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.

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.

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.

This final week of the count of the Omer (the sefirah of Malchut) asks of us: “Now that you have faced the truth (about yourself) what are you doing about it?” Kierkegaard put it this way: “Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.”

In our Kabbalah study we attempt to face another question: “Ask not what you are but who you are?” This Sunday is Mother’s Day.  For those who accept matrilineal descent as determining who is Jewish the explanation offered is that we always know who your mother is. A story that surfaced this week puts a new face on mothers and who we are.

My notions of altering one’s identity comes from fiction—books or the movies in which a person has a plastic surgeon change their face as a disguise. The first actual face transplant occurred in 2007. Unlike fiction, it is a painstaking and dangerous surgery and requires months of slow recovery as the new face learns to harmonize with nerves and muscles. As in any organ transplant there is the significant challenge of the immune system rejecting the organ. Not only the recipient, but the recipient’s immune system does not recognize the new face as its own.  This foreign and threatening organ will inevitably be attacked. The medicines used to counter the attack, as in other forms of chemotherapy are highly dangerous as well.

There is also the challenge of the donor—who must be willing to gift their face to someone. We all laughed in class this week to one person’s observation about donating your face for transplant: “You are pretty attached to your face!”

A woman who had been waiting for a face—her own face having been damaged beyond repair by a husband who doused her with lye—received the face of another woman. If you can tolerate looking at the before and after photos (google Carmen Tarleton) it will help you understand the need and the courage of this woman for receiving another’s face. The story was made more poignant by the recipient finding out who her donor is (it is not routine to reveal that information though one might think that the face would in itself reveal their identity) and to meet, this week, the donor’s daughter. (Click on the link at the end of the blog for the interview on NPR).

When the daughter of the donor met the recipient of her mother’s face she was moved to tears and felt she was with her mother again. The intellect may know quite well—“this is not my mother”—but the face is so much of who we see as that person that a daughter, especially a daughter grieving her mother, could feel, “I am with her.” So it was for daughter Marinda Righter when she touched her mother’s face, every mole and freckle, on Carmen Tarleton.

This week as we celebrate Mother’s Day and prepare for Shavuot (which starts next Tuesday night) we come face to face with our source—our mothers and the Divine Mother. The Shechinah—the Divine feminine—manifested on Mount Sinai and we manifested inside our mother’s womb.

So who are we?  To confront that question fully we must look to our original face.

Link to the interview on NPR

People were thrilled this week on Monday and Tuesday. It did not snow. May 1st today, Wednesday, it is snowing. Imagine the trees questioning, “Are we there yet?”

Whether it is a long car ride, or awaiting spring, “Are we there yet?” implies that we were ready to “be there” a long time ago. This week of the Omer count—the week of Yesod (foundation) is “not quite there yet” implying—not yet ready to be there. As the Jews were heading to Sinai I can imagine many a child echoing the same chorus—are we there yet? and some parents wondering the same. The week of Yesod is the week of truth—are we there yet transforms into are we ready to be there, yet?

Our ability to change (in relation to procrastinating or any other characteristic of our behavior) is predicated on facing the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Yesod has an inner meaning—the Hebrew word is Emet (Alef-Mem-Tav) and we are taught that the three letters that comprise Emet come from the beginning (Alef) of the Hebrew alphabet, the middle of the alphabet (Mem) and the end of the alphabet (Tav). The truth has to be the truth from the beginning, to the middle, to the end; through and through. That is what we can call nothing but the truth.

We can raise many questions about this statement. What is truth to begin with? What is it in the end? What does it serve as a middle(man)?

This topic is at the center of an Israeli documentary entitled The Flat. In clearing out his grandmother’s apartment in Tel Aviv he comes across a series of photos that when enlarged reveal a startling story of the relationship between his parents and one of the architects of the Holocaust.

While the filmmaker, Arnon Goldfinger, is tenacious in discovering and revealing “the truth”—there is a truth revealed that is nothing—but the truth. I leave it up to you who see the film to comment on the layered meanings of revealing to self and others, “the truth” and what can be understood from a spiritual point of view about the truth that is nothing.

Meanwhile it is snowing. It is May. One week to confront our ability to face the truth. Next week it is time to get there—whatever truth it is we seek.