Secret Stash of Poems

Mazal tov! You've found my secret stash of poems and flows of consciousness. These date back to 2006 or so.

Wean yourself off the sin that has raised you
The fires of iniquity burn, but fail to illuminate anything
They spread their dark flames and seer with their shadows
Get the sin out of your blood system with the system that spills blood for sins

Speak at the rock that is my heart
And let it spew forth water
But don’t strike it with Your staff
For I would not stand up to Your scrutiny
Repentance requires breakage
The insolent ones must be shattered so that Your words can enter
Those who love God can be opened with words
And both are remedied with them likewise
Please don’t shatter me like the insolent ones,
Who must be broken apart like a rock thrown to the ground
But let your words open me
And don’t shatter the idol that I am
How long will I refuse improvement?
How many times will I see truth and turn my head?
Truth is a slaveholder, a taskmaster, an oppressor
It does not release its captives
Nor do they release their clutch For clarity is an obligator

Rome’s angry minions chopped down the Tree of Life Snakes are driven to holiness so that they can claim it for themselves

The Creation of the Holy One, Blessed be He
Is like an apple
For the skin He created Beauty
Beauty is thin
Outside the skin is found nothing – Beauty is the most external pathway to further truths
Those who stand outside of Beauty have nothing
And Beauty is nothing compared to Purity
How many a peoples' hearts have been swayed and stolen by persuasive Beauty?
Claiming their sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touches, thoughts, emotions, connection?
Fathom that for fathoms beneath the Beauty is the pulp of the apple
And the pulp is Purity
Purity is better than Beauty
Inside the core of the apple are the seeds
And the seeds are Holiness
Purity separates Holiness from Beauty
And Holiness is better than Purity
The Holy One, Blessed is He, will pour out honey on the apple
And we can all celebrate the New Year
Then He will turn the honey into wine
Then He will eliminate spiritual drunkenness when He turns
The wine into water, reversing all evil
Of water into wine
And He will thrust the apple against the wall with violence
And the apple will explode into pieces that will fall to the ground
And the water on the apple will fertilize the seeds
Which will grow into trees

Drops of light fall from the sky
Drops of light form into puddles on the sidewalks of Jerusalem
Puddles of light form into seas than flow down the streets of Jerusalem
A sea of light flows through the Land, dimming the sun above
People swim and float joyously on the ocean of light
So bright that the sun's reflection is invisible inside it
Like a match to a fire

Let me absorb water of Torah like a grass and let me grow strong and tall
Not honey and not wine, but water
Has no color for the colored ones
The humans whose skin is like skittles
They try to taste the rainbow but close their mouth to the water
But the water gives life and honey and wine taste fine
But water gives life
In the end it is the water that will be confirmed sweet
Seeping into the hearts of men
In the end it is the water that will arouse the senses
Making joyous the hearts of men
In the end it is not water, but honey and wine that will drown the evil


G-d or Me? The Clash of Civilizations...

When I write, or when I do anything that that be considered to be an ability, I always wonder if that ability comes from a source other than myself, a place higher than where I am currently situated, like a rain that comes down from the sky.

As I was going through the personal transition of being secular to being observant (religious), I began to attribute everything that I personally was able to do, or was good at, to G-d. He was a body of water and a human being was a fountain that was able to turn itself on or off, but the water came from the ocean.

I believed that my writing, let's say, which I do a lot of, and the ideas that ensued when I began to write something, came to me from G-d, that I was able to attach to Him in this process and the material that I produced, even though it came from my mind and my hand, rained down through me from Him.

Today I still believe that. This has not stopped me wondering, however, if this process, and in the same way, still occurs to people that do not believe that G-d directly influences them or is the source of their creativity, or do not believe that G-d exists at all.

I pondered the question if their abilities came to them from a certain process of detachment that they were able to connect themselves to, that they were able to withdraw, to a degree, from reality, and enter a state where they were able to connect to their inner most feelings, and in doing that, reveal levels of truth that they were not able to in their normal state of consciousness. In other words, were these moments of clarity related to G-d at all, or to a wonder of the human mind, somehow built in to it, although not by any Creator?

All I know is that, I too have moments when I produce things, be they writing or whatever, when I attribute them to myself, or, for example, to my ability to perceive things (thank G-d for it).

However, when I have done that, I have always felt something lacking, that even though I produced something that I felt was of a certain quality, that it reflected my specific ability to understand whatever thing I was exploring and trying to convey or create. In other words, it lacked a certain luster in contrast to the things I tried to produce when I was aware that the source of human creativity (and in this case, mine in particular), is not really from the self, but from G-d. When I made it in my image, it was OK, when I made it in G-d's Image, it was awesome, to a fraction of the degree that He is.

Comparing times when I have either done A or B, whenever I connected to G-d in the writing, verses trying to strong-arm the flow and take credit for it, afterwards I always felt that I had touched a truer and deeper nerve after doing the former, (like reaching into the depths of a tooth's cavity) which in turn also created feeling of fulfillment that the latter simply did not provide me with. I felt that I touched on something that was true, and that my personal ability to touch on such a thing was virtually non-existent.

