Re - Member

“What does remember ourselves mean? It essentially means coming back to life – re-membering.

We see this in the vivid story from ancient Egypt, where Isis, the goddess of wisdom, re-members her husband, Osiris. As the god of the netherworld, Osiris weighed the souls of the dead to determine where each soul would go. Osiris’s brother, Seth, was so jealous of Osiris’s power that he murdered his brother and then cut him into fourteen pieces, burying them all over Egypt. When Isis learned of this, she scoured Egypt to find the pieces, and after collecting them, she put together all but one of them, restoring Osiris to life.  She re-membered him.

She put his members back together, a process of cosmic reconstructive surgery. Because she recalled him whole, through an act of remembering, both physical and mental, she brought him back to life. In mental imagery we re-member and restore ourselves from the fragmentation we experience both internally and externally from the disturbing situations that surround us. We bring ourselves back to life by aligning ourselves with the truths that come to us from the invisible universe.

This sacred realm knows what we need and is always available to us through mental imagery. The revelatory way of the prophets, the systematizers of Visionary Kabbalah, is alive today in the use of mental imagery for purposes of both healing and spiritual realization. This book endeavors to show readers how to invigorate their lives in the spirit of Visionary Kabbalah. In a modest way, the book aims to give everyone the means to become a practicing kabbalist.”
~ Gerald Epstein

Vertical Journey

“Intelligence is a quality available to choose, as a function of mind that can live itself through us. In this article, I will focus on spiritual intelligence as understood within the Western Monotheistic traditions. Here we will explore five forms of intelligence:  1) moral, 2) analogical, 3) intuitive, 4) imaginal, 5) esoteric...

Moral intelligence is lived out through the presence of the moral laws of conscience, namely the 10 Cosmic Laws or Commandments (along with the Three Vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity existing in all traditions, emphasized in Christianity). These laws link us directly with Divine Consciousness or God. The moral laws and vows allow us to live sane, sober, loving, and truthful relationships with each other and our source of Origin.  They incorporate the intelligence of the Absolute One Mind, living Its presence on Earth through us as servants of this Divine function. If we so choose, God fulfills itself through us as the time-space physical expression of this sublime force.

Of course there are conscious, intelligent souls who don’t choose to make morally intelligent decisions. No judgments of them are required here.  Whether one lives by these laws is neither good nor bad, right nor wrong, as these are not man-made standards.  Every choice brings its own consequences that can serve constructive or destructive ends for oneself or for others.  In spiritual life, sin means to miss the mark, or error. All of us make errors, and we all have the opportunity to correct these errors in this moment…

Practically, we can apply the 10 Laws to our day-to-day relationships. For example, are we stealing time from another by staying in a relationship with someone we know we don’t love?; paradoxically, we steal time from ourselves as well. Are we speaking the truth when asked, and holding our tongue when not asked for advice? When we don’t tell the truth, are we misleading or misdirecting others, or lying to ourselves? Are we coveting what isn’t ours – be it another person, a material good, or resources of another country? Are we jealous of another? Are we idolizing and idealizing someone, at our own expense? Are we putting someone on a pedestal, or under a pedestal? Are we holding a grudge against someone (as anger is a violation of the 6th, 10th, and 2nd laws)? Are we mixing or adulterating our relationships by mixing business with pleasure or introducing a third-party relationship into a dyad? Are we murdering someone’s reputation by not giving credit or by gossiping about them? Are we creating mental idols of how things ought to be? Are we looking backwards, filled with regrets about the past (another realm that does not exist)? Are we anxious about the future (all future talk is illusory)? Are we usurping God’s place by judging ourselves and others? All these errors of living impact our health, wellbeing, and our connection to others and to the Invisible Reality…

For human relationships, we seek the services of another form of intelligence called analogical, a central practice within Western spirituality. Analogy is based not on “horizontal,” linear causal inferences of materialistic science and logic, but on “vertical causality” of the invisible birthing the visible. Analogy is the function of thinking in wholes, seeing the whole of something. For instance, hold your right hand up to the mirror (analogy also means reflectivity or mirroring) and what do you see? . . .

Your left hand! What you are observing is analogy. These two hands are alike, but they are not the same. At the same time, they represent the totality of handedness. We can see the front, back, left, and right of the hands at the same instant. You have now understood handedness, the quality that displays itself in this experiential world as a physical hand. No inference is required here. We immediately know the relationship between the function, quality, and its birthed form.  Thus in analogy, we think in a relational manner even as we recognize points of similarity and dissimilarity amongst things. Through this practice we make “sense” out of the disparate pieces of our lives that we have been trained to focus upon in rational, linear thought. Concurrently, through this form of intelligence we experience oneness or wholeness within ourselves, the world and with Divine consciouness.

Analogical intelligence allows us to see the relationship between a physical heart attack and an emotional heartache over a love gone sour.  In my medical practice, if a person comes in complaining of a wryneck or headache, I inquire as to “who is the pain in your neck” or “who is your headache,” respectively. The physical here mirrors our social relationships. A tear in the tapestry of our moral/social relationship is reflected in our mental, emotional and physical spheres.  These tears are outgrowths of spiritual errors that are made primarily in violation of the 10 Laws (and the Three Vows)…

I met a woman on the street whose car was stalled due to a dead battery. I asked her “how’s your own inner battery?” Surprised by the question, she replied that she had been feeling unusually fatigued. She was experiencing a recurrence of asthma and was on her way to an M.D.’s appointment for the problem when her car went dead. Had I delved further we might have uncovered the relational issue that was nagging at her in her life that was reflected in both her car battery needing a recharge and her own inner “battery” needing a boost.

Through analogical intelligence, we achieve the unity of all that exists preceding every act of knowledge on the material plane in our time-space world. Analogy takes us to the essence, the heart of spiritual science. Logical or rational education bases itself on crafting intelligence as a brain function to act only as and on unorganized solids reducing them to discreet particles in a discontinuous way, as Henri Bergson pointed out in Creativity and Evolution.  It is thinking in fixed ideas, fixed thoughts: opinions, conjecture, explanation, conclusions, assumptions, and the like; always analyzing, meaning here to break down things into independent elements and stopping the flow of thought.

Logic, dependent on inferences, then tries to mend the dissection into some sort of mosaic of wholeness over time based on a specious idea of proving something. The endpoint error of the logician is the belief that logic and truth are the same. Analogical intelligence allows us to experience wholeness immediately absent the need for inferential piecing together. It gives us witness directly to truth.

