Question: A person comes to an integral group from the “outside.” He already has certain worries related to the material world, conflicts, problems with children, and so on. How can one transition from his routine predicaments to integration?

Answer: Everything has to be discussed in the group. However, it should be done specifically in the attempts to rise above corporeal problems. Various problems related to gender or character, to anything that might transpire between us have to be raised and discussed. We are a research group; we scrutinize ourselves. This is why we have to be ultimately sincere and interested in detaching from our animal “I” and rising above it into our integral “I,” which gradually is turning into “we.” So, there is nothing we should hide from one another.

At the same time, we shouldn’t concentrate on, dig into these issues too much: your personality against mine, somebody’s attractiveness, or animal, hormonal, drives… We have to discuss these things in brief in order to help each and everybody rise above them and keep ourselves specifically in this state while we continue understanding and sensing them in our animal body, as we know that they don’t exist at the next level.

We’ll constantly be “hanging” in the gap between our internal layers as if between the sky and the earth. This state will emerge in us and bother us for a long period of time: We’ll constantly be getting urges upwards and downwards. This is what our work is all about.

Within the inner states that we go through, we have to test our internal baggage of doubts, impressions, and aspirations in order to firmly position ourselves on the ground, to fly up as a balloon from earth to the “ceiling,” leaving behind our egoistic properties, ambitions, desires, and impulses. I am still aware of all of my problems, but internally I want to identify myself with the “ceiling,” meaning with my next step.
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From a Talk on Integral Upbringing 3/1/12

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It’s not enough to simply connect with our friends’ sparks. We also have to study; knowledge will shape us and teach us how to connect with the sparks. So far, we have no idea how to unite, since we are not familiar with the system of spirituality. So, we read about it, listen, and study. We learn that we have to connect and form a system that consists of 10 Sefirot, Partzufim, worlds, Surrounding Light and Direct Light. All these names describe the connection between us that we need to achieve.

The main thing is to tune ourselves to receive help from Above. It’s not enough just to think of connecting with our friends’ sparks; we need someone else who will tie us together. We have to appeal to the upper force so that It does this work for us. We bring our broken connection to the higher force and complain to It about our inability to unite. It’s similar to a crying baby who approaches his mother and father complaining that he cannot do something because it is broken and doesn’t work anymore.

The upper Light deliberately broke the bond between us so that we would demand it be restored. When one appeals to the upper force with this request together with his friends, it means that one is already inside the corrected system. It is called “Israel, Torah and the Creator are One.”

Israel stands for all of us, for those who are oriented “directly to the Creator” (Yashar – El.) The Torah is the Light that we search for in order to get glued back together. We study its actions with the books. The Creator is the upper force, a source of the Light that returns to the benevolence and assembles us back together. That explains why it is called the returning to the source of the good state that existed before the shattering occurred. This is how we attain correction.

We have to clarify numerous phases at this point. Although, we should understand that one is totally unable to do it on one’s own because he will always tend to work internally and presume that he has enough power and qualities to appeal to the Creator and scream to Him on his own.

But, I will never be able to address the Creator without presenting the broken vessel that consists of at least 10 friends who want to reconnect. I will be one of them. And if there are friends who understand that they need to connect in order to reveal the Creator and if they try to appeal to the Creator, for bestowal and love to reign between them, it happens.
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From a Talk at the Meal Commemorating Rabash, 9/20/12

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Question: Let’s say that a woman, whose missing husband is still on a “spree,” managed to rise to the integral level with the help of the group. Will her problem be resolved by itself or will she just regard it from a different perspective?

Answer: You should understand that the world is the way we draw it in our minds. We cannot ascertain objectively what, in fact, is real and what is actually going on. Everything is subjective. It’s all about how we sense and imagine it.

As soon as the woman begins to understand that her husband needs more social interaction and she is willing and able to give him a replacement that is of a higher and better level, his family, social, and economic problems will cease to exist. He will stop burning money with his friends in a pub or at a football stadium since he will have a new, contented attitude toward the world he lives in and to his family.

But we have to fulfill him somehow. We have to show him what we offer, that it is a replacement.

