Be Still and Get Going: A Jewish Meditation Practice for Real Life

The implication of this linguistic oddity is that God is the only thing that can be absolutely present, and if we think about it for a moment we see that this implication is entirely correct. We ourselves can never be absolutely present.

Pachad refers to projected or imagined fear. According to Rebbe Nachman, suffering is the state of being afraid of something that we don’t have to be afraid of. This

like meditation, this encounter is always about transformation.

from beginning to end, and especially at its center, the Torah continuously expresses this formal pattern, an elaborate structure, carefully centered around both the infinite and the impermanent, around God and death, around change and that which is beyond change; in short, around the great flow of being that is God’s very name. 2.

Suddenly I realized that when you truly entered the great stream of spiritual consciousness from which the Jewish people had been addressing God for the past several thousand years, time ceased to flow in only one way. Every point in that stream was connected to every other point and partook of it.

Deep down we know; what we see of the world is not really the way the world is but merely the way we are capable of perceiving it, the product of the limited capacities of our eyes, our ears, our minds, and our hearts. Deep down we know; however the world was one moment ago, it no longer is. It has changed.

all these things—fullness, decline, destruction, renewal, tearing down, rebuilding—are actually part of the same process, points on a single continuum, consecutive segments of a never-ending circle.

How little we seem to be able to control after all, I thought. We expend our life energy trying to get our children to become what we think they should be, and they turn into something else altogether. We work and work, weekends and evenings, but still feel unappreciated or undone by our own unconscious compulsions. In the words of the Indian mysti

Yet something in us aspires to heaven, something in us is always reaching beyond the limits of our earthliness, and we only ignore this heavenward impulse at our peril.