My understanding of autism is very limited—I have treated (early in my training) only a handful of children who were diagnosed with autism—now called autistic spectrum or neurodiverse. I have had the fortune of learning, a bit vicariously, about autism and neurodiversity this past year.

One area of learning has been around our capacity for empathy. Thirty years ago when I worked with children diagnosed as autistic the understanding was that in addition to extreme sensitivity to sensory stimulation, autistic children were “out of touch.” They could not connect to others, would not want physical connection and could not develop empathy.  Empathy though comes in different forms and in the worlds (and words) of those called autistic, empathy can extend to a deep connection with animals, plants and what we call inanimate objects.

Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay is what the medical community would describe as autistic. Tito is the author of three books: The Mind Tree, The Gold of the Sunbeams, and How Can I Talk If My Lips Don’t Move? To read the full interview from which these excerpts are taken click on this link: http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1056/1235

When Chilean coal miners were trapped in 2010 for over sixty days, the whole world could feel the anguish of their families. It was a human drama that captured headlines and our hearts found relief when they finally emerged.

Here is Tito’s slant on what went on for him as he watched the drama unfold:

“My empathy would be towards the flashlight batteries of those trapped coal miners. Or my empathy would perhaps be towards the trapped air around those coal miners. There would be me watching through the eyes of the flashlight cell the utter hopelessness of those unfortunate miners as my last chemicals struggled to glow the faint bulb so that I didn’t leave them dying in darkness. As the air around them, I would try to find a way to let myself squeeze every bit of oxygen I have to allow the doomed lungs to breathe, for I am responsible for their doom. And while I found myself trapped, I would smell the burning rice being cooked with neglect in an earthen pot.”

Not what us neurotypicals (that is the term the neurodiverse prefer for those not capable of diversity) might even consider when relating to empathy. Tito helps us to begin to understand the depth of his perception and experience and in so doing, this young man, is not only a poet-author but also an exquisite spiritual teacher. He continues:

“All matter possesses a mind because everything is the manifestation of the greater Being that Is in everything. My having a brain does not make me superior to a tree or to a non-living substance like a stone. After all we — human beings, a block of wood and a piece of rock — have the same atoms that make up what we are. Even if those atoms are of different elements, their core combinations are the same — protons, neutrons and electrons. In the macro field we are different, yet in the micro field we are the same… Maybe I do not have to try very hard to be the wind or a rain cloud. There is a big sense of extreme connection I feel with a stone or perhaps with a pen on a tabletop or a tree. It motivated me to write ‘The Mind Tree.’ I just have to think about it and become it. Somewhere in the matrix called the cosmos, we are all linked to that primordial origin. Every religion has a name for It. There is no separation.”

We have finished another year of study at Kabbalah Experience, ever evolving and always wanting to not lose touch. For those joining the learning (or contemplating it)—we have a full array of special classes this summer, including a mini-course on the television show Touch—about an autistic boy who does not want to be touched physically, even by his dad, but is in touch with what Tito calls “extreme connection.”

For those of you taking the summer off, please stay in touch.

A question this week from someone who came to an introductory Kabbalah class four years ago:

David,

I have a “very simple” question for you that came up in a discussion with one of my friends. Is the expansion of consciousness (by that I mean coming to a higher level of awareness of who one is, coming to a more alive state in terms of senses and discernment) a result of some kind of unconscious psychological healing and maturation process or a result of a certain amount of accumulated knowledge that leads to a shift in one’s cognitive schema. The knowledge of facts does not always lead to a transformation, right? Deeper level of my question: What is the force, from your point of view, behind the transformation of human consciousness?

My response: A simple answer: Awareness. Knowledge is power, Awareness is transformation. Cognition can be ‘trained’ to be in the service of awareness.

I met Yohannes Gebregeorgis when he visited my good friend Richard Male in Denver a few years ago. Yohannes at that time was in the United States to attend the CNN Heroes event—he was a nominee for his Donkey Mobile Library which brings books to rural children throughout Ethiopia. Yohannes is a big picture thinker but he is aware that the big picture is made of many tiny pixels. Literacy (of a country) is accomplished one book at a time. Do books transform? Can they move a child or adult to realize their (fuller) potential? At each stage in our knowing more there is also awareness—of a world beyond our own way of thinking. Sometimes this starts with reading itself—the wonderment of discovering letters and language. I remember the moment I discovered that the words “thank you” were words that meant, “I am thanking you” rather than just word sounds.