I then consider, in what ways is this different from the Buddhist practice of removing yourself from the realm of consciousness (or the world, in some cases) in order to reach another level of consciousness. But this doesn't seem to make much sense, for the human being is a being with flawed perception, and the flaws inherent in his or her perception permeate all levels of consciousness, from the most topical level (waking life) to the deepest, which Judaism says is death. In other words, there is no level of human consciousness that is perfect, that is free from all inconsistencies. It would be wrong to say; that the closer we get to our sub-conscious mind the closer we get to a purer perception, for what is it that makes one level of our psyche more pure than another? If the "pollutant" is present at one level, does it not just become distributed throughout the human psyche, like a chemical being poured into a river that soon dirties the entire body of water?

For example, if we are troubled in our waking life, how do we know that this trouble doesn't simply seep into our deeper levels of consciousness and pollute that too? When a troubled person sleeps and has a dream, sometimes the dream can be disturbing, reflecting the troubled state that he has in his waking hours. The deeper levels of consciousness are not free from disturbed emotions created by disturbing events, but are affected by them too, usually in a much more raw way. What is inherently intelligent, special, wise, or all-knowing about the inner-most level of our psyche if it is just another level of ourselves and not attached to something that is truly special?

If we say that getting in touch with our deepest self can answer our questions, then we must conclude that it is because there is something inside of us that knows everything, and since we don't know everything, that something must be connected to something that does. In other words, if by meditation we can find answers to the most perplexing questions, it is because we are contacting something knows the answers, otherwise we are inventing the "answers." Judaism says that that thing is the soul, and that's the thing that it's connected to is G-d. We don't have souls; we are souls, so by getting "close to our souls" we can find understanding, but only because our souls are connected to G-d. But if we don't believe that G-d exists, such as in Buddhism, then how can getting in touch with our "inner-selves" enlighten us? We are not connecting to ourselves, we are connecting to G-d, otherwise it is we that answer our own questions, and what stops us from answering them in any way that we want? Nothing.

Buddhists are connecting to G-d too, they just don't know it.

Furthermore, a soul is a "piece" of G-d, so in the ultimate sense of exposing the truth of our souls to ourselves, we are not just connecting to G-d, but we understand that we are actually made of the same "material." We are not G-d (of course), but we are made in His image, as the Torah states (Let Us make Man in Our image). Since we are made in His image, but not equal to Him, we need laws, the mitzvot, which will allow us to put the internal nature of our soul (sometimes called "faith") in concordance with the external nature of performing mitzvot (called "works") and therefore direct both towards the direction of G-d. There are many ways of thought that claim that since the connection of the human being to G-d is internal and essentially without obstacle (once they have been removed), that no external path is needed to reach G-d.

But the glaringly clear truth is that a human's journey to the depths of the soul is obstructed by many "unnatural" elements, things that are foreign to the soul and that come from the world outside, and since the human is in a state of spirituality, he or she makes the (honest) mistake that whatever element being experienced is from G-d, and therefore there are boundless and uncharted paths of spirituality. Anything "found inside," then, must be from G-d, and a person can then become devoted to it in the same exact manner in which one becomes devoted to worshiping G-d.

The Torah explains that this is what idolatry is (and was), and the way that I understand it, that the religious practices that were a part of the services of pagan religions stemmed from a nearing towards G-d, and capitalized on either this element or that element found in this process, and believed that they had found the "ceiling." For example, one of the polytheistic practices in what is called "the ancient world" was the "passing of children through the fire," which is what the priests of the worshipers of the deity "Molech" did in their worship of it; they burned their children alive to the god, a living human sacrifice. We can barely fathom such a thing today, categorizing it as one of the most inhuman crimes, but the "ancients" saw it differently, and it was quite understandable from their perspective.

Connecting to G-d means aligning yourself with G-d's commandments and reaching a type of harmony with Him through doing His will; it's a process that yields deep spiritual and emotional results. The psychology behind the "passing of children through the fire" was probably viewed as such by the worshipers of Molech; the emotional intensity experienced by viewing a living human (not to mention, a child) being set ablaze in the name of a god, until all the life has left the body, is so potent and so immediate that it was used as a spiritual practice, that those doing it believed that the ecstasy (and dread) that they were feeling (from the smell and sounds) was, in a way, communion with Molech. In a book written on polytheistic practices that I used as a source for a paper a while back, the author explains that the "magic" of the experience was inherent due to the very violation of life, that the life was viewed as being given to the god, and the violence and brutality of the passing served to intensify the sacrifice and therefore the religious experience.

* On a side note, I can't help but to see the similarities in this spiritual act of brutally killing one for a god and the (religiously-affiliated) act of blowing yourself up in order to kill your enemies. The former occurred to Molech and the latter occurs to All-h in Jihad, and both are associated with a spiritual, emotional, and religious "high," connected to the belief that killing others (and oneself) is an act of communion with gods or G-d. During the pilgrimage to Mecca, muhajirun, Muslims making the pilgrimage, acquire stones that they throw at a structure that symbolizes Satan. At the height of this spiritual and holy experience and in the holiest place of Islam, does the act of throwing stones at an enemy gain significance that turns into an holy act in another context, let's say, when throwing stones at Israeli soldiers (Jews)? In this context, it makes sense to call Israel "Little Satan," and America "Big Satan," although it was planes, and not rocks, thrown at America.*

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