Question: How should the studies in integral education be organized for retirees?

Answer: With retirees, it’s not possible to study through television communications, through screens. You need to stand in front of them live so that they can feel you. It’s possible to introduce a combined study system, varying study with a teacher and virtual lessons.

Teaching retirees, the teacher simultaneously chooses from the group who is suitable for teaching. These people are easily and quickly discernible: They usually sit in front and listen to the teacher attentively. Likewise, they immediately sign up to be his helpers, quickly grasp the study material, and within a short time they’re able to give lessons on their own. In addition, we must prepare flyers and newspapers, organize convenient and accessible kits of video materials that will always be with them.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #23, 03/03/12

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Question: In integral learning, is it possible to use the educational infrastructure that already exists: schools, universities, teachers, and professors?

Answer: I believe that all teachers during the process of integration should try to adapt it quickly and everyone must work with his or her niche. Since there are many materials from other sources in integral upbringing and education: physics, chemistry, biology, geography, natural science, etc., it would be very desirable for teachers to continue to teach their subjects, and at the same time to also acquire a certain level of integral knowledge, which they would implement in their classrooms. This comes first.

Second, there are teachers, who can quickly adapt the integral method to teaching while taking courses of integral education, and in their turn, they would become educators and teachers of integral learning. And then there would be a constant supply of personnel.

Question: How can teachers be applied in the beginning of the educational process?

Answer: First of all, they continue to do their regular work, they do not stop doing it. Teaching children in schools must continue.

And integral method studies must be simply added everywhere they can be added, they must be implemented in all possible productive and educational processes, but never in a way that can harm them—it must be done as gently as possible.
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” #23, 3/3/12

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The last conventions indicate the beginning of a new era in which we have to practically fulfill everything we’ve learned for so many years, what we’ve read in the letters and the articles of Baal HaSulam and Rabash: the connection in the group, the unity with friends, and the clarification of the place inside the group where the spiritual world, the Creator, the building of the collective vessel, and the correction and the shattering are revealed.

Actually, all the descriptions refer to one action: the connection of all the shattered, distant, opposite desires that hate each other with the help of the Reforming Light, which we draw by our collective prayer, raising MAN, during the workshops, the different activities, and all the time until we perceive the spiritual goal of our life.

We should see this as a general trend that affects every aspect of our lives: educating children and adults, our groups, and the whole word, everyone, from the individual to all of humanity, and seeing this trend to connect in “circles,” which is the major trend leading to the correction of the shattering and the attainment of the goal of creation.

We can regard the whole way we’ve made so far as the time of preparation, and from now onward we and the whole world must start to build such circles.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/20/12, “Talk About Past Conventions”

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Today, the happiness of man depends on his relationship with the environment, on whether he finds his proper place in society. And so we see that gradually a person leaves the little family unit.

At first all of life was connected with family, not only women, but men as well. The husband would leave to some factory in the morning to return in the evening to his wife, children, and the household, and all of life was revolved around it.

But this pastoral idyll ended. We left our homes for the wide world, began travelling and experiencing the world. On the other hand, thanks to modern means of communication, this world has begun entering our homes. As a result, we all ended up being interconnected through industrial, economic, and financial relationships. The circle closed, and all of us, both men and women who want to connect, must unite and through this connection, return to the familial connection, but on a new level.

For this to happen, everyone should examine: where we live, in what state, in what kind of world do we find ourselves, why do certain processes take place in the world, and what do we need to do? In what way does nature move us forward, giving us no opportunity to resist? Then, we will see that we need to establish tighter connections through media and specialized education.

In the end, we who once headed for the world, freed from home and family ties, will return back home free and independent. Once again, we return to a more quiet and slower-paced life, in connection with each other, but in a different form. Each of us will remain free, and based on this freedom, understanding, and vision of the future, we will establish for ourselves a connection between all people around the Earth and within each family.

Man suddenly sees that family offers meaning; there are great benefits and a better life in a family. Then, he will find a partner close to him in this new spirit that he has acquired based on integral education, and he will re-build the family. [Read more →]

Filed under: Children, Education, Integral Upbringing, Society - 1 Comment →

Today we are facing a serious economic crisis that will help us discover that by our unrestricted yearning for wealth, control, and technological advancement, we have confused ourselves and placed ourselves in a trap. We run around like a hamster on a wheel feeling that we constantly have to manufacture more and more products for which there is actually no real need.