In the Western tradition – including the Monotheistic, Pharaonic, and Hermetic lineages – intuition is considered one of, if not the highest spiritual attainments possible in our quest to evolve into conscious oneness with the Absolute One Mind. Intuition, or unconditional intelligence, is the communication network between ourselves and the infinite world of invisible reality.  In this zone of awareness, we receive direct communication of truth that pierces through the incessant noise of the world around us.
Intuitive intelligence consists of three components:
1) detached intellect 2) disinterested instinct   3) imaginal thinking.

The first two are sympathetically connected with each other, while the imaginal acts as a bridge between them, creating sym (together) pathy (affinity) or correspondence between intellective thought and instinctual physical behavior. As noted above, we have been trained to use our logical, cause-and-effect intellect to look for outcomes, endpoints, or conclusions.  By its very nature, this type of thinking puts a stop to open-mindedness and freedom, as endpoints, by their very nature, are always discontinuous and movement stops.  In contrast, with detached intellect, we actively withdraw and divest from the excess of thought we engage in habitually, wherein we jump from one inference or conclusion to the next. Likewise, we divest from projecting our thoughts into a time, place, or circumstance that doesn’t exist called “the future.” 

Just stop and listen to your (and others’) speech and count the number of times we are speaking about the future – what may come to pass, what should come to pass, what we fear will come to pass.  These thoughts aren’t detached, they are conclusionary!  In disinterested instinct, we divest from our habitual instinctual drives to acquire, claim, or possess material goods/resources, power, or other human beings. In the Western Spiritual tradition, we call these the Five Dark Currents of Will: to take, to keep, to hold on to at the expense of others, to advance at the expense of others, or to desire to be great. By practicing the Five Light Currents of Will, to give, to share, to renounce, and to mentor, we act to counter these instinctual urges…

The realm of imagination, or the “imaginal” (a term coined by Prof. Henri Corbin of France) is a real living presence of existence, as real as waking reality, populated by beings of these invisible worlds comprised of forms (absolute matter) not having volume or mass, as exists here in the time-space world.  Nonetheless, these worlds and beings are accessible to us, given such credence in past writings by such notables as William Blake, Emanuel Swedenborg, and profoundly described in the book of Ezekiel 1:1–28.  This chain of being has been perceived as angels, archangels, principalities, powers, virtues, dominions, thrones, cherubim, seraphim.

Image is the true and natural language of inner life. It is a shared social sacred language of the world, bypassing the discursive verbal languages and dialects that have been noted in Genesis in the description of the Tower of Babel. This inner hieroglyphic language connects invisible reality with this visible one.  It brings together these two worlds in the form of symbols, images that connect this visible world with the invisible existence. The two worlds of reality are thrown together (sym = together; bol = throw);  Divinity is sending its communication to us in divine language, our task is to learn how to read these messages. They provide us with constant information and revelations about the macro-world of the universe and beyond, which mirrors the micro-world of this planet and its inhabitants, especially of us. This information is at once a cosmology, astronomy/astrology, and geo-human science.  It is the Absolute One Mind (AOM) keeping in touch, helping us to direct our lives via universal, sacred, holy intelligence.  Along with intuitive intelligence, imaginal reigns at a level of the highest openness that consciousness can take us to reach the unitary experience we are searching for.

The Christian and Islamic offshoots of the Monotheistic tradition have pursued the imaginative dimension.  In Christianity we find the work of St. Ignatius, St. Teresa of Avila, St. Hildegard of Bingen, St. Bernard of Clairvaux as primary examples.  In Islam, the work of Ibn ‘Arabi, Najmoddin Kubra, and Shihab al-Din Yahya al-Suhrawardi stand out like gigantic stars in the firmament of imaginal experience – they term imaginal work “active intelligence.” But it is in the Hebraic wisdom tradition where we find this visionary intelligence expressed in full regalia. Imaginative, visionary intelligence began with the patriarchs and matriarchs Abraham, Sarah, Rebecca and Jacob, prominently.  It advances through the prophet Moses in his vision of the burning bush from which he hears the word of God [sic] “I AM the Present and the Future” (“I AM the I AM, I WILL BE the I WILL BE”).  The Israelite prophets such as Ezekiel, Isaiah, Daniel, and Hosea continue to receive sacred messages revealed through visionary experiences. Ezekiel’s vision of worlds within worlds, the creature with the four faces and the throne of God, stands out as the most vivid example.

The Bible is replete with the messages of the prophets, usually unattended to by the populace they are intended for.  The prophet or navi acted as a mouthpiece or spokesperson bringing the presence of the Divine Consciousness here: bringing spiritual intelligence into the mass consciousness in order to raise human awareness so that we may understand our mission and purpose(s) for being here on Earth. Today, we can each still learn prophetic practices to access and receive the messages of invisible reality by engaging in imaginal experiences such as mental imagery and waking dream practices.

The most profound exploration of intelligence takes us to two lineages of the Western wisdom tradition:  1) Kabbalah, 2) Hermeticism. With reference to these two traditions, we can explore some of the concepts introduced earlier more deeply.

The Monotheistic lineage brings us to the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, known as the Sephirotic Tree. While this version of the Tree of Life is not original to the Hebraic tradition, this vision can supply us with bountiful wisdom needed in the contemporary world. 

I substitute the term “spontaneous intelligence” for that of understanding. It is here that intelligence changes its plane of direction from a focus on the horizontal, logical plane of ordinary daily life – what helps us to navigate the world of facts – to an upward plane of direction that comprehends the vertical spiritual reality and its various relational manifestations.  In doing so, we draw in a different sort of reasoning, following out the primary dictum of Western sacred science, “as above, so below,” or as is so eloquently stated in the Emerald Tablet of the Hermetic tradition:
That which is above is like that which is below,
And that which is below is like that which is above,
To accomplish the miracles of one thing.

This dictum is, in fact, the Law of Analogy. Returning full circle to analogical intelligence, an essence of Hermetic intelligence, we see that this esoteric conception intersects with moral intelligence. In particular it conjoins with the second divine law or precept of the West, viz., not to make graven images, translated by me to include mental graven images – fixed images equivalent to an idol, a mental idol. As noted above, logical intelligence leads us to conclusions, fixed ideas, a closed system of thought; whereas analogical thinking takes us into an open system where we are understanding the relationships between things instead of drawing conclusions about them. For example, on Valentine’s Day, we are drawn to the relationship between the heart and love, a theme well documented in Western literature, plays, and poetry. We can draw this symbolic comprehension out further and become aware of many other kinds of relationships not recognized before.

