There are two fundamental ways to approach these questions. The first is “What do we do?” and the second is “Why do we do it?” I find the “what” question a question that opens into multiplicity and the “why” question one that leads to unity. In other words, there are multiple forms of meditation, prayer and spiritual practice but ultimately they tend toward the same or similar aims. We may use different language to describe these aims, but I would suggest that they are different ways to speak about the same thing.

What are we speaking about? What do we hope will be accomplished by spiritual practice? Here is a list of aims or intentions that may be all pointing at the same center.

• Establishing and expanding our relationship with God
• Expanding our awareness, becoming more awake in our lives
• Expanding into a higher consciousness, perspective, understanding
• Living with Divine qualities of openheartedness, compassion, patience, tolerance, loving kindness, generosity, humility, trust, reverence, gratitude, etc. (middot)
• Expanding our ability to receive and give love from Divine and human sources – Ahavah Rabah through V’ahavta
• Experiencing and acting from integration, unity, wholeness- of body, mind, emotions, spirit, of inner and outer, of different dimensions of existence, of the seeker and the sought.
• Understanding the relationship between acting wholesomely and a sense of being part of the Whole.
• Living with more ability to make choices that conform with our intentions
• Being more responsive in relation to oneself and others, rather than acting out of habit and reactivity
• Being more peaceful not because one is withdrawn or indifferent but because one has an understanding of what contributes to aggression and violence and what alleviates it
• Having a perspective that is more able to include the different dimensions of existence including the unpleasant, the different, the weak, the uncertain, the fleeting.
• Understanding the relationship between suffering and the self that is craving a thing, an experience or a state of being
• The ability to live with joy and praise
• The transformation from being a slave of Pharaoh, controlled by unconscious inner and outer forces and a servant of God, one who is able to be in relationship with the Eternal unfolding of existence from moment to moment.
• Being less self centered and more other centered, not in order to manipulate others but out of a true identification and sense of commonality
• All of the above is to the end of being part of a holy community and a redeemed world

Saying that spiritual practices train our minds, shape our consciousness and mold our character can sum this up. We undertake spiritual practice in order to change in some way, even if it is only a change of perspective. In more traditional language we undertake spiritual practices because they bring us closer to God’s will.
How does this work?

Spiritual practices including meditation (whether the object of attention is set at the breath, bodily sensations, a visualization, a mantra, a prayer or at floating open attention), and mitzvoth like Shabbat, Kashrut, and Torah study, and conscious non-harming speech share a similar technology.

One commits to a particular action as the focus of one’s energy, attention, time, and behavior. One articulates this intention. Then one waits. Soon, the obstacles appear. In a sitting meditation practice we may intend to follow each in breath and each out breath. No sooner do we begin then thoughts rush in or we find ourselves nodding sleepily or in a state of anxiety regarding the pain in our knee or lower back. Or we have decided to observe the Sabbath and an invitation comes our way that is irresistible. Or we promise ourselves to observe kashruth and a strong desire arises to taste the forbidden. Often rationalizing thoughts obscuring the clarity of the original intention surround these temptations.

The training occurs in the next step, the step of renunciation or returning. We see the temptation. We acknowledge it in a non-judgmental and non-personal way realizing that we are seeing forgetfulness in the human mind. As we bring attention to the temptation we see that it has no substance. Each time we do this, the ability to choose is strengthened. Each time we return from distraction or obstacle, the power of habit and unconsciousness is weakened. In this process we begin to see the nature of our minds and the nature of reality itself. We increase our ability to pay attention. And what do we begin to notice? We observe the arising and passing away of thoughts, sensations, sounds, desires, feelings, and moods just as daylight passes and evening comes. We see the consequences of various forms of contraction in the mind or body like fear, desire, suppression, judgment, anger, and aggression. We see the consequences of various forms of expansion like, trust, ease, relaxation, acceptance, generosity and gratitude.

