Crisis: The Search For The Solution

Today, we have gradually attained awareness that our existence is harmful, and we call this a “crisis.” We still don’t think that this is a general crisis encompassing all realms of human existence. We still don’t understand and do not connect all the individual crises within the family, in education, in culture, in science, in relationships, and most importantly the crisis threatens our existence—financial,  economic, and ecological. Yet all of these crises are essentially the same crisis.

In general, the word “crisis” in its translation and in its correct meaning symbolizes birth. In ancient Hebrew and also in Aramaic, the term indicated the same thing, a place upon which a woman gives birth. In ancient times there were special birthing stones upon which a woman would give birth with the help of midwives. This place was called a “Mashber.” This concept is found to symbolize birth in many languages, translated as the “birth of something new.”

This is to say, we should not look at a crisis as it’s seen by everyone who wants to get more and more out of this world, who are meanwhile acting as egoists without any deliberation. You can see that there are many who think that in this crisis something now must be corrected and then everything will be okay as it was the day before yesterday.

But lately there are fewer and fewer people like these and we see all these things happening very rapidly. After five years of the crisis it’s already clear that it is continuing and will not just gradually go away by itself. They are already saying that this will take about twenty years to correct as if it would be possible to correct something using the old methods in spite of everything. It has become clear already that this crisis will not end in another year or the following year.

According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, the crisis will continue. It will evolve and deepen. We will yet reach states, which at the present time would seem to us as impossible, when people will lose their human visage, becoming like wild animals, taking upon themselves laws, general rules, and norms of behavior that were considered inhuman, beneath the human level throughout the twentieth century. The accepted conventions will be pushed aside by our evolving ego and in general we will gradually descend to the level of the beast.

On the way, there could even be wars. We see how this is happening in the world today, when suddenly for no clear reason these break out in various regions and nations and phenomena begin to appear whose true reasons are not clear to anyone. Essentially these reasons always existed but were buried deep within and were not visibly apparent, or at least not sufficiently prominent to arouse problems, as for example in Syria or Lebanon, and so forth. This is speaking here about the social and political problems.

And in addition to this, there are very deep economic reasons; because the ego is revealed first and foremost in the economic area. This is because the economy reflects the connection between us, who gives to whom, how much and how they receive. Therefore the economy shows us first and foremost how much the system has become uncontrollable. We don’t understand which laws are currently governing us at all because the world is rising to another level. According to its level of development, it has already passed through the egoistic stage and has reached a particular limit. And as Baal HaSulam already hoped at the beginning of the twentieth century, from now on, more and more, we will need to reach an awareness that we must connect.

Essentially all of these conditions also existed in Russia at the time of the socialist revolution. These were all the revelations of the inner development of the human towards a new social order. But in the end, nothing came of it. As you know, Baal HaSulam hoped very much that the revolutions in Russia and Poland would transpire differently, and not just be taking the power into their own hands and establishing a new egoistic order, a new government. World War I was a “trigger,” the first “shot,” the first push toward the fact that the world must begin to change.

Therefore in the wisdom of Kabbalah it is said that if people don’t succeed in understanding that evolution must be through connection above the ego, which is presently leading us towards this connection, the world will then continue to become more and more incomprehensible. This is because the nature that had previously been discovered within each one of us and all of us together had pushed us for thousands of years in an egoistic form. In accord with our ego, we developed science, technology, commerce, and various social relationships; we changed society, we went through a change in form…

But ultimately the ego reached the end of its development and began to “circle” back on itself. Why? This was because nature had developed and exposed the entire ego, expanding it to a state of absolute mutual, global, “round” connection. Accordingly, we must also be “round,” meaning, connected into a single whole, and we are not doing this.

Revealed here is not just some kind of disorder; rather, it’s a fundamental difference between our economic, political, social, and internal mechanism, and everything that exists, that system, that program that nature brings up for us. This is because it began to be discovered not only in a more and more egoistic form, but in a form of egoistic communication. And yet within this system there are various altruistic connections between us that are beginning to be revealed by which we are becoming completely transformed.

Thus an overlap between the two systems is being formed. Nature, the internal system, is discovered more and more as being altruistic, integral or analog; whereas we came to exist within a system of egoistic mutual connection that we developed over thousands of years. And so, the nature that aroused this egoistic development in us has now changed and continues to change more and more. Essentially, the Creator, the system of integral connection, has begun to be revealed more and more within human society, within civilization.

This state of opposition between the two systems is dangerous and not at all clear to us. Therefore none of today’s leaders, scientists, technologists, political scientists, sociologists, politicians, economists, or financiers, not one of them understands how to manage this system.

This is the greatest problem. We always ruled through the developing ego; we directed it towards various goals and areas. Someone who was more of an egoist, more clever, profited. We tried to do this also in other forms, like through socialist revolution. But there was no method for connecting the people then, and so in the end the egoists rose to power and began to manage, only using socialistic and altruistic slogans but essentially with the same egoistic system. Therefore nothing came of this at all; on the contrary, everything became worse.

And it’s not clear how the world will continue to advance and develop before it is discovered that there is a method of transition from that egoistic system in which all of human civilization is found to an integral altruistic system. So it’s up to us to clarify this and to tell others.
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From the Preparation for the The Convention In Krasnoyarsk 6/12/13