Inspired by Rodger Kamenetz’s visit and talks on Dreamwork this spring, I offered a class on Kabbalah and Dreams—a topic I had never considered teaching. I have been listening in therapy to people’s dreams for the last thirty years and have an active interest in my own dreams—but it took a book (and its author Kamenetz) to bring me to a new awareness of the importance of dreams to spiritual work. In my therapy office a large red book lays prominently on top of the credenza and the gold letters on its spine proclaim: THE RED BOOK. It was a generous gift to me from a Kabbalah student (thank you Rich!), opened once and perused. Now it was time to read it and take in its images—the illustrated autobiographical dreams of Carl Jung disclosed to the public after nearly a century of remaining a private memoir.

There is a phrase often used in Jewish texts that refers to a person who has knowledge but lacks awareness. The phrase is: A donkey carrying books. For Yohannes Gebregeorgis’ mobile Donkey Library books bring wonderment and literacy. For a person who has much knowledge, but little awareness, it is akin to having the RED BOOK on your shelf and never opening it. Awareness comes to those who look around and see that the book is already there waiting for you to read it.

Reading the book though is not the goal—it is the journey—to awareness. According to Jewish tradition the Messiah will come riding on a donkey—no Kindle, no Nook, no iPad—not even a library card are needed. The Messiah’s only “book” is awareness—what you learn on the back of a donkey bringing books to those who have never held, let alone read, a book.

This past year I was privileged to develop and teach a new year-long class with Lili Zohar—designed for third year students-we call it Holding Opposites. It has received mixed reviews—for some it is the “best Kabbalah learning so far” and for some it is “not so easy to follow.” Even the feedback for this class requires holding opposites.

Holding opposites is a state of awareness that we develop and implement continuously and it includes paradox. We talk in class about the expansion of our “containers”–as in the ability to hold more but when we use the words expansion we also mean the ability to be a container for both expansion and contraction. An “expanded” container holds opposites—it holds expansion and contraction—not one or the other– it holds both.

This past weekend Rabbi Mordechai Twerski was the Rebbe in Residence for the orthodox Jewish community of East Denver. A Hasidic Rebbe is more than a scholar (in residence) and for Rabbi Twerski, Denver was his residence for most of his life. It was a homecoming. But you never come back—because you are not the same as when you left. I had not seen him for quite some time. He left Denver a dozen years ago for the Jewish centric world of Brooklyn, N.Y. and with his leaving the community he had built here in Denver—called TRI—dissolved.

Melodies that are composed in Hassidic circles are called niggunim. Rabbi Twerski has many niggunim that became signatures of Shabbat and High Holiday services at TRI. Those tunes were known to all who attended the synagogue. There is a special significance to the third and final meal of Shabbat which is partaken close to the end of Shabbat. At TRI a small group of us would go down into the dimly lit basement and sing niggunim that reflected the intimacy of being in the presence of the Rebbe and the fading light of Shabbat. When Rabbi Twerski and I embraced—a hug is his handshake—I sang in his ear a tune that I had not sung for all the years since he left Denver. The melody and words came to me as I walked to synagogue this past Shabbat—as the light of Shabbat was fading.

When the singing began Rabbi Twerski chose a different melody to accompany the words of that song—it was a new melody for me—one he had created in Brooklyn no doubt. At song’s end the Rebbe paused and switched—to the melody I had quietly sung into his ear and I was transported. “Holy is the Sabbath Queen bringing blessings into your home” sung over and over until the melody fades into itself—like the setting sun.

I have never been a very good follower—that is one opposite I can still develop more alongside my leader role. I learned to develop the ‘follower’ quality with Rabbi Twerski—he was the leader and I was among his many followers. This past Saturday, as I followed the melody he sang, I was intimate with the immediacy of holding opposites. The years, distance and the context were different. There was the melody but the flame that had connected us (we learned with each other every morning for seven years) was cold. It is an opposite that I held—present to both the warm and cold–as the melody and I faded into the darkness on the way home.