The kinds of spiritual practices we can undertake are limitless. However, ultimately the form is less important than these factors: the commitment to practice, the ability to keep returning to the intention, the attitude one brings to the uncontrollable and the ability to transfer the benefits of the practice into how we live our lives, how we relate to ourselves and others, how free we become to embody the values and ideals we embrace in our minds, how we deal with temptations of all sorts. In other words we practice to live with the wisdom and compassion, which we already possess. We practice to actualize the pure soul, which God has planted with us.

The Ground of All Being

The practices we include under the rubric of Jewish meditation are designed with this direction as our reference point. The wisdom accessible through Jewish meditation supports the understanding that the Divine Presence is the ground of All Being, and the ground of All Being is part of a singular interconnected web of being.

Jewish meditation also provides the wisdom to understand the nature of mind including those factors of mind that tend to obscure clear seeing. The practice teaches us how to direct our attention into the present moment of experience, which is the only place the Divine Presence can be experienced.

In careful observation of the present moment, we become more aware of which of our beliefs and which of our actions are beneficial to ourselves and those around us and which ones are harmful.

Opening the heart, cultivating gratitude and awe

As wisdom grows through practice, the obscurations that cause the heart to close gradually become transparent, and lose their ability to keep the heart closed. At the same time, using other Jewish meditation practices of prayer, chant and blessings it is also possible to cultivate wholesome mind states such as gratitude and awe.

Together, these practices open our hearts and strengthen our love for all Beings, parts of the Holy One of Being. This sense of connection leads to a commitment to act as much as possible in the service of tikkun olam or repairing of the brokenness of our world.

Blending the traditional and the contemporary

With this overview in mind, The Awakened Heart Project makes accessible techniques inherited from earlier generations of Jewish contemplatives and in addition has developed contemporary syntheses of a variety of meditation practices that further the Jewish practice of veahvta l’ray-eahchah kah-mocha, You shall love your fellow human Being as yourself. (Lev 19:18)

Three Pillars

Jewish meditation also brings an awakened and clearer state of mind to three fundamental arena’s for attention as it says in Pirkei Avot: The world rests upon three fundamental pillars- Torah, Avodah and Gemilut Hassadim, or Acquiring wisdom, the service of the heart and deeds of loving-kindness.

I want to interpret the story of the [Passover] exodus in the light of our meditation practice—not only what we learn on our cushions, but what we have come to understand through our experience in life about the shape of the spiritual journey.

Passover comes in the Spring of the year, a season that in all cultures suggests new life, new beginnings. So it’s no surprise that Passover is a holiday of renewal, a celebration of life. But Passover is also a holiday of liberation, commemorating the unprecedented and dramatic redemption from slavery of the Israelite nation. The Torah depicts this liberation in one of the world’s greatest moments of imaginative history: we see this people, six hundred thousand strong, bearing all their possessions in bundles on their backs, standing on the banks of the Red Sea—before them the raging waters; behind, fierce onrushing Egyptian charioteers. At that final moment of no exit there’s a sudden breakthrough: the sea parts, the people push through. The waters close behind them, and their pursuers perish.

We all know this story. We’re used to regarding it as a tale of historical and political liberation, which it certainly is. But the genius of the Torah is that it operates constantly on several levels at once, and it is possible, even necessary, to read the Exodus story also as the record of a personal, spiritual event, a spiritual liberation, a breakthrough for the soul that happened once long ago, and happens again and again, in the life of each individual who suddenly recognizes that chilling existential moment of standing right here, between the relentless pursuer and the forbidding sea.

Breakthrough is exciting. That transcendent moment, the giddy feeling one has when things suddenly burst open, a path suddenly appearing that a moment before was not there and did not seem possible. After the breakthrough moment, when you calm down and slowly integrate the experience into a life that can actually be lived on a day to day basis, you eventually appreciate that what is finally more interesting than the moment of breakthrough (thrilling though the memory of it may be) is the path that led to the breakthrough—the days, weeks, months, years, even decades—that were preparatory to it. Though it may at first seem less clear, less spectacular, and less pleasant, in fact there is more to be learned from the struggle than from the victory (which, considering the ongoing biblical story, or one’s own spiritual journey, is usually rather temporary anyhow). In reading the biblical Exodus story, then, it may be more profitable to look at passages preceding the moment at the Red Sea, with an eye for those moments of preparation and formation, which turn out to be, in hindsight, the seeds of liberation.

