Great Throughts Treasury

"Change begins by not trying to change. What you imagine you must do in order to change yourself is often the very force that keeps you precisely the way you are… Beneath all the layers of wanting to be different, self-dissatisfaction, pretense, charade, and denial is a self. This self is a living, dynamic force within everyone. And if you could remain still long enough here, now, in this very place, you would discover who you are. And by discovering who you are, you would be at last free to discover who you yet also might be."

"The wilderness is not just a desert through which we wandered for forty years. It is a way of being. A place that demands being open to the flow of life around you."

"Everything returns. Comes back to that which it was. This is not futility. It is fulfillment."

"God puts you where God needs you. You are where you are supposed to be. The job you are doing may not be any easier on account of this, indeed it may be harder, even more urgent, but now you are centered, focused, clear. So this is where I am supposed to be. I always thought I was supposed to be somewhere else, doing something else, being someone else. But I realize now that I was mistaken. This does not mean that I can't or will not be doing something else. Just right now, I am where God wants me."

"For others the puzzle is more difficult to assemble. But know this: you do not have within yourself all of the pieces of your puzzle. Everyone carries with them at least one and possibly many pieces to someone else?s puzzle? When you present your piece, which is worthless to you, to another, whether you know it or not, you are a messenger from the Most High."

"God does not have hands, we do. Our hands are God?s. It is up to us what God will see and hear, up to us, what God will do. Humanity is the organ of consciousness of the universe ... Without our eyes the Holy One of Being would be blind."

"Mysticism, unlike religion in general, is not about communicating with God; it is about dissolving yourself into the divine All and becoming one with God."

"If a person who cynically refused to believe in God could observe everything a congregation said and did whenever its members gathered for prayer, study, and communal meetings, by the end of a year or two he would know a lot about what God does, even if God never showed up. For, while God does not have hands, we do. Our hands are God?s. And when people behave as if their hands were the hands of God, then God ?acts? in history."

"If spiritual awareness is being, then what do you do once you have reached such holiness? If living in this world is doing, then how shall you be while you are doing? You must sanctify the deed with the spirit and embody the spirit with the deed."

"So that's what it's all about! You put your whole self in, you take your whole self out; you put your whole self in and you shake it all about. The idea is that by doing whatever you're doing with all of you, you can then take all of you out. The trick is how to do both."

"What we try to communicate is you could be friends with someone preposterously unlike you, and with a little bit of luck and help you might help that person and be changed by that person."

"A mystic is anyone who has the gnawing suspicion that the apparent discord, brokenness, contradictions and discontinuities that assault us every day might conceal a hidden unity."

"A kind of journal of forgotten, reworked, and remembered holy moments, too awesome to be simply described in everyday conscious language. It is all that remains of the most penetrating incursion of waking into the earth-mother-Jewish-people darkness of what is not the spirit, but only sleep. But the memory is still there, set in our bodies by our parents or our choice. We may ignore the dream or we may appropriate it for ourselves, and so make it our own. It is our choice alone."

"All creation is patterned according to an inner blueprint or arrangement that carries within it a genetic memory of everything that ever happens."

"Allowing the river of light-the deepest currents of consciousness-to rise to the surface and, without anxiety, animate our lives. We are thus blessed to return to the scriptural text of our ordinary lives and live out its dream. Not to leave life but to learn how to be fully present in it."

"Everyone carries with them at least one piece to someone else's puzzle."

"And this, then, is the job of the searchers and the dreamers: to reach deeper and deeper into the dream. Peeling away one layer after another. Until we realize that the voice speaking our dreams comes from within us and from without at the same time.11 Until we see at last that the story is true. Not necessarily because it happened in a particular place at a particular time, but because it is within us. It always was. It issues from us. It is ours. The whole ancient hierarchy of meanings."

"As any good teacher of dreams will tell you, you are all the people in your dream. Fritz Perls taught, [All] the different parts, any part in the dream-is yourself, is a projection of yourself.22 And to ask why we made our story this way and not that way is to reenter our sacred text once again as living participants. We could have made it another way, but chose to cast it in this one. We must be all the parts of our dream, even the ones we don't like."

"Each lifetime is the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. For some there are more pieces. For others the puzzle is more difficult to assemble. Some seem to be born with nearly a completed puzzle. And so it goes. Souls going this way and that trying to assemble the myriad parts. But know this. No one has within themselves All the pieces to their puzzle. Like before the days when they used to seal jigsaw puzzles in cellophane. Insuring that all the pieces were there. Everyone carries with them at least one and probably many pieces to someone else's puzzle. Sometimes they know it. Sometimes they don't. And when you present your piece Which is worthless to you, to another, whether you know it or not, whether they know it or not, you are a messenger from the Most High."

"Assume full responsibility for the dream. For through the dream the man makes the matter his own; it is in his will, and he is responsible for it."

"By reading holy literature as if it were a dream, we gain access to a primary mode of our collective unconscious."

"For others the puzzle is more difficult to assemble. But know this: you do not have within yourself all of the pieces of your puzzle. Everyone carries with them at least one and probably many pieces to someone else?s puzzle? When you present your piece, which is worthless to you, to another, whether you know it or not, you are a messenger from the Most High."

"Hold up your hands before your eyes. You are looking at the hands of God."

"I think what our generation seems to be living through is the realization that rationalism is only part of the answer. I think, I?m not the first one to notice this, that Auschwitz and Hiroshima were perfectly rational decisions and behaviors. So there?s this sense that religion has to be more than rationalism. And mysticism offers this sort of like in the corner, ?Psst, hey kid how would you like a direct experience of the divine? Would that help your religious life?? And, a lot of people discover that they?re mystics after all when they?re given that offer."