Through analogy and these other Western practices outlined herein, we use our spiritual intelligence to become Self-knowing. These practices open the closed circle of a horizontal, deterministic existence – engaging an openness of freedom symbolized by the spiral. As an open system, the spiral leads us to understand the astounding spiritual scientific understanding of what an open system of freedom indicates: a system of unlimited energy, without end. Here there is no decay and decomposition as exists in all closed systems, bounded as they are by linear time and three-dimensional space, where entropy = breakdown, decay, decomposition, is a necessary governing principle.

The further implication of an unlimited, non-entropic system of freedom where there is no decay is . . . there is no death!  This is where spontaneous intelligence (binah) and wisdom (chochmah) join together with the wisdom or the intelligence of the heart (tiferet). Chochmah is actually a form of faith as well. One definition of faith is trust in the unseen world and its influences in our life. Where the two spheres of binah and chochmah link, we find a hidden region of knowing (not knowledge which is fixed and part of discontinuous brain function) called “da’ath” (Hebrew for “knowing”). Da’ath is intuition, linking us directly to the Absolute One Mind. This experience analogizes the experience of Adam and Eve in the Garden, where they listened only to the voice of One who was speaking to them.

Esoteric intelligence is direct knowing of our unitive possibility with our Source and the bridge to that unity at the same instant. It is the super-intelligence beyond ordinary intelligence. It allows us to access the truths of existence, those lying behind this veil of illusory reality called the manmade world. The manmade world of illusory reality has been created through our audacity to usurp the knowledge and power of God, to submerge the very foundational forces of the Absolute One Mind that preserve our world, nay, the entire cosmos. These foundational forces are love, faith, hope, will, intuition, imagination, and supernal light, i.e., that light beyond the sun, moon, and stars.

Thus, esoteric intelligence is the secret knowing of what was, is, and will be – the culmination of knowing. “What will be” refers to the world to come, sometimes called the messianic age, or the end of days, or as Friedrich Weinreb, in his most profound book Roots of the Bible, calls it, the “eighth day of creation.” Here, beyond time and space, this current creation will gave way to a new creation of truth and harmony, still containing vestiges of the old, where the laws of conscience, morality, and duality are no longer necessary. In this world to come we will know those other worlds and their occupants mentioned above. Here God becomes knowable, Eden is restored, and we are able to correct the error of Adam and Eve. On this eighth day, we will have answered the riddle of the two trees of life and death, where the latter no longer exists and eternal Life awaits us.”

~ Gerald Epstein is an American psychiatrist, founder and director of The American Institute for Mental Imagery, and the author of several books including Studies in Non-Deterministic Psychology, Healing Visualizations, and Kabbalah for Inner Peace.

In 1974, Epstein experienced what he calls an "epiphany". In Jerusalem as a visiting professor in law and psychiatry, he met a young man who reported that three years of extensive psychoanalysis had not succeeded in freeing him of his depression but that four sessions with a local healer who practiced "waking dream therapy" had cured him. Epstein arranged a meeting with the healer, a woman named Colette Aboulker-Muscat, who, at her death in 2003, "had an international reputation as a . . . healer of body and mind who employed visualization and dream interpretation." Epstein's epiphany came after he suggested to Aboulker-Muscat that since Freud had proposed to analysts that they elicit free association by asking patients to imagine being on a train with an analyst and describing to the analyst everything the patient sees while looking out a window, one could consider Freud's free association a form of mental imagery. Aboulker-Muscat asked, "In what direction does the train go?" Disconcerted, Epstein made a horizontal gesture with his hand. Aboulker-Muscat made a vertical gesture in response. "What if the direction was changed to this axis?" Fifteen years later, Epstein described this moment in born-again language:

I felt an overwhelming sense of self-recognition, an 'aha' experience. It was an epiphany. The vertical movement seemed to lift me from the horizontal hold of the given, the ordinary patterns of everyday cause and effect. I leapt into freedom, and I saw that the task of therapy . . . was to help realize freedom, to go beyond the given to the newness that we all are capable of. . . .This is what imagery, I have come to learn, makes possible.

Epstein studied imagery with Aboulker-Muscat for nine years. In New York, he closed his Freudian practice and opened a new practice based on mental imagery.

For more information please visit drjerryepstein.org

Already Given

“... It is an imperfect world at every level. Therefore the future is always, somehow, scary. We attempt to build for ourselves many protections against this imperfection, even in the patterns of our mind. This unsayable future — preparing for it and also fearing it — determines much of our lives. Thus we search for predictability, explanation, and order to give ourselves some sense of peace and control.

Even much of religion itself has become a search for social order, group cohesion, and personal worthiness, or a way of escaping into the next world, which unfortunately destroys most of its transformative power. True spirituality is not a search for perfection or control or the door to the next world; it is a search for divine union now. The great discovery is always that what we are searching for has already been given! I did not find it; it found me. It is Jacob’s shout of Eureka! at the foot of his ladder to heaven in Genesis 28:16–17.

Union and perfection are two different journeys with very different strategies. Common religion seeks private perfection; the mystics seek and enjoy the foundation itself — divine union, totally given. Personal perfection insists on private knowing and certitude. Surprisingly, union is a much better way of knowing. It is a shared knowing that is much more solid and consoling. I promise you that this will make more sense as the book unfolds, but in the meantime just ask anyone in love if this is not true.

The most amazing fact about Jesus, unlike almost any other religious founder, is that he found God in disorder and imperfection — and told us that we must do the same or we would never be content on this earth. This is what makes Jesus so counterintuitive to most eras and cultures, and why most never perceived the great good news in this utter shift of consciousness. That failure to understand his core message, and a concrete program by which you could experience this truth for yourself, is at the center of our religious problem today. We looked for hope where it was never promised, and no one gave us the proper software so we could know hope for ourselves, least of all in disorder and imperfection! Worst of all, we did not know that hope and union are the same thing, and that real hope has nothing to do with mental certitudes.

WHEN YOU SURRENDER TO FEAR AND DISTRACTION

If you surrender to the fear of uncertainty, life can become a set of insurance policies. Your short time on this earth becomes small and self-protective, a kind of circling of the wagons around what you can be sure of and what you think you can control — even God. It provides you with the illusion that you are in the driver’s seat, navigating on safe, small roads, and usually in a single, predetermined direction that can take you only where you have already been. For far too many people, no life journey is necessary because we think we already have all our answers at the beginning. “The church says,… the Bible says, etc.”

