We have to convey our message to everyone. However, I suppose that people will accept it better than the leaders will. The general population will come to us before the “notable” people.

Question: Why can’t we convey our system from the top? After all, if the government decides, the decision will be carried out.

Answer: The point is that an ordinary person has no system. He has an empty stomach, and he usually doesn’t care what he fills it with. He doesn’t care about the means, about someone’s system. For him, the main thing is not to be hungry.

The prime minister, on the other hand, makes plans and thinks about what is best to do, such as raise taxes or lower them, cut the budget or not to change things, and so on. He is involved in the technical details. He cannot take his mind off them and get rid of them. That’s the problem.

This is why we find it hard to reach those who sit at the top. Their problem isn’t their stomach, but control. They want to preserve it, and they cannot see beyond their plans to understand the reason they are unsuccessful.

They find it hard to hear something new. They can’t do it. What they would need to do to change their way of thinking is to put on “round” glasses to see the “round,” integrated world and its interdependence.

In this world, success is not measured by economic plans, technical details, interest rates and taxes. However, experts cannot break out of this vicious circle; they see the economy through the old perspective and cannot imagine anything else. They make plans according to profit.

For example, I make shoes; I sell them and make my living this way. One pair gives me enough to live for an entire month. If I make and sell two pairs, now I have a monthly surplus. Now the government comes knocking at my door, “I am taking 50% of your profits on the second pair of shoes. After all, I need to fund the state, the army, pave the roads, and so forth.” Well, that’s understandable.

Then the municipality knocks at my door, “You need sanitary services in your neighborhood, public utilities, landscaping, and so on. Give me 10% your profits.” And so it continues. [Read more →]

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In the News (from Lragir.am): “The global survey was carried out by the world’s largest independent network of opinion pollsters, WIN-Gallup International in over 58 countries (52,913 interviews), covering the vast majority of world population.

“The attainment of happiness is aided by economic hopefulness; but often “happiness” refuses to be subdued by economic gloom. Thus 42% of the global “gloomies” who are gloomy about economic prospects of 2012 say they are on the whole “happy.” Evidently, despite economic gloom, most European nations are in the Happy Box. The survey also finds that nations, which are struggling to move up on global economic ladder, produce a lot of ‘unhappy’ people. Thus, net happiness in China is nearly half of global average and stands at 25%. In contrast, the economically pressured Spaniards score 55% net happiness. Perhaps the feeling to “be happy” is also a cultural trait!

“According to the WIN-Gallup International Global Barometer of Happiness, 53% of the world say they feel happy, while 13% say they feel “unhappy.” Another 31% say they are “neither happy nor unhappy,” while 3% did not respond.

“The global poll further shows that those who claim “no religion” have lower net happiness at 27% compared to those with religious beliefs, among whom net happiness is generally higher…

“Net Happiness score for North America is 31% compared with 50% for West Europe as a whole and the economically despondent Spaniards who, when it comes to happiness, score 55%. Africa as a group scores 66% net happiness and Latin America scores 63%.

“The happiest people live in Fiji (89%), followed by Nigeria (84%), the Netherlands (77%), and Switzerland (76). The “unhappy” people are from Russia, Czech Republic, Turkey, China, Ukraine, etc.”

My Comment: Obviously, a human being is not a machine and takes everything emotionally and subjectively. No doubt, if he satisfies his physical (animal, basic) needs, he will be able to get unlimited happiness from a feeling of unity.
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Question: Israel is facing the question of free preschool education, which will require great cutbacks in other areas. Each time we are faced with a choice between one thing and another and it is always one at the expense of the other. How can such conflicts be solved?

Answer: We don’t see things correctly. Actually there are such surpluses that we could build another state of Israel, but we don’t see them. The point here is not how to save, but to distinguish where our resources are being squandered uselessly and wasted.

On the whole, we shouldn’t touch the budget and increase the deficit. We only have to find the billions that are wasted, go nowhere, and help no one. It all stems from negligence and carelessness, from the fact that we aren’t concerned about the situation as a whole. Each one considers and loves himself and as a result great wealth is being squandered.

There is no secret here. Observe yourself and how you use electricity at home and somewhere else, how organized and thrifty you are when it comes to your property for which you pay dearly, and how indifferent you are to wasting at the expense of strangers. In another’s place we are happy to splurge, but at home we are happy to save. So if we treat the whole national economy like the home economy, we will find such excess that we didn’t even imagine.

