In the News (from Daily Mail Online): “Anonymous baby drop boxes have been introduced for the first time in Russia.

“The Krasnodar Territory in south Russia bought five of the so-called baby drop boxes in the beginning of November so mothers could drop off unwanted children anonymously.

“The first three were installed in Sochi, Novorossiysk and Armavir, and by the end of the month one child had already been left.

“The move was aimed at providing sanitary conditions for unwanted children, instead of ‘having them left in garbage containers’, health officials told Ria Novosti.

“The move mirrors steps taken in South Africa, where anonymous ‘baby safes’ were introduced by a children’s charity in Spring last year.”

My Comment: As the prophets predict, in the future, unless we correct our nature, we will reach a state when we will “utilize” the newborns, up to consuming them as a healthy product for food. This is what our developed egoism will bring us to.
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Opinion (from The Independent): “The British people are becoming less honest and their trust in government and business leaders has fallen to a new low amid fears that the nation is heading for an ‘integrity crisis.’

“Lying, having an affair, driving while drunk, having underage sex and buying stolen goods are all more acceptable than they were a decade ago. But people are less tolerant of benefits fraud…

“The ‘integrity problem’ is likely to get worse because young people are more tolerant of dishonest behaviour than the older generation. The new centre will look at issues arising from recent scandals such as phone hacking, MPs’ expenses and the banking crisis.

“Trust levels in MPs from all parties slumped by 36 points to 4 per cent after last summer’s riots. People also lost confidence in the young and the police. Only 29 per cent of people believe the Government is doing the right thing, while 38 per cent trust businesses and a surprisingly low 42 per cent trust non-governmental organisations.”

My Comment: Obviously, only education can change society! A person is a product of the society in which he lives and develops. The only way to effect change in the world is to create a correct environment.
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Question: Can questions related to the integral nature of society or news on current events serve as a topic for discussion in the courses on integral education for adults?

Answer: It all depends on the group of people and the degree of their preparation: to what extent their understanding has ripened, how well they have mastered the tools for analysis and synthesis of their knowledge and attitudes, and how objectively they can rise above themselves and distance themselves from their personal interests.

But generally, we should certainly explore such questions. We should “dissect” democracy openly before everyone and demonstrate what an absolutely egoistic structure it is, that it is nothing to be proud of. At one time, one king reigned, and everyone submitted to the will of a single person, regardless how foolish or smart and sensible, still just one. And now it is clawed apart by different parties that want to “gnaw” everyone else to death. This is not the kind of parliament that should exist. In other words, there are obviously many problems here.

At one time scientists and philosophers ruled people, or at the very least they were valued and served as advisors to the kings. A king had an army and money, all in one set of hands. But in order to control the treasury and the army, he had a few smart people. And it was much simpler and easier, there was no embezzlement, and mistakes were kept at a minimum. Everything was in a single set of hands, a king had nobody to rob—everything belonged to him. And for making certain decisions, he had a couple of smart advisors. That’s all. Small struggles behind the scenes still existed, of course, but only in minimal doses. That’s why everything was much more stable and survived for centuries, in contrast to today’s parliament.

All of our freedom today is just maximum freedom from responsibility. Overall, understanding freedom is a big problem.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #5, 12/13/11

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Question: Let’s say there are elections in Russia, I am watching the news and receiving information about who won, who lost, and so on. How can I make this information integral so that it completes the overall picture?

Answer: The integral picture can help you draw a conclusion that society is separated, that it doesn’t see a corrupt system in democracy or its absence (which, essentially, is the same thing), and not only in Russia but in America and all the other countries as well.

If we can’t arrive at a common understanding of where we are and what we should be moving towards, then this speaks of a lack of connection between people in society. Imagine that a large number of societies is forced to exist on one territory and live under one “roof,” which they currently divide into an enormous number of parties or mafia structures. Each of them, naturally, desires to increase its influence at the expense of others, to snatch a piece of the common pie (it doesn’t matter for whom and for what, whether it brings benefit or harm), that is, each of them only takes his own interests into consideration.