A second group tries a different approach. They choose to whistle in the dark, look the other way, or just keep busy — seeking various ways of being important, or as Jesus put it, trying to “build bigger barns.” For them, life becomes a series of manufactured dramas, entertainment, and diversionary tactics intended to help them avoid the substantial questions. Here, what some call intensity is frequently an avoidance of what I will call presence — intimacy with ourselves, with life, and with others. This avoidance is symbolized by what we call the consumer culture, which in our current economic situation appears to be falling apart.

This group also represents a large percentage of humanity, especially in the developed world. Governments encourage this pacification by various distractions, what used to be called “bread and circuses.” They know it will keep us small, content, and uninterested in those “weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and good faith” (Matthew 23:23) that have attracted all great souls.

A third group does seek various forms of transcendence and spirituality, but in a mixture of mature and immature ways… Unfortunately, so much religious seeking today is immature transcendence, dualistically split off from any objective experience of union with God, self, or others — what Owen Barfield would have called “the desert of nonparticipation.”
If it is authentically experienced, Christianity is the overcoming of the split from God’s side once and for all! Sadly, most of us remain split inside of a heady set of formulas and religious jargon, a place where deep constant hope cannot be found — to say nothing of joy. We need to leave the desert for a much better land, a “final participation” that can be partially enjoyed now.

WHEN YOU JOYFULLY SURRENDER TO GOD

Mature transcendence is an actual “falling into” and an “undergoing” of God, as James Alison so brilliantly names it. God is “done unto us,” and all we can do is allow it, as both the similar prayers of Mary at the Annunciation and Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane make clear. What we fall into is what Christianity would call both “an abyss” and an “utter foundation.” What a paradox! But in God, they are not opposites.

When we do get there, we almost wonder how we got there. We know we did not do anything nearly as much as we know we were done unto. We are being utterly and warmly held and falling helplessly into a scary mystery at the very same time — caught between profound desire and the question, “Where is this going to take me?” It has been said many times that, after transformation, you seldom have the feeling you have found anything. It feels much more like Someone found you!

You find yourself having been grabbed, being held, and being Someone’s beloved. At first, you do not even know what is going on. All you know is that it is a most wondrous undergoing, but an undergoing nevertheless. You know you have been “had” (see Jeremiah 20:7–9 or Isaiah 6:4–7). You are in Someone Else’s grip. How else will anybody freely and rightly give up control? They won’t. They’ll use religion itself as a disguised way of taking control, or try to control God by their good behavior.

Finally you allow yourself to stand before one mirror for your identity — you surrender to the naked now of true prayer and full presence. You become a Thou before the great I AM. Such ultimate mirroring gives you the courage to leave other mirrors behind you. “Human approval means nothing to me,” Jesus said. “Why do you waste time looking to one another for approval when you have the approval that comes from the One God?” (John 5:41, 44). Henceforward, as Teresa of Avila said, “You find God in yourself and yourself in God,” a discovery that precedes, outdoes, and undercuts all of the best psychology in the world. Think of the thousands of dollars you can save in therapy!

Most people in our whimsical culture live in a hall of mirrors, and so we find ourselves with fragile and rapidly changing identities, needing a lot of affirmation. We see this especially in so many young people. Their identities are built on feelings, moods, and ideas that are easily manipulated by everything around them, including advertising and its selling of superficial images.

You have been given something so much better, so much more joyful and more substantial than that! Divine presence, and the faith, hope, and love that accompany it, are a gift — you cannot control it — but nevertheless a gift that can and should be asked for (Luke 11:13). Asking for something from God does not mean talking God into it; it means an awakening of the gift within ourselves. You only ask for something you have already begun to taste! The gift has already been given. Most people, quite sadly and with disastrous consequences, do not know that the gift is already theirs. The teachers of the early Christian centuries, along with many of the later saints and mystics, were clear about this. Yet most Christians today still seem to be like the citizens of Ephesus in apostolic days, saying in effect, “We did not even know there was such a thing as the Holy Spirit” (Acts 19:2).

DISCOVER YOUR BIRTHRIGHT

It’s true that you cannot risk telling people with an immature or dualistic consciousness about the Great Indwelling before they have actually experienced it, because they will always abuse it or trivialize it for purposes of superiority, libertinism, or control. This is probably what Jesus meant by one of his more offensive images, “throwing pearls before swine” (Matthew 7:6). At the same time, we surely did not have to deny it or keep it such a big secret! Perhaps this occurred because many of the clergy had themselves never experienced divine union and so could not teach others about it. Catholics and Orthodox make the Holy Spirit depend on membership and sacraments; Protestants make the Spirit depend on a personal decision or faith as a technique. In both cases, we are back in charge; we are the doers. There is no undergoing.”

~ Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See                                                                                          Father Richard Rohr is a globally recognized teacher and the author of numerous thought-provoking books, including Breathing Under Water, Falling Upward, and Immortal Diamond. A Franciscan priest, he is the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation and is Academic Dean of the Living School for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The school seeks to support students in “deepening engagement with their truest selves and with the world, discovering their authentic identity and growing their capacity to embody this calling in the world.” Father Richard’s teaching is grounded in Franciscan practices of contemplation and self-emptying, expressing themselves in radical compassion, particularly for the socially marginalized.

Gifted

“I am writing to you, to those of you who know highly intelligent children. Much is made of trying to help these kids “achieve their potential,” in all the myriad ways that can mean. It is so tempting to urge a gifted child to use all of their gifts right now, right away. We believe we’re helping them to be their best selves…

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve praised someone’s child to the heavens - how thoughtful and incisive their in-class comments are, the beauty and clarity of their writing, how kind and encouraging they are toward their fellow students, how utterly they have succeeded in a very challenging course—only to have the parent say, “What else should we have them do?”

I see so many parents who automatically leap to asking more of children who are already giving so much of themselves, already performing at so high a level that they can take college-level courses at thirteen. Academic achievement comes easily to many of these children, but the pressure they feel to keep achieving does not. It’s a lot for a child to handle, even a gifted one. Maybe especially for them. For the most part they’re gentle, thoughtful kids who are loath to question their parents’ wishes. I see them edge close to breakdown, to oblivion, all by striving to do and be what we ask of them.

The vast majority of their parents mean well; they want to help their children get into good colleges and secure comfortable futures. Many of them also want to take pride in their children’s achievements, of course, but I don’t think it would be fair to imply that this is their primary motivation. They want to do right by their kids. For many parents, that means pushing as hard as they can.

But as a teacher of gifted children, and as a survivor of that label myself, I am writing to ask that we stop. To suggest that space and gentleness and lack of pressure is exactly what these children need.

What gifts can we offer gifted children? How can we who are their guardians do justice by them?

