Question: In the courses on integral upbringing and education, we intend to first of all educate people who lost their job. The majority of them is disillusioned with life; many have difficulties with their family, self-actualization, and so on.

The first thing that you may encounter in such a group is resentment, frustration, and aggression. Would people in this state be able to perceive such distant, abstract, and theoretical information? What should we start with in order to find common ground with people?

Answer: We have no other choice. We, people, consist of two halves: heart and mind, and they have to balance each other. Then a person develops harmoniously, sees the world and himself within it. Perhaps he sees both himself and the world as unbalanced, but his worldview becomes more or less correct.

Therefore, first and foremost we have to counterbalance all of today’s problems with knowledge: From where did these problems arise, what is  their origin, their necessity for our continued development, what exactly we need to come to, and so on.

As the first order of business people must necessarily complete an educational course, and not the ones on upbringing, practical work, and game scenarios—they are still far from that. The practical work within such groups begins only when the state of all sorts of problems and crises is balanced. People begin to understand the essence of these problems; they can now discuss, decide, arrive at some kind of an opinion, object, and discern the truth. But it gets discerned when feelings are balanced by knowledge.

If right now we simply take 50 people from the street and start to talk to them about today’s problems, we’ll be confronted with complete lack of understanding of our point of view. Correspondingly, feelings prevail above the mind, and we won’t get anywhere.

This is what happens in today’s world. Without understanding the general system of nature, its development (beginning, middle, and end of this path), and the state of humanity (where we exist in this moment along the axis of time), we evaluate everything only on the basis of our small, worldly egoism that doesn’t allow us to obtain the correct result. Moreover, we make wrong decisions about the future and with that bring ourselves into an even more difficult state. That is why, personally, I have no doubts that first and foremost we need to pursue education.

Precisely with that we begin our interaction with children. We always need to take our natural attitude to children as an example.

Everything begins with explanations. A child develops and feels: I sense this and that. A correct upbringing lies in supplementing a child’s feelings with explanations and with a system of correct attitude towards what he feels and how he perceives everything. This has to be balanced in adults as well. Without this we cannot advance.

Only to the extent that a group adapts this knowledge into itself does it realize and understand the causality and consequences of the feelings, their cause and effect development, and is able to see itself from the side. When a person rises above his self, he can separate his own “I” and see himself and society from the side.

The same way in psychology: You look at a person not as an individual, but from the side, trying to imagine him as a certain psychological object. Then, exploring him, you begin to give him some concrete recommendations, fragmentary explanations without even explaining who and what he is. But in principle, these explanations too are based on some kind of balance between knowledge and feelings. You cannot do without that.

That’s why in the first place we will have to introduce the courses that we spoke about in the last talk. It is a great amount of knowledge.

In the process of study, this knowledge gradually gets absorbed by people, and a person then starts to internally assimilate it along with feelings. At this point we need to start fortifying it with practical exercises that help a person balance knowledge and feelings.

A person can receive an initial sensation of that state by studying the material first-hand. We need to tell him about the origin, evolution, and properties of egoism and to present it completely objectively as a certain existing reality independent from and having nothing to do with us, so that a person could absorb everything in the form in which it exists in nature.

Next in the same course, a brief explanation can be given about how egoism works in a person: how it manifests itself in our world, in connections with family, children, with one’s own self, and so on.

That is, education involves at the very least separation into two parts, when we objectively lay out what is taking place in nature and try to express that in a somewhat dry, scientific language, and afterwards, as a supplement to that, we utilize this. After that is when the practical training begins, where we try to investigate our feelings from the point of view of reason.

A theoretical study is always reason, and we study it, fill ourselves with all kinds of knowledge, data, graphs, formulas, images, discernments of relationships, and so on, while gradually adding a little bit of feelings to that. In other words, studying always proceeds from two directions, “reason and feelings”: feelings in reason and reason in feelings.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education,” 12/13/11

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Question: What are the most important principles that any unemployed person should know so that he’ll be able to manage in the new world?

Answer: First, it is impossible to manage in the new world when each one thinks only about oneself. We have to think about everyone. There is no other choice. This is nature’s law that is being revealed in our times.

Second, every member of society should be concerned about others as organs in one body. In the global world we need not build egoistic systems: media, governments, social systems, health care, education, etc., which today do not care about what happens to others. What we need to be concerned with is how to build a healthy person in a healthy society. All the systems should be focused on this purpose. This means that there must be one general plan.

