Entries in the 'Crisis' Category

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The Post-Crisis World Institute: Wait For The Storm

Opinion (Alexander Iskandaryan, Armenia, Director of the Caucasus Institute, international research paper Models of Post-Crisis Development): “An ideological system cannot be born and pass through the phase of structuring, propaganda and capturing the masses in just 10 years. Around 60-70 years passed between Marx and the October Revolution. And 30-50 years is the period in which movement in this direction has to happen. Socialist ideology has died, liberal ideology cannot offer anything new, and the limits of Islam are clear. So the appearance of a new ideology is very important!”

Anders Svensson, Sweden, tax manager, “Big Four” international auditing firm: “In the long term I hope there will be alternative globalization, but I’m not very optimistic about that.”

Gaetano Capasso, Belgium, stock trader (EU equities Germany, UK, France, Italy), Vanguard Investments: “For the next 10 years I would think there will be social progress, because public opinion asks for it and politicians are looking at how their actions can get the highest number of votes.”
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Who Creates The Deficit?

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Initially, all the useful resources are unlimited, but people create a deficit through bad intentions and certain fluctuations. Things that belong to humanity and that we should receive for free have become artificially limited and inaccessible.

As soon as something becomes deficient, it immediately stops being equally distributed, and everyone who can begins to accumulate it. Those who did not have it, will not have it. In the end, everyone suffers, both those who profit from it because excess does not lead to anything good and those who do not have it because they are not fulfilled. This applies to everything.

What does a person need? He needs safety, peace, attention, family, and food. All these things began to require enormous effort.

Regarding peace, we have lost peace. We work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Regarding safety, safety is an elementary resource, but because I did not establish a relationship with my neighbor, he got a gun, and I got a machine gun. You would think that someone would profit from selling weapons, but in the end, he is killed when the bomb drops on him.

Is there a solution to come out of this dead end? Can these problems be solved by upbringing?

Answer: If today we all are being driven into a deficit that is being used to rule over and control us, then we should ask ourselves: Can we resist these forces? It is not easy to resist them.

On the other hand, we see that crises come and erode the foundation under the people who have tried to create this system of government, who tried to profit and dictate everything to mankind. In the end, really, the bomb also falls on them. In other words, they also are absolutely uncertain about tomorrow.

It turns out that here, we encounter certain laws of nature. The reason for this is our egoism that drives us and constantly pushes us forward. People try to manifest it somehow in the best and most profitable way for them.

However, in the end, we encounter two parameters here: Egoism gradually and constantly develops in us from one generation to another and over the course of the entire life of every generation. In this way, we differ from the animate level. As we develop, we also try to exploit egoism with our mind and feelings, to turn it into something that will help us attain power, fame, knowledge, and maximum freedom.

As a rule, this happens by comparing oneself to others. Our egoism is tuned this way. This is why all the movements of humanity and of every person individually are only in this. A question arises: Will we be able to continue to exist in this paradigm?

You say that natural resources, such as oil, gas, coil, metals, and any natural resource are unlimited, but we see that they are finite. We even predict their end. Scientists say that they will end in a number of decades.

I base the things I say on the data provided by mass media. I am not a member of other circles. To be honest, I am not interested in them. However, overall, this is probably the way things are.

Perhaps it is done on purpose. Prices increase and people are convinced that resources are limited in order to gain from the increase and profit more by investing less. I do not know.

Of course, overall, we are coming to a point today when nature itself is showing us through a global crisis that we are global, connected between us. We depend on one another.

I think that the economy is not the problem here; it is social and personal relationships between people. In other words, mankind is the cause of the crisis that we are experiencing.
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From a TV Show “The Global Crisis: A Deficit of Resources” 3/1/2012 

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Looking Where To Run Away

Dr. Michael LaitmanIn the News (from CBSNews): “Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking was too ill to attend a conference in honor of his 70th birthday Sunday, but in a recorded message played to attendees he repeated his call for humans to colonize other worlds. ..

“In his recorded speech, Hawking pleaded for interplanetary travel, arguing that humans faced a grim future unless they spread out from their terrestrial home. ‘I don’t think we will survive another thousand years without escaping beyond our fragile planet,’ he said.”