A little bit of necessary background: Throughout the bible story up until this point, the issue of generation, fertility, legacy, has been paramount. It is as if the narrative is tracing the establishment of a human race that is as yet still a tender shoot, tentative, in search of its place, its role, and its nature. This theme of generation, fertility, and legacy was central in the book of Genesis. In this book we follow the fortunes of a small tribe that struggles to have children, pass on a heritage, find its roots. God makes a covenant with this small ragged clan, promising that in return for their faithfulness they will multiply like the stars in the sky, and become a great nation. But this seems unimaginable.

Several generations pass. Through a long series of betrayals, disasters, and miracles, Joseph, son of Israel (Jacob), has become an honored official of the Egyptian government. Reunited with his family after long absence, he invites them to come to Egypt to escape famine. Because they are Joseph’s kin they are given respect, good land, and an honorable position as shepherds. They live this way for several generations. Then a new pharaoh comes to power. He does not respect Joseph’s legacy. This pharaoh sees the Israelites multiplying greatly, swarming the land like insects. Alarmed by their prodigious fertility, he decides to control them by enslaving them to the backbreaking work of building great “store cities,” monuments to the power and might of Egypt. When this doesn’t work to diminish them he orders finally that all the Israelite newborn sons be sought out and destroyed.

It seems clear that this focus on generation, fertility, and legacy, stands for something more than simple physical success or national dominance. At the heart of the Israelite’s project of self-establishment is the covenant they have made with God. Because of this, they are constantly challenged, tested, called forth. They are involved always in a relationship with something beyond themselves and their simple self interest. They cannot merely grow and prosper. They must grow and prosper in a particular way, in relation to God’s will. Like the rest of us, they rise to the occasion sometimes; but also like the rest of us, they often stray, forget, backslide, returning again and again to their habit of lazy narrow-minded self centeredness. It seems that they need to grow up, to firm up in their commitment to holiness before they can really go forward.

In Hebrew the word for Egypt suggests “narrowness.” In their enslavement, the Israelites are forced into narrower and narrower corners, more and more restriction and constriction. The logic of their self centered blindness becomes increasingly compelling as their suffering grows. What will bring them forth from this relentless narrowness out into the open?

At the beginning of the book of Exodus the people are described almost as if they were animals. Though they suffer greatly they have no understanding of their suffering. It has no meaning. They bear it, are ground down by it, but it’s as if they are incapable of really feeling it. They seem without consciousness, without passion. Moses functions as the eyes and hearts of the people. He is the first to feel the weight of their suffering. He feels it with such passion that he lashes out in anger, killing an Egyptian overseer. He is an Israelite, and yet he is removed from the situation of the Israelites, not really a part of them, and so he feels their suffering as an outsider. He is choked and squeezed by the suffering. It is unbearable. He bursts out of it with violence. No liberator, and without a depth of compassionate understanding, his sympathy is destructive, poisonous. After the murder, scorned by his own people, he flees, going out into the wilderness for, as it turns out, purification and preparation.

“It was many years later; the king of Egypt died. The children of Israel groaned from the servitude, and they cried out; and their plea for help went up to God, from the servitude. God harkened to their moaning, called to mind his covenant with Avraham, with Yitzhak, and with Yaakov, God saw the children of Israel, God knew” (Exodus 23-25, Everett Fox, translator, Schocken Books, N.Y. 1995).

This passage, coming immediately after the story of Moses’ flight, marks the beginning of the path toward liberation for the children of Israel. In this passage the people transform from patient slaves into people on a spiritual and political quest. Let’s examine how this happens.

The first thing to note is that the people’s awakening comes finally not as a consequence of any event marking their own suffering, but rather on the death of the king of Egypt. This is strange. It’s as if the people take their own condition for granted, are buried in it and are therefore oblivious to it, and only come to truly feel it when they notice the death of the king of Egypt. He, a powerful man, he of the monuments, of immense power, a god in his own right: now dead. I imagine that in ancient Egypt the death of a monarch was an immense psychic event, occasioning parades, ceremonies, pageants, more monumental building, sacrifices, a complete turning upside down of all daily life that would surely have affected even the lowly slaves.