And this is called a “democracy,” when I’m only thinking about how to be victorious and crush everyone else? Yet this is what everyone else is thinking about. They are not united by one common idea, everyone simply has their own opinion about how to lead towards it. Yet they can all be working in harmony. What kind of a government will it be if it is once again built on fighting? Is this what we call democracy? Where is this democracy?

Democracy can only exist when the public is educated, when it has an understanding of the next degree. And this next degree isn’t the kind that can be seen one way by one party and differently by another; it is the kind that is leading us towards unification with nature, towards an integral society.

The agenda of all parties should be the study of integral society. We need to lead people towards this. Then we will feel comfortable and achieve the most optimal state in our health, studies, family life—in everything because it will correspond to nature.

Hence, let us agree that this is our goal. But our current state is bad, and everyone understands that more or less equally. How can we bring ourselves towards this goal, to draw to it as close as possible? What opportunities, theories, and foundations do we have for that? And here we will work constructively with one another, complete each other. We will argue, but our goal will be becoming an integral society, and we will be working only for the sake of achieving this goal.

If we are not going to act accordingly, we will see how all that destroys the state. The government shows us an example of protectionism within each part of society and between governments in relation to each other.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #5, 12/13/11

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If the term “force of nature” is not completely clear, we can explain the stages of development to a regular person looking for a real good, with empirical evidence. It’s clear to all of us that a positive attitude to one another is good, absence of crime is good, and serenity and safety are also good. If we help each other and everyone will have what the others have, this will be better than our present miserable life! Everyone would agree with this.

Great! Now let’s acknowledge the affect of the environment on us since it can be seen at every given step in life. Any group can manipulate its members through persuasion. A person can be forced to think in a completely opposite way if there are 20-30 people around him who say that black is white. This is a proven fact that can’t be denied.

Therefore, if the environment does in fact influence an individual, we can create an artificial environment where everyone will treat each other well. We will oblige everyone to behave in this manner, and every transgression will be answered with polite criticism at first, and then with stiff denial.

There is no other choice. After all, we wish to live having everything that a human being requires: a home, food, family, health, pension, vacation, and so on. All this in normal proportions and not in the form of many zeros in our bank accounts, meaning in accordance with one’s natural needs.

If you desire this, you have an opportunity to create this environment, where everyone will care for everyone else. And this will happen only by changing our attitude to one another. In addition, even if we treat each other well out of desperation, artificially by accepting the mode of behavior and acting as in good environment, thereby we acquire a habit, which becomes our second nature. We actually become like that!

Until now we were savages, ready to swallow up everything around us. By joining this game, we literally turn ourselves inside out like a glove. And then over the course of some time, everyone will change and from being a savage, everyone will turn into a human being.

As a result, we become a completely new humanity: We reveal additional opportunities. By acquiring balance with nature, I begin to feel it, and then I reveal new abilities in me with the help of which I create progressive mechanisms and turn worlds upside down, literally. I know all the laws of nature because I am similar to nature.

What’s unreal about this? Let’s play and build such relationships. We have no other choice! Everything depends on education, meaning the influence of the environment. We are sufficiently mature, experienced, and intelligent people. We see a threatening future and we provide a piece of advice that lacks any mysticism.

Humanity has no chance of escaping this development, and we are offering a remedy that prevents illness. All the negative impacts of nature are brought about by our incongruence with it. Therefore, any blow that I experience indicates imbalance with nature. For example, if it’s cold, I need to turn on the heat or put on warm clothes; if it’s noisy, I need either to install a noise reduction system or close my ears. In other words, I must carry out some action in response to every phenomenon.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” Episode #4, 1/1/12

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Opinion (from WND Money): “‘With no existing government or financial institution solvent enough, respected enough or feared enough to lead the required re-balancing in peace, we believe the world will experience a painful re-calibration of economic strength and geo-political standing during 2012 in the midst of widespread civil insurrection and cross-border war,’ writes Charles Ortel, a managing partner with Newport Value Partners, LLC in New York City.