My Comment: This statement indicates that our science is a product of our egoism; we are not aware of the fact that we are killing ourselves; we aren’t talking about the natural environment at all, as if it’s not our problem; the relation of man to the world is “we destroyed it and went to look for where we can continue.”

The meaning of existence is in the possibility of mindless existence. What about space? Let it be what has happened to America after its colonization. And this is the scientist’s wish. There is no awareness of our evil, that we are egoists and ulcers in nature, and must direct all our forces at our correction in the likeness of nature; then it will not oppose us.
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“Wind Farms Cause Global Warming!”

Dr. Michael LaitmanIn the News (from Forbes): “’Large windfarms can increase local night time temperatures by fanning warmer air onto the ground, new research has revealed. The study used satellite data to show that the building of huge wind farms in west Texas over the last decade has warmed the nights by up to 0.72C.’

“The basic effect is that given that the ground at night is generally cooler than the atmosphere, thus the air near the ground is cooler than the air higher up. Turning blades of the turbines mix up this air, cool with warmer, and thus lower the temperature of the higher up air.

“The effect is quite large too, that 0.72 of a degree is not far off the 0.8 of a degree which is said to be the total amount of anthropogenic global warming so far.

“However, amusing as this is, being able to point to one of the proposed solutions for climate change as being a cause of it, it’s not actually anything that affects the larger picture.

“We’re not changing the amount of heat that is disappearing off into space with this and thus not changing the basic energy balance of the planet. We’re just moving it around a bit, that’s all.

“As with the earlier paper that showed that offshore windmills will lower the air temperature around them by 1 degree or so: I assume from that same mixing increasing the evaporation rate of the sea water.”

My Comment: If we think that we can win somewhere without losing elsewhere, we deceive ourselves by forgetting about the unity of nature and its laws of a closed system.

We cannot fool nature, no matter what; in order to become harmonious with nature, we will have to change egoism as the root and cause of the created situation.
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Cause And Effect

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: The island of Haiti very well demonstrates the irreversibility of laws of nature. For many years it had been a flourishing country with a wonderful climate and a relatively developed infrastructure. However, five years ago the earthquake hit, and the international community invested trillions of dollars in the island’s restoration.

The UN organized global help, and it seemed everything was going to be okay and life on the island would go back to normal. But it turned out that even tremendous resources that were pumped into it couldn’t prevent chaos and destruction.

This is a colorful example that once a certain point is passed, human nature becomes irreversible.

Answer: This once again confirms that first of all it is necessary to educate the population. And only then, depending on the extent of the education, direct the population further towards formation of the new social interaction. The Haiti Island’s problem cannot be solved merely by money injections. If those funds hadn’t been provided, the island’s inhabitants would have gotten out of the situation by themselves.

Comment: Not the whole island suffered damages from the earthquake. But those who still had homes and could feed themselves by fishing moved to UN tent cities where food was given out for free. Mafia-controlled clans put the entire island under its power. UN troops move only at daylight in tanks because gangsters are all around. And these gangsters annihilate the island’s every attempt to break away from the existing situation.

Answer: It’s what was once done to Africa.

I’m repeating again that education, a universal education system, must precede all transformations. If we do not want humanity to advance through crises and brutal world wars, we have to first of all organize an education system ourselves!

You say that the cause of everything is the crisis, and hence we must change the society and human nature, make them integral and interconnected. I think here our opinions differ on what is the cause and what is the effect.

From my point of view, the cause is the motion of the force of nature that is constantly pushing us toward the new evolutionary state. Since we already went through all our previous evolutionary stages, right now we are moving toward the next one. The next stage of humanity is integrality, globality. Nature is moving everything toward integration, toward equivalence with itself.

Just like everything in nature, for instance, pressure and temperature differentials, is moving toward coordination and entropy, the same process is happening to humanity. It has to move toward integration because nature is forcing us and thus causing in us the crisis that we have today.

It wasn’t us who caused it, but the contrast of our contemporary societal state with the state we must come to. This is what we feel as the crisis.
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From a TV show “Experimental City: Exiting the Crisis” 02/03/2012

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Are We Lost? We Aren’t!