Only those who understand that we need integrality and mutual guarantee should have the right to lead society. Otherwise, each will continue with his protectionism, which will lead to opposition to and destruction of nature.

We should aspire for this same relationship to exist in the family, children’s education, neighborhoods, cities, nations, and the whole world. This means that we don’t have to develop separate, specific systems for education, culture, and health, but rather we need to work in circles, moving from a small circle to a wider one, and eventually encompassing all of humanity.

We have to organize all international organizations differently, so that this will be their goal and this is what they will aim all their activity at. All the laws in the world should be made as integral laws so that integrality will become the essential law of our existence. The leadership, courts, and systems for human rights should be aimed only at that.

What stems from the integral law influences all spheres of our lives, especially factories, companies, and businesses and whether or not they have the right to exist. If a business doesn’t match the essential production system, it is like a splinter that enters a body and infects and harms the whole body.

It must be taken out and only the healthy, necessary things should be left. This is a totally new perception according to which no one has the right to create something just for the purpose of trying to sell it. On the contrary, the less we produce and the less we sell, the better. This is a totally opposite from our present approach, and according to it everything will change.

Question: It seems this is a very advanced future state that will result from the integral education, when the government can decide if a business is in harmony with nature and therefore should operate?

Answer: In part, it will be the result of conscious change and partly a consequence of natural evolution in which unnecessary industries will shut down on their own.
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From “Lessons About  the New World” 12/1/11

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Question: How can we awaken care for the whole world inside our hearts?

Answer: We all exist in one spiritual vessel, in one desire. The Creator created one soul and it is impossible to selectively care for just one part of it, but only for the entire, full vessel. Nothing exists “partially” in spirituality.

If we are talking about bestowal, then we have to be concerned with becoming a candle for the Creator, which means correcting the full vessel. Since the Creator made one, single desire, bestowal can only awaken in all of it entirely. And as Baal HaSulam explains in the article “Mutual Guarantee,” we exist only for this sake.

Therefore, a person who does not care for the common vessel does not care for himself. We just have to open our eyes and see that this is the exact same thing. The world is an imprint of what we have inside; it only seems to exist on the outside.

Therefore, the aim isn’t for “me to care for the world,” but to open my eyes, to see the truth and understand that care for the world and care for yourself is the exact same care. We have to dispel this fog and clearly see that this is one soul!

Instead of “awakening care for the world” inside myself, I have to take care of myself—of why I don’t see that the whole world is my spiritual vessel, my soul.

From this it is clear that I cannot stop caring for the world under any circumstances because this is the main part of me. Everything I feel inside of me now is just my body, and this sensation called “the body” will die one day and will disappear from my consciousness. And only the care that I will acquire for my external “body” will become revealed to me as my soul and will remain with me forever. In it I will acquire my true, eternal life.

This is the inner revolution we have to go through. Essentially, this is the meaning of passing the Machsom (the boundary separating us from the upper world). When a person begins connecting and identifying himself with what is outside instead of the ego that he previously perceived as being himself, this is called passing the Machsom.

Baal HaSulam says that this requires only a psychological revolution. This blindness and deception holds the reason for all of the evil we feel now.
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From the Preparation to the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/8/12

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Question: Does our request to the Creator become stronger because we repeat it many times?

Answer: We advance only thanks to our requests. If we want to hasten our advancement, we have to learn to ask! Because there are no other actions in spirituality but to raise a request (raise MAN), all our actions are aimed at raising our first prayer to be accepted Above.

It’s like writing to some organization or to a girl you’re in love with. You send her letter after letter, until she finally answers you. But if she answered your 100th letter, you can’t say that she answered that letter necessarily. She answered all your 100 letters that influenced her! It doesn’t mean that you could have sent her this 100th note and that’s all.

This is how we develop. All these years you develop in order to finally raise MAN, a prayer, to stabilize the right request and only that. All the previous rehearsals were so that you would feel and discover exactly for what you should ask. The Light doesn’t need that, but you do! You’re doing that for yourself and by that you are creating your vessel, your desire, and then the Light will come and correct it.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/4/12, Shamati #240

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Question: It is said that before rising onto the highest level, Rabbi Shimon fell into the state of “Shimon from the market.” What “market” is this?

Answer: “Shimon from the market” lives like a Rothschild. He has everything he wishes in this world: power, money, honor, longevity, and so forth…it is just a dream. However, he feels that he is at the lowest level at that point.