For dozens of years, world governments have been investing in massive team sports since an enormous number of fans unite around them. It distracts them and gives them a chance to unite, according to their affiliation with various sport teams. Such unity bears an egoistic nature since they need an opponent in order to unite. Governments realize that they should distract people by providing them with outlets and letting them experience warmth from belonging to various groups, clubs, etc.

However, we must gradually show people that connecting around something that is against something or someone is flawed; it destroys society. We see that there is no room for friendliness in sports. Competition only leads to drugs, sales, and buying players. There is nothing to it except financial cunning, “Give me another couple of billion, and I’ll make a team for you that will defeat everyone out there.” This scenario really cannot serve as a foundation for those who aspire to unity. Who exactly am I supporting? Are a couple of Africans or South Americans bought for money and brought to my favorite team supposed to defend my city or my country?

The same egoists do not want to look at all this because it really is not what they want to see in their passions.

We can raise the level of awareness of people to where they won’t abide such an attitude to sports. When we become a member of a club in order to unite with others, we generate a sordid type of connection. We beat our neighbors in order to somehow satisfy our dormant herd mentality that comes from ancient times, instead of one that leads us forward.

Therefore, there must be a serious explanation. We are quite capable of providing this explanation using humor and satire and showing how it is constructed, from football to beer to any teams or sports clubs, no matter if it is a local or national team, from the primal, underdeveloped nature of man, from his need to unite. And then, little by little, we can bring him to another level
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From a Talk on Integral Upbringing 3/1/12

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Question: In the workshops we sit together and work on the cooperation among us, but what do I have to feel during the day when I am not in such an interaction with the friends?

Answer: Imagine that you are sitting with them, in a circle of ten men. How would you feel them, how would you mutually cooperate with them? Why would you do it that way? Go on clarifying the relations between you and don’t stop the discussions since this is the pattern of the soul, which will later grow all the way to Ein Sof (Infinity). That’s all. It is there in the relations that you clarify that you discover all the ten Sefirot, the whole network of the worlds; it is all there among you.

Let’s take the mutual connection between me and you and the general system for example. If we unite, I will attain Ein Sof, which means that there are no borders between us, that we are together.

Now there are five worlds separating us: Assiya, Yetzira, Beria, Atzilut and Adam Kadmon. By getting closer to you, I go up the levels of these worlds until I reduce the distance to zero and enter the world of Ein Sof.

Everything begins and ends here, in the connection between the souls. That’s all. The wonder is that if you are truly closing the gap with someone else, without lying to yourself, then you are also getting closer to all the other billions. It is exactly the same thing.

It is because we are in an integral, analog system and so all the other connections will concentrate in the connection between you and me. The whole system will display itself between you and the friend to whom you want to get closer.

An analog system is like a holographic picture—every detail in it is made of all the others. As a result of this wholeness, you will have to correct everyone and determine your attitude to all the souls in order to connect to your closest friend.

So don’t leave the picture of the overall unity, stay in it; carry on the workshop and you will succeed. It is the workshop that provides you with mutual work. The friends can awaken you and make you see how important the goal is and provide you with fuel. They help you and you help them. You want to and have to justify the friend, no matter what he seems to you, and you should carry on this work as much as you can, even internally, with other people.

Question: So what do they exist for? Why shouldn’t I spend my whole life in a circle of friends? Could it be that the others are just be interruptions that I should ignore?

Answer: No, you should also work with them, but differently. You have to accept all the external conditions as the corrections of the soul, the corrections of the connections with other people. Even if you work as a forester in the wilderness where there are no people, you still have to clarify your mutual relations with humanity: “Why am I doing this?” By that you are “feeling” and clarifying your own soul.

We have to see a network through which we enter spirituality in every situation in this world. You cannot draw away from everyone and be only with the group. One way or the other, we have to be connected with the whole world, and especially in our times when we have to correct the whole world.

So you have to work, you have to get married, you have to be connected with the world and be included in its suffering. Then, as it says, you will be rewarded with the comfort of the public.

