The River of Light

Lawrence Kushner

Description

“Despite the obvious contradictions, complexity, and apparent randomness that assault any human being day after day, everything is somehow nevertheless connected, orchestrated. The universe is filled with meaning….

In Jewish mysticism, the river is a metaphor for the Holy Oneness that unifies all creation. Just imagine it: a sacred stream, luminous and ubiquitous, a river of light.”
—from the Preface to the Anniversary Edition

This is an invitation to wade into a deeper spiritual consciousness. Taking us step-by-step, Kushner helps us to allow “the river of light”—the deepest currents of consciousness—to rise to the surface and animate our lives.

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Sujets

• mysticism
• Philosophie et théologie
• Jewish philosophy
• Kabbalah
• Judaism
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 16 mai 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781580237543
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

PRAISE FOR LAWRENCE KUSHNER S BOOKS
Praise for The Book of Letters: A Mystical Hebrew Alphabet
A book which is in love with Jewish letters. It gives us a feeling which the Kabbalists always knew-that the letters of the alphabet are not just letters but symbols of our history, of our philosophy, and of the life of the Jewish people.
-Isaac Bashevis Singer ( )
Praise for Honey from the Rock: An Introduction to Jewish Mysticism
Captures the flavor and spark of Jewish mysticism. Read it and be rewarded.
-Elie Wiesel
Praise for The Book of Miracles: A Young Person's Guide to Jewish Spiritual Awareness
Many religion books give our young people facts to learn; here is a book which gives them wisdom to remember.
-Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, author of God s Paintbrush and In God s Name
Praise for God Was in This Place I, i Did Not Know: Finding Self, Spirituality and Ultimate Meaning
A rich and intriguing book which, like the ladder of its metaphor, contains both many rungs of meaning as well as insights into the process of Jewish theology.
-M. Scott Peck, M.D., author of The Road Less Traveled and other books
Praise for The Book of Words: Talking Spiritual Life, Living Spiritual Talk
It is wonderful! A surprise at every page. His translations and elaborations provoke and stimulate the religious imagination.
-Rabbi Neil Gillman, Professor of Jewish Philosophy, The Jewish Theological Seminary of America
Praise for Invisible Lines of Connection: Sacred Stories of the Ordinary
A deeply human book and at the same time a compendium of instructions for seeing religious epiphanies and revelations, the ultimate game of hide-and-seek.
-Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul and The Soul of Sex
The River of Light