Indeed, the market seller wishes to become a Rothschild, and this is exactly the state that Rabbi Shimon fell into. It is an ascent for you while, for him, it is a descent.

We are talking about a qualitative evaluation here. Rabbi Shimon had water and the carob tree, while Shimon from the market had a table overflowing with food. So, what is he suffering from? Why does he feel so low?

He is suffering from a loss of spiritual consciousness. He has everything except what is most important. Shimon from the market provided for himself for the rest of his life, yet he does not feel happy.

The point here is that Rabbi Shimon understands the abyss that lies between him and Shimon from the market, and he does not agree to it. He is feeling even more hurt by the fact that he feels this way himself.

Shimon from the market is always full. He sells his goods and in the evening he returns home satisfied, having everything he needs in life. The wife, the kids, and everything else are in order. Everyone is healthy. There is no shortage of anything.

However, when Rabbi Shimon falls into such a state, he feels that he has nothing behind all of this abundance. He cannot stand this life. Each moment of it is hell. For him, this is not life.
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/30/11, “The Peace”

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Question: We are presenting a new ideology to humanity: the transition from separation and competition to unity and mutual concern in order to provide for the vital necessities and social needs of every person. This means that we need to offer people a new paradigm of social relationships. What will attract them to it? What will happen to the huge mass of people who will be left without jobs or will be working only part-time?

Answer: They will learn to take part in different activities geared toward gradually acquiring the desire of the human level and its fulfillment.

Question: But they don’t want this….

Answer: They wish to live and enjoy in addition to providing for their basic needs. Every person has a large vessel of desire. Its lower part pertains to the essential needs—let’s call them as a whole “food.” This is the animate degree, the desires that have to do with food, sex, and family.

Above that are the so-called “extras”: desires for wealth, honor, and knowledge, which pertain to the human degree. And here I am told, “You need to fill this whole part with bestowal to the neighbor. Everything you wanted before now needs to be directed to benefit others. Only in this manner will you be able to receive fulfillment in this part of the vessel.

Today people live in order to satisfy their own needs. One’s basic needs will be satisfied, but in all other respects a person will experience emptiness: “My body is satisfied, but now what?” One no longer receives anything extra due to the crisis. This pertains to even those at the top since they too live from the profits that will vanish as the economic bubble deflates.

So from what can I receive pleasure as a human being? I ate and now what? And this is where a replacement of fulfillment will occur. While previously everyone wished to stand out, show how good, strong, and wealthy he was so that others would envy him, now this no longer will be the case. The terrestrial globe is not meant to eternally provide for these games of ours. From now on, fulfillment of the human degree will be achieved by caring for humanity. We can no longer scoop away from each other; now, on the contrary, we need to fill each other.

This is the only solution and it is offered to us by the science of Kabbalah. You can fulfill everyone, yourself included, for the sake of bestowal; and for the sake of reception, you will not be able to fill yourself even a tiny little bit.
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/8/12, “The Freedom”

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Question: I told my mother-in-law about the wisdom of Kabbalah, about the fact that the whole world is one big family and that we are all interconnected with one another. She doesn’t study the wisdom of Kabbalah, but she understood everything. It turns out that when she was young she was part of the hippie movement and supported their ideas. Then she asked: “Does that mean that we will all be like the hippies?”

Answer: I was also young at that time and I remember these movements. Indeed the urge to be cut off from the ego, from materialism and competition, from the endless chase of material things was very strong then among young people. It isn’t by chance. They felt the emptiness in all these things very strongly then.

In those years, the Club of Rome started talking about the futility of individualistic development based on trade and technology. Many agreed with that, but eventually the “mainstream” representatives managed to somehow cover up this problem. They liquidated the connection between gold and paper money and began inflating the financial bubble.

As a result the world underwent great changes. In general, a lie is a tool to make great profit. Only today do we begin to realize what it led to and what an explosion we are facing.

So in the hippies’ times people began to ask about the meaning of life, but the question was formed gradually. They arrived at it from different directions, and so they found many answers. Some turned their eyes to India and others started devoting their time to art.

On the whole, when it comes to the masses, your mother-in-law is right. We are talking about questions that are very similar to the questions that troubled her when she was young. In our days, however, the situation is completely different. In those days, the wave that the young generation felt was broken by the achievements of technological progress that promised endless growth. Today this is impossible.