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: Some of the population drinks alcohol, some need drugs, some are fanatical, some don’t see anything except their ideas, some feel hatred and fear, some think only about sex, some are ill and think only about their health, and some are completely ruled by money or power. However, there are the few, the rare others, who are focused on what is outside of themselves and have the intention to do good. Life is founded upon these few.

Tell a person who only worries about his health or sex to think about the world. Do you know what he would say in response? Try it.

Humanity is at the point of making a decision. Either it will perish or begin to correct the situation gradually. In a short time it will pass the point of no return. Can we only send to the earth and humanity our love and wishes for health and nothing else?

Answer: You are not taking into account two circumstances:

  1. The world is governed by the upper force according to its plan and goal, and we can affect this force. It leads us to the goal, to our correction, in equivalence of form to it, either via suffering or consciously, by good, depending on our behavior.
  2. According to our behavior, we, the one percent, have influence many times over as compared to the negative influence of the masses, the ninety-nine percent. However, it is on condition that we act correctly, in cooperation.

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A Big Turn

Dr. Michael LaitmanToday humanity is starting to look for methods that will enable it to manage life and to know something about the future. It’s now that the wisdom of Kabbalah is revealed, and just like it was revealed to humanity in the days of ancient Babel so that they could correct themselves, now too it’s about to bring about a correction because we are at the second climax of the rising of the ego.

The first eruption of the ego took place in Babel, and now we have reached the peak of its growth, but on a new level which is absolutely wild.

A Big Turn
Our ego is constantly growing, not gradually (linearly or exponentially), but in leaps. These sharp leaps bring about wars, revolutions, and hard times. Although a revolution can be an industrial or a cultural one, like in the Renaissance or the industrial revolution.

According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, we understand what is happening to us. The point is that we are in a state of shattering which we must correct. There are only three states. In the first state, we are all together as one whole, and this is called the world of Ein Sof (Infinity).

From this state of unity, we descend into “this world,” and from it we have to rise to the world of Ein Sof again. The difference between these three states is that the first state of the world of Ein Sof is corrected, our present state is corrupt, sunk in a huge ego, and in the third state we must attain correction again.

A Big Turn
It’s as if we return to the same state we were in before, the same world of Ein Sof, but in the first state we were unconscious. We didn’t understand anything, like a drop of semen in a womb that hasn’t yet developed into an embryo and which means that it hasn’t developed into the “human” level yet although there are all the necessary conditions and potential for that in that drop.

The third corrected state which we have to reach now is special since in it we understand, feel, and attain everything that happens in the world of Ein Sof—the One who created us, His intention, the plan of this upper force, all of creation. We understand all this, feel it, and control it.

In fact, this is the goal of this whole big circle that we made. It’s a unique process: During the descent from the top down there is a shattering and corruption, and after the shattering there is the correction. So now in our world, we are in the worst possible state, in the most shattered state, under the control of the huge ego, which we have to correct. It’s corrected by the connection among us.
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From the Brazil Convention 5/04/12, Lesson 1

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It’s A Long Way Back Home

Dr. Michael LaitmanToday 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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Avoiding A Panic

Dr. Michael LaitmanQuestion: 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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On The Borders Of Humanity


The movie “There’s no Tomorrow”

(“There is no Tomorrow” is a half-hour long movie about the depletion of natural resources and energy and about the impossible limitless life in a limited planet. Inspired by the capitalist caricatures of the 40′s, the movie is an introduction to the energy dilemmas we are facing today).

My Comment: Our problem is that although the message in this film is true, it isn’t the whole truth. Nature has its own plan according to which it develops us, not to live modestly, but to understand the meaning of our life. So our wandering and wondering in the endless search for the right way to live on earth brought us to a general crisis, to a crisis in every aspect of our life, even if we could multiply beyond the earth’s carrying capacity.

The crisis is in us because we’ve developed until we reached the question about the meaning of life, and it doesn’t exist in our current existence! All the problems we encounter in everything that we do are called the “general crisis,” it is our own crisis, as we consume ourselves and nature, living in order to “live.”

Nature pushes us out of the crises to “turn on our brain,” so that we will think about that and discover the next level of our development, in another dimension, in the attribute of bestowal, above our current feelings and mind. We will discover another space instead of the earth and our bodies, which are felt in the attribute of receiving (the ego); we will discover a field of forces of bestowal, the dimension of the quantum state!
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