Renaissance [5]

All new horizons begin with a sense of the ineffable. Everything newly born, everything purely good, everything real. It is that overwhelming elation that inspires all new undertakings. Only it can give the strength of spirit necessary to blaze a new trail and create something totally new and yet undiscovered.

We started our lives as children with the constant sense of the ineffable. A child is amazed by all that he discovers. The world and all its’ phenomenon are an endless source of wonder that causes him to be in a constant striving to unravel the secrets that ineffable reality hides. We tend to get exasperated by a child’s fascination with the menial and mundane; but within that exasperation is a tinge of jealousy, a slight longing for that time when we were so…open to wonder.

 “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ....get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” 
― Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

Later, as we grew and felt acquainted with our immediate surroundings and they stopped arousing within us the sense of the ineffable, we then felt an indescribable calling, a challenge to conquer the world, an indescribable call to growth, maturity, and success. Some hear that call for a while, but then become deaf to its' siren. Not those whose humanity is laced with the mystical. Their openness to the mystical ameliorates their humanity and facilitates it being constantly fertile. Every great endeavor in history resulted from an indefinable need to reveal something beyond all that has been already defined.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SswMzUWOiJg

And of course, all true love begins with a sense of the ineffable. A sensing of sweetness, of  indescribable longing, a feeling of completion that the beloved causes within that has been the subject of countless magical words that have all failed to truly describe the experience of utter love.

And only those lucky ones that have “dreamed a dream in time gone by, when hope was high and life worth living ,[and] dreamed that love would never die” are all too often the truly unlucky ones, who know that it never pays to dream, for they know the ineffable feeling of emptiness and pain over loss and death.

But, of course, ‘tis only that ineffable pain…that breeds the new vistas of rebirth and life that come thereafter.

When the night has been too lonely

and the road has been too long…

Just remember in the winter

Far beneath the bitter snows

Lies the seed that with the sun's love

In the spring becomes the rose.

                                            --- Amanda McBroom

                                    

But most importantly, an authentic, penetrating connection with G-d…begins and is only able to be developed and enhanced with a sense of the ineffable.

Because to really forge a bond with Him, one must have the constant sense of wonder and sincerity of a child [1], the unquenchable thrust to growth of robust youth [2], and the unyielding passion of a lover that knows that “Purity of the heart is to will one thing” [3](Kierkegaard).

Birth…Growth and daring to search for innovation…Love…The bond with God.

In King Solomon’s words:

All night long on my bed
    I looked for the one my heart loves;
    I looked for him but did not find him.
² I will get up now and go about the city,
    through its streets and squares;
I will search for the one my heart loves.
    So I looked for him but did not find him.
³ The watchmen found me
    as they made their rounds in the city.
    “Have you seen the one my heart loves?”
⁴ Scarcely had I passed them
    when I found the one my heart loves.
I held him and would not let him go
    till I had brought him to my mother’s house,
    to the room of the one who conceived me.

                                         Song of Songs 3

---

[1] 

[2] Tanya, Chapters 15, 47

[3] 

The Flame of the Rotating Sword [4]

After he had expelled the man, the LORD God placed winged angels at the eastern end of the garden of Eden, along with a fiery, turning sword, to prevent access to the tree of life.                                    --Genesis 3:24

Long have I wondered about this mysterious sword. What is this fiery, rotating sword that if traversed offer glimpses into the Garden of Eden, and tastes of the Tree of Life? Is this prevention of access definitive and total? Or is there away to circumvent this gatekeeper?

Or...maybe the fiery, turning sword--is not just the obstacle that prevents. Maybe it itself is the portal.

Maybe...that's the deeper meaning of it's turning and rotating...

Maimonides writes in the introduction to his Guide of the Perplexed--

"For this reason the prophets treat [mysterious] subjects with parables, and our Sages, imitating the method of Scripture, speak of them in metaphors and allegories…. Do not imagine that these most difficult problems can be thoroughly understood by any one of us. This is not the case.

At times the truth shines so brilliantly that we perceive it  as clear as day. Our nature and habit then draw a veil over our perception, and we return to a darkness almost as dense as before. We are like those who, though beholding frequent flashes of lightning, still find themselves in the thickest darkness of the night.

On some the lightning flashes in rapid succession, and they seem to be in continuous light, and their night is as clear as the day. This was the degree of prophetic excellence attained by (Moses) the greatest of prophets, to whom God said," But as for thee, stand thou here by Me" (Deut. v. 31), and of whom it is written" the skin of his face shone," etc. (Exod. xxxiv. 29).

 [Some perceive the prophetic flash at long intervals; this is the degree of most prophets.]

By others only once during the whole night is a flash of lightning perceived. This is the case with those of whom we are informed, "They prophesied, and did not prophesy again" (Num. xi. 25). 

There are some to whom the flashes of lightning appear with varying intervals; others are in the condition of men, whose darkness is illumined not by lightning, but by some kind of crystal or similar stone, or other substances that possess the property of shining during the night; and to them even this small amount of light is not continuous, but now it shines and now it vanishes, as if it were “the flame of the rotating sword." (Genesis 3:24)

The degrees in the perfection of men vary according to these distinctions. 

Concerning those who never beheld the light even for one day, but walk in continual darkness, it is written, “They know not, neither will they understand; they walk on in darkness" (Ps. lxxxii. 5). Truth, in spite of all its powerful manifestations, is completely withheld from them, and the following words of Scripture may be applied to them, “And now men see not the light which is bright in the skies" (job xxxvii. 21). They are the multitude of ordinary men."

Notice that Maimonides likens prophecy to sudden, fleeting moments of lightning on a pitch dark night. But when he speaks of “the condition of men, whose darkness is illumined not by lightning, but by some kind of crystal or similar stone, or other substances that possess the property of shining during the night”—what is he referring to? He does not tell us to what his metaphor alludes. What are these luminous stones that shine and vanish like the flame of the rotating sword?