“‘The transformation of a contented and silent Majority into an irascible and vocal Majority will break many conventions in the United States and in other developed nations as incontrovertible evidence piles up weekly and perhaps daily over coming months that the status quo is broken for young and for old, as well as for workers and investors alike,’ he warns.

“Ortel foresees that civil unrest will intensify in the United States and in other developed nations…

“‘Some will manage to contain their activities to peaceful protests. However, we believe the far more likely scenario is that violence will result, especially in the United States where the wider population has more ready access to weaponry and where mobs have proven impossible to restrain.’”

My Comment: Many of my students are economists, and I see how difficult it is for a person to accept a new vision of society, world, family, and his, his family’s, and national sources of income. It is necessary, as Baal HaSulam points out, to create an example of a small town, which had undergone bankruptcy, plant closures, and revived itself in a new integral style.
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There is a general law in nature, which actually gives us hope for our coming closer to each other and in our ability to overcome our egos. This law states that one’s habit becomes his second nature.

We see this ourselves. Let’s suppose from my childhood and over the course of my life, I become used to carrying out certain actions in order to reach a positive result or avoid undesirable consequences. Due to these actions that are repeated often, I develop a habit. It becomes the same kind of demand for me as the desire to receive pleasure, since I do not receive pleasure in any other form but this.

A person learns this and these actions become a habit for him. Everything depends only on how the environment obliges him to do something, how many people act in that manner, and to what extent it has support from everything that surrounds him in life.

Therefore, if we create an education system and organize an environment that will offer support to every person, one will be influenced by the mere fact that other people care so much about everyone else. He will find out about it from the media from the positive public opinion it forms.

In addition, everyone will know that we do this on purpose: We play with each other and pretend to be kind, as though we think that we all are one family, like we care about each other as we do about ourselves. We will need to play this game constantly. We will act like we already are corrected. And what will this do for us?

Gradually, due to this habit, public opinion, and the influence of the environment, I will begin to think in this direction and receive an impression from this behavior. I will begin to form a habit, and I will not be able to act in any other way anymore. It will become my nature, as though I was born this way in spite of the fact that I acquired this quality, that I was forced to develop it, and that I agreed due to a lack of any other choice.

Therefore, we need to realize the law “a habit will become second nature.” Everything depends on how much a person is situated under his own pressure and the pressure of his environment in order not to forget about this game and to advance in this manner. And we will play this way like little children.

After all, when children play, they imagine that they are doing something important and building something new. But we know that it’s a game, and it isn’t serious, and that there is nothing real in their actions. They make mistakes, build anew, destroy once again, and again rebuild. However, due to such different games they advance in their development, grow up, and become smarter.

Without games a child would grow up like a savage, a small animal that is just growing bigger. Great institutions using the best minds including psychologists create special developmental systems for children to play with using various materials (such as blocks and clay) and taking into consideration their interests (cars, dolls, and so on). They use various equipment and computer programs for this. And due to this, the children advance in their development.

Physical development is also impossible without games. We call it sports, but sports are also games where we use physical activities to accustom ourselves to achieve results that are beyond the power of the common man who doesn’t exercise, train, and play the sport. We see that athletes achieve great results due to their habit of working on themselves.

We also notice that people who live together for many years develop similar perceptions; they understand each other without words. And all this occurs as a consequence of the habit of living under one roof, seeing and feeling each other involuntarily, and reaching mutual inclusion in each other this way.

In much the same way, whole nations and civilizations were formed some time ago by way of people who were different and foreign to each other interacting together until they developed certain characteristics that became specific to that nation.

This goes to say that the law of habit becoming second nature is particularly necessary to us, so that even through actions that we do not desire and forms of interaction that are unnatural to us, we can acquire qualities that we choose against our own nature. These new qualities already exist in us, and it is due to them that we build ourselves.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” Episode #4, 1/1/12

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Our attitude towards nature, towards that one law which obliges us to connect with each other into one whole, is manifested within the environment. That’s why our attitude towards the environment, building it on the basis of this law, is more important than the attitude towards Nature itself. The main thing is to build one’s environment.