The first gift is not to praise them for their talents alone. Just as a beautiful child is often praised only for their beauty, and grows simultaneously vain and insecure, an intelligent child can easily learn that their mind is what makes them loveable. Praise can morph into expectations that feel exhausting, or even impossible, to meet. It can lead to panic attacks about a B on a test, a myopic focus on school, and disproportionate feelings of failure when they do any work that falls short of perfection. They learn that if they can’t do something easily and well, can’t elicit praise at the first attempt, that it isn’t worth doing at all. They grow terribly fearful of failure, and even of risk. I and many other ex-talented-youths know this all too well.

Instead, give these children the gift of praise for attributes that have nothing to do with intelligence. Praise their kindness, their empathy, their bravery and strength. Praise their hearts and souls; but don’t do so by calling them exceptional. Declare that you are glad there are people like them in the world, and by your praise help them feel they belong here. Tell them they do belong, just as they are, not that they stand out. This is the balm for a lonely child’s heart.

It also leads me to the second gift, which is ordinariness. Too many parents want their children to be exceptional, sometimes for the child’s sake, sometimes for their own. But there is a creeping insidiousness to the idea that only an extraordinary life is worth living, and that bowing out of the highest possible echelons of achievement is weakness. That it is somehow a sin not to ‘reach our potential.’

Yet most of us, in the end, live ordinary lives; we are not Nobel Prize winners or leaders of nations, even if perhaps we might have been. When I think of the things that have brought the most goodness, the most spiritual health to my life, they are utterly ordinary. A kind word, a walk outdoors, the communion of human touch. Life’s greatest gifts are offered to everyone. Let your child find what makes them remarkable if they so choose; but let them be ordinary, too. They do not need to use all their gifts right now.

The third gift, then, is time. So many young people are over-scheduled, drowning in school and sports and clubs and church and jobs and volunteer work. So many of our children don’t get enough sleep, let alone time to themselves. We are teaching them to pace their lives at the same breakneck speed that leaves us tired and burnt out for our whole adulthoods. Is it not enough that we exhaust ourselves this way, but we must do it to our children, too? Is this really how we want to teach them that life should be? Give them time to breathe, time without the burden of expectation; and then, perhaps, give yourself that gift, too.

That word expectation is at the heart of what I am trying to say. If we truly want to help our gifted children, to give them gifts that will serve them well, we must divorce expectation from opportunity. All children’s needs are different, and I genuinely believe that all children are gifted. They absolutely deserve the opportunity to use their gifts, and it is therefore our responsibility to create those opportunities.

But we must not dictate what they will do with them. Children will always use their gifts in ways that their parents cannot understand, or perhaps even sanction. We must create the space in which our children can grow, and then—painfully, wistfully—step back and let them do it.

I have recently been revising my syllabus for the coming summer.  Under the Class Goals heading, I describe the major assignments students will complete, and the skills I hope they will gain. In truth, though, my goals are simple: opportunity without expectation, or with as open and wide-ranging expectations as a particular course can allow.  My students come to my class so often worn down, harried, and isolated. They are so worried about doing things properly that creative expression can feel like a frightening foreign language to them.

But there is no right way to tell a story, especially if it’s your own. The freedom of never being right is terrifying to them at first, but they’re young enough to leap into it with abandon after a day or two. I often wish that more adults could do the same.

That courage to leap is the fourth gift. I believe it is one of the best that we can give to any child. Encouragement is not about pushing or shaping or expectations. It has the word courage at its heart. If we can encourage our children, if we can fill them with courage, we will have done right by them.

The fifth and last gift is community, in the sense of communion. I attended CTY as a student for four years, and I am only making the tiniest rhetorical leap when I say that it saved my life. The three weeks I spent at “nerd camp” each summer were my first home, the first place where I felt truly accepted and, more than that, understood. I came from a difficult home life and a large amount of social anxiety at school, but that first summer, I met dozens of others just like me. I giggled with friends, danced with abandon to the Violent Femmes and REM, and had my first kiss.

Among the weird kids, I got to be normal. It was an incredible gift.
Not every gifted child is socially awkward, a poor athlete, or any of the other concepts we might associate with them. Nearly all, however, feel some degree of loneliness and isolation—even the popular, athletic ones.  There is some part of themselves that they cannot share with their peers: the part that wants to talk about the finer points of particle physics, for instance, or that just blew through the collected works of Jane Austen in a week. They’ve learned to silence it, because no one understands, or because it will make teachers and parents expect even more of them than they already give.

That’s what makes a gifted child lonely: the part of themselves they can’t share with peers or even the most well-meaning parents. Only a fellow teen genius burns with the same all-consuming excitement that they do.

As a teacher of these students, I often feel that the most I can do is give them space, and perhaps a spark—a writing exercise, a page of prose—step back, and wait for the explosion. They light each other up far more than I can.

I am a good teacher, and I am proud of the contributions I make to the program that was so vital to me as a teenager. But I know that the actual classes, as exciting and stimulating as they are, are not the point of CTY. The point is the children themselves, the community they make for each other, the life-saving understanding that they, and only they, can offer one another. As adults we have the resources to create the space for this to happen, but it does not belong to us. It never does. It is the gift they give each other.

Witnessing that gift has been one of the greatest privileges of my life. At the first weekend’s camp dance, students who’ve known each other for only a few days join hands, embrace, and sway in circles to Queen’s “Somebody to Love.” The students laugh or smile or cry with relief; chaperones quietly do the same. There is a potency of belonging in the room so thick you could float on it. Many of these students have never attended a school dance before, or have been rejected or mocked if they did. But here, in a place where their parents have sent them to improve their minds, they find instead a fellowship of the heart.”

~ Betsy Cornwell is a New York Times bestselling author living in west Ireland. She is the story editor and a contributing writer at Parabola, and her short-form writing includes fiction, nonfiction, and literary translation. She is the author of the novels Tides, Mechanica, and Venturess. Betsy’s fourth novel is a feminist retelling of Robin Hood forthcoming in 2018.

Already Given

“... It is an imperfect world at every level. Therefore the future is always, somehow, scary. We attempt to build for ourselves many protections against this imperfection, even in the patterns of our mind. This unsayable future — preparing for it and also fearing it — determines much of our lives. Thus we search for predictability, explanation, and order to give ourselves some sense of peace and control.

Even much of religion itself has become a search for social order, group cohesion, and personal worthiness, or a way of escaping into the next world, which unfortunately destroys most of its transformative power. True spirituality is not a search for perfection or control or the door to the next world; it is a search for divine union now. The great discovery is always that what we are searching for has already been given! I did not find it; it found me. It is Jacob’s shout of Eureka! at the foot of his ladder to heaven in Genesis 28:16–17.

