The Long View

I've been starting to study Shaar HaGilgulim (The gates of reincarnation) by Hayyim Vital. I'll write more later on what I'm learning from the text itself but it's made me realize that I've started to take the long view in my life. I don't know if it's related to getting older, but things don't feel as rushed as they used to. I know that I have the rest of my life to work on my spiritual development. I can have רחמים compassion with myself if it takes awhile to happen. I know that growth takes place over many lifetimes, and all that I can see now is a small piece of a much, much larger picture. I can't stop working. I have to put as much effort into my growth as possible, but it's ok if things don't always go as planned.

One of my Hevrutas overslept a few days ago and we missed our study time. At first I was a little upset and annoyed, but then I realized that we've been studying together for two years and b"t we will be studying for another many years. If we miss this week, in the scope of things, it's not such a big deal. But only as long as we're made plans for next week and the week after.

There are so many stumbling blocks that lie in the path of our growth. It's important to know when we've hit them and how to move through them. But it's important not to let the yetzer harah, the impulse to self-destruction, use those stumbling blocks as an opportunity to beat us up and stop the growth.

The long view is a great motivator. It tells us that the problems we have in this life will be repeated in the next until we've worked them through. Or, more colloquially, same shit, different lifetime. I have no desire to go through these challenges again, so I know I have to work as hard as I can to grow so I don't subject myself to them again. At the same time, there will always be another chance to face these issues again. If I don't get it right the first time, there will be infinite second chances, which is both good and bad.

There is a Talmudic story about Honi the Circler who came upon a man planting a carob tree. Honi asked the man how long the tree would take to bear fruit? The man replied 70 years. Honi asked the man, Why do you plant a tree whose fruit you will never eat? The man said that he was planting it for the next generation, just as his father and grandfather had done for him. Honi walked away, suddenly felt very tired and lay down to sleep. He awoke to see the tree was now a giant and the same man picking the fruit. He asked the man if he was the one who had planted it? The man shook his head and replied that it was planted by his grandfather. Honi realized he had slept for 70 years.

Honi saw for himself that growth takes generations and lifetimes. Small seeds we plant now may grow into giant trees later on, though we won't, in our current incarnation, see them. We have to do the work so that we continue to grow. But we have to be patient to let things grow no matter how long they take.

Photo courtesy of Macropoulus

Gevurot Geshamim

Sometimes it seems that I am led to certain topics. The latest is Gevurot Geshamim, גבורות גשמים, the strength/powers of the rain. At the end of Sukkkot, we change the rain prayer we say twice during the Amidah from blessings to rain.

The prayer occurs twice. The first time is during the prayer for reviving the dead, מחיה המתים, and the second is during the prayer for a good year. The Talmudic explanation for this is because when the rains come it is like reviving the dead. I remember being in the Negev desert many years ago and watching what I thought was a dead branch start to sprout immediately after the rains. There are certain plants in the desert that remain dormant for years and then come to life after the rains. Thus the rains can easily be understood as bringing life to the dead.

Interestingly, during this prayer, we mention the rains, but don't request any. Later, during the prayer for a good year, we specifically ask for a blessing during the summer, and dew and rain during the winter. In any land, rain is essential to agriculture, and too much or too little rain can determine who lives and who dies in the coming year.

Traditionally there are three things for which God alone is responsible: creating life (babies), reviving the dead, and the rains. This leads to very interesting discussions about the effect of modern technology on human power to effect those three things, but in my mind we are still technicians. For all the medical advances in IVF, we still have no idea how life is created. We can help it along, but if it works or not is far beyond us. We can predict the rain, but we have no control over it. We've just gotten better at observing what God does, not influencing it. Though human actions do seem to have an effect on the climate, we are just a small part of a very big system.

My question here is really about the term Gevurot Geshamim. In one sense it could mean just the strength of the rains meaning that we want strong rains and not just a drizzle. In another term, it might mean the power to cause the rain to fall. In that light, I called the soul of Honi the circler who was a Talmudic figure who actually did cause it to rain.

The last time I talked to him about this, he showed me that he could connect to the weather and influence in much the same way that I heal clients. If God meant for it to rain, then he was able to help that process happen, and if God did not, there was nothing he could do.

This time, he showed me how to connect to the energy of clouds. They felt very scattered, like touching something that has a form but very little substance. The process of helping the rain was one of filling the clouds so that they became fuller, more dense. When the cloud became too "pregnant" with energy, the rain would come forth. I practiced it awhile, connecting to God and then connecting to the clouds, though I don't think I'm much good at it. And it is very humbling to realize how little power one have over this process. The analogy that comes to mind is of pushing a truck. If you are going downhill, it will roll with your help, but if you are trying to push it uphill, there's not much you can do. Maybe the strength of the rains is the strength to push that truck?

I need to do some more study on this topic, so hopefully will write more in the future. I suspect also that this is one of those topics in Judaism which energetically comes up every year around this time, so if I don't get back to it soon, I'll probably be back next year about this time.

Honi and the heavens

This past week at Morgensterns I learned a new thing. When I first walked into the room, the energy was very flat. At some point soon after, Morgenstern left the room and then returned. At that point, it felt like an inverted funnel opened above his head into the heavens. And then the energy in the room really started to build.