It’s not for nothing that thousands and millions of people are forced to leave their jobs and become unemployed; we need to open courses for teachers, educators, and facilitators. In fact, in this work, each of us is a teacher, an educator, and an assistant in relation to others. Therefore, everyone will have to go through this learning process and acquire a new “profession,” meaning to become a “Human Being” in a new society. Each of us should rise to a level where we’ll be able to understand what happens in Nature, and what is going on inside of us, what forms of relationships we can build with each other.

According to research, if a person finds himself in an environment where there is mutual influence, he can’t escape. This compels him, envelops him, and unwittingly or not, he changes. We see how the environment raises our children just by examples. The environment educates us, and in our life, we acquire new forms of behavior, relationships, and a new scale of values.

That’s why we don’t even count our desires, be they the desires for food, sex, family, money, power, knowledge, or hundreds of other things. We should look not at how to use these desires, but at their direction (and this is the most important!). In other words, the most important thing is solely my intention in the use of my “I” with all of my desires. I must transform the use of all my abilities for the benefit of society, and then my “I” will turn into “we.” And from the notion of “we,” which is like the gathering of individuals, we will arrive at the concept of “One.” And this “One” is already in balance, in unity with the only Law that governs us.

Then, a person becomes a Human Being, and begins to understand his nature and general Nature. On this path, he studies a lot of inner laws, the laws of psychology and the universe, and he absorbs everything that exists in nature, reaching its highest degree, the degree of that single force that affects us, and in the form which today we perceive as the crisis, it invites us to approach It. This course is designed to teach a person how to become a Human, how to reach the best, safest, and most comfortable, healthy state. Therefore, we should be thankful to this situation that leads us to a new era, to the world full of goodness.

However today, we have not yet begun this process and are not yet aware of it; our lives seem pointless; we are fearful of what awaits our children and grandchildren. So people don’t want to bear children and don’t even understand their place in this world. But everything is just the opposite! In the real sense of this word, “crisis” means a new birth, the threshold of a new humanity. The realization of our greatest hopes lies ahead of us.

We have to begin to realize this single law, and in a very short time, within a few weeks, we’ll feel how much it works, how “habit becomes second nature,” how much we can’t live without showing a good attitude towards each other. And if by chance we forget about it, we must remind each other while we’re together, united, when everyone feels the others, what a warm and desired state this is so that we want to return there again.

Let’s hope that due to our mutual support, we’ll be able to come to this state where a game, a habit, will help us achieve the good nature of love.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” Episode #4, 1/1/12

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Nature demands equivalence of form from us, balance. Nature is round” and we must build human society in the same round form as well. It will bring benefit to everyone and will lead us to a good state that is comfortable and balanced in all areas.

If we are united, nature will cooperate with us in everything: education, culture, every day life, home life and family, ecology, our relation to nature and its response to us, and in general in all of our activities. Only by correctly uniting integrally will we be rescued from nature’s disasters in the first stage, and then later, be successful in the second stage when completely new perspectives will open before us.

In this way we will, at least, escape the general, global crisis that we are experiencing today. This crisis was created as a result of our oppositeness to nature, which is an integral system. And this was revealed only in the last one hundred years.

Until then, there wasn’t a global crisis: humanity was developing and prospering. Only in this last stage, we see that nature, as it were, envelops us from all directions. In other words, nature shows itself as an integral network and we are not able to demonstrate this same unity. In this way, humanity is being revealed as opposed to nature, opposite from nature. And we feel our oppositeness as a crisis. This is exactly the problem.

Accordingly, the solution is to attain balance with nature. Our program of integral education is intended precisely for this. After all, in any event, nature will win. It is clear that in comparison to it we are weak, small, and nothing. We see this from the disintegrating of all of our systems that we no longer can cope with, for example, rising unemployment in the Western world.

Question: We can imagine the unemployed person who knows that it is unlikely that he will find a new job because there are many like him. No one prepared him for this kind of situation and he is apparently disappointed with life. In addition to this he doesn’t know what to do with all his free time because no one ever taught him this.