"If a group of people can have a psyche and think of itself as an organic being, then surely a people should also be able to dream. A series of motifs and archetypes should keep reappearing and seem to each individual dreamer, as Jung suggested, to emanate from a transcendent source.8"

"If Scripture be like a dream, then methods of understanding the dream are, at least in principle, valid for learning Scripture."

"Is it not at least occasionally the case that we set out on a clear and simple mission and return with something undreamed of? Whether or not we accomplish our original intention becomes unimportant."

"Isolate and identify the primary elements of the dream text before us. What are the dream's components? One of the most common errors made in trying to understand a dream is the almost automatic refusal to recognize more than one character or element or verbal idea in the narrative, when of course, all the parts are indispensable."

"Pay especially close attention to the seemingly trivial details and the little discrepancies."

"Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups."

"Our tolerance for forms of religious expression we disagree with is a precise barometer of our own spiritual security."

"Obviously we cannot undo the past. What is done is done. But what we do now about what we did then, while not altering the past deed itself, can place it into a new context of meaning. By our present actions we can effectively reach back through the otherwise impermeable membrane that seals the past and reshape it?now we not only acknowledge, regret, and repudiate what we did, we devote ourselves to repairing the damage. By doing so we have placed the initial damage into a larger constellation of meaning. Isolated, the past evil deed is only a great shame. But seen from the present, as the commencement of this new turning, the meaning of the original deed has been transformed and the past is rewritten."

"Over time, things change meaning. I am reminded how one of my children took a rare book I loved and innocently used a few pages of it for a coloring book. At the time, I was furious. But now, as I reflect on those scribblings, they bring not only nostalgia but tenderness. What was once a source of anger is now a source of great love."

"Recall our own recent, immediate experiences. Since dreams are often initiated by something that happened only recently, we must ask about yesterday's residue."

"Personal confusion, search, and self-interrogation are more important than any answers could ever be."

"The "burning bush" was not a miracle. It was a test. God wanted to find out whether or not Moses could pay attention to something for more than a few minutes. When Moses did, God spoke. The trick is to pay attention to what is going on around you long enough to behold the miracle without falling asleep. There is another world, right here within this one, whenever we pay attention."

"That's what Hanukkah is about: trying to survive the darkness on the far-fetched hope there's still some life and light left in the universe. It's more than just a religious story. The days have been growing shorter, imperceptibly but inescapably darker.... Heading into the night of the winter solstice, every spiritual tradition has some kind of festival of light. We're all just whistling in the dark, hoping against hope that someone up there will see these little Hanukkah candles and get the hint."

"Religion is a more or less organized way of remembering that every ministry points to a higher reality."

"Spiritual and cultural strength is measured not by rigidity or power, but by the vitality and flexibility of the response."

"The amount of communal participation in prayer is in inverse ratio to the combined vertical and horizontal distance between the leader of the prayers and the first occupied row of seats."

"The boundary between now and not yet will softly blur. And the clean line between your discrete body and all creation will someday be no more."

"The goal of all spiritual life is to get your ego out of the way ? outwit the sucker; dissolve it; shoot it; kill it. Silence the incessant planning, organizing, running, manipulating, possessing, and processing?? because these activities ?preclude awareness of the Divine."

"The first mystery is simply that there is a mystery, a mystery that can never be explained or understood, only encountered from time to time. Nothing is obvious. Everything conceals something else."

"The letters of the name of God in Hebrew are yod, hay, vav and hay. They are frequently mispronounced as ?Yahveh.? But in truth they are unutterable. Not because of the holiness they evoke, but because they are all vowels and you cannot pronounce all the vowels at once without risking respiratory injury. This word is the sound of breathing. The holiest Name in the world, the Name of the Creator, is the sound of your own breathing."

"The one who pays attention to the dreams, draws on them, and lives them out is blessed, even as the one who dreams is also dreamt. We each take our turn at living out the dream. Like some ageless wave, Scripture flows through us."

"The present can change the past. Teshuva (Hebrew word for ?repent), the act of returning to whom you were meant to be, can change who we were. It cannot change what we did, but it can change the meaning of what we did. In so doing, it can change the future. Don?t make teshuva because it will make the pain go away. Make teshuva because it will send you back to who you were, change it into who you meant to be, and in so doing change you into whom you still might become."

"The story is not about someone else. It is not even about you. It is you. The one who lives in the dream is the one who dreams. Just as the dream softly pulses beneath everyday waking-noticeable only when the din and clatter of daytime is stilled by sleep-so the one who remembers a dream brings a new facet to waking."

"This is the great dream of which each individual dream is a personal manifestation. Dream is ontogenetic. Myth is phylogenetic. Dreams and especially myths are a primary medium for intuitive insights into the ultimate nature of human existence . . . [they] are not restricted to ... sleep. They pertain rather to the symbolic dimension of human experience as a whole.24"

"This consciousness is never still, not even for a moment. It will not be photographed or even named. In its wanting to become aware, it rearranges itself in one pattern after another. Feel it now in the blinking of your eyes. The moisture on your tongue. The gentle filling and emptying of your lungs. It rises unnamed through us, the incessant motion of the four creatures bearing the chariot in Ezekiel s vision: human, lion, ox, and eagle, running and returning. Creation is in us. The plan the Creator used reappears everywhere:"

"We must not allow embarrassment to distract attention from elements that make us uncomfortable. Disgust and dread are the sorts of feelings we frequently marshal to conceal deeper layers of our psyche."