From the Kabbalah website: 4 "Stories". Question: Is THIS is the true "Kabbalah" of Judaism or is it something else ??? YOU be the judge.
(Due to the controversial nature of this subject, the views expressed here are those of the writers themselves.)
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"The Flirt
http://www.kabbalah.com/k/index.php/p=community/livingkabb/122

"George Begley, an accountant for a law office, discussed his life in Kabbalah after he had to tell his wife about a number of serious flirtations he maintained over the years with her friends. His confession, though agonizing for both, brought new life into the commitment they had to Kabbalah and to each other. George had to understand the meaning of true repentance. As he says in his story, "True repentance is taking away someone's pain." He had to learn to take away his wife's pain.

I was a tremendous flirt when I was married. Any chance I could get, I was hitting on women. I wasn't exactly adulterous, but the flirtations went way too far. There came a point, however, when I needed it all to be over. I was ashamed of myself for what I was becoming through these typically meaningless liaisons with women. So I did repentance. I knew I wanted to give it up, so I confessed to my teacher. I broke down bawling my eyes out, I was so ashamed of myself. I told him everything just to clear my conscience.

By confessing, I thought it was over. But just to make sure, I asked my teacher if I had to tell my wife, and he said, "No, you've changed. You've switched universes. There is no reason to hurt her right now." I was so relieved because our life was so wonderful and happy. I was at peace with myself for no longer being a flirt — and I didn't have to tell my wife and make her go through the agony of hearing about my years of poor judgment.

Then, four years later, my teacher came to me and said, "Now you have to tell her." "Why? Why now?" I panicked, thinking of my wife's reaction. "You have to tell her because you're on a spiritual path together and she's your soulmate. Nothing can be separating you. You have to have total trust in one another or you can never be true soulmates. There can be no lies in your past." My heart was pounding and I said, "I just can't tell her. I can't do that." I kept thinking, "What if she leaves me? What if she two-times me back?" My teacher said, "You've got to let it go. Let go of the lies, let go of all the things that separate you. You have to do this in order to stay on the true spiritual path together."

So I finally agreed to do it. We all went out to dinner together: me, my wife and my teacher. And I told her. I told her about every incident that had ever happened, every incident with her friends. How I flirted, how I fooled around. The only thing I had never done was complete the actual deed. There were five or six incidents over the years, and I had to go into each one in detail. And right there in the restaurant, she literally collapsed. Crying, crushed, destroyed. My teacher told me to feel her pain. I was getting a serious Kabbalah lesson right then as he asked me to go deep inside her to help her to take her pain away. True repentance is taking someone's pain away. I needed to do that for my wife. I was trying, really trying. I was holding her, listening to her, trying to understand what she was suffering.

Then all of the sudden it hit me. The dam broke, and I fell apart in the restaurant. My wife was weeping, I was sobbing, my teacher was crying. I got her pain, I went into her pain, and it was staggering. I couldn’t breathe. I felt faint. My teacher kept saying for me to get out of myself and pay attention to her. Her pain was so intense, I could feel it in every pore and blood vessel in my body. Then she started confessing to me. There was nothing terrible there, thank God. There were a couple of things, but I mean, I was the bad guy in the relationship. But Kabbalistically speaking, she was responsible too, because she wasn't giving me what I required in the marriage in the first place. She was selfish, she was cold. Now, that didn't let me off the hook, but at least we were in it together. That's the beauty of Kabbalah. We were both responsible for our karma.

I should have talked with her about my loneliness and what was driving me to other women. But who thinks of these things? Who thinks spiritually like this? I didn't know how at the time. I was just living my life and having fun when I could.

The people in the restaurant didn't even look at us as we were sobbing and holding each other. It was as if we were in our own little cocoon. It was mystical. After this night, I had haunting dreams where I glimpsed at what hell is like. I went to hell for my wife's cleansing and then came back up again. It was a dream no one can ever imagine — one in which I experienced what she went through as I confessed to her. She told me she felt like dying, she wanted to die, so I died in my dreams, night after night. I know today that if we'd gone to a marriage counselor, we'd be divorced right now. We'd be miserable. There'd be court cases, fights. Only through Kabbalah, when you let go and let the Light in to do Its work, can you pay it back. However, you pay it back with the Light all around you and you come out on top. But we came to fix these sins and correct them. By our confessing and coming together as one, our relationship has become something we never even knew existed. We rejoice in each other —sexually, emotionally, and spiritually. We rejoice in our children by allowing the Light into our lives to do the work.

For years, I have wondered why sex is often so bad for married couples after a while. Why does the thrill wear off? Why do we want to flirt? Now I realize it was because we didn't communicate. We didn't confess; we couldn't let go of our own egos. I learned that when we gave up all the lies and withholding, it was like being together for the very first time. It was beautiful."