If you really check things in the Ministry of Education you will find such breaches into which not just some but a great percentage of our resources are pouring. Sift everything that isn’t for the benefit of the students, shake the system, and you will see how much will “fall” out.

On the whole, the attitude is that we don’t have to sacrifice one thing for another. No aspect of life should be deprived in order to strengthen others. If our major concern is mutual concern for the state like as for our family, then by changing our attitude and as a result of our desire to be efficient, we sill discover such great surpluses that we will have to think of how to spend them.

But since we don’t do that, the crisis will do it for us. It will “shake” us against our will. If we don’t put things in order, it will be done for us.
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/9/12, “The Freedom”

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If we examine human development, it becomes clear that it stemmed entirely from our desire. Time after time, man desired more and more. Long ago we had small desires, like simple village folk: a few cows, a small piece of land to grow food to eat, a spouse and kids, and that was quite enough. The desire was small.

Then the desire began to grow. It pushed us to start selling our goods at the marketplace and in cities. And in return, we began to buy fine clothing and some special items that we didn’t have before. Man arrives in the city, sees some miracle machine for cultivating land, and begins to work even more diligently to acquire it. Or he borrows money from someone to first buy the machine and then returns the loan after he sells the harvest which is larger thanks to this machine. So we begin to develop and establish increasingly tighter bonds between us. Our ego grows and pushes us to develop.

This is the usual story of humanity based entirely on man’s developing desire: We want more and more, but why? Our desire grows. I don’t know why, but suddenly I feel that I want something more, and then more and more. I look at others and I see that everybody aspires to something. And I follow their lead because inside me there’s envy, lust, ambition, and the thirst to rule. I am interested in buying from them things that are useful to me, but I don’t want to be below them. After all, I have an ego of my own, and I don’t want to feel like I’m losing. I want to win!

If we consider human development in this vein, we’ll see that this is what drew us forward. We were always looking around us and learning from others. There were some among us with an active imagination capable of inventing and innovating technology, economics, medicine, and everything that could be used to benefit humanity and fulfill our desires. This is how we developed.

When the time came, we waged wars, conquered new territories and nations. Then the time came to discover new continents, develop technology and commerce. Then we went out into outer space and continued developing, until we found ourselves at a dead end. This is something humanity began to feel around 50-60 years ago.

Starting in the 1960s, intelligent people, engaged in the study of the environment, society, and the process mankind was undergoing, began to warn us that we have come to a dead end and were simply continuing to march in place. Something happened to us, and we could no longer see where to continue developing.

At the time, the space program allowed us to forget about it somewhat. But even the space program ended quickly. So what if we fly around the globe one more time, or fly to the moon again; we’ve done all that already, so what’s next? We’ve seen that it doesn’t help us much; all these things are on the still level, not even vegetative or animate. And we failed to locate any alien civilizations despite our hopes and dreams of finding intelligent life elsewhere.

And here is where we arrive at emptiness. We’ve developed to a point where we’ve got nowhere else to go; we don’t see any future prospects. Our inner nature, as well as the external nature, meaning the world that we feel around us, no longer opens itself for us. Whatever we’ve got, that’s it, and nothing more. And then the people that discovered this, such as sociologists and philosophers (Fukuyama and others) began to warn us and write many books about it, calling it the end of humanity. On the other hand, other scientists claimed that the world develops cyclically.
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“Talks About a New Reality,” Talk 1, 12.27.2011

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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.
[65401]
From “Lessons About  the New World” 12/1/11

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Baal HaSulam: “The Freedom”: The truer and more developed views are never in the hands of the collective in authority, but rather in the hands of the weakest, that is, in the hands of the indistinguishable minority. This is because every wisdom and everything precious comes into the world in small quantities. Therefore, we are cautioned to preserve the views of all the individuals, due to the collective’s inability to tell wrong from right among them.

All of creation makes up one Partzuf which is divided into five levels of coarseness (Aviut). The Lights are dressed in it in the reverse order: The greatest Light is dressed in the purest vessels, the weakest ones. This is also reflected in the structure of human society: The smallest, weakest Lights are typical of the coarsest forces and the strongest ones, while the greatest Lights are in the upper levels, those that have the greatest forces but are the finest.

The potential of a mechanical collision is negligible compared to the intensity of an atomic explosion in which sublter processes take place. So obviously, in one kilogram of an atom bomb there is much greater energy than in many tons of ordinary explosives. It all depends on the quality of the material, not on the quantity.

