In the News (translated from utro.ru): Sooner or later the economic crisis will be over, and then life on our planet will be completely different. The experts of the World Economic Forum concluded that the era of swift development has come to an end, economic growth will slow down, the influence of the government will increase, and the global economy will change completely. The experts put forth four scenarios for the future of the global financial system: Either the worst will happen in the East, or in the West, or everywhere at once, or the world will somehow recuperate.

My Comment: Nobody knows the future, because it is for us to decide. However, there aren’t four, but two possible scenarios: either things will be good for everyone, or bad for everyone. It can’t be divided up into parts, because the world is integral and absolutely interconnected, and this is being revealed more and more each day.

There are two possible paths: the path of suffering, or the path of conscious development and a favorable connection between everyone. However, one way or another, we will have to reach one goal – to become an integral part of Nature.

Related Material:
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News Report (translated from Scepsis.ru): The recent years, dubbed the “era of globalization,” will not go down in history as years of prosperity. They will be studied (if there will be someone left to study them) as a time of bloody regional wars, the growing poverty of the Third World, and the crisis of the Western middle class; a time when technological progress and financial speculation brought outrageous profit to tens of thousands, while casting hundreds of millions to the bottom of the social ladder.

The current crisis will be no exception: as we speak, some are already making plans to ensure that the losses suffered by the financial speculators will be reimbursed at the expense of regular citizens and debtors from poor countries.

My Comment: It all depends on how you view the crisis. Kabbalah views it as the beginning of goodness – as the revelation of the evil that is our egoism, the revelation that egoism is the one and only source of evil in our lives. It is the reason why we only perceive a tiny, negligible fraction of our eternal existence. This revelation, that egoism is evil, will be followed by a renunciation of it, and then by the correction of human egoism to bestowal and love.

We will then feel our existence as eternal harmony, called the Upper World or Paradise. And we will feel it both during the life of our physical body and after it dies. So let us accelerate this process by studying the method of our correction.

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I had two conversations that were recorded for the TV show, The Butterfly Effect. The topics discussed were, “Changing Our Direction” and “The New Global Order.” Speaking with me was Zalman Shuval, one of the owners of the Bank of Jerusalem and former Israeli ambassador to the USA.

Related News Story (from Financial Times): “Turmoil needs more effective solutions” Huge bank rescue plans co-ordinated three months ago by many governments were meant to let confidence recover. But governments and banks have had to respond to a renewed outbreak of fear. Anglo Irish Bank, nationalized on Thursday, and Commerzbank, given €10bn by Germany’s government last week, are among the institutions all but overwhelmed as measures once seen as dramatic have proved insufficient.

My Comment: For now nobody yet understands the fact that we are now in a different “coordinate system,” where everything operates in an integrated manner. Now, the only things that will work are those aimed at bestowal and the good of everyone. The rest is doomed to fail, maybe not immediately, but in the near future. We can’t do it all at once, but gradually we must learn about the new world we now find ourselves in! However, for now, people don’t believe me.

Related Material:
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News Report (from The New York Times): “Project Created to Restore Ancient Babylon” A master plan is being developed for the restoration of the Mesopotamian site of the ancient city of Babylon, in present-day Iraq. The “Future of Babylon” project, financed by a $700,000 grant from the State Department, will map the city’s archeological sites, develop conservation plans and pursue possibilities for tourism and education.

My Comment: This is a landmark event because our global civilization is a replay of ancient Babylon. In the past, Babylon was a place with the same conditions as we have today – those of a “small village” and “the Butterfly Effect.” In other words, people’s egoism grew by leaps and bounds, and they stopped “understanding one another.” This is how we got the expression that “they began to speak different languages.” Yet, at the same time, people revealed that they were completely interdependent.

That’s when one of their priests, named Avram, began to examine the crisis and revealed its cause: it was happening because Nature (or the Creator) was pushing people towards unification. As a result of his research, he attained correction – the revelation of the quality of bestowal and love within him. He also realized what kind of connections are necessary in a closed system in order for it to survive and function correctly. He changed his name to Abraham, where the additional letter ה (Hey or “h”) designates the addition of the Upper Force (bestowal and love) to him. Thereafter, he wrote a book called The Book of Creation.

Abraham taught what he had learned, and thereby formed a group of students. He called them Israel (Isra – El = straight to the Creator), and together they went to what would become the land of Israel. As for the Babylonians who remained behind, they got rid of the crisis by breaking the connections between one another and dispersing all over the planet.