For hundreds of years these slaves suffered without aspiration, without even any understanding of their plight—until the all-powerful pharaoh perished. Shock mixed together in them with amazement at the vulnerability of even this great patriarch, and with sorrow and fear that the beginning of a new era might bring on them even worse travail, and, perhaps, even with compassion (slaves often love their oppressors, even as they hate them).

Rocked by a cataclysmic event coming from outside themselves, the slaves were startled into looking at themselves for the first time. They saw their immense suffering, and they saw it more clearly than Moses had, for they, unlike him, were inside the suffering, and they, unlike him, were now seeing it in the light of the vanity of violence, oppression, and worldly power. Their recognition of suffering was now deep and true. It was no longer just a matter of their own discomfort, their own tragedy, but of the tragedy that we all suffer, the tragedy of all our living and dying.

I have always seen this same sense of a deep recognition of suffering in the story of the Buddha’s life. It is the suffering of sickness, old age, and death seen in others and at the same time in himself that first inspired the Buddha as well on his path toward liberation.

So this is the first awakening, the first step on liberation’s path— a deep appreciation of one’s suffering, but not out of anger or resentment, not out of a sense of chagrin over one’s personal situation; rather an appreciation of one’s suffering as nuanced and shared; a seeing and feeling that suffering is unavoidable, deeply connected, deeply ingrained in the nature of what is.

And what’s next? Next—as the text shows—there’s a groaning, and a crying out, and a plea for help. Once this immense insight into the nature of suffering arises, one can no longer be passive. But what can a slave do? A slave can groan, cry, plead. Here for the first time there is expression, there is speaking out into the void the pain and the anguish. And with that speaking something occurs: the listening ear of the world is activated. Something stirs. The world begins finally to turn. Although nothing whatsoever has happened in the outer world, the inevitably of liberation is set forth at this moment, when the Israelites finally touch their suffering, their actual human suffering, when they find their heart and they find their tongue.

Hearing them speaking out their pain into the world, God responds. “God heard, God remembered, God saw, God knew.” In a sense, it is not God who initiates the action of the story, not God who controls things. It is the people, coming into contact with the depth of their travail and speaking it out, who activate God, causing God to stir; their voice fans the small flame of spiritual aspiration (that is both their own, and God’s: at this point it is hard to tell the difference) that will inevitably lead to that immense moment on the shores of the Red Sea.
This then is the process of the spiritual path. A true awakening to the human condition of suffering—connected emotionally to personal suffering but beyond personal complaint or whining—calls forth a speaking out, a reaching out, and that speaking and reaching always finds a response in the world and in what the bible understands as God. This is how the path to liberation always begins.

In the very next verses in Exodus God appears to Moses in the flame of the unconsumed burning bush. In this meeting between God and Moses the forces of liberation are assembled.

Now let’s flash forward to the last night of enslavement: “It was the middle of the night: YHWH struck down every firstborn in the land of Egypt … and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there is not a house in which there is not a dead man” (verses 29, 30). This is what Fox translates.

The grief takes place, as all grief does, in the middle of the night. After a lifetime of arrogance, dominance, and monument-building, pharaoh is finally brought low by insurmountable grief. He is brought low by the facts of life, by human powerlessness in the face of time and change. In his anguish he summons Moses and Aaron and tells them to go with all the people, immediately. “Go serve your God,” he tells them. “And bring a blessing even on me!” (verse 32). The children of Israel make hurried preparations, so quickly that there’s not even enough time to completely bake the bread. This last night before liberation is “a night of keeping watch for YHWH, … a keeping watch of all the children of Israel, throughout their generations” (verse 42).

This is an immense moment, a moment of sorrow, peace, and anticipation. The antagonists are, for this one night, united in their grieving. They stand as one, side by side, struck dumb with awe in the face of God’s power. which is the power of life and death, to which we are all subject. Even the pharaoh asks for God’s blessing: the oppressor too is human, and himself requires salvation in the middle of the night, just like the rest of us.