Nahara DiNehora
Jewish Mystical Awareness
Special Anniversary Edition
by Lawrence Kushner
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for S. T. H .
Contents
Preface to the Anniversary Edition
Foreword
Introduction
Abraham s Journey: A Legend
1. Like Ones in a Dream
2. The River of Light
3. The Self-Reflection at Sinai
4. Protoplasm of Consciousness
5. The Light of Creation
6. Returning to Nothing
7. Living in the River
Epilogue
Notes
About the Authors
Copyright
Also Available
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Preface
to the Anniversary Edition of The River of Light
A t the end of the film A River Runs through It , which is based on a memoir by Chicago literary critic Norman Maclean about his growing up trout fishing in Montana, the narrator says, All things flow together into one great unity and a river runs through it. I think it means that despite the obvious contradictions, complexity, and apparent randomness that assault any human being day after day, everything is somehow nevertheless connected, orchestrated. The universe is filled with meaning.
In the movie, at least, there was literally a fast-flowing, pristine Rocky Mountain trout stream serving as a motif for much of the story s action. In Jewish mysticism, that river is also a metaphor for the Holy Oneness that unifies all creation. Just imagine it: a sacred stream, luminous and ubiquitous, a river of light.
The River of Light offers a possible synthesis of the insights of psychoanalysis, midrash, new physics and biology; if you will, a kind of unified field theory. I am continually chastened to realize that many of the core teachings of all four disciplines are, if not identical, at least instructing one another. It often seems that we know what we do because the knowing itself is literally encoded within our very molecular structure just as it is refracted back to us from the light of distant galaxies. We are all made of the same stuff, so it is hardly surprising that similar insights should blossom from apparently different fields of inquiry. The so-called hard sciences, the human ones like psychoanalysis, and the rich fantasy of ancient rabbinic legend are all seeking the same thing.
The River of Light is not an easy introduction, but its subject is not an easy one either. Despite a few spots of resultant mystical opacity, the book s continued popularity for over two decades means that readers nevertheless find River readable and (I hope) even occasionally lucid.
When I first wrote River , almost twenty years ago, I was convinced that theology, therapy and science were each talking about the same thing: bringing apparently disconnected events, things and ideas into ever-larger constellations of meaning. And even though I now understand just how daunting such a project is, I remain convinced it is still possible and probably the ultimate goal of all writing.
Indeed, as we embark on the twenty-first century, it seems that such an ambitious vision is not only mystical but also ecologically and spiritually even more important than it was over twenty years ago.
Foreword
to the second printing of The River of Light
I n rabbinic school we used to tease one another about how even great Rabbis only have a few good sermons in them. And that throughout their preaching career, all they accomplish are variations on a few themes. In retrospect, I realize now, with some embarrassment, that The River of Light is nothing more than a prolonged commentary on the first three pages-the letter Aleph-of my first book, The Book of Letters (Harper Row, 1975; JEWISH LIGHTS, 1990).
RIVER explores themes initially assembled in LETTERS which continue to animate my imagination: barely audible noise, the name of God, the life of the first Jew, the primordial human archetype, the nature of consciousness, the relationship of self to God. and above all, how they are all interrelated to one another. To me, they all seem to be part of the same sermon. In that sense, The River of Light remains my most ambitious shot at a unified field theory for Jewish theology.
From a literary point of view, I believe RIVER is also noteworthy. It may be one of the very few times that a sustained (and systematic) theology was written within a Midrash. Of course, the Rabbis of the Talmud constantly taught about God s relationship to human beings, history, and the world through imagining brief sub- and super-texts to the bible. But The River of Light does so for an entire book. And in the process it tries to integrate the classic themes of creation, revelation and redemption, with their contemporary counterparts of self-realization, consciousness, and personal transformation. All of these ideas are set within the larger matrix of a spiritual journey made by Abraham, our father.
RIVER is certainly too ambitious for what is only a little book. Indeed, I now realize that it too is only the table of contents of a much larger one which I pray to be able to complete.

LSK
August 1990, Elul 5750
Sandwich, MA
Introduction



O ccasionally, a single word appears at the confluence of great intellectual currents. A word that seems to belong in each, yet combine all. In this generation, consciousness is such a word. Possessed of almost poetic promise, it is also the legitimate object of scientific inquiry. It brings together many of the strands of psychotherapy, from Freud to transpersonal psychology. It appears on the outer edges of theoretical physics and biochemistry. It is at home both in theology and mythology. Perhaps, we imagine, it is the location of a long-awaited synthesis of some of the great truth traditions of humanity. I have tried to bring together these several readings of consciousness in the spiritual idiom of the Hebrew Bible and subsequent rabbinic tradition. They are arranged according to a journey Abraham, our father, once made; a journey that lead him beyond the scriptural text of his daily life, all the way back to the primordial light of consciousness itself.
The following chapters chronicle that legend and attempt to describe what might happen to someone who ventures on such a journey: a journey that is nothing less than the evolution of consciousness. And because human consciousness-and probably all of creation-comes from the yearning of the Holy One of Being to attain self-awareness, it is a story about God. The story of our role in the coming into being of the One of Being. So it is also a theology of consciousness, or, if you will permit, ongoing Kabbala.
Chapter One offers an alternative metaphor by which we might reenter the scriptural text. By reading holy literature as if it were a dream, we gain access to a primary mode of our collective unconscious. The Bible, for us, is an entrance to the cave, perhaps the only entrance. The great dream of Western religion.
Chapter Two considers this consciousness beneath waking. The ancient Hebrew literary form known as Midrash, which seeks to fill in the spaces between the words of Scripture, is analogous to the psychotherapeutic experience, which likewise seeks to join the fragments of one s life into a greater unity of meaning. The Eden legend explains why this underlying consciousness appears only sporadically, and why our lives are disconnected. Brokenness is the price of our ability to procreate sexually.
Chapter Three suggests a new understanding of the revelation in the wilderness. It was a time when humanity, for a moment, turned its awareness bac