As I meditated during his talks, I kept wondering how I could support him, rather than take energy from him. At that point, I felt a small tunnel open above me. It was almost like looking up what I imagine the eye of the storm looks like, only there was no storm, just an hole leading up. I've been playing around with this since.

Today during Talmud class we read a passage about Honi the Circler. He's someone I've contacted before, and someone I really like. He was a priest and a Shaman during the second temple period. We read a section for Mishnah Taanit about Honi praying for rain. If you would like, you can read it in Hebrew (ג,ד) or in English. At the end of the section, they tell Honi that he might have been excommunicated if he wasn't Honi. This bothered me a lot. Then we asked the question why? and people threw out all sorts of answers such as Honi was arrogant and he made God do his will, not the other way around. These didn't seem right to me.

So I opened up the tunnel about my head and down came Honi until it felt like he was inside me but I wasn't channeling him, rather his soul joined mine. He told me that the priests were scared of him, which is why they wanted him out. He also showed me how he was able to bring the rain - it was kind of like healing, but he was connecting to the clouds and the skies. To do this, his power must have been immense, though I felt only an echo of it. He told me that it was going to rain anyway, he just helped it out, and that he was acting with God's will because how else could he make it rain? If God didn't want it to happen, it wouldn't happen.

So here I am in class with answers straight from the horse's mouth, but no way to say that. So I brought up my objections carefully and based them in the text. He stayed around until I had managed to convey all his ideas to the class, and then he ascended back up the hole into the heavens. I been working very hard to learn how to express these type of insights in ways which others can digest them.

Later on, while I was seeing patients, I again was playing around with this hole. Particularly while I was working on one patient, at first the light of heaven came down through the hole to help her out, then the two of us went up through the hole. It felt like we came out the top above a large floor of clouds. The light of heaven surrounded her then so she could heal.

I'm excited to play with it more and hope it lasts for a while.

Honi the circler and a line of power

Tonight I went to see Morgenstern again. The energy felt very good tonight, and I wasn't disappointed.

When we first got there, I had a long conversation with a man there I have met before who seems to take care of a lot of the logistical details around the yeshiva. He had told me earlier of another Hasidic master that I should meet. Tonight I asked him how to get to meet this person. He told me there were several ways: the first was to get accepted into his "Kollel" or adult study where a person receives a stipend to study. Baring that, the easiest way to meet him was to donate money, say, around $1000 or bring people to him that would donate. When I indicated that those weren't good options, he told me that he teaches classes, and if I dressed like a hassid, I could sneak into one of the classes. At that point, I realized that this teacher was probably not someone I'd want to meet with anyway. Too many layers. And I don't want to meet someone for whom I have to pretend to be someone else. So I'll keep looking for other kabbalistic masters.

I also asked him how he experienced Morgenstern's energy. he said it was like light emanating out from him. It was in the sephirah of Keter. An interesting way of talking about it, but not one I understand yet.

During the first talk that Morgenstern gave, I went very deep and felt a lot of power. At first I tried to connect with Morgenstern, but quickly realized that there was another soul right in front of me, above and to the left. Last week, when I was there, I was very sick, and another soul came to the same place. I thought at that point that it was the Amshinover. He pressed into the left side of my head until I finally let him in. He then put a long pole of light down through my head into the center of my body. I asked him what it was and he said: Boundaries. I've been playing with it all week.

Tonight, the soul was much more powerful, and again pushed a rod of light into my body. This time, however, it went above and below me, and had handholds like knots in a rope every few feet. When I asked who it was, I was asked back if it was important. No, I said, so I let it be. Later on, I thought it was Honi the Circler (a talmudic figure) and asked again. This time, he drew a circle for me. I asked him about how to get powerful and he said that in asking the question, I was preventing it from happening. That my motivations for becoming powerful were to impress others. I thought that I needed to become more modest, and he said no, that would happen on it's own. I needed to focus on learning, not self-aggrandizing, and I would move forward. Then he said he was done, and he was gone. He is definitely not a soul I can call, and I count myself blessed that he showed up.

I connected to Morgenstern then, and again, he was very far away. I realized that I could use the rod that Honi had put into my body like a ling shu, a spiritual pivot, to climb into the spiritual world. So I went up and found myself inside myself looking down at the room. I could see that Morgenstern didn't have spirits around him, as I suspected, telling him what to say (magidim), but instead was filled with divine light that gave him the inspiration. And that light emanated out into the room. Just like my friend had described. But I also realized that he wasn't getting anything back from the other people in the room.

Some people have a guru mentality, where they are nourished by the attention they receive from others. Some have a dark guru power where they take other's power to use as their own, thereby making the other people dependent on them. Morgenstern didn't seem to get anything from the people in the room. He was doing what he was doing, and some of the people in the room were taking from him, which I think must be hard on him, some were not connecting at all, and almost none were giving anything back to him. I can only think it must be very draining on him. I tried to figure out how I could give back to him and make it a two way connection, but I'm not sure I succeeded. It made me think it's time to meet him outside of these Motzei Shabbat (Saturday night) talks.