Besides, if you turn to people in order to bring them the method of correction, in whatever form it may be, you are sufficiently incorporated in them by that, so that you can carry on the internal work. It is simply a wonderful opportunity to exit yourself and to come into the masses in order to include them later in the process of correcting the connection among us.
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/23/12, Questions and Answers 

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Baal HaSulam, “Introduction to the Book, Panim Meirot uMasbirot,” Item 4: This is what has sustained us thus far, to maintain the armies and the wall around the wisdom of truth, so no stranger or foreigner would break in….

The wisdom of Kabbalah was concealed because all the nations had to develop. The entire world must advance until it is totally disappointed with the ego.

Then, when they feel powerless and cannot continue, people will see that the current form of life on earth has come to an end. This refers to the social and ecological destruction, and to a person’s inner destruction.

So, the wisdom of Kabbalah must be concealed in order to allow the ego to develop and not to stop this process in the middle. It is because it speaks about overcoming the ego, but if it isn’t ripe yet, there is nothing to overcome. Thus, we must wait until it reaches its full development. Kabbalists determined that the final phase began 500 years ago in the times of the Ari, but the last alignment was necessary so that, in our days, it will be absolutely clear.

Today, the entire world is beginning to acknowledge the fact that there is nowhere to develop and advance, and that none of the known methods can help us develop in the right way. So, the wisdom of Kabbalah—which, until now, was rightfully concealed—is being revealed to the world.

Question: To whom is it actually revealed?

Answer: It is gradually revealed to everyone. If we take the Europeans and the Americans, for example, if they see that they have reached a dead-end and have no means to correct the social crisis and the crises in industry, commerce, education, and in any other area, then thanks to our internal and external dissemination, they finally will be able to understand that there is a method that can help them overcome the ego that is destroying and viciously consuming them like a cancerous growth. This method will allow them to cope with it and begin living the good life again.

First, the cells of the general human organism grew separately, each according to its own form, like buds that sprout out of the earth. It was a natural process, and the wisdom of Kabbalah waited patiently in concealment for them to fully grow.

Finally, they have grown and begun to connect egoistically, and this egoistic connection very soon will lead to death since they are all connected, but “pulling the blanket” in their own direction. This is the nature of cancer. As a result, the terminal state is revealed, but, together with it, the wisdom of Kabbalah also is revealed immediately in order to allow its recovery.

The remedy cannot be revealed unless the patient discovers how critical his condition is. There must be “recognition of evil” here and “free will” as to whether to take the remedy or to ignore it. We, on our part, must work, and humanity must feel that it is ill. This is the process.
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/19/12, “Introduction to the Book, Panim Meirot uMasbirot”

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Question: What do we get from the workshops?

Answer: The workshops allow us to clarify the types of connections among us.

Question: Do I actually discover a lack of connection with the friends or is it the opposite?

Answer: Both. Through the questions in the workshop, I clarify where I am and what I lack in order to attain what I desire.

Together with nine other friends, I begin to clarify the question we were asked and to penetrate their opinions and their thoughts, such as what they think about the same type of connection or the type of clarification. Through that, I already am in contact with them. I already see to what extent we “connect.”

We are all different, and in the workshops we clarify how we should connect. Is it possible? With whom should I connect? Do I agree or disagree?

I constantly build the forms of connection among us. This is the workshop, and it already clarifies and reveals this collective network. Thus, I have a twofold task:

• On one hand, I must see the friends as great so that I can lower my head before them and be small among them. Compared to them, I am a zero, while they are all number one with several zeros after it. Then, accordingly, I am incorporated in them and become a “spiritual embryo.”
• On the other hand, I must be one, or ten, or a hundred, and they must be the zeros. However, “zeros” in this context mean how much I can bestow upon them and what help and support I can give to them.

So, a middle line is created between these two extremes that equalizes them (=•=). Thus, the point of balance is created at which we reach a common ground. Each one respects the others as much as he can, each one humbles himself before the others as much as he can and, at the same time, is ready to raise the goal and the work in their eyes.