Today, just like Abraham’s science, Kabbalah,  predicted, from the end of the 20th century on, we have once again entered the state of “a small village” and “the Butterfly Effect.” However, this time we have done so on the global scale, so there’s no place to run in order to destroy our globalization. Hence, there are two paths before us:

1. Suffering, due to the discord in our civilization’s system, or
2. We can use Kabbalah as the method of correction.

Either way, we are obliged to correct ourselves so as to reach the level of observing the conditions of existence in a closed system, where every person will have to live by the rule of, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

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News Report: According to the data of the All-Russia Public Opinion Research Center:

• In January 2008 – 32% of Russians expected to see an improvement in the problem of heavy drinking, and 9% – a regression
• In November 2008 – 20% of Russians expected improvement, and 22% – a regression

The turning point in the public opinion took place in August-September of 2008.

The Russian authorities fear that due to the global financial crisis and the deterioration of people’s standard of living, the country will experience a drastic rise in the consumption of poisonous types of alcohol as well as the suicide rates related to this.

My Comment: This is inevitable, and not only in Russia. Hence, we must urgently create educational and social television programs for all ages and all segments of the population.

News Report (from The Observer): Scotland’s distillers are in hot water as they struggle to satisfy the world’s growing demand for whiskey. …meeting this extraordinary demand has forced manufacturers to launch an urgent construction programme that will see the opening of Scotland’s first major new distillery for more than 30 years. … A spokesman for the Scotch Whisky Association added, “Consumers round the world may be saying no to a new house and no to a new car, but they are continuing to say yes to bottles of whiskey.”

My Comment: Of course, this is better than drugs, but it’s not a solution to the problem, especially if people prefer whiskey (or vodka) over the vitally essential products.

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A question I received: Please give an example of the correct economic and social connections, how to begin building them, and how to make the transition. Please give practical suggestions.

My Answer: All of this can be seen using the example of our bodies.

An example from Nature: In our bodies, every molecule, cell, and organ, and the entire organism as a whole, have their own personal interests. When each part of the organism shows others that it’s interested in self benefit, everyone starts to “negotiate” with each other. At every given second, the negotiations taking place in our bodies bring the system to a state of harmony, because the interest of the whole system prevails over the interests of the smaller parts, which it incorporates. Everything is built according to a hierarchy, which includes everyone’s interests. Hence there is a place for the individual benefit of each part within the larger or higher structure.

Imagine the system as one whole. Then you will understand that each level of our system must remain healthy and retain the ability to care for its own interests, but doing so within the framework of the whole organism.

An example from our economy: What if the body behaved the way we conduct the world’s economy? Imagine that we took the heart (the respiratory system – the “industrial” organs), and gave it the power to use the resources of the rest of the body. The other parts would provide all the raw materials into the circulatory system, such as oxygen, and they would cleanse the blood. This way they will produce a useful consumer good: blood. However, the sales department of the circulatory system sets the price of blood in the organism, and provides it to the organs that can afford it. But what if some organs couldn’t afford it? Could our organism stay healthy?

Globalization: This is a natural biological process, aimed at forming one integral human family. We are already seeing this interaction take place in various areas of our lives. Nature has already prepared us to become a global family.

But there’s one problem: Our economy is aggressive, and the display of personal interests on all levels of the integral whole means that the global trade organizations will not be able to tell the local economic systems what is good or bad for them. They will be forced to consider the interests of each local ecosystem and economy. All of this means that we need a world that will be good for everyone. This is our evolutionary task: to create a sustainable global economy and to become a global family.

The transition: The old and the new civilizations must coexist for a period of time. We must create a Forum of the New Civilization, where we can discuss our new connections in order to build the new civilization. We shouldn’t worry about the old system that is dying out. Rather, we should respect the former egoistic civilization, which is now generating a new, global civilization, and we should try to avoid a collapse of the old system before we sufficiently establish our connections in the new civilization.

(Based on materials by Dr. E. Sahtouris, my colleague in the World Wisdom Council.)

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News Report (from Financial Sense Editorials): Andrew Gelman of Princeton stated, “The law of unintended consequences is what happens when a simple system tries to regulate a complex system. The political system is simple. It operates with limited information (rational ignorance), short time horizons, low feedback, and poor and misaligned incentives. Society in contrast is a complex, evolving, high-feedback, incentive-driven system. When a simple system tries to regulate a complex system you often get unintended consequences.”

Examples of Unintended Consequences of the Last 100 Years:

• The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria: All sides envisioned a short painless war. The war lasted 4 years and killed 20 million people, with another 20 million casualties.

• Treaty of Versailles: The harsh terms inflicted upon Germany by the victorious Allies eventually led to the rise of Adolph Hitler as dictator and ultimately to the deaths of 70 million people in World War II.

• Manhattan Project: Led to an arms race with the Soviet Union which almost led to nuclear war in 1962. The proliferation of nuclear weapons is one of the biggest dangers to world peace today.