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Letting go of the pain
http://www.kabbalah.com/k/index.php/p=community/livingkabb/123

"We know that as the grown children of our parents, we carry the baggage of the pain and dissappointments we experienced in our youth. Often it blocks us from going forward. The Kabbalists teach that it can also prevent the souls of our departed parents from moving on. Tom Jaffe was assisted by Rav Berg to let his pain go and set his father soul free.

Tom Jaffe wore his anger and grief at the loss of his father like badge for thirty-five years -- until, at a cemetery during a torrential rainstorm, Rav Berg helped Tom to see that is was time to release his rage and thereby set his father's soul free to journey to Heaven.

According to kabbalistic teachings, the thoughts and feelings we experience in this world are not ends in themselves. They directly affect the souls of those who have left the world, and their ability to ascend to a higher level of being. Once Tom let go of the anger and resentment that had burdened him, his life was transformed. And this transformation extended to the Upper Worlds, where his fatherís spirit was also freed from the effects of Tomís negativity and suffering.

My father passed away when I was sixteen years old. Thirty days before he passed away, he called me to his room one night. He told me he was going to die that night.

I said, "Yeah, Dad, sure you are. Go to sleep." What sixteen-year-old wants to have a death bed chat with his father, who at the time seemed perfectly healthy.

Then he grabbed me to him and said, "Listen, I'm going to die tonight, and I want you to promise you'll take care of your mother, your brother, and that you'll support the family and take care of everything."

"Okay, okay," I told him, hoping to placate him, just wanting to escape a very disturbing conversation.

My father did not die that night. But thirty days later, while I was in the hospital from a football knee injury which occurred during one of my high school games, my father's premonition of death came true. He had come to visit me in the hospital around lunch time. He told me that he was going to a trap shooting contest. Before he left, he reminded me to take care of my knee, and then he went to the contest, where he shot twenty-four in a row. While waiting for the 25th shot, he dropped dead of a heart attack.

Relatives came that very afternoon and got me from the hospital to take me home. I was in a wheelchair. I had to go to my father's funeral in a wheelchair. At the chapel, I got up from the wheelchair and I gave my father a kiss on the forehead in the coffin, which was probably the worst mistake I had ever made in my entire life. That stone cold feeling that I got from the kiss stayed with me for such a long period of time that I had very difficult time adjusting to life without my father. I was supposed to be taking care of my mother and brother, who were very needy themselves, and I could barely take care of myself. I couldn't believe my father had left me with such a tremendous burden of responsibility.

Growing up, I could never do right in my father's eyes. I always had to do something better. A perfect example was when I was playing semi-pro baseball. My father was watching the game where I hit a triple. Afterwards, instead of congratulating me, he said, "Why didn't you hit a home run? You should have hit a home run."

I had to endure that kind of critical attitude as long as he was alive, and it didn't diminish with his death either. I grew to hate the memory of him and the fact that he left me as a sixteen-year-old kid with all these responsibilities. He left me with no tools to shoulder it all. These feelings of resentment and anger, lasted, oh my God, for years, because I didn't begin studying Kabbalah until about 35 years after he passed away. The Rav knew that I was suffering terribly from this tremendous guilt, from this staggering inability to accept the fact that my father had left me the way he did.

One night I was sitting with the Rav and my brother at my brother's house in Toronto. The Rav said to me, "Are you ready, Tom?"

"Am I ready for what?" I replied.

He paused before he said quietly, "Are you ready to release your father?"

"What do you mean?"

"It's about time that you got rid of this anger and frustration and this thing that you've been carrying around for 35 years. We have to release your father, so his soul can go up to Heaven, and you can become a new person."

I thought about it for moment before I said, "All right, then, yes, I am ready."

It was at two o'clock in the morning when this conversation took place, during the worst torrential rainstorm that Toronto had experienced in five or six years. The rain gushed down so heavily that when we started driving to the cemetery, we could barely see three feet in front of car. My brother was driving. The Rav was in the front seat. No one spoke as we drove for an hour and a half to the gravesite which was located in this bereft little town outside of Hamilton, Ontario. We got out of the car and found the grave. We stood there by our father's gravesite with the Rav lighting 72 candles, saying meditations and prayers. My brother and I were holding the umbrella over the Rav to keep him dry from the tremendous downpour, and so the candles would stay lit.

But at a certain point during this whole experience, a tremendous spiritual weight lifted off of my shoulders. In all that darkness and rain, there came a feeling of lightness and inexplicable joy. All at once, I lost that chip on my shoulder that I had carried for so many years. I felt at peace and comfort with myself. For a brief moment there, I was just completely and absolutely at peace. My brother experienced the same thing.