All this is in our thoughts when I am with the friends, and we discuss the questions in the workshop. I hear them and I think that one speaks nonsense, the other didn’t understand the question, and the third speaks logically instead of emotionally. The fourth seems to speak to the point, but I resent the fact that his words are deeper and wiser than mine.

Thus, I begin to work mutually with the friends and experience different states, and that is great. We just need to take what is going on seriously. “I have come here in order to connect in order to pass on to them my energy and to receive everyone’s power. This hour and a half is the most beneficial time for me.”

Of course, I see how the strange thoughts throw me off in different directions and how my inner resistance doesn’t allow me to agree with the friends. Great! I will not find an opportunity for more intensive clarification and to work on a higher “frequency.”

It is a pity that during the workshops there are those who exchange words like politicians, others who use different expressions from the bank they have in their memory, and others become psychologists and analysts. The main thing, here, is the feeling I experience in my heart.

We must learn from the ego’s endless urges since it is a “helpmate.” Our ego is an “angel” in the hands of the Creator through which He evokes us. So, I must see how the Creator doesn’t leave me even one moment of rest, and how he evokes my ego again and again in different ways in order to allow me to advance as fast as possible.

The workshops are the most helpful time, but, if we begin having them every day, attendance will drop immediately, and it will become a burden, hard work. We may think that it is a good idea to continue the convention for another week or two, or a month or two, until we succeed, until we rise to the spiritual level, but we are weak. We can hold on for another day or two, but not more than that.
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/23/12, Questions and Answers

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Question: How can we use the lesson in order to tighten the connection between us? How can we enter the channel that you open and hold one another?

Answer: We have to feel that we are mutually connected to one another. If you don’t feel that we are connected in our hearts a bit more today than we were two days ago, then you haven’t attained anything at the convention. This is the index for the success of the convention. We feel the connection a bit more, the warmth and the closeness among us; we have been through a certain process, we have experienced a certain event that connected us and has created a common understanding, feeling, action, power, investment, and general knowledge of what we had. All this has built a connection and now the feeling of connection has to develop further.

We have to feel this especially during the lessons, since during the lesson we actually develop our connections more deeply, and so I have to keep the way it feels inside me and thus to advance. Step by step, from one lesson to another, from day to day, I have to feel, just as I do now after having grown a bit closer to one another after the convention.

It isn’t felt in the mind and not in the heart, but in the feeling of connection, as we all become closer to one another. A few more such efforts and we will begin to feel different phenomena among us—that something is beginning to move, to shake inside, and this is already the spiritual embryo.

So we should want all our desires and thoughts to be around that and they will be part of our mutual connection. This is called the “center of the group,” the collective feeling that is built by similar actions.

It is impossible to hold conventions everyday; it isn’t good; we would immediately feel that it is useless. But we have to renew our connections during the morning lesson. Of course, there will still be the daily problems, difficulties, and the hardening of the heart as usual. But this is what we have to do: We have to check daily and assess the point of our connection and with it advance forward.

I think that today it should be clearer to everyone than it was before.

Question: Is the morning lesson a group work?

Answer: Yes. We know this from Rabbi Shimon’s students who also came to the morning lesson and discovered the mutual connection between them and wrote about it in The Book of Zohar. First they felt the evil among them, the hatred, a burning fire among them; they couldn’t look at one another or connect to one another. Then they overcame that state and attained the connection: love, unity, mutuality, and described these levels in their book. This is how The Book of Zohar was created.

There is nothing more than that; only the closeness among people when we clarify and discover among us the levels and the types of the connection. This is the spiritual world. If instead of receiving, instead of the desire to gain from one another, we reach bestowal, when everyone wants to give to others, then the corporeal world changes into the spiritual world and there we find the transcendental reality.

We should understand that only in this direction will we discover the sources and understand as described by the Kabbalists.
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/23/12, Questions and Answers 

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Question: There are discussions in a courtroom-style format in integral groups. What are we to arrive at as a group at the end of this kind of trial?

Answer: The trial should be based much more strictly, precisely, and more clearly differentiated so that later you can categorize it as a trial record that you understand what happened, what we have now, and what will happen.

