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So you want to get on the right path

And not just the path that others,

Almost without thought, take;

You want a path

In tune with the universe,

In tune with the depths of your being,

Something authentic.

Well, many people,

Philosophers, preachers, social scientists,

All those New Age pundits,

Will give you advice,

But watch out,

Tomorrow they will probably tell

You something different –

Philosophies and theories and fads keep changing –

And you may discover that the

So-called reveleations

From the holy books

Are also pretty suspect after all.

The truth is: the Path is

Unknowable,

Unspeakable,

Mysterious.

Yes, that’s where you must begin.

Not with answers

But with the

Mystery.

The Path and ITs Power, Lao Zi’s Thoughts for the 21st Century by Jay G. Williams.

I am excited to announce that the next book in the Mystic Heart Series will be Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s latest book, Moses: A Human Life. She is a scholar and prolific writer who compassionately and directly sets before us the hidden knowledge of biblical text where lost desire, lost language and lost prayer await our arrival. With the intimacy of an objective heart of deep knowing, understanding and tenderness, she gently whispers an invitation. Avivah invites us to be provoked by Moses – to be called and challenged to know and remember as she moves us from birth to death, following the life of a soul journeying home to the divine feminine, awakening desire, language, and prayer.

Maron L. Waxman – September 8, 2016 writes: Moses: A Human Life chal­lenges read­ers to see Moses in an orig­i­nal and thought-pro­vok­ing way — not as a leader or a prophet, but as a man whose dis­abil­i­ties and con­flicts make him unique­ly qual­i­fied to speak for God and to achieve God’s pur­pose. Only when his nation’s long jour­ney is almost fin­ished does Moses speak to them in his own voice, recall­ing his mem­o­ry of the Exo­dus and jour­ney through the desert. Zorn­berg illus­trates a touch­ing pic­ture of a man whose speech is lim­it­ed but reach­es not only his peo­ple — God’s cho­sen peo­ple — but the hopes and future of all human­i­ty. Index, notes.

We will Zoom on December 10, 8-9:30 am (ET). Register now.

Book is available at https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/moses-a-human-life, Amazon, and online at https://www.sefaria.org/Moses;_A_Human_Life?tab=contents

Registration

What I suddenly saw then was this…that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most unshatterable association …. with the light of the understanding and the fire.

Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape

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A reading from a chapter in Ann & Barry Ulanov’s book, Primary Speech. Ann Belford Ulanov is an American academic and psychotherapist. She is the Christiane Brooks Johnson Memorial Professor of Psychiatry and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and a Jungian analyst in private practice. Baruch “Barry” Ulanov (April 10, 1918 – April 30, 2000) was an American writer, perhaps best known as a jazz critic.

“A major step …. is learning how to have our fantasies and stand aside from them simultaneously.

Fantasy fully accepted in prayer becomes a rhythmic movement in one’s life that may lead to a meeting with Being. Here music can offer guidance and direction to the praying person. The alterations of sound and silence that we meet in music, of dynamic variations ranging from fortissimo to pianissimo, of every kind of beat and pulse, can evoke and support the rhythms of primary speech. We burst full of images and desires, crowded with rich fragments of ourselves. We fall utterly silent, lost in the timeless moment, still as an emptied pot is still. We are seized by a fantasy, and then stripped of it. But the images return, sometimes new ones, sometimes the old ones in changed form. The spirit works us like bread dough, leavening the lump of our inertia with images that make us rise, expand, and grow light in weight. Then it punches us down and the fantasies escape from us like so much hot air.

We are pummeled and molded to fit a shape that takes its origin outside ourselves – the image of the being in which we were created. We are made to conform to its dimensions, firmer and larger than any we could fashion by ourselves. Then we can rise again to our full height. Prayer is a growing process.

A major step in the world of primary speech is learning how to have our fantasies and stand aside from them simultaneously. This apparently contradictory stance is intrinsic in all subsequent movements of the spiritual life. In its simultaneous gathering in and giving up, it rehearses us for the paradoxes and antimonies of the life of the spirit, where affirmation comes in denial and withdrawal may be the only way to move ahead.

