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Little Known Ways Art Can Transform the World

Calling All Trend Setters: You Can Making Giving Fab

In order to achieve the necessary shift in our perception and lifestyle, that can help us solving the global crisis, and build a sustainable future, we have to introduce a new global education system, and change the values prevalent in society. In this change, the media has a primary role.

But as important as media is to our culture, it cannot make the required shift in spirit all by itself. To complete the shift in our thinking, we must engage actors, singers, and other public idols and celebrities in the process. Their productions are displayed not only on television, but also on the Internet, in movie theatres, and on the radio, and are vital to getting the new message across.

It is hard to predict exactly how the arts will develop once we become familiar with the giving half of reality. Because we have never tried it on a large scale, we cannot tell how things will unfold once unity and giving are in vogue. The ideas below will describe possible shifts in cinema and theatre, but the rules that apply to this art form also apply to the more traditional arts such as painting and sculpturing.

 

Who Else Wants Movies that Celebrate Humanity’s Full Potential?

The visual arts are the most powerful means of influence. Up to 90 percent of the information we receive on our surroundings is visual information. For this reason, a shift in our thinking must begin with what we see, even before we change what we hear.

On the surface, the plots of most movies and plays can remain pretty much the same: a fight for a just cause, a love story, or even a tragedy. But behind each plot should be a subtext that conveys a message of unity.

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Psalms Commentary – Psalm 84: To the choirmaster: according to The Gittith. A Psalm of the Sons of Korah

Psalm 84
To the choirmaster: according to The Gittith.
A Psalm of the Sons of Korah.

How lovely is your dwelling place,
O Lord of hosts!
2 My soul longs, yes, faints
for the courts of the Creator;
my heart and flesh sing for joy
to the living Creator.
3 Even the sparrow finds a home,
and the swallow a nest for herself,
where she may lay her young,
at your altars, O Lord of hosts,
my King and my Creator.
4 Blessed are those who dwell in your house,
ever singing your praise! Selah
5 Blessed are those whose strength is in you,
in whose heart are the highways to Zion.
6 As they go through the Valley of Baca
they make it a place of springs;
the early rain also covers it with pools.
7 They go from strength to strength;
each one appears before the Creator in Zion.
8 O Creator, God of hosts, hear my prayer;
give ear, O God of Jacob! Selah
9 Behold our shield, O Creator;
look on the face of your anointed!
10 For a day in your courts is better
than a thousand elsewhere.
I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my Creator
than dwell in the tents of wickedness.
11 For the Creator is a sun and shield;
the Creator bestows favor and honor.
No good thing does he withhold
from those who walk uprightly.
12 O Lord of hosts,
blessed is the one who trusts in you!

There are all kinds of Psalms. This Psalm is King David’s gratitude toward everything he went through in order to reach the source of the whole path he underwent. It marks the closure of all questions, disconnections and misunderstandings, whereby then comes the outburst of praise.

Psalms are impossible to comment on. They are a vessel similar to the Light, where discernments disappear and everything is swallowed in wholeness.

Why do we say that Psalms are written in wholeness when sometimes they sound like they are written out of pain, sorrow, lacks and requests?

Sometimes they do sound very much like outbursts of sorrow, or outbursts of lacks of understanding, pain, and lacks of wholeness, for example, as David escaped Avshalom, and how he had problems with Uriah. He had a very difficult life arranged for him, because it is Malchut (Kingdom), i.e. the King of Israel, who is in constant battles.

However, everything he wrote, despite sometimes revealing very deep sorrow, so deep that we do not understand its meaning, in any case, it is written out of adhesion. Every single word in Psalms is written out of adhesion. Everything King David wrote about as prior to adhesion, i.e. what he underwent in order to discover adhesion, is him awakening the vessel, because one cannot exist without the other. Right without left is not right, and likewise, left without right is not left, and therefore, they can only complement each other in the middle line.

If you divide Psalms into all kinds of styles, you cast a flaw on them. This is because, despite them appearing different, with some appearing greater or smaller, or some relating to gratitude or to request, that is simply an incorrect view.

Each and every Psalm contains wholeness, as it is written out of perfection. In order to reach such attainment, King David needed to go through a lot of incompleteness, the same as it is for all of us.

What is adhesion? What is wholeness? Where are you in this whole picture of attaining wholeness and perfection out of a lack of that state? All these questions and more are dealt with in the Free Kabbalah Course, which provides the fundamental principles and tools by which to correctly approach the wisdom of Kabbalah. It is recommended to take the Free Kabbalah Course before approaching the Daily Kabbalah Lessons with Dr. Michael Laitman. Click the banner below to sign up…

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How Nature’s Example Is Perfect and Following It Will Resolve Every Crisis

Why Today Nature Is the Only Role Model for Humanity

Today humanity is gradually sinking deeper and deeper into a multi-faceted global crisis. It doesn’t seem there is antibody who has true solutions, or ideas how correct the multitude of mistakes.

The surest way to correct mistakes is to learn from those who have done things right. In this case, nature is our role model and a proven success, so she should be our teacher.

To see how we can let the desire to give into our lives, let’s look at how nature does it. We perceive the outside world by using our senses, and we believe that the picture of reality our senses provide is accurate and reliable. But is it?

How often do we walk with a friend, and the friend hears something that we miss? Well, just because we didn’t hear that sound doesn’t mean there was none. All it means is that our senses didn’t pick it up, or that we didn’t pay attention. Or maybe our friend was hallucinating!

In all three possibilities, the objective reality is the same, but our perception of it is not. In other words, we do not know what the actual reality is like, or if it even exists. All we know is what we perceive of it.

