Posted: Wed Oct 10, 2007 5:15 pm Post subject: Authentic Kabbalah site
I found this site 4 years ago, it served me as a source of wisdom all this time. And I really excited about its new look and content!!!
Enjoy it!!!
http://www.Kabbalah.info , the world�s largest online source for FREE Kabbalah content, has updated and expanded its site to meet the growing worldwide interest in the wisdom and study of Kabbalah. The new site offers quick and easy access to a wealth of information and resources for learning the science of Kabbalah.
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2007/10/prweb558913.htm
Kabbalaists teach us and tell us this famous allegory about a generous shop owner whose shop is always open, and everyone can walk in and take what they want. But his hand writes what you take, and his collectors collect. You can pay him by becoming like him, which is what he wants, or you can use what he gives you for yourself, and then his collectors come.
Stuff. It fills our closets, our garages, and our lives. We gauge success in life by the stuff we own, and spend incredible amounts of time shopping for it. A new documentary, The Story of Stuff, shows how our entire lives have been taken over by “stuff.” And the wisdom of Kabbalah shows what we can do about it
Annie Leonard, an expert in international sustainability and environmental health issues, spent ten years tracking “stuff” from its beginning as raw materials until it ends up in the trash. Her documentary, The Story of Stuff (www.storyofstuff.com), is as entertaining as it is educational, and has been viewed by over two million people.
Annie states the problem quite simply: “We have become a nation of consumers. Our primary identity has become that of being consumers. Not mothers, teachers, farmers—but consumers.” But her deeper concern is that U.S. consumption-mania destroys our balance with nature and ruins people’s lives. And all this happens away from the public eye. Here are just a few of the facts she uncovered:
- In the past three decades alone, one third of the planet’s natural resources have been consumed.
- 75% of global fisheries are now fished at or beyond capacity. 85% of the planet’s original forests are gone.
- The U.S. has only 5% of the world’s population, but uses 30% of the world’s resources and creates 30% of the world’s waste. If everyone consumed at U.S. rates, we would need 3-5 planets.
- U.S. industry releases over four billion pounds of toxic chemicals a year. Over 100,000 synthetic chemicals are in use in commerce today.
- Toxic chemicals found in the products we use concentrate in our bodies. In fact, human breast milk tops the food chain as having the highest level of toxic contaminants.
- Each person in the U.S. makes 4.5 pounds of garbage a day, twice what we made 30 years ago.
- Even if we could recycle 100% of the waste, it wouldn’t make a dent in the problem; for every can of garbage we put out on the curb, the equivalent of 70 cans were manufactured to make that one can of garbage.
But there’s more to the story. Annie reveals that “It didn’t just happen—it was designed.”
Why Shopping Has Become the National Pastime
Perhaps the most shocking fact revealed by Annie’s extensive research is that our “throwaway society” was carefully orchestrated by the government of the United States in order to revitalize the economy after World War II. At the time, retailing analyst Victor Lebow proposed an ambitious plan: “Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life; that we convert the buying and the use of goods into rituals; that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption. We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”
“We shop and shop and shop, keep the materials flowing! And flow they do,” in Annie’s simple words. Our entire lives are being narrowed down to working, shopping, and then working again to pay off for the stuff we just bought. And with such an endless treadmill, it’s no surprise that polls show that our national happiness is actually declining.
Is this really how we want to run our lives and our economy? Do we really have to keep subjugating our lives to a system that ruins people’s lives, destroys the environment, takes us completely out of balance with nature and—at the end of the day—doesn’t really make us happy?
Kabbalah Explains "the Will to Consume"
The Story of Stuff concludes by talking about a variety of “green” strategies to improve the situation. However, Annie also realizes that “Things are really going to start moving when we see the connections, when we see the big picture.”
As it happens, the wisdom of Kabbalah is all about seeing these “connections.” It explains that we have to delve behind the scenes and reveal that the driving force that motivates our "will to consume" and the systems that nourish it, is no other than our very nature—human egoism.
From Kabbalah’s perspective (or any other perspective), it’s crystal clear that no consumer goods will ever bring us spiritual satisfaction—or in simpler words—true, lasting happiness. Spiritual satisfaction can only be attained by harmonizing with nature’s underlying quality of complete love and bestowal.
Kabbalists say that being balanced with nature’s quality of bestowal is the one and only way for us to be truly happy. Moreover, acquiring this quality will grant us a whole new perception, and we will experience life on a completely different level.
“As long as we do not raise our goal above the corporeal life, we will have no corporeal revival, because the spiritual and the corporeal in us cannot live in one basket.”
Posted: Tue May 06, 2008 9:30 am Post subject: another authentic website
I want to mention another website that is authentic called Olam Hatorah which is a database of over 2000 Jewish Israeli institutions. Amongst the list is
the Netivot Haim Institutions
which is based in Bnei Brak and was established to aid the Sephardic community amongst many others.
Come visit us and share your thoughts with us. _________________ Yehudi hamacabbi Olam Hatorah
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