Island time is sacred. City time is profane. 

Call it Courage was the first novel I read; a 1941 story by Armstrong Sperry of a boy who survives by himself on a deserted island. I have returned to the theme of living in isolation many times through our studies of Kabbalah, especially in coming to an understanding of the dimension of time and how to live in the present moment. Looking at extreme circumstances can be useful in discerning what is of greatest value to us and serve to clarify who we are, as we “drop in” to surroundings that are completely foreign to us. If we actually were to experience living on an island by ourselves, for an indefinite period of time, it would create a radical shift in how we experienced our life—both in terms of identity and perception of time.

The phrase Island time is an expression aimed at defining what it means to live in the present (off the clock). Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel uses the island metaphor to describe sacredness of time on the Sabbath:

“In the tempestuous ocean of time and toil there are islands of stillness where man may enter a harbor and reclaim his dignity. The island is the seventh day, the Sabbath, a day of detachment from things, instruments and practical affairs as well as of attachment to the spirit.” (from The Sabbath by AJ Heschel).

What would it be like to live isolated on a deserted island—where neither safety nor natural supplies are lacking—lacking any human interaction and connectedness. The second chapter of Genesis already lays the foundation of the human need for attachment and connection. God recognizes, “It is not good for man to be alone.”

Daniel Dafoe provides the shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe with a dog and two cats and eventually with the company of his man Friday. In the film Castaway, Tom Hanks’ character ameliorates his aloneness by creating an “imaginary” relationship with Wilson, the volleyball. The common thread here is that we need an attachment and a connection; to survive we need not only food, water and shelter, we need to be in relationship.

During our discussions in class this week a student asked a most provocative question: Is a relationship with God enough or do we need to share our lives (and love) with a being that answers back? While we could argue that God “talks” to us, nowadays only implicitly, if we were isolated from contact with humans or animals would that be a meaningful life? Do we fundamentally need to share in a relationship in order to be human?

Imagine then life in isolation—with no feedback from others (beyond the voices in your head), with nothing to be “productive” about (beyond taking advantage of the abundance the island provides) and no days of the week—just Island time where the waves come in and out for a thousand years.

Daniel Matt, professor, scholar and student of Jewish mystical teachings arrives this Sunday at DIA. Dr. Matt’s scholar-in-residence week is a  joint effort for the new Jewish learning collaborative of the Loup Jewish Community Center, Denver University’s Center for Judaic Studies and Kabbalah Experience.

If you have time to ask only one question of the man who is at the center of the monumental translation of the Zohar which question do you choose?  I will have that opportunity as we settle into the car ride from DIA to east Denver.

The Zohar is the centerpiece of the thousands of books that transmit the wisdom of Kabbalah.  The Zohar is a mystical midrash—teachings of the Kabbalah that intermittently, but consistently, follow the Torah text. This allows the Zohar to stand out as a practical tool for seeking a deeper understanding of the verses in the Torah which served to popularize it among scholars and people in general. The Zohar also gained its unique status for its denseness and complexity.  The first complexity is the denseness of its Aramaic language. A translation into English, with copious annotations, will help dissolve that barrier.  The second complexity is the language of the Kabbalah itself and for that no translation can quite overcome the Zohar’s meaning. One needs to study in order to enter the Zohar.

Much of the Zohar is story telling; following the students of the first century master, Rabbi Shimeon bar Yochai as they bring their questions and experiences to their teacher and challenge each other. Even the stories are layered in shrouds of meanings—intentionally obscuring understanding for the uninitiated.

The story of Matt’s translation is also layered, as is any life work we engage upon. Margot Pritzker, married to Tom, who is CEO of The Pritzker Organization (among whose businesses is the Hyatt hotel) was studying the Zohar with her rabbi in Chicago and wondered why there was not a comprehensive translation of the Zohar in English.  This led to a now famous meeting at O’Hare airport between Pritzker and Matt. Dr. Matt was dubious about Margot’s grasp of what it meant to undertake the project until she reassured him that no matter how long it took and whatever might be involved, the support would be there. I can only imagine Moses de Leon, the author of the Zohar hovering in the airport lounge and smiling.  Some 800 year ago he too found patrons to support his writings, including the writing of the Zohar, most prominent of them, Joseph Abulafia, CEO of The Abulafia Organization.

