To undertake relatively selfless action in love and wisdom based on clear intentions and an appreciation of turning points (teshuvah in Hebrew) has many resonances in Jewish thought. Tikkun olam -- a Hebrew phrase for repair of everything, is relevant in our study at this point. Tikkun is undertaken for the benefit of others, for all creatures, for creation, in partnership with God, and is most effective in moments when, from skillful understanding of timing, actual deeds are performed. Then, as Michael Lerner in Jewish Renewal explains:
(Michael Lerner. Jewish Renewal p. 29)
But tikkun cannot be entirely selfless. It needs a core self that learns from experiences and makes conscious choices, a self that takes responsibility for action, a decisive self, a self with "ego strength." And this core self in tikkun olam confronts the conditions of dukkha and responds to them directly. Tikkun wants us to enter the fallen world and raise up its sparks, redeeming its energy, ameliorating its problems. (The sparks of light, in Cabalistic mythology, come from the shattering of the vessels in the moment of creation -- as in the breaking of cosmic symmetry in the Big Bang.) By reaching down and lifting up the sparks, in daily life, in real circumstances, we modify dukkha through tikkun, through personal action for progress on the historical scale.
In full maturity perhaps we reach a point in the practice of tikkun and kavvanah where we inhabit an adamantine, diamond self in our turning points, where we relinquish egotism (in the sense of motives of personal aggrandizement,) but don't disappear from the field of worldly action. Instead we hold to a residuum of self in order to understand timing, to frame and hold an intention, to exercise self discipline and to practice virtue (virtue in Greek means strength,) and to distinguish our strengths from their destructive counterparts and to choose between them. And in this reduced self state we can, in certain moments in the heart of turnings, briefly take on the limiting case of a selflessness that is fecund and creative. And when we do so our creative freedom enters the world through deeds of action. A small self is needed for this, a "still, small voice," a self to steer with, a self with ingrained humility. Too much self is hubris, and hubris undermines action, but too little self undermines decisiveness.
The relatively selfless self, the humble self, the Watcher, is characterized by quietude, intelligence, dispassion, steadiness, imperturbability. These are often mistaken for transcendent or eternal qualities because of our yearning for mystery at the edges of the knowable. But the Watcher is real and natural and has a perspective on the play of phenomena that brings it to the spiritual position that "this too shall pass." But the Watcher is not the eternal soul, because the Watcher too shall pass -- the Watcher comes and goes from day to day, and the Watcher is born and does die with you.
Though we can strengthen ourselves to be present in the Watcher at crucial moments during turning points, and this may give us the power to make conscious use of our freedom, all of the components of the collection of drives and awarenesses that make up our multiple selves, including the Watcher. wink and evanesce. And some of these have their own freedoms too, but only at certain times and under special circumstances. When it is time to build, the builder module ascends to consciousness, when it is time to tear down, another component of the personality takes over. Some of them are free and some are constrained, and they change places according to the spatio-temporal situation -- because the world is neither wholly free nor wholly determined. This shifting causal complexity varies with the turbulence in near chaos conditions which enter into outer events as well as into our neural substrate.
To be compliant to the times is to know your particular position in the time, and your position in the time is a cultural time-and-place. By definition, it is always the time-and-place in which you find yourself. And it is in this moving stream that biographical events unfold and your personal history develops. Your clearest sense of yourself lives at the growing tip of your time line. So to be compliant to the times with full consciousness is to connect with your opportunities. To take your opportunities is to do what is close to hand. This is our perpetual starting place, perpetual because we are always in our starting place, always here-and-now, always "close to hand." And there is always something to be done close to hand.
This sensibility that favors engagement has been called "the way in life" and has been described in relation to King Solomon by Jacob Needleman:
(Jacob Needleman, Money and the Meaning of Life, p.82)
Needleman further illustrates the way in life by quoting from Hakuin, an 18th century Japanese Zen master and artist:
(Hakuin quoted in Money and the Meaning of Life p.85)
The methods, skills and insights for Solomon's version of the way in life are spelled out most clearly in the Book of Proverbs where wisdom is found not in the cloister or the study, but in the streets:
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Copyright 1998 - Ira Rosenberg
Last Updated 09/19/98 (rge)