Union and perfection are two different journeys with very different strategies. Common religion seeks private perfection; the mystics seek and enjoy the foundation itself — divine union, totally given. Personal perfection insists on private knowing and certitude. Surprisingly, union is a much better way of knowing. It is a shared knowing that is much more solid and consoling. I promise you that this will make more sense as the book unfolds, but in the meantime just ask anyone in love if this is not true.

The most amazing fact about Jesus, unlike almost any other religious founder, is that he found God in disorder and imperfection — and told us that we must do the same or we would never be content on this earth. This is what makes Jesus so counterintuitive to most eras and cultures, and why most never perceived the great good news in this utter shift of consciousness. That failure to understand his core message, and a concrete program by which you could experience this truth for yourself, is at the center of our religious problem today. We looked for hope where it was never promised, and no one gave us the proper software so we could know hope for ourselves, least of all in disorder and imperfection! Worst of all, we did not know that hope and union are the same thing, and that real hope has nothing to do with mental certitudes.

WHEN YOU SURRENDER TO FEAR AND DISTRACTION

If you surrender to the fear of uncertainty, life can become a set of insurance policies. Your short time on this earth becomes small and self-protective, a kind of circling of the wagons around what you can be sure of and what you think you can control — even God. It provides you with the illusion that you are in the driver’s seat, navigating on safe, small roads, and usually in a single, predetermined direction that can take you only where you have already been. For far too many people, no life journey is necessary because we think we already have all our answers at the beginning. “The church says,… the Bible says, etc.”

A second group tries a different approach. They choose to whistle in the dark, look the other way, or just keep busy — seeking various ways of being important, or as Jesus put it, trying to “build bigger barns.” For them, life becomes a series of manufactured dramas, entertainment, and diversionary tactics intended to help them avoid the substantial questions. Here, what some call intensity is frequently an avoidance of what I will call presence — intimacy with ourselves, with life, and with others. This avoidance is symbolized by what we call the consumer culture, which in our current economic situation appears to be falling apart.

This group also represents a large percentage of humanity, especially in the developed world. Governments encourage this pacification by various distractions, what used to be called “bread and circuses.” They know it will keep us small, content, and uninterested in those “weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and good faith” (Matthew 23:23) that have attracted all great souls.

A third group does seek various forms of transcendence and spirituality, but in a mixture of mature and immature ways… Unfortunately, so much religious seeking today is immature transcendence, dualistically split off from any objective experience of union with God, self, or others — what Owen Barfield would have called “the desert of nonparticipation.”
If it is authentically experienced, Christianity is the overcoming of the split from God’s side once and for all! Sadly, most of us remain split inside of a heady set of formulas and religious jargon, a place where deep constant hope cannot be found — to say nothing of joy. We need to leave the desert for a much better land, a “final participation” that can be partially enjoyed now.

WHEN YOU JOYFULLY SURRENDER TO GOD

Mature transcendence is an actual “falling into” and an “undergoing” of God, as James Alison so brilliantly names it. God is “done unto us,” and all we can do is allow it, as both the similar prayers of Mary at the Annunciation and Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane make clear. What we fall into is what Christianity would call both “an abyss” and an “utter foundation.” What a paradox! But in God, they are not opposites.

When we do get there, we almost wonder how we got there. We know we did not do anything nearly as much as we know we were done unto. We are being utterly and warmly held and falling helplessly into a scary mystery at the very same time — caught between profound desire and the question, “Where is this going to take me?” It has been said many times that, after transformation, you seldom have the feeling you have found anything. It feels much more like Someone found you!

You find yourself having been grabbed, being held, and being Someone’s beloved. At first, you do not even know what is going on. All you know is that it is a most wondrous undergoing, but an undergoing nevertheless. You know you have been “had” (see Jeremiah 20:7–9 or Isaiah 6:4–7). You are in Someone Else’s grip. How else will anybody freely and rightly give up control? They won’t. They’ll use religion itself as a disguised way of taking control, or try to control God by their good behavior.

Finally you allow yourself to stand before one mirror for your identity — you surrender to the naked now of true prayer and full presence. You become a Thou before the great I AM. Such ultimate mirroring gives you the courage to leave other mirrors behind you. “Human approval means nothing to me,” Jesus said. “Why do you waste time looking to one another for approval when you have the approval that comes from the One God?” (John 5:41, 44). Henceforward, as Teresa of Avila said, “You find God in yourself and yourself in God,” a discovery that precedes, outdoes, and undercuts all of the best psychology in the world. Think of the thousands of dollars you can save in therapy!

Most people in our whimsical culture live in a hall of mirrors, and so we find ourselves with fragile and rapidly changing identities, needing a lot of affirmation. We see this especially in so many young people. Their identities are built on feelings, moods, and ideas that are easily manipulated by everything around them, including advertising and its selling of superficial images.

You have been given something so much better, so much more joyful and more substantial than that! Divine presence, and the faith, hope, and love that accompany it, are a gift — you cannot control it — but nevertheless a gift that can and should be asked for (Luke 11:13). Asking for something from God does not mean talking God into it; it means an awakening of the gift within ourselves. You only ask for something you have already begun to taste! The gift has already been given. Most people, quite sadly and with disastrous consequences, do not know that the gift is already theirs. The teachers of the early Christian centuries, along with many of the later saints and mystics, were clear about this. Yet most Christians today still seem to be like the citizens of Ephesus in apostolic days, saying in effect, “We did not even know there was such a thing as the Holy Spirit” (Acts 19:2).

DISCOVER YOUR BIRTHRIGHT

It’s true that you cannot risk telling people with an immature or dualistic consciousness about the Great Indwelling before they have actually experienced it, because they will always abuse it or trivialize it for purposes of superiority, libertinism, or control. This is probably what Jesus meant by one of his more offensive images, “throwing pearls before swine” (Matthew 7:6). At the same time, we surely did not have to deny it or keep it such a big secret! Perhaps this occurred because many of the clergy had themselves never experienced divine union and so could not teach others about it. Catholics and Orthodox make the Holy Spirit depend on membership and sacraments; Protestants make the Spirit depend on a personal decision or faith as a technique. In both cases, we are back in charge; we are the doers. There is no undergoing.”

