… Each of us sits alone within the cell of our subjective awareness. Now and then we receive cryptic messages from the outside world. Only dimly comprehending what we are doing, we compose responses, which we slip under the door. In this way, we manage to survive, even though we never really know what the hell is happening.”
— John Horgan
Tag: It
… can’t really be named, only experienced.
EACH PERSON’S PERCEPTION OF TRUTH is different. This one has a broader outlook, this one a narrow outlook. But the sincerity of each one’s devotions is all that counts.”
— Reb Nosson: Plato to Rebbe Nachman’s Socrates
Truly, you are where your mind is.”
–Baal Shem Tov
How to Become Wise(r)
PICTURE, ON EVERYTHING/PLACE/PERSON/MOMENT you encounter, a big bright label that says, “LEARN HERE.”
If my audience will feel that these interpretations are also relevant to their perceptions and emotions, I shall feel amply rewarded. However, I shall not feel hurt if my thoughts will find no response in the hearts of my listeners.”
— Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith
Fixing a Hole
RECENTLY, I RECEIVED SOME SPAM from Chosen People Ministries (one flavor of the Jews-for-Jesus-ers). When their website’s response-form asked why I wanted to unsubscribe from future mailings, I wrote, “Exodus 20:3; 1 Kings 18:21. Go play with someone else.” They…
5 Thoughts: The Grand Old Process
1. THERE IS A CERTAIN COMPULSION to the act of writing: an unscratchable itch that won’t let the fingers refrain from their fruitless but busy task, whether on paper or keyboard. 2. To ask writers “Why do you write?” is…
On Writerly Spirituality: Yom Kippur Edition
THIS DAY IS STEEPED IN regret — and resolve. Yom Kippur is not as joyful as Pesach or Shavuot, which respectively mark the exodus from Egypt and embrace of the Torah[1], but it’s a day which carries its own spiritual…
Disposathon!
SPEAKING FROM EXPERIENCE: IT IS easier to get rid of everything in one big purge than a few things in a bunch of smaller ones. The time: June 1985. Hopped-up on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and The Dharma Bums,…
Boulevard of Broken Animals
FIRST, THERE WAS THE ONE-legged California towhee. She didn’t actually start out as one-legged. But when we first noticed her in the backyard, one of her legs was badly withered. It eventually dropped off. We named her “Tikvah” — Hebrew…
365 Names: God-Who-Sees
GOD-WHO-SEES is, in spite of titling a music video, also a fairly accurate descriptor of the non-dual mindstate: “All is seen, but No-thing is seen,” as one seeker-after-the-Divine put it. The Hebrew version, “El Roi” (lit.: “G?d Who sees me“)…
365 Names: The Nameless One
THE NAMELESS ONE was invented by me (unless I unrememberingly wheelered it from somewhere) to express, ironically, that the whole “365 Names of God” project (and similar efforts) is doomed to fail. As Lao-tze said more than a thousand years…