So how do we perceive? We use a process best described as “equivalence of form.” Each of our senses responds to a different type of stimulus, but all our senses work in a similar manner. When a ray of light, for instance, penetrates my pupil, the neurons in my retina create a model of the outside image. This model is then encoded and transferred to my brain, which decodes the pulses and reconstructs the image. A similar process occurs when a sound hits our eardrums or when something touches our skin.

In other words, my brain uses my senses to create a model or form equal to the outside object. But if my model is inaccurate, I will never know it and will believe that the actual object or sound is the same as the model I created in my mind.

 

Discover the Best Step to Take to Better Perceive Reality

The “equivalence of form” principle applies not only to our senses, but to our behavior, as well. Children, for example, learn by repeating behavior they see in their surroundings. We call this “imitation.” Eager to learn about the world they were born into, and having no language skills, children use imitation as a means to acquire skills such as sitting and standing, speech, and use of cutlery. When we speak, they watch how we move our lips. This is why parents are advised to speak clearly to children (but not loudly; they can hear better than we). By imitating us, children create the same forms (movements or sounds) as we do, and thus learn about the world they live in.

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The Surefire Way for You to Achieve Balance in Life

Ever Wonder Why Other Species In Nature Are in Balance but Humans Aren’t?

Our reality is built by the interaction of two forces, the desire to receive and the desire to give. When there is an imbalance in between those that forces problems arise.

Our imperiled world is indeed a sad result of man’s lack of recognition of the desire to give. In contrast, the rest of nature is a magnificent display of balance between the two desires. In the diverse ecosystem that is Planet Earth, each creature has its unique role. The system is incomplete if even a single element in it is missing or deficient, be it a mineral, a plant, or an animal.

An eye-opening report submitted to the U.S. Department of Education in October, 2003 by Irene Sanders and Judith McCabe, PhD, clearly demonstrates what happens when we breach nature’s balance. “In 1991, an orca—a killer whale—was seen eating a sea otter. Orcas and otters usually coexist peacefully. So, what happened? Ecologists found that ocean perch and herring were also declining. Orcas don’t eat those fish, but seals and sea lions do. And seals and sea lions are what orcas usually eat, and their population had also declined. So deprived of their seals and sea lions, orcas started turning to the playful sea otters for dinner.

So otters have vanished because the fish, which they never ate in the first place, have vanished. Now, the ripple spreads, otters are no longer there to eat sea urchins, so the sea urchin population has exploded. But sea urchins live off seafloor kelp forests, so they’re killing off the kelp. Kelp has been home to fish that feed seagulls and eagles. Like orcas, seagulls can find other food, but bald eagles can’t and they’re in trouble.

All this began with the decline of ocean perch and herring. Why? Well, Japanese whalers have been killing off the variety of whales that eat the same microscopic organisms that feed pollock [a type of carnivorous fish]. With more fish to eat, pollock flourish. They in turn attack the perch and herring that were food for the seals and sea lions. With the decline in the population of sea lions and seals, the orcas must turn to otters.”

Thus, true health and well being are achieved only when there is harmony and balance among all the parts that make up an organism or a system. Yet, we are so unaware of the other force in life, the giving force, that we cannot achieve this balance, or even positively define what being “healthy” means.

 

What Everybody Ought to Know About Depression & How to Overcome It

The definition of health in the Britannica Concise Encyclopedia truly captures our sense of bafflement: “Good health is harder to define than bad health (which can be equated with presence of disease) because it must convey a more positive concept than mere absence of disease.” But because we have no perception of the positive force in life, we cannot define a positive state of existence.

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BeHukotai (In My Statutes) Parsha – Weekly Torah Portion

Leviticus, 26:3-27:34

This Week’s Torah Portion | May 4 – May 10, 2014 – Lyar 4 – Lyar 10, 5774

In A Nutshell

The portion, BeHukotai (In My Statutes), deals primarily with the topic of reward and punishment for the children of Israel according to their behavior—whether they follow the ways of the Creator. It is written, “If you walk in My statutes and keep My commandments, and do them” (Leviticus, 26:3). The portion begins with presenting the reward: “Then I shall give you rains in their season, so that the land will yield its produce and the trees of the field will bear their fruit” (Leviticus, 26:4). Opposite that is the presentation of the punishment: “But if you do not obey Me and do not carry out all these commandments” (Leviticus, 26:14), “I will appoint terror over you: the tuberculosis and the malaria,” (Leviticus, 26:16), and the worst punishment of all—exile.

If the people of Israel repent, the Creator promises to remember the covenant He has made with them and forgive them. It is written, “Yet in spite of this, when they are in the land of their enemies, I will not reject them, nor will I so abhor them as to destroy them, breaking My covenant with them; for I am the Lord their God” (Leviticus, 26:44). The portion ends with additional laws concerning vows, ostracism, tithing, and others.

 Commentary by Dr. Michael Laitman

The issue of reward and punishment was not presented at the beginning of the Torah because it is impossible to understand it unless you are able to make free choice. Without this ability it is pointless to instructions on this issue. First you must learn the laws and judgments. Then, if you keep them you will be rewarded, and if not, you will be punished. You cannot punish in advance. First one needs to reach the spiritual degree of shifting from unfounded hatred to brotherly love, to “love your neighbor as yourself,”[1] which is the whole Torah. This is the way we must walk: we must correct our evil inclination and turn it into a good inclination through the light that reforms[2], by studying the wisdom of Kabbalah, the wisdom of light.

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