After this whole “cycle” the world has reached a general crisis, and now we will be able to continue to exist only if we tie money to real things. In other worlds, we must tie a person’s exertion to something that has a real value and not to “papers” that can be printed limitlessly or that can be duplicated “virtually.”  [Read more →]

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Question: An important part of the course on integral upbringing pertains to reasonable economics, or economics of rational consumption. What is that, and what is it based on?

Answer: We already spoke about the fact that in an integral society there is no coercion or limitations. That is, there exist certain social boundaries, and from within them you select what you like and what you want. This pertains to food, home, clothes, safety, medical services, education, and so on. The only exception is upbringing, which is required for everyone.

In this regard there is a very clear pressure on everyone, I might even say coercion, though not from the side of human society, but from the side of nature. We simply take these parameters and implement them for our comfortable existence.

When it comes to all the minor needs, then in accordance with our collective development, we will need to arrange debates among ourselves regarding what we consider as necessary and not. By the way, here we have something to learn from the kibbutzim: They had a very interesting way of doing that. Does a person really not need anything of his own, or conversely, does he require his own personal wardrobe?

Naturally, each selects a specific assortment of products that are most suitable and healthiest for him and correspond to his or her tastes. Nobody is going to force anyone to eat the same food, although in principle, all of these things: clothes, objects, apartments, and so on are pretty standardized.

If a person is engaged in intensive inner development, his interest in all the necessary bodily, physical needs is essentially reduced, and he doesn’t seek in that an additional fulfillment, satiation, and some particular flavors or shades. All that becomes absolutely uninteresting and unimportant to him just like for a scientist who is deeply absorbed in his research and can just walk around in a tattered suit because to him it doesn’t hold any significance. He grabs a bite to eat somewhere and that’s good enough—the important thing is that now he can go back to work.

In other words, society will constantly conduct research to determine an optimal level of income, which would be neither excessive nor deficient for any person. In an integral society each person will take all that is necessary for himself either from warehouses, or perhaps a large delivery, distribution, and supply system will be put in place for that purpose.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education,” 12/12/11

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Question: What is the reason for taking the integral family course for the women who don’t have a family and possibly never will?

Answer: I doubt that in the integral society we would fail to reach such a state when everyone would have a family. On the contrary, a person will feel that a family is that primary instrument through which he or she influences the world. That’s one.

Second, we need to understand and realize that nature is designed in such a way that the number of men and women in the general population is going to depend on how we will conduct ourselves with each other. Through our relationships we will, so to speak, introduce our desired quantitative and qualitative inputs into nature, and we will receive precisely the kind of progeny that would create correct connections and units. It depends only on our harmony.

Since today we do not exist in a state of harmony with our own self, between us, and with nature, we give birth to children who struggle to find anything suitable for themselves. We do not imbue them with integrality, and that is why our world is falling apart today.

If we approach this question globally, through that we will instill into our children completely different informational records, new “genes.” They will be born in such a form that their common field of nature, one that drives all of us towards correct development and a particular goal, will gather them in mutual likeness. Each of them will quickly find their second half.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education,” 12/12/11

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Question: How is an integral family different from the traditional family we’re used to seeing?

Answer: The aspirations of men and women who constitute different charges, different natures, must be aimed at creating a dipole between them, that is, the kind of interconnection that could become a building block of the universe.

As the Bible says, together, husband and wife are a single whole or “of the same breed.” They are two people who are opposite to one another and connected together at the same time. Either they are connected in a natural way, or via a special method, for here nature actually shows us the complete opposite data. This is important to keep in mind.

But this isn’t simply the bonding or cementing of a family; rather, it is the cementing of a family for the sake of achieving general harmony. Therefore, it transpires in a completely different manner, in a different sense. This is very important! In this case the couple feel responsibility not only for themselves, but for others as well, for they are part of a greater whole, and by not “connecting” to this greater whole, they trigger from nature a negative reaction proportional to the disturbance they introduce.

Suppose my spouse and I introduce 10 grams’ worth of disturbance into the general system because we are merely a tiny part of it, these 10 grams are then multiplied by the complexity factor of the entire system, thus turning into kilograms or tons. And then it all comes back to us, presses us and forces us to change.

Even the mistakes we make presently and in the future trigger the correct consequence, which is felt by us as undesirable, forced, and unpleasant. But it is precisely the consequences of our mistakes that push us forward.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education,” 12/12/11

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