This phrase, “a night of keeping watch,” moves me, because it’s like our meditation practice. This is a description of what we’re doing in meditation. We’re keeping a night watch. We’re sitting on our cushions, waiting and watching for absolute being, sitting in the present moment of breath and body and mind, not trying to do anything. Once our mind comes to some quiet, we let go of all the useful techniques that we have learned. In the end, there’s no technique. We just sit there, not even any longer being anyone in particular with needs and desires, or even with spiritual aspirations, but willing to simply be there, with life as it is, alert, alive: waiting and watching for YHWH, the beyond. We’re waiting for nothing at all—nothing’s utter presence, nothing’s immense scope.

At the outset of this essay I said that there are many levels of reading Torah. There may be an infinite number of levels, but traditionally it’s said there are four, called, in Hebrew, Pashat, Remez, Drosh, and Sod. Pashat is “plain meaning,” simply what the text is saying plainly on the surface, the narrative, the plot, the facts; Remez is a mystical level, bringing our heart of practice to bear on the text, finding in it the meaning that uniquely flows from our own experience and life journey, often deviating from the plain meaning, sometimes even opposed to it; Drosh is a reading that includes various textual operations that might enhance and alter the plain meaning: word play, etymology, references or allusions to other parts of the text, rabbinic legends, apocryphal material; Sod is another mystical level of reading Torah, but this one is a more traditional mysticism, perhaps coming from Kaballah or other secret traditions that have derived new strategies of meaning hidden to all but the initiated.

The four letters standing for these four levels are P, R, D, S, which in Hebrew spells Pardes, Paradise. The Torah, finally, is said to be beyond the Torah, a text beyond the text—the letters fly off the page and into space. In the end, the whole world, inside and out, is Torah, is the text, is, when all the levels of meaning are finally brought together, Paradise.

We’re all pretty good at reading the Peshat of our lives, but that’s too simple. There’s more going on in what happens to us than we think. The usual name for the human race is homo sapiens, which is doubtful terminology—”wise persons!” Another name for the human race is homo religiosa, and that might be a better name—”people who practice religion.” Because we’re born and because we die and because we know how to speak and understand speech, we have spiritual lives and spiritual needs. Through all history, recorded and unrecorded, every people has always practiced some form of religion, and there are thousands and thousands of expressions of human religious life, though usually we cite just a few that have become dominant. In modern times we have a new religion called “no religion”: secular life, which sometimes works out and sometimes doesn’t work out to satisfy our spiritual needs.

But simply to sit down in the midst of the present, in the immense absolute moment of being alive, to face being, to be being—this is the bottom line of all religion, the ground of religious practice. Being is mysterious, awesome, impossible.

It’s not so easy to admit who we are, but when we do, when we’re willing to try, we’re standing on the basic ground of all religious understanding, and this is not Buddhist and it’s not Jewish and it’s not Christian and it’s not Muslim. It just is. What’s great about being’s mysterious immensity is that since there are no explanations for it and no words to describe it, we can’t fight about it. We can only fight about the provisional and necessarily imprecise vocabularies and concepts we fumblingly use to indicate it.

For this reason, true contemplative practice, which is grounded in actual religious experience, beyond concepts, is always radically tolerant, radically open; that’s why I think it’s the best way to find our commonality as human beings. When we sit together in silence we are peace. And then, of course, we have to get up. We can’t be silent all the time; we have to open our mouths. And when we do—we’re going to disagree—which is okay. Disagreeing is important, too. It makes things happen in the world. Through our practice we—can learn to appreciate one another in our disagreements, and appreciate the larger space that holds us all.

© 2006, Norman Fischer

Guided meditation:

Sit with the feeling of being alive; simply being present using body and breath as anchor. This means just to be present with what is, without DOING anything with any of it. Just being in relation to it. Allowing it. Permitting it. Being permissive, being open to it. In a sense we are not experiencing anything at all in meditation, because experience is always grasping. And with grasping there is dissatisfaction, because whatever we can grasp we can tire of – we will tire of. And will want something else, something new. But what we just allow, what we just let come and go, without grasping or identifying, we don’t tire of, we don’t need anything more. So we sit, simply sit, in the present moment of being alive.