We are like a dancer who learns certain basic movements, repeats them, depends on them, builds on them in the most complicated and advanced executions of the body, and then can forget all about them, not losing them but dropping them from full consciousness when a new world of movement must be entered. In the same way, we receive and hold in awareness the most full bodied fantasies for the longest time, building on them, never pushing them away. And yet we are able, when the time comes¹, to relinquish them, to let them disappear from consciousness altogether. The spirit finds us this way and firms us. We grow into a capacity for grateful flexibility and for the endless ups and downs of prayer, not only pliable in this life that bounds between extremes but also durable.

What does this mean in practice? It means we take our fantasies seriously. It means we offer them to God. We have them and we don’t have them. We are rich and poor, hungry and satisfied, full and empty simultaneously. Our most fearsome fantasies remain with us – we are murderer and victim, sick unto death and healer of the dying, victor and defeated. We extend across worlds into every condition of men and women and are connected with them, as ourselves, in our living persons. We become bigger, more stretched out, more transparent, less densely compacted around our tight little identity. Our fantasies become lenses through which we see God’s spirit working at us, on us, and in us. We see through our fantasies and are less apt now to be duped by them.

we become more vivid and secure….

An element of play enters….

a sense of humor….

We laugh.

God must long for a funny story, we think, instead of still another lugubrious hymn or turgid meditation, still another solemn promise, still another tortured, pompous confession in which even our sins are matters of pride.”

-Ann & Barry Ulanov

1. I apprehend the appointed time Ps 75

It is a valuable practice at night to spend a little while revisiting sanctuaries of your lived day. Each day is a secret story woven around the radiant heart of wonder. We let our days fall away like empty shells and miss all the treasures. —Eternal Echoes John O’Donohue

To understand the world, knowledge is not enough; you must see it, touch it, live in its presence and drink the vital heat of existence in the very heart of reality.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

ONLY A WITNESS CAN DANCE

“Can a witnessing consciousness really sing, dance and taste life?”

Yes, in fact only a witnessing consciousness can really sing,
dance and taste life.

When you are in the mind, how can you sing?

The mind creates misery; out of misery there can be no song.

When you are in the mind, how can you dance?

Yes, you can go through certain empty gestures called dance, but it is not a real dance.

People who are living in the mind are living in the ego, and the ego cannot dance. It can make a performance but not a dance. The real dance happens only when you have become a witness. Then you are so blissful that the very bliss starts overflowing

— that is the dance.

The very bliss starts singing; a song arises on its own accord. And only when you are a witness can you taste life.

You are worried that by becoming a witness one will become merely a spectator of life.

No, to be a spectator is one thing, and to be a witness a totally different thing, qualitatively different.

A spectator is indifferent, he is dull, he is in a kind of sleep. He does not participate in life. He is afraid, he is a coward. He
stands by the side of the road and simply goes on seeing others living.

That’s what you are doing all your life: somebody else acts in a movie and you see.

You are a spectator!

People are glued to their chairs for hours together before their TVs — spectators. Somebody else is singing, you are listening. Somebody
else is dancing, you are just a spectator. Somebody else is loving and you are just seeing. You are not a participant.

A witness is not a spectator. A witness is one who participates yet remains alert.

A witness is in a state of WU-WEI. That is Lao Tzu’s word: it means action through inaction. A witness is not one who has
escaped from life. He lives in life, lives far more totally, far more passionately, but yet remains deep down a watcher; goes on remembering that,

“I am a consciousness.”

Try it walking on the road: remember that you are a consciousness. Walking continues — and a new thing is added, a new richness is added, a new beauty. Something interior is added to the outward act.

You become a flame of consciousness, and then the walking has a totally different joy to it; you are on the earth and yet your feet are not touching the earth at all.

Where can you be a witness if you move away from the world of action?

The world of action is the best opportunity to be aware.“

OSHO