So the individual and the general are opposite to each other. But they are within one structure and thus have to complement one another. This way, in whatever relates to the general, one must take after the collective, while in whatever relates to the particular and the picture as a whole, it is namely an individual who examines it, and so one should take after the individual.

This contradiction is only an apparent one. When we understand that it is one form, we immediately see what belongs to what, meaning to what important people have to lower themselves by caring for their people, and to what the people have to lower their heads and listen to the great ones.

First and foremost, we must acknowledge the fact that we are all united by one form (Partzuf). Later we will be able to understand the principles of mutual dependency and its parts and the cooperation between them on the way to the general success.

First we must realize that we are all connected to one whole. No “poverty line” can divide us into upper and lower. No one can look at others indifferently and pretend that it doesn’t concern him. This means that we can’t “break” anyone, on the contrary, everyone should be taken into account and we should understand that we cannot manage without one another. Our success doesn’t depend on oppression but rather on mutual completion.
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/8/12, “The Freedom”

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In the News (from BBC News): “A low-caste Dalit boy has been killed in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh for sharing a name with a man of a higher caste, police say.

“They said Neeraj Kumar’s father Ram Sumer had been asked to change the names of two sons as they were the same as those of Jawahar Chaudhary’s sons.

“The body of Neeraj, 14, was found on 23 November in a field. Two friends of the Chaudhary family have been arrested.

“Mr Chaudhary denies the involvement of his family in the murder.

“He says the family is being framed by police.

“Dalits, formerly known as ‘untouchables,’ are at the bottom of the Hindu caste system in India.

“Although caste discrimination is illegal, biases remain in many areas.”

My Comment: Is it not astonishing that people see India as a source of spirituality, love and mercy, and the ascent of the spirit above the body? But in fact, India’s society shows opposite relationships: the caste system, neglect, humiliation, and so forth. Delusion, fashion, and sweet self-deception attract people, and they want to stay in the “Indian fairy tale.”

See my talk with an Indian Guru Baba Virsa Singh Ji.
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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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There was a time when money was equivalent to effort. A farmer sold eggs or milk, a shoemaker sold shoes. And their labor determined the value of things.

In contrast, today you simply need to print money and declare its purchasing power. These pieces of paper haven’t had the actual backing of their supposed value for a long time now.

At the same time, money must always be proportionate to human effort, and this is true of capitalism as well. Only nowadays those in power don’t know how to get back to this system, and some of them simply don’t want to.

One way or another, we’ll need to do this. Otherwise all things will devalue and the ensuing imbalance will destroy the global economy. Our present economic relations don’t even abide by healthy egoism, to say nothing of altruistic correction.

We’re talking about a society that follows the elementary rule, “Go and profit from one another.” Indeed, in reality we trade goods, whereas money is merely their equivalent. And that means the first thing we must do is to ensure the equivalent properly reflects the actual state of affairs. Otherwise we will plunge into chaos.

Today millions in a bank account may have a far greater real-world value. We have inflated the system with a myriad zeroes that carry no weight whatsoever.

A corrected society must be united in equality and reciprocity without rich or poor. Indeed, the eventual face of social justice entails the same standard of living for everyone regardless of any other factors. The first thing we must do is make sure everyone receives all that they need for a decent life, wanting for nothing as far as their basic needs.

In contrast, the business people of today do the exact opposite and thereby destroy whole continents for the sake of phantom profit, which they cannot even spend….
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/5/12, “The Freedom”

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Question: It’s easy to imagine introducing integral education in America and other European countries where the country’s culture seems conducive to going through the process of self-knowledge; however, there are societies entrenched in ancient traditions where it appears the implementation of integral education will be difficult. In your opinion, what must happen in order for these people to start “gathering in a circle”?

Answer: Within the next 10-20 years I see such societies changing into something completely different.

Just look at what’s happening in India and China with their secluded way of life in villages far removed from all civilization. Just look at the way people are living: sleeping on a cot in a dormitory in a factory where at least 50,000 people work.

Everything has changed. Now these people are losing their jobs. Where will they go? A person loses his cot in a dorm and that is it, he has lost his corner and has no other place in the world. It is terrible what’s happening in these countries. China and India are enormous lands.

We must understand that changes can occur very sharply and suddenly. I see how fast the Gulf states are changing, the Arab Emirates for example. This is an educated country where the entire population lives at a comfortable level, but their way of life and their clan system is changing very quickly. All of a sudden they are losing the basis for it.

Closed societies still exist here and there; however, they are beginning to include themselves into the general masses that are living a more or less modern life.
From the Fundamentals of Kabbalah Lesson 12/18/11

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