When we sit in this way, we find ourselves in a different relation to ourselves because we are no longer objectifying ourselves and our experiences, no longer judging ourselves, trying to improve ourselves. We are just sitting, just being there. So in a sense we are not there at all, because the person we think of as being ourselves is an object to us, a self we can feel good about or bad about, a self we present to others against whom we must be measured. This fact of being presented to the world, being measured against others, IS what we mean by our self, even in the privacy of our most intimate moments. We have been taught to internalize the world; in a sense the world’s judgments are inextricably connected to our deepest innermost sense of who we are. But when we are sitting we are deactivating this socially determined self, so we are getting a big relief, a big break from ourselves in our sitting.

Now this is odd and strange. It is completely paradoxical. Because when we are sitting we are, at the same time, of course, getting a tremendous dose of ourselves. We are probably having a greater density – or at least it seems as if we are having a greater density – of thoughts, feelings, and sensations than we normally do. So there may be a lot of familiar and unfamiliar material arising when we are sitting. This makes it seem, at first glance, as if we are being more ourselves on the cushion than anywhere else; that we are more stuck with ourselves on the cushion than we are at other times, when we can distract ourselves with other people, or with activity of some sort. But in fact the opposite is true. Because we are relating to what arises on the cushion quite differently from our usual way – which is to say, we are not taking it for granted automatically AS ourselves, we are not identifying with it automatically, in the usual way, but are instead allowing it to come and to go, using the feeling of the body and the breathing as a way of making a large enough space to let the material of the self come and go without objectifying it. Because of this simple yet radical shift in basic attitude that takes place when we are sitting, relating to the material that arises in this different way, we are actually getting a big break from being ourselves when we are sitting on our little cushions. There is a big difference between being enmeshed in thoughts and feelings and simply being with or allowing thoughts and feelings. It might not seem this way at first but little by little this becomes clear. In sitting, we are free of ourselves, even in the midst of ourselves.

And here is where sitting is directly connected to our relationship to God. Because as I understand it, God IS this more open and wonderful, in the literal sense of wonder-full, relationship to and within ourselves. When I am stuck on myself in the usual way there is no room for God to get in. And if there is a sense I have of “God” it isn’t really God per se- it’s my own sense of wanting to be helped, wanting to be saved, a projection of my own desire and need. This is poignant but I would say this is not the relationship to God that Judaism proposes. Because in Judaism God requires something of us. God is an encounter that is frightening to the self precisely because it calls into question the ordinary sense of self, wants it to open to wonder, to not knowing, to its own radical vulnerability. God comes forward all of a sudden and proclaims being in all its openness, mystery, and connection. And God’s call requires, seems to demand, a response: henani is the Biblical word for it, repeated at crucial moments in the narrative when God calls. Henani ,” here I am.” This “here I am” isn’t me or mine- it has nothing to do with my splendid personality or all my brilliant accomplishments, even my spiritual accomplishments- it is the utterance of being flowing through us, any of us, Abraham, Moses, me, you- any of us who is willing to drop the objective, seemingly secure, but in reality quite painful, self, and come out into the open, which is the only place where you can meet God.

From within the self all this seems scary; but from God’s point of view, it is liberating: and it is normal. This coming out to meet in the open is just normal for God. This meeting IS God. There are of course consequences to this meeting – one’s whole life has to change, and this can be a struggle, as the Torah chronicles. But the alternative is actually impossible. Because a life without meeting in the open, without encountering the ground of our being, is really impossible for us. It appears to us as a feeling of meaninglessness, despair, fear – feelings which we sometimes have as a prelude to our encounter with God.