But nature, compressing us into one ring, shows us that we have to start living like one harmonious family that needs only the normal basic necessities and no excesses. This means that we will have to reach the level of rational, sensible consumption. Of course, a person needs clothing, food, medical care, security and a job. But he doesn’t have to follow every advertisement, which for the sake of someone else’s gain convinces him that he really needs meaningless products, by constantly offering him new things and igniting his appetite.

There must be an end to this chase, and we are already starting to feel that global production is slowing down. As a result, many people are losing their jobs and are being thrown into the streets. The number of unemployed is in the millions and is growing day by day throughout the world. This trend will continue.

I believe that the crisis will be reflected in the family causing an opposite process. After all, women will begin to gradually return to the home. Men too, will spend more time at home. Life at home will be more balanced and the mad chase in which we wish to swallow the whole world will stop.

Then we will feel the desire to live in a family again, not like in the past, but in a more balanced, tranquil way. A person will start dealing with his internal development! He will live a balanced life with nature.

First we must reach a balance among us in our relationships by forming better connections in society. We must do that or we will simply not survive. The external harmony will change us internally and make us more tranquil and patient and teach us how to build our families based on such connections so that “love will cover all sins.”

Then we’ll be able to be more tolerant and learn to live in a family where everyone is free, but at the same time internally connected to a spouse. We’ll want to have children in such a family and will learn how to treat them and give them the right education according to the spirit of this new humanity.

It may well be that not everyone has understood this yet, but the old world no longer exists. In the new world we’ll be filled, not by running around from one place to another chasing money, status, and fashion. We’ll feel what lies behind all this emptiness and the filling that is on a higher, perfect, sublime level giving us a sense of upper harmony.

We’ll begin to feel a more internal reality, the harmony that exists in nature, and all thanks to the fact that we connect with others in mutual concern and mutual guarantee.

None of us has ever felt what true fulfillment is! Have we ever succeeded to fill ourselves in the chase after wealth, honor, control, and knowledge? Did you ever stop and say, “Now I am happy and I don’t need anything else”? There was never such a moment. We only keep on running, but we can’t fill ourselves.

Now we are about to rise to the next level of existence and to find out: what can a person enjoy, what can he be filled by? We’ll be filled by reaching the right connections among us because in the right connections and the ties among us we will reveal the wholeness of nature. This is the feeling of love that no one has known until now. I will enjoy my good attitude toward others and my love of others, and my desire to bestow upon them. If everyone treats others this way, everyone will be filled with this feeling of love.

Very little is needed in order to achieve this—only to learn how to do it! We have everything that we need: the method and the system of the integral education that can teach everyone. It’s an ancient method that has existed for ages, but it’s revealed only in our times because the world has reached such a state that it has become crucial for its existence.
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From KabTV’s “A New Life” Episode19, 2/2/12

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Question: Let us say that a big factory has closed down in a small town of fifty thousand people, and people have been left without work. What should we do? Should we inform people information that qualitative changes are coming on a global scale, or just put them before the fact?

Answer: What do you want the population to do, panic? Confusion, alcoholism, crime, collapse of the family unit, and so on, all social relations, even the concealed ones, immediately become aggravated.

You must first warn people, give them the remedy, and then tell them about the illness. We must have mercy on the poor population. This comes first.

Second, how do we do this? Imagine the horrible state of fifty thousand people who gradually will descend to the poverty level and degradation. How can this be prevented?

Question: We do not stop the factory. Instead, we begin to gradually cut down work hours by one hour a week. We offer people the option to spend this hour studying, without leaving the plant. We make an announcement that the corporation is introducing a special service, and now everyone must attend lessons as if it were work.

Answer: Our explanation can be in accordance with the common condition of the nation and the world, the common crisis, the common problems. This is why we want to enlighten the population and even make our city special, exemplary. This is the reason that we are introducing common, anti-crisis education and upbringing.

