|
|
SEEING WHAT TRULY IS
B.S.D.
Rabbi David Aaron
Excerpt from "Seeing G-d"
The greatest obstacle to seeing Hashem is our filing cabinet of labels and preconceptions. Our filing cabinet gives us a sense of being in control. When an experience comes along, we know right where to put it. When we say that we understand something, we mean that we know which file to stuff it into. But true understanding is knowing that there are things beyond our comprehension, and when you begin to discover the incomprehensible, you discover Hashem. This realization hit me like a ton of bricks at the birth of my first child. My wife, Chana and I did all the birthing prep courses and read all the books we could get our hands on. But when that baby came into the world, I was literally in total shock. Even after all the knowledge I had accumulated I was completely taken by surprise. It was clear to me that even seeing is not believing. Only then I discovered that Hashem becomes believable only when life becomes unbelievable. One day my son Anani asked me how is it that when it is day for us in Israel, it is night for Grandpa and Grandma in Canada? I took a tennis ball and a basketball to demonstrate how the earth (the tennis ball) rotates on its axis and circles the sun (the basketball). As I am explaining this simple concept, feeling delighted to share this very basic knowledge with my son, I see the incredulous look on his face.
Suddenly I got a glimpse of how all this looks to my son's pure eyes of wonder. I then realized how utterly arrogant of me to think that I could actually explain the movement of the universe. My son's expression communicated to me how unbelievable it all was. It's not so simple-this tennis ball moves around this basketball-it's incredibly mysterious and complex. Think of it, the earth is a mass of rock and soil, eight thousand miles in diameter, covered with an envelope of gases and with a hot liquid inner core. It is 93 million miles from the sun, which is really a star, a self-luminous body of exploding nuclear reactions that is 865,400 miles in diameter. These giants
are spinning out in space in a precise order and rhythm we are just barely beginning to understand. When that came to me, at that moment, I got a glimpse of Hashem. If it had not been for my son's incredulous face I would have continued to think of the sun and earth as two balls out in space-a model I had seen in science class. I would have had before my eyes an image that was as far away from the reality as the earth is from the sun. The Gift of the Unexpected. One obstacle to seeing reality is our resistance to the new and unexpected, to the innovations that do not fit into our old, cherished concepts. We don't know how to look at things with totally fresh eyes of wonder.
There is a wonderful parable about a dove that illustrates the danger of forcing everything new into our existing concepts. It says that originally doves had no wings. One poor dove was
being constantly harassed by a lion. Every day the lion would run after the dove, and the dove would just barely escape. One day the dove prayed to Hashem: "Hashem, I'm a little dove. I can't outrun this lion every day. One of these days he's going to catch me. I need help. Please, Hashem, help me." Sure enough, HaShem answered this dove's prayers. The dove woke up the next morning and found she had wings. "Wow! Check these things out! Terrific!" With these wings she would get away from the lion; now she was feeling really confident and safe. As soon as she saw the lion, she called out to him, "Hey, here I am! Ha, ha, I'm over here." She stood there jauntily, figuring that she would wait until the lion got very close so she could show him what she could now do with
wings. The lion charged after the dove, and when he was inches from her, the dove started running away. But something strange happened. The dove tripped over her new wings. Instead of helping her run faster, the wings got in her way. The lion was on top of her now, and before she could pick herself up … well, it's a sad story. When the dove got to bird heaven, she complained to Hashem, "I'm a little dove. The lion was harassing me. I prayed to you to help me, and you gave me wings. But instead of the wings helping me to run faster, they interfered with my speed." Hashem responded: "You foolish dove. I didn't give you those wings to run with. I gave you those wings to fly with." The dove was too fixated in her perspective to see that the wings could have opened her up to a completely new experience. She was just expecting to run faster.
We need to be willing to see things in a whole new way. That's what geniuses are all about. A genius is not stuck in somebody else's mental cliché, the conventional notions of the world. The genius says, "I want to see it like I've never seen it before." He questions the way everybody else understands it. Who says the world is flat? Who says that time is absolute? Many great scientific discoveries occur in this way. A scientist would set about to prove his theory. He would conduct
experiments that he expects will prove him right. But often the results indicate something totally unexpected. At that point, many scientists throw away the experiment rather than their belief systems. But the truly great ones, the geniuses among them, reformulate their concepts of reality according to the data. That's how all the great paradigm shifts in scientific history come about. That is spiritual seeing: seeing what is, rather than your concept of what is.
This, of course, was the genius of Abraham. To the mind of the world of his day, when it was obvious and accepted that idols had meaning, he was a maladjusted person. But Abraham saw in a whole new way. Imagine the courage that it took. After all he was the son of an idol-maker and he had a vested interest in seeing things his father's way and his society's way; and what's more he was expected to inherit the family business. But, while everybody else saw and worshipped multiplicity, Abraham looked at reality with eyes of wonder and concluded that there was one, invisible, incorporeal source that created, sustained and embraced everything. Abraham was a
spiritual genius. He came up with the first unified field theory and called it Hashem.
To see Hashem, you have to dislodge from your mind-just like Abraham-society's idea of "God."
I can't say this often enough, or forcefully enough: Forget about God. God has been monopolized by the left brain and has been preventing our right brain from seeing the freshness of the moment, from seeing what we've never seen before. We have to look at a hand, look at a tree, look at a bird and realize, "I don't know what that is. I call it a hand, tree, bird. But now that I look at it for the first time I don't know what it is. It's simply unbelievable. All I can really say is 'Aah.'"
Adapting yourself to reality can be scary, because it requires the courage to confront what is much bigger than yourself and to be changed by it. It takes humbleness and surrender. Most people are afraid of changing in any significant way. They say, "Oh, I'm so bored with my routine. I want a
change." They want a change, but they don't want to change. When you see reality with the eyes of wonder, you are changed every day. Life is an adventure and it's called growing. Change and growth are what the Kabbalah is all about. It gives us a new frame of reference, so that more and more in
our lives we can see reality, which is essentially seeing Hashem in our lives. They offer us a framework called the sefirot which are designed to empower us to restructure our consciousness
in the broadest, freest way. The Hebrew word sefirot is loosely translated in English as "characteristics" because it is intended to describe the various characteristics or manifestations of Hashem that we are able to perceive in the world.
|
|
|
|
|