I said that this encounter is normal from God’s point of view; it is also quite normal for us, at least the us that is liberated. From the point of view of our stuck objectified selves, which is all we really know, God is special indeed. This is why in spiritual practice we are always looking for the big boffo moments. The transcendental ahas. If such moments come they may well have God in them, God may be peeping out at us from around the edges of them. But as soon as we objectify these moments as “our experiences” we are destroying their virtue. Possibly the most difficult thing of all is exactly how normal and ordinary the encounter with God actually is. And this is something I have always appreciated about normative Jewish practice- it is quite normal, quite ordinary, and the encounter with God is built into the structure and routine of every day. But we don’t quite believe it. We are looking for something else.

Last week I was up in Canada doing a Zen sesshin. There’s a fellow up there who likes to practice with me, a Jewish guy, and even though he comes to the Zen retreat and does all the Zen stuff, and I am wearing my Zen robes, really he and I know that we are practicing Jewish meditation together. There are various bows and protocols for the Zen interview, but when he comes in for interview he doesn’t bother with all that, he just sits down and tells me what is on his mind. This is a guy who has over many years done a million meditation retreats. Last week he came in to see me and said, “My trouble is I am always looking for the big spectacular experience- something that is going to happen and wipe me away and from then on I am going to be ecstatic. But now I am beginning to see that maybe there is no such thing. Maybe the point is just living – just enjoying the peak moments of everyday life, the weddings, the bar mitzvahs, the sunsets.” He imagined I must have experienced such a peak moment at our son’s wedding, which had happened a few months before the retreat.

I said to him, “Does it make sense that God would make God’sself available only at weddings, bar mitzvahs, sunsets and holidays? Does it make sense that God would be there on Yom Kippur, Pesach, and the rest of the year be snoozing or absent? No, God means nothing if God is not built into the shape of each moment. True, we might miss God in any given moment. But in the next moment there would be a fresh chance. We don’t have to wait. Yes,” I said to him, “I did have a joyous and transcendent moment at our son’s wedding- but no more than now, when I am talking to you.” This impressed him- the idea that the moment of my talking to him and the moment of our son’s wedding were for me equally impressive, which was true. If God is being, the open encounter with the mysterious, contingent, ever-connected essential fact of being, beyond my objective self, than of course God is constantly available. Prayer, observance, even meditation itself, are just reminders. Just ways of tuning ourselves to what must be available always, and always so.

Recently I noticed a funny quirk of speech that you find in any language. When I refer to myself, as I just did, I always use the word “I.” But when you refer to me you say Norman or him. If I refer to Adam or Jennifer, I use those names, so it is clear that Adam and Jennifer and Norman are all different people, but when any of us are referring to ourselves we all say the same word “I.” Have you ever noticed this? Have you ever thought about how profound it is? As objects in the world we are all quite distinct and separate. What is good for Adam may not be good for Norman. But what is good for “I” is always good for I. In other words, in the intimacy of our subjectivity, of our beings subjects rather than objects, we are boundless, unnamed, and always connected. We may be Jennifer and Adam and Norman but we are also all “I” and it is in the mystery of this that God comes. God in fact is part of the I, the truly salient part. And this is why meditation is such a good way – possibly, if we understand “meditation” in the widest sense – the only way – to truly encounter God. Because meditation is the way we drop all the barriers that separate us from our real “I” and allow that real “I” to manifest in our lives; in that real “I” God is always present. So it might be right to say that although I am not God, God is my real I. This is why I am always in and must always seek to be in relation to God. There is no real me without that relation and there is no real God without that relation.

So you see why my meditation experience has led me to such a deep appreciation of the thought of Martin Buber, who, I believe, has really seen this point and emphasized it. Buber sees that in “I” there is never just I. There is always a relationship. The relationship may be I-It, or it may be I-You. If it is I-It, I confronts an objective instrumental world that will leave us unsatisfied and in the end defeat us; if it is an I-You relationship then whatever we encounter we encounter with love; and God is always there. For Buber, all truth, all meaning is encounter, and encounter, when it is most true, is always encounter with God. The story of the Bible, Buber feels, is the story of this most profound and most important of all encounters. And its meaning is this: that we need God and God needs us: we call out and we are answered.

© 2006, Norman Fischer (originally posted on EverydayZen.org)