News Story: Down the Tube: the Sad Stats On Happiness, Money and TV

“Put down the remote and back slowly away from the television.

Despite the sharp rise in our standard of living in recent decades, Americans today are little or no happier than earlier generations. Why not?

A new study suggests one possibility: Maybe we need to be smarter about how we spend our time. And, no, that doesn’t mean watching more TV.”

The article continues by outlining three components of happiness:
1. Your nature or personality, that is, whether or not you’re a happy person by nature – and you have no control over this.
2. Your life’s circumstances, such as your age, health, marital status and income. The study continues by saying that these are nowhere near as important as people usually imagine them to be, giving the example that even if our income doubled, we would get used to it very quickly.
3. Your use of your time.

The study showed that people were generally happy in activities that the authors described as “’engaging leisure and spiritual activities’ – things like visiting friends, exercising, attending church, listening to music, fishing, reading a book, sitting in a cafe or going to a party” – and that people choose to undertake such activities, instead of doing them out of necessity.

Moreover, the study mentioned watching TV as taking a lot more of people’s time than the above-mentioned activities did in the past, and that if we spent more time on the “engaging leisure and spiritual activities,” we would then have a more satisfying life.

My Response: Soon we will start finding out that even these activities will leave us empty and unfulfilled. We will search for fulfillment in all kinds of places, until we arrive at our last desire: the desire to discover the meaning of life, through the attainment of the Creator.

Related Material:

* ARTICLE: It’s All About Pleasure – Although we enjoy different things, we all share a common need to fulfill our desire for pleasure

Filed under: Science - 1 Comment →

News Story: Earth’s Ozone Would Be Largely Destroyed in Nuclear Conflict

“According to a new study published in the magazine ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,’ A nuclear war involving 100 Hiroshima-size bombs would open a massive hole in the earth’s ozone layer, exposing life to dangerous levels of the sun’s rays.

Smoke caused by the atomic explosions would trap heat in the stratosphere and lead to the deterioration of more than 20 percent of ozone globally.”

My Comment: We have shifted the world’s balance to its very edge, when even the smallest violation of nature’s laws will lead to an avalanche of downfalls in all various spheres of our activity. I don’t believe in human reason’s ability to get us out of this tension. Rather, I believe in the opportunity to aspire toward our correction and as such, attract the positive forces from above, which will repair our situation. To this end, the quality of voices is more important than their quantity. A handful of people aspiring to correction can bring about a change in the Upper Governance of our world. That is why I keep repeating myself. Some of you seem to think that I’m trying to frighten you with scary stories, and it’s a shame that the message I want to get across is so often misunderstood. So again, here is the main message I want to get across: “Let’s work together and think of how we can discover everyone’s interconnection in the common soul of Adam, which is filled with the Upper Light of eternity and peace.”

Filed under: World - 2 Comments →

Alexander Rapoport is a practicing psychologist specializing in relationships, as well as a famous TV and radio host, theater and film actor, and singer throughout the Russian-speaking world.

We had a conversion over a video conference once, and it’s available here for your reading:
This World Has Not Been Created In Vain – Conversation between Michael Laitman and psychiatrist, sexual pathologist and actor Alexander Rapoport (December 1, 2005)

Here’s how the talk began:

Alexander Rapoport: By listening to the CDs with your speeches, I am ready to subscribe to every word. To me, everything that you say seems to be correct, everything that you say is good, everything that you say is very clear. The only thing that is not clear to me is how this differs from what the representatives of other teachings: yoga, Islam, Orthodoxy, qigong, Tai-Chi and etcetera claim. How is this teaching unique?

My Response: Your question, “How does Kabbalah differ from other teachings, religions?” I can answer by saying that on the surface, it does not differ at all. It stands in the same row as all other teachings: esoteric, non esoteric, religious, different spiritual practices. And man outwardly cannot distinguish one from the other. One can say that it is older than the rest, one can say that it has a more serious inner apparatus, with sketches and graphs, an enormous amount of literature, a connection to different manifestations in our life, but all this does not yet speak about the verity and uniqueness of the teaching.

The uniqueness of Kabbalah is absolutely not visible outwardly. Read the Full Conversation…

Filed under: Spirituality - No Comments →