How fitting is it that the Zohar’s fate continues to be a collaborative effort between scholar and financier? The soul and the body must find their union at all times. And who knows, maybe the next time you stay at a Hyatt, check the nightstand. There just may be a yellow covered book entitled, Daniel’s Zohar.

This week my awareness of the present moment is being challenged by knowing that once you read this Danny Matt will have come and gone. Who knows what tomorrow will bring forth from this disguised mystic wearing what others often only see as the clothing of an academic scholar?

We have had some wonderful quiet moments, Danny and I; the gleam in his eye as he showed me a photocopy of the earliest near complete Zohar manuscript housed at the University of Toronto. This manuscript also bears a historical fascination—it was acquired for Shabbatai Tzvi, the failed Messiah of 1665 and then, by way of many hands, wound up in the hands of Toronto resident Albert Friedberg, a private collector of ancient Jewish manuscripts who donated them to the University of Toronto.

I feel young in Danny’s presence—not because he is my senior by eight years. It is his youthful excitement about a passion we share—the thrill of discovery of a variant text and the realization that the text is not only out there, on the pages of the Zohar–the variant reading is inside each of us.

In one of the seminars today a questioner probed to understand how the scholar-translator is affected by the mysticism of the book? Danny answered that after hours of research on the meaning of an unusual Aramaic word it is wonderful to let the Zohar simply wash over him. He was stating clearly that both activities provide profound joy—there is the work of the scholar and the mystic that unites through the left and right brain and is crowned in what flows infinitely out of the single point of discovery.

Danny shared with us one of my favorite stories I knew about his committing to translate the Zohar—his meeting with Margot Pritzker at the O’Hare Hyatt—he added one detail I had not known before. Margot had decided that the Zohar could use a new translation into English. I would surmise that when Margot decides something she is not to be denied. What I did not know was that Danny had also determined that he was not going to agree to be the translator. He knew it would be a commitment of 15 years, day in and day out and he was convinced he did not have the desire to get that intimate with just one book.

What convinced him to change his mind? Margot. Danny had agreed to the meeting to be courteous. In the midst of explaining how long and arduous a task a translation would be—not wanting to offend Margot, though wanting her to know that it would require her financial support perhaps for decades. To this she replied: “Dr. Matt, if you think you are scaring me, you are not!”

Was Danny scared? I know I would have been to think of the awesome responsibility of taking on such a monumental and important work as translating the Zohar. Sometimes we need to come face to face with our fears and then love takes over. It is now 15 years for Danny Matt—seven volumes done, two more to go. Margot is still not scared. Danny is clearly in love.  We are inspired by their emotions.

A mile wide. That was the center of this tornado. When nature strikes with such devastating force it rips lives apart—the death toll from this tornado was mitigated because some residents of Moore, Oklahoma built shelters after a 1999 tornado, of lesser force, killed 36 residents. Six people were saved by entering 94 year old Nancy Davis’ shelter—she built it after surviving the tornado of ’99.

The deaths and the devastation to lives permeated our classes today and this time it was nature, not human hands that was the cause for questioning whether or not events are random. Kabbalah posits that nothing is random.

As we were discussing this I began thinking what would be a good antonym to use for “random” and I drew a blank. I felt a bit better when I plugged in random in antonym finder and one of the definitions, among many, was nonrandom.

Here is the full list:

willful, steady, orderly, aware, regular, continuous, thoughtful, established, systematized, deliberate, purposeful, constant, organized, systematic, planned, arranged, managed, nonrandom, orchestrated, purposive, stable, set, fixed, even, ordered, methodical, conscious.

I wondered if any of these adjectives could be applied to the tornado’s path of destruction—and more specifically to who died or was injured and who survived. The tornado itself may have some fixed order to it but we certainly would not anthropomorphize and call it willful or purposeful.