In my opinion, he is referring to the sense of the ineffable. The moments in life that we find utter perfection and bliss, and can be utilized to access the Divine Light. And sense the mystical in humanity. Those are the crystal stones that can illuminate our night.

One who becomes receptive to the sense of the ineffable that can be caught in the tremulous pulse of empirical reality, slowly begins to view all of the things and events in life…as parables, metaphors, hints to a higher reality. 

Your life's experiences, especially the profoundest and most moving ones...they are the fiery, rotating sword! They can keep you grounded in humanity, fulfilled and satisfied with the physical sensual plane. Those moments are so perfect, so much fun-who needs to utilize them as conduits to a Higher Plane? They then serve to prevent access to the Garden of Eden where G-d's Light shines openly. And then you can't see the sky.

Or they can become the Light that brightens the skies of your life...by sensing the ineffable One within them. Feeling the mystical in the humanity.

Those ineffable experiences in life that are so wonderful, they can make you feel that you don't need Him. Or--that they are Him.

Do you see the world only as a world? Are you never overcome with inexplicable emotion by certain things in your life? Do you not use them as windows to Transcendence? Then you are one of “the multitude of ordinary men.”

You haven’t fulfilled humanity. You haven’t yet truly lived.

“And now men see not the light which is bright in the skies.”

See it!! See the Light which is bright in the skies of your earthly existence! In your living room…your kitchen…in all the rooms of your home.


WHERE are the tidings of union? that I may arise–
Forth from the dust I will rise up to welcome thee!
My soul, like a homing bird, yearning for Paradise,
Shall arise and soar, from the snares of the world set free.
Hafiz

-Translated by Gertrude Bell 

Shall We Cultivate a Sense of the Ineffable? [1]

Thus while the days flew by, and years passed on,

From Nature and her overflowing soul,

I had received so much, that all my thoughts

Were steeped in feeling; I was only then

Contented, when with bliss ineffable

 I felt the sentiment of Being spread

O’er all that moves and all that seemeth still;

O’er all that, lost beyond the reach of thought

And human knowledge, to the human eye

 Invisible, yet liveth to the heart.

                                                       --William Wordsworth

At times, one who thinks deeply reaches a state of wonder, that state which is more precious than any intellectual endeavor, for it is then that he is able to “peek through the cracks of the lattice” (Song of Songs 2:9) that separates the human mind from what lies completely beyond it. During those moments he lives an endless life that reaches beyond all boundaries of time, for he feels that he has ascended above the limits of time and space within which intellect dwells. His soul yearns to leave the confines of his body, for this sense of the ineffable is essentially the Divine Luminary revealing Himself to the person, drawing all the desires and passions of the soul to Him with this revelation of pleasure through wonder.

                          --Rabbi Yoseph Yitzchak Schneerson, Previous Rebbe of Chabad-Lubavitch

We take it for granted that man's mind should be sensitive to nature's loveliness. We take it equally for granted that a person who is not affected by the vision of earth and sky, who has no eyes to see the grandeur of nature and to sense the sublime, however vaguely, is not human.

But why, what does it do for us? The awareness of grandeur does not serve any social or biological purpose; man is very rarely able to portray his appreciation of the sublime to others or to add it to his scientific knowledge…Why then expose ourselves to the disquieting provocation of something that defies our drive to know, to something which may even fill us with fright, melancholy, or resignation? Still we insist that it is unworthy of man not to take notice of the sublime.

Perhaps more significant than the fact of our awareness of the cosmic is our consciousness of having to be aware of it, as if there were an imperative, a compulsion to pay attention to that which lies beyond our grasp.

The power of expression is not the monopoly of man. Expression and communication are, to some degree, something of which animals are capable. What characterizes man is not only his ability to develop words and symbols, but also his being compelled to draw a distinction between the utterable and the unutterable. To be stunned by that which is, but cannot be put into words.

It is the sense of the sublime that we have to regard as the root of man's creative activities in art, thought and noble living. Just as no flora has ever fully displayed the hidden vitality of the earth, so has no work of art ever brought to expression the depth of the unutterable, in the sight of which the souls of saints, poets and philosophers live. The attempt to convey what we see and cannot say is the everlasting theme of mankind's unfinished symphony, a venture in which adequacy is never achieved. Only those who live on borrowed words believe in their gift of expression. A sensitive person knows that the intrinsic, the most essential, is never expressed. Most-and often the best-of what goes on in us is our own secret; we have to wrestle with it ourselves. The stirring in our hearts from watching a star-studded sky is something no language can declare. What smites us with unquenchable amazement is not that which we grasp and are able to convey, but that which lies within our reach but beyond our grasp; not the quantitative aspect of nature, but something qualitative; not what is beyond our range in time and space, but the true meaning, source and end of being, in other words, the ineffable.

                                                 --Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

                                       Opening chapter of Man is Not Alone-The Sense of the Ineffable

                                                          

While living in a world so busy, occupied with a life so full, should one extricate himself from it all to be aware of and cultivate…the sense of the ineffable?

“Why should we philosophers concern ourselves with beauty? That”, said Aristotle, “is a blind man's question”.

But beauty is part of our experience. It enhances whatever we're involved with at any time. The Talmud (Babylonian Talmud, Berachos 57b) asserts that "three things broaden an individual's mind: a beautiful house, a beautiful wife, and beautiful objects."

But…the ineffable? Why concern ourselves with that which is too great or extreme to be expressed or described in words? Why dedicate time to search out that which is too sacred and pristine to be uttered?

That question is asked only by someone that has not yet tasted the light of mysticism. And in truth, by someone that is still unaware of what it means to be truly human.