Then the Rav turned to us and said, "It's time to go. Everything is fine now." We left the cemetery at about 4:45 a.m. It was pitch dark with rain still streaming down, and yet I felt like I was floating on the air. It was as if the sun was shining, and life was suddenly so beautiful, because I had gotten rid of 35 years of anger and frustration and guilt. I released it because the Rav was able to open the cosmos for me to expel my anger. I was a new person.

I must tell you that it has now been nine years later, and I thank God that I am still at peace with the memory of my father. I am at peace with the fact that his death wasn't my fault. It had nothing to do with me. I was finally able to go on to become a better person because of the Rav and the Kabbalah Centre. I hope I will be able to continue to become a better person for many years to come.

Lesson: Immortality, according to Kabbalah, is more than just an idea or an aspiration. It is a literal reality. When physical death occurs, the deceased continues to live in our hearts, perhaps with even greater intensity and presence than ever before. Conversely, the emotional and spiritual conditions of our lives continue to affect the souls of our loved ones. By transforming our inner nature during our lives, we benefit ourselves as well as the metaphysical realms constitute the Upper Worlds."

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We are all one
http://www.kabbalah.com/k/index.php/p=community/livingkabb/129
"Several years ago, when I first started to study Kabbalah, I had a very intense experience. I had been wrestling with the idea that we are all one and not separate from anyone or anything on this planet. I had been meditating on this in my living room, when I had this sudden sensation that the roof of my home had been removed and I could see the sky. Not only could I see the sky, but the physical sensation of BEING the sky was extremely intense and joyous. I finally understood: I WAS ONE WITH EVERYTHING and because of it, THERE WAS NO ONE HERE BUT ME.
I became very excited. I came out of my meditation and immediately decided to phone some close friends and share my experience. NO ONE WAS HOME. I realized at that moment that of course no one was home, they were all here with me since we were all one. This happened over 10 years ago, and I have never forgotten it, or the sensation. It has carried me through some very difficult times and I have never felt alone through them.

Shulamit Joffre"

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Kabbalah from the Heart
http://www.kabbalah.com/k/index.php/p=community/livingkabb/203

I am about to finish the second basic course in Kabbalah at the Kabbalah Learning Center in Miami Beach, Florida. Each course is ten weeks long, meeting once a week for one and a half hour. What have I learned? What I have gained? In what dimensions have I gained? In what ways have I changed, if at all?

Kabbalah makes clear that its mission is "To remove chaos from our lives." This is made possible by realizing that we created our own chaos and we also have the power to remove, mitigate, repackage the negative consequences of our own thoughts, desires and actions.

When we stick a wire inside an electrical outlet, we get electric shock. When we jump from a tall building, most likely, we die. When we throw a ball against the wall, it bounces back to us. This is simply an application of the third law of motion, "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." "We reap what we sow."

We see the consequences of our actions with the above examples because the effects follow immediately the cause in the above examples. With some actions, the effects slowly accumulate over time and we only suffer the consequence after a long time. We do not gain weight after a bite of one cookie but a diet of high sugar coupled with lack of exercise will result in a build up of fat deposits after some time. The negative consequences of smoking on our health such as lung cancer, heart disease and stroke have now been documented. No one gets those dreaded consequences with the first puff of smoke. We tend to hold on to an illusion that since we did not suffer what the research said, we have beaten the odds. Not forever. The consequence will ultimately catch up with us.

The First Law of Thermodynamics say that "Matter and energy cannot be created nor destroyed. They can only be transformed." The positive energy that we expend through kindness and helpfulness results in building a reservoir of positive energy for us from which we can draw to work out negative factors facing us in our lives. Similarly, every negative energy we expend motivated by our desire to hurt, to get even, to use force to control another against one's will, etc. will result in a negative energy or a draw from the positive reservoir we had created. This is the Law of Karma as known to the Hindus or the Buddhists.

Without the above perspective, we feel that life's challenges simply happen to us out of random probability that such an event will happen to anyone. This time it was our turn. With this framework, we lament on our situation, we claim that life is unfair. We work on mitigating damages in the same manner that we keep mopping the floor from the water that overflowed from the plugged sink (the consequence) instead of turning off the faucet (the cause).

With a knowledge of the Law of Cause and Effect, we are grateful for the good fortunes that come to us that bring us love, wealth, happiness. We are also joyful when we experience events that ordinarily cause suffering such as being misunderstood, being a victim, etc. We know that when we address those challenges as opportunities to make our corrections for wrongdoings of the past, we are cleaning our plate or emptying the dirt from the glass vessel so it can be washed clean and allow the Light to shine through.

To be continued after more work with Accreditation. This was my break.

Ijya Tulloss
2/18/2001"
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- posted by Izak @ 1:47 AM