• Richard Nixon takes U.S. off Gold Standard: The U.S. dollar has lost 93% of its purchasing power since 1971. The welfare statists have confiscated middle class savings through inflation.

• China Embraces Capitalism: Peasants in China were turned into workers (so as to narrow the gap between rich and poor), resulting in an economic crisis and social unrest.

• Cheap oil: will halt projects aimed at developing alternative energy sources and create an energy problem in the future.

My Comment: These were just the naive errors of the past, before we revealed the closed global system of the entire planet’s absolute interdependence. Today, however, any mistake made in any part of the world will lead to an unpredictable domino effect in various parts of the planet and on various levels. In this case the best thing to do is, as written in a Kabbalistic text, “Sit and do nothing.” Or in a word – freeze!

The only chance we have of making the right actions is to take into account the well being of all humanity. But this is only possible when one perceives everyone as one family. It is impossible to calculate this legally or mathematically! It is only possible to act this way under the influence of the Upper Light, which transforms our innate egoism into Nature’s quality of bestowal and love – the quality of the Upper World. This is the transformation we’ll have to undergo.

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News Report (from Science Daily): All spiritual experiences are based in the brain, according to a University of Missouri neuropsychologist. …spiritual experiences associated with selflessness are related to decreased activity in the right parietal lobe of the brain. This study, along with other recent neuroradiological studies of Buddhist meditators and Franciscan nuns, suggests that all individuals, regardless of cultural background or religion, experience the same neuropsychological functions during spiritual experiences, such as transcendence.

My Comment: The science of our world can only discern the external manifestations of all phenomena, as in this case with physiological phenomena. However, it cannot say anything about their inner essence.

Kabbalah explains that at the very center of Nature, there is Light. Surrounding the Light is the desire It created. The desire and the Light create a system of interconnections, called the system of the worlds. The most external (the last) world creates a shell around itself – the matter of our world. We perceive just this matter, and based on it we reason about what’s happening. However, all occurrences originate at the very core of this great global system – in the “place” where God resides.

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News Report (from GfK): For the international GfK survey on cheating, carried out in 19 countries, the respondents were asked whether cheating was more common today than ten years ago, particularly at school, where taxes were concerned, in sport, in the workplace, in business and in relationships. Almost half of all respondents thought that more cheating goes on now than ten years ago.

My Comment: Indeed, egoism is growing, and there is no way for us to curb it. Even though we admit that our actions are bad, we no longer blush about it; we’re even proud of it.

News Report (translated from Israelinfo.ru): “Israelis have become crueler to the weak” Statistics show that over half of those who were killed on the roads of Israel in 2008 were the most unprotected: pedestrians, motorcyclists, and bikers.

My Comment: This is evidence of an increased egoism, neglect for the weak, and the feeling of impunity due to the fact that such egoistic behavior is becoming a norm. The accidents aren’t even mentioned on TV anymore, and people don’t have the right attitude to them. Indeed, egoism doesn’t allow us to take even the basic precautionary measures. Defenseless, our society is heading right into the mouth of the Snake!

News Report (from Times Online): Although there is no definitive list of mortal sins, many believers accept the broad seven deadly sins: lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, anger, envy and pride. …new sins have appeared on the horizon of humanity as a corollary of the unstoppable process of globalization. Whereas sin in the past was thought of as being an individual matter, it now has “social resonance.” You offend God not only by stealing, blaspheming or coveting your neighbor’s wife, but also by ruining the environment, carrying out morally debatable scientific experiments, or allowing genetic manipulations which alter DNA or compromise embryos.

My Comment: So how would we put the sins in a spiritual order?

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Odessa Congress 2005: “The Last Stage of Evolution”
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News Report (from ITN): “Life meaningless for young adults” A survey of 16 to 25-year-olds by the Prince’s Trust found that one in 10 young people believed life was not worth living or was meaningless. The poll of over 2,000 showed that more than a quarter felt depressed. Almost half said they were regularly stressed and many did not have anything to look forward to. The trust, which aims to help vulnerable young people, said its study revealed an increasingly vulnerable generation.

My Comment: Indeed, this is true. However, we shouldn’t see the state of our generation as a fact, but as a result of a grown egoism. It follows from this that the enormous egoism will force us to find a fulfillment worthy of it, as otherwise, if it remains empty, it simply “won’t let us be.”

Only the revelation of the goal of all that exists, the goal for which this egoism is growing and why it has become so horrible, and the attainment of this goal – only this will be able to comfort and fulfill us. The fulfillment will give us the strength to live, to correct this egoism, and to prosper by using it for the benefit of others in the global system of humanity.

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