Every person would evaluate the group and himself from the “human” level and the level of his egoism, that is, from the perspective of a number of roles such as the judge, the defense, the jury, and an observer, a listener, and the victim, the injured side.

There are many roles in every one of us because every person consists of everyone else. For example, there are five parts role-played in a group. This means that every person must find these five levels within him, and, on every level, he must feel how he regards this situation as he separates from everyone else.

Then, he reaches the conclusion that, in general, there is no one to judge and nothing to judge. He understands who can judge and who can justify, and everything we do only has the right to exist when it pursues a single goal: a connection.

When a person is able to softly change ranges—like a regulator, to go from one level to another—then he really becomes internally soft and integral. He activates absolutely all of his qualities, beginning with the lowest, animal qualities, and ending with the highest qualities, which are originating only in him, and, this way, he advances.
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From a Talk on Integral Upbringing 3/5/12

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Question: I have noticed that there is a lot of laughter and jokes during the discussions in integral groups. How serious should these classes be? Should we somehow fight the laughter?

Answer: No. We need to give the emotions an opportunity to come out, rise above us, laugh at ourselves, and understand where they come from. We are dealing with the origin of the second level “Man” above the “animal” level in us. And this is why these two levels have an equal right to exist. Under no circumstances should we suppress the animal level. The egoistic level remains, it flows beneath us, and it’s always in the process of growth. And accordingly, we grow and rise above it. We’re not able to grow without the growth of egoism in us.

It’s hard to determine how much people are developing egoistically during the first encounters in an integral group. However, later, different excesses and contradictions will start appearing in them. And working with it now becomes very interesting, since the purpose is to develop our integral interaction through this. This will happen later.

But for now, laughter, exclamations, a variety of very deep inner outbursts, represent the inability to express our sensations. All of this is the need to ascend: either a negative one, which comes from egoism, or a not yet resolved or realized altruistic level. But this is a good thing. The main thing is to let it all come out.
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From a Talk on Integral Upbringing 3/5/12

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Question: We are speaking about the end of the egoistic development, and in the meantime, I have a feeling that humanity is still very far from reaching the peak of egoism and its recognition…

Answer: Having no choice, I can remain in an unchanging state as long as it doesn’t get any worse. Under the pressure of suffering and problems, I can subdue myself and settle for mundane daily life: go to work, come home, watch TV, close myself in, and not ask for more. I am ready to live like an animal and not ask difficult sophisticated questions till I die.

It is true; this is an instinctive defensive reaction. There is no human being here, but only an animal existence, which 99.99% of the people lead.

But there is another question: How much do I suffer? You are saying that the world is not ready for correction yet. It will never be ready for correction, but will it want to get rid of the sufferings? This is actually what we are talking about. If people have nothing to do, if they have nothing to live on, if they go out to the streets and shatter windows, governments will start wars in response to the riots just to hold on to what is left, to push the problems to a lower priority and to keep the people busy. War is sure way to put everyone in his place. It is a possible future scenario.

But there is also a new deficiency growing here: People are increasingly asking the “ideological” question, which may seem very far from the “animal” question. The question of “What am I living for?” It is being revealed more clearly in humanity. Although the leaders believe that they will be able to keep the masses on the “corporeal” level much longer, it isn’t so.

On the whole, when you look at the world, you see billions of people on the level of the still nature. The world will stay this way, on the level of still nature, but there are also the higher levels of the vegetative, the animate, and the speaking, which are changing. The main part is the level of the speaking, which is the most advanced. It needs to change first, thus pulling all the other levels behind it.

So don’t look at the lower levels and don’t wait for them to do something. They will never do anything but simply follow the shepherd, that’s all. A person needs a thin connecting wire in order to follow someone.

I certainly don’t disrespect them and don’t think lightly of them, since later they will accumulate into one whole and the differences will disappear. Today we can take our body as an example; it is made of different cells that are tied together in different ways and only a tiny part the size of a match head manages them. It is in this part that all the feelings and the understandings and all the plans and memories are revealed. Everything is concentrated in this grain.
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/19/12, “Introduction to the Book Panim Meirot uMasbirot”

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