~ Richard Rohr, The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See                                                                                          Father Richard Rohr is a globally recognized teacher and the author of numerous thought-provoking books, including Breathing Under Water, Falling Upward, and Immortal Diamond. A Franciscan priest, he is the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation and is Academic Dean of the Living School for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The school seeks to support students in “deepening engagement with their truest selves and with the world, discovering their authentic identity and growing their capacity to embody this calling in the world.” Father Richard’s teaching is grounded in Franciscan practices of contemplation and self-emptying, expressing themselves in radical compassion, particularly for the socially marginalized.

Orthodox Way

“Judaism conceives of the universe as a vastly integrated system… The Torah insists that all the mechanisms of daily life are the hinges of holiness. So there is a vast system of sanctification of food, concerned with what is kosher and what is not. The Torah is also very concerned with the sanctification of time… Judaism has it worked out to a dance. And thirdly, it is concerned with the holiness of various kinds of actions and functions and objects of daily life. The whole purpose behind it is that a person must deal with the world as it is, and out of that can be distilled a true religiosity. Among the common people, it will produce an extremely high level of ethical sensitivity. For this, in Yiddish — Ehrlich-Keit — a high level integrity. That means a kind of purity…

Judaism is very concerned with the natural realities of life, like crying children, and the pulse of family life. It insists on family life… The Torah as a system compels one to do the exercises and guarantees the results. Guarantees it. And the result truly authenticates its nature as a religion; it produces a truly religious awareness that doesn’t force one out of the context of reality. 

Kabbala is the esoteric side, while Torah, is the exoteric… Judaism, is an Oriental tradition — not from the Far East, but Oriental… The Hebraic mind understood truth as essentially the face of God that is truly One presence in all knowledge and meaning — which we may have come to see in a fragmented form. We should not lose sight of the fact that this is only a spark in a bigger fire. We release the sparks of holiness. Meaning that holiness is inevitably hidden, in the kabbalistic frame of things, under the appearance of non-holiness… There is an abundance of texts in kabbala but they are really discussing something that can only be known in a direct, existential mode. It is only knowable in an inspirited, intuitive mode. The other things can stoke the engine, or turn up the gas, but they can’t light the fire. The fire can only be lit by the intuitive spark. All the rest is to bring the rational mind into gear and to disperse the process throughout the corridors of the being.

It uses practices that are deeply meditative in character. It has a vast array of meditative practices that are the equal of practices in the Far East. They are of all different sorts, different hues and colors, and there are a vast array of different steps in the process… True entry has to come gradually but with genuine commitment to the path of the Torah… A true teacher is necessary for the whole process — one who can contain and reflect the material and who is solidly and soberly linked to the tradition he represents…

The number of illuminated ones in any tradition — the people who really know what it’s all about — is a very minute minority… You cannot divorce kabbala from normative Jewish practice… To depart from the norms of the tradition is to do violence to its fabric. It is a bit of an arrogance. I don’t say that of the people, but of the intrinsic posture of a culture that empowers people to sit in relatively uninformed judgment on any great, venerable spiritual system… Now to cut away part of it, like Shabbos [the Sabbath], is simply the influence of contemporary America, which is afraid of commitment and discipline, and has justified that as an alternative position in a tradition that is obviously rich, profound, and has been created by many generations… If you’ve ever spent Shabbos in a religious atmosphere, then you’ve seen that Shabbos doesn’t have at all the restrictive character that people would suppose it does when they hear that you can’t do this and you can’t do that. You really don’t notice what you can’t do… The colors of the tapestry are much more important than the pegs holding the threads of it.

Judaism creates this space. It understands space and time as the sacraments of God in the universe. Now, what happens when a person enters Shabbos? Everything stops in terms of the feeling that I can hide from who I am or who God is becoming in me. And the next thing is that I am released. I am released from the necessity to do anything, and I’m therefore released from anxiety, because I know the character of the next 25 hours. It is simply whatever is. There’s no compulsion to do this or that; everything just is. This is the essential posture of a meditative stance. Judaism always wishes to understand that a meditative practice can never leave behind the physical component… The body must also be trained in the path of spirituality to contribute whatever it has to the process of meditation or contemplation. And that’s magnified many times over in the Shabbos, which is repeated week after week… For the common people that is a basic transformation of consciousness — at a level they are able to digest.

One gradually comes to see that there is a richer texture to events that otherwise would seem ordinary. And once that is seen, the next step is wondering what is giving them this greater depth. What is it but the presence of something supernal within? Then it is the question of growing with and nurturing that basic insight in moments of stress, using it even in times where it would suit the shortness of spirit to avoid it. That is hard work, but the supportive structure of the lifestyle does that for you. It doesn’t release you from responsibility, but it provides the oars for the boat by insisting on the sanctity of everything. Sanctity not because the thing possesses anything outside of itself, but because it is what it is. Since it doesn’t possess anything outside of itself, it can’t frustrate you; it can’t tantalize you with a vision of things being other than they are and then let you down when you see that’s not so. It insists that what is, is, but is deeper than it looks. You must invest the effort to seek that further, and when you do that, it in turn will support you. The frame of that is the lifestyle — the rhythm of prayer and observance and holiday. All of which are saying, “This is not just one more ordinary time after another. This is this moment and this particular enrichment, which even if you do it in a non-enriching way, still affects you.”

Gradually, as the spiritual process unfolds, a totally new dimension of being and awareness emerges. The truth is that this is a new metaphysical perspective: the prior state of the being was one in which the self formed the lens of perception. The self was perceived to be the subtle focus of reality and meaning. Now the being has been transformed by turning outward toward the cosmos and the divine presence. It cannot be adequately emphasized that this is not a romantic vision, but the description of a precise metaphysical process of transition.

I was born to Jewish parents, but I came to it myself… I knew Rabbi Schlomo Carlebach well, at a formative time, and Rabbi Zalman Schacter also. I don’t want to say that the formative time is over, but my position differs from that of some of my companions and teachers in that they have taken liberties with the ritual and orthodox belief structures. My own path is clearly aligned with a very traditional position. This is because I feel the Torah is oracular in nature. The path that I have chosen and teach my students seeks to restore the traditional patterns of belief and practice to the levels of their full and pristine integrity. This infers clearly, then, the problem with traditional orthopractic structures; they have maintained the forms but have fallen short of being able to sustain the deep inner spiritual content.

Nevertheless, the apparently secondary vessels of a secondary societal nature which characterize traditional Jewish lifestyles shouldn’t be dismissed; they have successfully translated the profound values of the spiritual inner core to the group as a whole. And they have passed the tests of cultural endurance, sustaining profundity of vision and context over centuries of remarkable adversity and difficulty.

