Talk on Integral Education 4/4/13

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Question: How can I become more sensitive to the fact that I am a component of the integral system?

Answer: This sensitivity develops when a person tries to devote more and more attention to his connection to the group. He checks himself whether he sees the friends as his beloved children, whether he has sweet thoughts about them, and whether he wants to feel their suffering as if it were his actual, physical pain.

A person must try to increase his sensitivity and his attitude and decipher the concept “as yourself.” It isn’t easy since a person manages to do that for a moment and then, the next moment, he falls and is detached from this feeling since our ego doesn’t want to suffer for the whole world. However, a person still advances time after time.

The Masach (screen) he acquires helps him to share everyone’s suffering and at the same time, justify the Creator and rejoice. The spiritual Masach works that way, giving a person the endurance without lowering his sensitivity to suffering. Thanks to that, he can experience very deep feelings that can be both good and bad.

In our work, we either sweeten or cover up our suffering through the mind, through the thought that many suffer from the same things that we do and that it isn’t our personal pain. In a time of war, for example, when many are killed, it is easier to bear the loss. It isn’t by chance that it is said, “Misery loves company.”

That’s the way it is in our world, but in spirituality, it is impossible to reduce your worries this way since you feel everyone as yourself. However, the Masach brings you closer to the Creator. It is absolutely impossible to advance if you don’t identify with the Creator since your perception becomes very sensitive. The depth of the good and bad feelings in your soul is unbearable, and they overflow beyond the boundaries of this world.

Although there is also such terrible suffering in our world that can drive a person mad, our sense organs cannot bear that. So, only in the connection with the Creator, in the Light of bestowal, can you be so greatly impressed that it exceeds the boundaries of the corporeal world. Thus, the connection is an essential precondition for the spiritual revelation.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/8/13, Writings of Baal HaSulam

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Question: In integral education, we assign couples to systematically do unity exercises. A little later, when they come together, we discover that all couples understand the assignment differently.

Answer: Very well! Let them discuss it and complement one another. This will be very interesting because now every one of them will be able to understand other people on the street and anywhere else. They will become top psychologists.

Comment: But this is where it stops, people restrain themselves, for we teach them that it is forbidden to share personal experiences.

Answer: There is nothing personal here. A person rises above himself.

What is personal in going to the doctor and telling him that my stomach hurts and that my stool is loose, excuse me for saying this. And here I say: “I am incredibly irritated and I hate him.” It’s the same thing, but on a different level. What is unnatural and personal, human about this?

A person has received all of this from nature. Only when it comes to the corporeal level, he received problems with food intolerance, and here he also has received the same problems with “food intolerance,” but on the spiritual level, and is unable to tolerate another person. Here it’s not a piece of meat that he is unable to tolerate, but his partner. It’s the same thing! And we must very naturally turn ourselves inside out in every case.

This is why we rise above ourselves and learn about us, this is the real self analysis. This is exactly what we need to reach, otherwise we will not know how to connect between ourselves. All of us need to be this kind of psychologist, and even more than a regular psychologist.

We begin to discover that we and the society are a single organized system: how to enter it, how to build it, and how to be interconnected. We must feel where nature has allocated a niche for every one of us, how we have to communicate with one another.

Here we cannot do without at least gradually beginning to open up to other people.
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From a Talk on Integral Upbringing, 04/04/2013

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Question: What should my prayer, MAN, in the group of ten be?

Answer: A prayer, MAN, depends upon the state that you are in. You may be asking something from them and they may be asking something from you, and you operate mutually in relation to one another. Or you may be already connected and together ask from the upper one who is in the group of ten.

You say: “The Creator is in the connection between us.” This connection between us is the mother’s womb, it’s ZAT (the lower seven) of Bina, our upper one. There is no other upper one but our connected group. But we are not connected yet, and so we turn to our future, connected, and corrected form that is our next, higher level. We turn to it and to the Creator who is concealed in it. This means that the prayer, MAN, can be aimed from each of you to others, or from all of you towards your future upper form.
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From the 3rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/6/13, TES

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Question: Why does the Creator send me “thorny” thoughts?

Answer: From Rabash’s article “What is the Lily Among the Thorns in the Work”: The Zohar says “As the lily among the thorns so is my loved one among the girls.” The Creator wanted to make Israel like its form Above, so that there will be one lily on earth like the upper lily which is Malchut, and a lily that has a scent and is selected of all the other lilies in the world is the one that grows among the thorns.

A lily can grow and bloom only if it grows among the thorns. It’s impossible to grow without the thorns. The thorns are the forces that help us advance. Otherwise we would peacefully fall to sleep in our desire to receive and would never want to rise above it.

The thorns are the forces of motion that push us forward and help us advance while we aspire towards rest, fulfillment, and pleasure. They appear when there is no choice, when a person disrespects the option to advance by his own efforts and tries to rest all the time, justifying himself, feeling that he does enough and that everything is fine.

Then his stubbornness and his laziness gradually accumulate until a serious thorn appears. Then he begins to cry out and to advance. Everyone will agree judging by his own experience and say that this is exactly what happens, sometimes more and sometimes less. This is how a person is taught that he should find the power to advance by himself and not wait for the thorns. But there will still be thorns since it’s impossible to totally manage without them.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/3/13, Writings of Rabash

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Question: What does it mean that a person should only present his “half a shekel” in the work and the Creator adds the other half?

Answer: My “half a shekel” means that I have to bring a vessel, a deficiency, while the filling comes from Above. This deficiency is necessary in order to acquire the force of bestowal. If my deficiency is right, I will receive the other half.

But usually we prepare the desire to receive for our own sake and cry out: “Give me, Give me!” Then we say: “The Creator doesn’t give us anything! He must be wrong and this whole method doesn’t work.”

We are not aware of the fact that our vessel is actually aimed at what the Creator doesn’t give. He only gives us a vessel of bestowal, the Light that Reforms, which is the only thing for which you may ask. If you really ask for that, you receive it.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/3/13, Writings of Rabash

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Question: Sometimes, a strong group begins to block a person who is a leader and an organizer as it tries to make him equal to everyone else. What should we do in such a case?

Answer: In the past, people used to say: “If the head stands out, it should be taken off.”

A group cannot and should not allow someone’s head to be above the others. Everyone is equal, in everything! The group is all about commonality, and there should be no doubts here.

If you see that there is a person with special qualities in your group—a person who has special skills such as working under pressure, patience, desire, and so forth—give him something to do outside the group. Test him through that, and then take him out of the group. Let him engage in something external that is detached from the group so that there would be no gossip or trouble in the group. However, as long as a person is in the group, he must not stand out. It is also a kind of a test to see if he has the will power to constantly restrain himself so that the group will be homogeneous.

Speak to him separately: “Although you stand out, look and learn from the others. This is your mission. You have to behave like the others and under no circumstances be above them. This is the only way you can express yourself. This is not the place to spill your heart out.” Thus, he will train himself.

Question: When should he be taken out of the group if he cannot be equal to everyone, but still tries to be?

Answer: The group cannot tolerate any such attempts. If he can control himself, leave him in the group, but let him develop his organizational skills. However, if he has no organizational skills but just likes to make noise, then he gradually will get used to not standing out in the group. There are people who cannot accept this and who think, like children: “How can I sit together with others?” Such people should be taken out of the group.
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From a Talk on Integral Education 4/4/13 

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