We can speak about the fact that the crisis is not only taking over the city, but the entire world. We really must justify it in the press and everywhere else. People must understand that there is a “tsunami” heading toward the entire planet. The only thing is that the population must be enlightened gradually, not with a harsh blow.

As the crisis continues to grow, we must educate the population and change social relations and our life into a form, a system, that could serve as a buffer to live through the crisis peacefully and well, without conflicts, perhaps even with a certain benefit. In other words, the crisis does not have to be presented as a crisis, since the word actually means “the birth of something new.”

We can explain all this to the population gradually. We must study all this so that we understand where the world and the country are, with us inside them. This will help everyone survive and succeed to the extent of his or her understanding.

All this could be realized through different public services, local television, newspapers, and presentations by local celebrities. We must do everything we can. We can invite professors and organize something very presentable, respected, and convincing. All these presentations will make it clear that the world really is at a bifurcation point.

Question: Instead of grief, “All is lost, we are closing the factory,” we can make it a celebration, giving people a chance to create a good, positive emotional background. In reducing the workday by one hour, we could say, “This is a very good thing.”

Answer: We introduce a system of integral learning not only at the factory, but also for all in general as a mandatory system, up to retirees.

Question: There is a category of people, entrpreneurs, who are very difficult to engage in studying. They are economically independent. How can we influence them to learn?

Answer: We can do it, for example, through the taxation system. A certain decree obligates a person to attend a course. Only then, will he be allowed to file his tax return.
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From KabTV’s “Experimental City – Soultion to the Crisis” 3/2/12

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Question: A person needs to open slightly to feel the taste of exiting himself, the taste of integrality. How is it possible to do that? Where do we begin?

Answer: In the beginning, we use games in the process of teaching. They show how much we lose in our interaction from being individualists and how much we gain if we participate together.

When we mutually participate, we don’t connect our efforts or our knowledge, but rather give birth to something new: a new force, a new knowledge, new opportunities, and most importantly, a new sensation that exists between us. And we all exist in it together.

From within this new participation, we do not begin even to feel the “we” since it is the total of the individualists who assemble together. When we exit ourselves, the individualists, we go to the next state of integrality that is called Adam (Man or Human). We must try to begin to feel it. But this is fine tuning.

Question: What is the first step to begin to feel this?

Answer: I think it is built on conversation, on communication, on understanding and mutual participation. A kind of commonality is gradually created, a kind of deep, internal, non-verbal mutual understanding, when they begin to feel what ties them together, what is common between them.

It is a shared goal. But it is not an individual goal of each of us; this goal is above us: harmony with nature that we must understand, grasp its meaning, its characteristics, its relationship to us, and the way we enter it and exist in it.  However, we only exist in it thanks to the connection between us. It is specifically the connection between us that creates the “lining,” the background, our integral sensor. With its help we feel integral nature revealed in our mutual sensation, as if within us.

Then, we begin to feel its thought, intelligence, the goal, the plan, and gradually, we begin to attain it. Besides feeling that it exists, I begin to attain it, to discover it, but I discover it inside, through our shared feeling. Together with everyone, I begin to discover this more and more.

We begin to share our emotional impressions and discuss it from a logical point of view: What is this plan? What is this force that operates on us and others? How does our perception of our world change when we begin to feel the inner force of nature, which, apparently, exists here inside, and all of our world as if lies on its platform, while it constitutes a network of forces that holds up the entire world and manages it. So, what is this force? What is this energy?

When we begin to clarify this between us, among the friends, each one of us arrives, first of all, at this shared knowledge and receives from everyone additional feelings and intellect. And through these shared sensations and intelligence we begin to attain the harmony and the integral force of nature, which can never be discovered and attained alone.

This discussion should take place for a few hours in a group of ten people and two instructors, in a calm environment, with specific reading materials.
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From a “Talk on Integral Education” #17, 02/28/12

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Man finally is realizing that he is not the master of nature and that nature is the supreme power of the world. Thus, it is necessary to lower our heads and abide its laws.