I have many weaknesses of many kinds, but I have one strength — a very strong spiritual focus that is central, and it seems to always percolate…

The Ari, a very great kabbalistic master of the sixteenth century, taught that in the proverbial beginning, there was something like a tremendous explosion of Godness that at once created the universe and filled it; it sort of created it one moment before it filled it. Now, looked at one way this was a disintegration — as the language of the text says, “a descent of sparks of holiness into the outer darkness.” Looked at another way it was the expansion of holiness to enlighten the darkness. The difference between these two ways of looking at this is that one way it’s as if you are in the mind of the darkness; what you see is that the light is being fragmented. Now if you think it out calmly, and are patient with what’s going on, then you see that it’s not necessarily that the light is being fragmented; it is that the light is spreading, in order to redeem and reintegrate the darkness.

Now again we have to keep in mind the vast difference in cultures. The Ari was not really erecting some kind of quasi-scientific explanation of things, but it is perhaps the closest we can come to describing it. This was his grasp of a vastly intuitive mythos — a mythos that is a truth in cosmology, in sociology, in philosophy, in psychology. It was an attempt to locate the centrifugal process of meaning. In this way the Ari understood one of the mysteries of the presence of the Jews in the world as the presence of meaning in the universe. In one sense they have been scattered and dispersed and exiled; that’s the plain history of the thing. In the other sense, it’s only from the perspective of history that it is a tragedy; from a more ultimate transcendent perspective it is a redemption. What appears to be moving away is in fact gaining momentum in order to return.

Jews are a people of light — not by what they know, but what they are… Jews are a very spiritually conscious people… At the time of the Second World War, Judaism in Europe, just at the point when it might have produced an Aquarian Age of Judaism, was obliterated. So who was left on the scene? There were no Jews practically except in America… The generation that came after that wanted the deep things, but it did not possess the depths to search out its own storehouses. That I think is the practical answer…

Everything in nature is chosen… Everything is chosen to its purpose… Judaism says the same — Judaism is for the Jews. It’s not for anybody else. Not that we would throw people out, but we’re not coercing anybody to come in. Judaism is emphatic in saying that all men have a path to God. It will affirm and protect the right of others to go to God in their way. It doesn’t discount the other venerable traditions of mankind; it respects them. Judaism affirms that the Torah is the clearest focus on God… Judaism is adamant, almost fanatical, in its insistence on monotheism… The Torah is, however, adamant in its condemnation of idolatry because it senses that the idol is a projection of the “self” of man — sometimes a very dark or questionable aspect of his nature — and thus is a perversion of the religious process completely…

All the practices in Judaism are designed to take the person out of the arena of self-concern, into another arena. If not carefully understood this could also seem a platitude. It doesn’t simply mean that I shouldn’t be concerned with the self. The Torah understands that the implicit, unconscious illusion under which man operates is that he is the measure of the universe. It is an illusion on the existential, philosophical, metaphysical levels. I feel that I am the universe and therefore everything goes inward. I walk around my whole life thinking that’s how things are — “me” cars to drive, “me” food to eat, “me” things to do. The system comes and forces everything outward, which means that the unity that Judaism is looking for is the point at which, without losing this brain, a corridor of correspondence is opened between this brain — the individual identity — and the transcendent identity. But it isn’t that I become annihilated and flow into the great river; it’s that I am maintained in a scale model relationship to the transcendent. I stay here, but I grow outward. I stay here, but I use my here only to be positioned onto there. So I become that without ceasing to be this, and that becomes this without ceasing to be that. This sets up a perpetual interflow; both are the same and yet they are not…

Today, the only “Thou shalt not” is “Thou shalt not say no.” Everything is good, everything is cool, everything is wonderful, everything is fine — except don’t hurt the other guy, and even that sometimes. Why is it good? Because I want to do it, and my primary task is the fulfillment of my individuality. What that means is that we gear everything to the fulfillment of the individual self, and therefore we interpret and align all experience and all the inner workings of reality toward that unspoken end.

Following that, the danger would be that I would conceive of my spiritual practice as a means of achieving fulfillment. It sounds wonderful and just as it should he, but the truth is that it’s a tremendously false position. I would go around arranging my spirituality so that I get a charge from it all the time, so that I know that I’m being “fulfilled…” The deep essential truth of spirituality is present in the folds of other levels of reality — the cognitive and functional modes — which don’t seem at all as glamorous…

It’s to align me with God. That mode that I induce for myself, which could be made to sound very good, matches the kabbala’s essential understanding of evil, which is illusion. Illusion is the root of evil. The world is illusion, but it is, so to speak, a necessary illusion. It’s true, but it is ultimately not true. It is a functional necessity… Let’s say — God forbid — that someone kills someone else. In the moment that they pull the trigger, they have to be saying that this is good. In their twisted mind they are saying it is good that this person should be dead, and it’s such a good that I’ll do it. Now that is a very vast illusion…

Notice that the crossing point there is between what is good and what gives me pleasure; that’s the hitch in the train. When we want our mind-frame to be the universal mind-frame, we prevent ourselves from being at rest in who we are by nature, from seeing that we have to open to alignment. To avoid that we people our illusion with all kinds of things that will convince us that we are everything. It’s easy to extend yourself and say that the world should run according to what you say, but to return to the truth of one’s being in which one is at rest and therefore aligned is more difficult…”

~ Reb Dovid Din Dovid Din was born in 1941 in northern England to Jewish but non-religious parents. Over the years he carved his own path into the Jewish tradition, and eventually studied in yeshivas [religious schools] both in Israel and America. Seven years ago, he brought his family to this Brooklyn community. Beyond that scant outline, Rabbi Din prefers to be none too specific about his past. While he draws great inspiration from the Chassidic master Reb Nachman of Bratzlav, he claims no allegiance to any specific Chassidic branch. At first, he had been a student of R. Shlomo Carlebach, living for a while in the House of Love and Prayer in San Francisco. Afterward, he studied at Rabbi Shlomo Freifeld’s yeshiva Sh’or Yoshuv in Far Rockaway. He was also a student and friend of Rabbi Zalman Schachter, though he differed with Reb Zalman regarding Orthodox practice and commitment. After leaving Sh’or Yoshuv, he moved to Boro Park and gathered a small cadre of talmidim around him. There are almost no essays of his that remain. There were, at one point, hundreds or recorded lectures. (A number of his students are attempting to track down any remaining tapes and digitalize them. If anyone has tapes of R. Dovid, they should please be in touch Reb Shore.)

Labyrinth

A labyrinth, once walked, is always in you.