The bottom line of the questioning in class can be simply put: Is it random that children in one elementary school died and in another they survived?

When we confront such suffering and loss it is not wise to invoke, in the name of any philosophy or doctrine an intellectual explanation; far better to remain in the question—and stretch out a helping hand.

I would though like to share an idea that emerged from our discussions. I will call it the nonrandomness of nonevents. Nonevents are always far greater in number than the events themselves. To cite a well known example: A meteor or asteroid that flies by earth without entering earth’s atmosphere, let alone impacting on earth’s surface. It is rare that a meteorite (what breaks off from a meteor) slams into planet earth, nonevents are surprisingly common—meteorites miss earth (or land in uninhabited areas quite often).

Turning our attention to the tornado that slammed into Moore we can reflect on both “events and nonevents.” If we call one random we must logically label the other random as well. Keep in mind that the nonevents in Moore far outnumber the events. Some of the nonevents received media attention –Nancy Davis and her tornado saving cellar was one-other nonevents included parents and teachers huddling with schoolchildren in bathrooms and watching cars and trucks fly over their text book covered heads. Last minute decisions to run this way or get in the car and drive that way led to many other nonevents. For those whose survival is a nonevent, the word lucky comes up often in their speech and for other survivors; the word that comes up is miraculous.

For every event there are exponentially more nonevents. What would you choose as the antonym for random?

Perhaps creativity is a function of how little we know. There is this guy who keeps popping up on my radar—name David Eagleman. We share an interest in time. I credit a physician for giving me the metaphor of what we don’t know we don’t know by once saying in passing, “A fish will be the last to know it is in water.” This morphed into a question posed in our first year class on the Time Dimension, “A fish is to water as humans are to_____________?” An Eagleman quote: “We’re stuck in time like fish in water.”

Eagleman is a neuroscientist by trade and his experiments on how the brain processes time are unique. For a taste of Eagleman see a 2011 profile in the New Yorker entitled The Possibilian, a word Eagleman made up–which morphed into a movement he is proud to lead on a road between what he labels as the “certainties called atheism and religious belief.” He has a talent for making hard things easy to understand while giving you a headache at the same time. He is one of those meteors that enters the earth’s atmosphere and leaves debris in the back yard of your mind.

As reported in the New Yorker profile, Eagleman wears a Russian wristwatch to work though it’s been broken for months. It turns out that all the scientists in his lab wear broken watches. Eagleman noted that, in his experience, scientists are often drawn to things that bedevil the–citing a lab that studies nicotine receptors where all the scientists are smokers, and another lab that studies impulse control where all the scientists are overweight.

This small piece of Eagleman observational debris is a wonderful confirmation of the metaphor work we engage in at Kabbalah Experience—what in Kabbalah study we call the connection between the story (metaphor) and the reality we manifest. In this case, what a scientist takes interest in is a reflection of the story of their (personal) life. Eagleman also has a deep and abiding interest in story-making; he argues that our brains are continuously creating stories about reality. Through his investigations as a neuroscientist he calls into question what the present moment can possibly be for us humans as the present moment from the perspective of the function of the brain is inevitably a reconfiguration (story) of the past (even if admittedly that past may be only milliseconds old).

I am writing this blog in the early hours of Friday morning—it is pitch black except for the brightly lit face of my laptop—now an old friend, who in computer years is about as old as I am in human years. During the last couple of days I have been off the “grid” living the holiday of Shavuot and as often happens, holidays brings me into reflection about community. And while I was reflecting on community I received an ‘unsolicited’ e-mail about guess who? David Eagleman.

I imagine Eagleman, a man I may never meet in person, up, as well, in the light of a laptop, typing some debris that will fall into the backyard of my brain. Eagleman points out that there are more connections in a cubic millimeter of brain tissue than stars in the Milky Way.

I imagine other words that could start movements such as Impossibilian or Probabilian. What I do experience is a neural net, not related to grey matter, which David Eagleman and other neuroscientists have yet to chart (and probably won’t be charting very soon). This neural net also consists of trillions of connections—deep connectivity of souls that form a community that are related to “light matter” in which all its members don’t smoke, overeat or wear watches.