The rules of nature to which we should become equivalent in everything we do are the following:

• Nature runs on sunlight
• Nature uses only necessary energy
• Nature brings form in accordance with function
• Nature recycles everything
• Nature rewards cooperation
• Nature is based on variety
• Nature requires experience in local conditions
• Nature limits excesses from within
• Nature reveals the power of restriction

However, Kabbalah explains that, by keeping these laws, we turn from bad creatures to neutral ones. If we correct our anti-natural egoistic qualities into altruistic ones, we will climb to the top, eternal, and perfect level of nature.
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Source:  Integral Education

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Question: What is the role of the guide, of the moderator, in a group of integral education and upbringing?

Answer: It is much easier to study theory than to manage people and teach them practical lessons by bringing them to conclusions that they cannot arrive at by themselves. On the contrary, those who study according to this method reach these conclusions and experience this method themselves and invent a method of self-reform when they suddenly begin to feel that the group is the “artist” that sculpts something totally new from them.

With an unexpected feeling and impression, they perceive how far they can change. In addition, what previously seemed illogical suddenly becomes ordinary and what was imperceptible before is suddenly perceived and accepted much more easily, and even things they disagreed with suddenly seem different.

So first they begin to study the influence society has on a person. At the same time, each one discovers, quite surprisingly, how dependent he is on the environment and to what extent he can be manipulated by the environment.

We can compare it to a weight loss support group, or to alcoholics anonymous, or to a group of people trying to quit smoking, etc. It isn’t about quitting a certain habit and formatting a totally new personality: it isn’t your “formatting” according to the same egoistic pattern, but acquiring a totally new perspective, a new nature, a new code of behavior, and changing people.

Sometimes it may be quite unpleasant, or at least very surprising, because a person doesn’t even think that he can change himself so easily, by using the environment.

The environment is willing to help him in that. If it operates according to a certain method, and explains to people what they have to turn into, then there is an accurate mutual cooperation in the group, when they play together and this collective game, just like in a theater, turns them into totally new people. What is more, the role they are playing remains part of them.

There are many “buts” here; the question is whether the role they begin to play remains part of them forever. Does it become part of them like the permanent memory of a computer? Or is it temporary and it may change by different attributes, functions and other roles? This depends on the guidance a person receives and the guidance of the group, and on whether these groups will become a constant incentive that influences people.
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From a “Talk on Integral Upbringing” 2/27/12

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Question: You said that we must constantly return to the corrected state and to keep it in mind. What is that state?

Answer: The point is that when a person attains an integral connection with other people in a group that isn’t too big, he remembers that, he has an impression called Reshimo, (reminiscences). This impression is emotional and it is stored in him as a memory, but it is an active memory.

This means that with the help of any state that resembles it we can always fulfill the Reshimo and to actually begin to experience it anew, to live in it and to immediately feel in it the ease, the lack of restrictions, warmth, security and the exit from any crisis, etc.

When a person begins to exit himself and connect with others, he sees that all the problems he felt before were felt by him because he had a different perception of reality, “for himself” and not “from himself.”

So the main thing is to leave a very accurate impression of mutual cooperation with the world around him, with the environment, in a person and to teach him habits and how he can return from different states to this basic state. Then we will return to it on different, higher levels, despite the possible interruptions, with the help of different environments, in any environment.

Question: How often does a person have to return to the corrected state during the day?

Answer: He should constantly be in it. I try to turn any state I am in into the corrected state.

Question: How can it be intensified, how can it be stronger and more powerful?

Answer: It is possible to intensify it by the resistance that I feel in order to return to it. Eventually, when I overcome the resistance I feel, it becomes a coefficient of intensity. My experiences of cooperation, the oppositeness of the states “to me” and “from me” will accordingly be clearer, more distant and stronger.

Question: When you describe this phenomenon I see it as an individualistic process, but we are always saying that it is a group process.

Answer: It is a group process, but we are talking about an individual effort within the group process. Later, when the process stabilizes as a group process, everyone will begin to feel a unified partnership. This is the state in which individuals become one whole, just like many drops merge into one in which no division is felt, but rather is the feeling of one big unified drop.

But we are saying that these states are constantly changing—groups break up and reconnect. We are not speaking about one group or about the fact that humanity has become such a group. Therefore, the individual component of my work with all of the environment becomes the main thing here.
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From “A Talk on Integral Upbringing” 2/27/12

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