Raw n' Ready!

Anger is a mere shell,

A very ugly one at that.

Its prisoner is pain;

Ignored and abandoned.

Anger just grows around,

As an impostor identity.

Find your core of pain,

Watch anger dissipate.

Treasure this pain,

For it is your jewel,

Gleaming raw feelings,

Ready made for prayer.

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Outcry!

Tonight, I am yearning for her.

She's myself in the skin of another.

I feel deeply lonely in this long wait.

When will her glow from darkness emerge?

My first marriage was my second chance.

My second marriage was my third.

Now I desperately await her, my first.

Each moment without her is empty.

Such moments are of shallow soul.

They are dimly filled with diluted life.

I feel listless, like in a waiting room.

How can magazines hold my interest?

The most important moment of my life dangles.

It awaits, awaits, awaits ... awaits, awaits what event?

I am so frustrated, I don't even want to know !

I just feel like screaming a primal scream.

I hope it vibrates across the seas of cosmic feeling,

Until it reaches her heart and turns her in my direction.

If all I seek is a warm body, I wouldn't be so broken,

But I seek my very soul. Where is she already?

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Tethered Between

The truly saintly are tethered between the polar extremes of immersion in Oneness and concern for the less enlightened.

~ Adapted from Rabbi YM Morgenstern

Jewish Spiritual Growth

The Kabbalist Rabbi Yaakov Meir Shpielman (1813-1888) explained that in Judaism "spiritual growth" means downloading the lights of one's own soul. The more one works on refining one's own mind, heart and body, the more they become receptacles for the lights of his/her soul. As a result, the person spiritually grows.

It occurred to me that perhaps this is one reason why the soul is so multi-leveled or layered. This way the growth is not designed to be a potentially discouraging "all or nothing" process. Rather it's designed to be gradual, allowing one to taste the growth as it occurs, level by level, in real time. By tasting the growth along the way, one can then more easily find encouragement to continue onward - as a sense of that it's "really happening" is ever present with every step.

Collective Prophecy

Judaism teaches that while standing at Mount Sinai the Jewish people shared a collective prophetic experience. Many would typically expect prophecy to be a unique individual experience, a kind of private session with the Creator. So how did the experience become so collective, especially to the extent of allowing a vast population to pretty much share the exact same prophecy?

Perhaps, this question can be answered by asking it in the reverse direction; namely, how do humans share a collective earthly experience? My answer is because we're all souls who are invested in our earthly bodies more or less to the same extent.

So then what happens when we divest from our earthly bodies more or less to the same extent? Collective prophecy!

Seeing & Hearing

I harbor a suspicion that possibly a reason why the Torah comes in two streams, oral and written, is because the Jewish people both heard God's words and saw His words. To corresponding to the hearing, there's a stream of Torah orally transmitted generation to generation. To correspond to seeing His words, there's the Pentateuch - a written version, with words that one can see.

Yearning Eastward

Bodily in the far West, my heart is in the far East,

Desiring a higher vibrational way of relating to life.

The West is so stuck in "form" that it forgot "flow".

In a fit of stiffness it forgot the direction of sunrise.

I yearn to float away in concerts of Eastern music,

As everything Eastern wafts and reeks of the mystical.

I see the flowing robes of the East dancing in the wind,

Matching turbans spiraling gracefully in multicolored whirls.

Behind the dancers, arrive musicians in mystical ecstasy.

They open hearts to shared inner voice ~ not heard, yet so heard.

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