Answer: Actually the so-called free time is the most productive hours, during which he creates a man of himself.

Let’s begin with all of humanity sitting at the desk to learn. Man doesn’t know where to place himself. He is used to working according to the schedule of a working day. So everything will stay that way. We will arrange the order of day and we will commit to implementing it. It is only that now we are speaking about introductory courses whose length are a few hours a day. In this way, we don’t disrupt the established framework and don’t try to change the model that the person is used to. No, we only tell the person that he is receiving a “stipend” or “allowance” (not unemployment compensation), and in parallel to this, he works part-time or doesn’t work at all if his main work is the study.

We must pass a course like this. How long will it take—a few months or years? It doesn’t matter. The most important thing is that from now on, it will be our main task and it has to be treated as a job in every respect. Man learned to behave according to a certain framework, and so he now also needs to come to learn, similar to elderly people who happily go to various courses at the university. In this atmosphere, a person feels that he is being renewed, like in childhood.

Today we can talk about this without hesitation. Until recently the media didn’t take the crisis seriously, and two years ago they even announced that it had ended. And today there is no shortage of disaster forecasts. Thus if we talk about retraining courses, of a continuing education program, then it will be accepted.

Then everyone is accepted to this “university,” with all its familiar characteristics, including examinations. People will be busy during the day, obligations are imposed on them, and they have nowhere to run to since success depends on the study. In this way we need to raise the people.

By the way, the curriculum of the integral education program will include general education subject: history, geography, household financial management and others, and the most important psychology, the science of man.
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From “Lessons About a New World” #1, 12/27/11

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Question: Let’s suppose that I am used to working 8-9 hours a day and I get paid for overtime. My thoughts constantly revolved around my job, pride in my professional achievements, and my income. That was my world. I spent very little time at home. I was really with the family only on weekends and holidays. And then suddenly I was fired and deprived of all the routine that was in my life.

Answer: They revoked it because there is no more money left in the world. In other words, the whole world needs to let out the air from “the inflated balloon” and descend to the level of basic needs.

Let’s say we need to take care of 5 essential things: shelter, food, warmth, safety, and health. This is our mission, to supply this for everyone. There are many in Europe who saved all their lives for their retirement and were sure that in their old age they could live like everyone else, and in the end they barely find money for food and medicines.

So we need to show a person that he will receive a real bonus in return for his participation in the program of integral education that the society offers him. For example, society sends you to work for a three-hour shift and to five hours of classes at the university, and someone else is sent to the university for all eight hours.

As a result, we fill man’s day without touching the framework that he already had. He feels that he is occupied exactly like before. It is good for him to continue in the same vein. It doesn’t matter that the kind of tasks are different or that his many dreams and plans dissipated, he nonetheless sees that the same thing is happening all over the world. The troubles of the many are in themselves a partial consolation especially since he sees also no other options exist.

Accordingly, study and learning become an essential condition for providing his basic needs.

Question: A person who loses his job, doesn’t just lose the income. He loses his identity, his self-esteem, his social position, and friends. He is left isolated from society and feels as though “demons” have burst out of the bottle, opening inner doors within him that previously he didn’t even know existed.

Answer: To avoid this, we advise him to make an honorable living like others. But also, the moment he comes to study the integral education, he will immediately begin to understand his personal situation and the situation of the whole world, and this understanding will become a kind of prop for him.

Now man understands where he is and why everything is happening especially in this way. The education gives him a new vision, a new approach to the world. He becomes a real man (Adam – human/man) in the full sense of the word, educated and oriented toward what is happening. He is not detached from society, he maintains relationships with others, he participates in various activities, and ultimately thrives in society.

After all, a person who loses his job wants to understand himself, to restore himself. He lost his way and wants to clarify what is happening to him. When he sees that it is a part of the developmental process that operates on everyone, and not just him, that will already bring him some relief. Thus our materials need to provide a person with friendly and tender support, which will help lighten his spirits.
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From “Lessons About A New World” #1 12/1/11

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