Oscillation as Spiritual Practice

The Ultimate Both/And(s)

1.

How are you doing?

I find myself in constant oscillation. Sometimes, I feel anxious about the fragile American experiment in democracy, enraged that so many people are already living in abject terror right now, and equally enraged at the hundred million or so Americans who think things are going great.

Then again, it’s a lovely spring day, I’ve had a full day—preparing a talk on gender in the Talmud, finishing the final for my psychedelics class at Harvard, taking my daughter bike-riding—and it’s possible, for people with my good fortune, to still live pretty normally. Is this obscene, or human, or both?

I find myself oscillating between these realities, as if living in two worlds. For now, the horrors are mostly somewhere else—even though I teach at Harvard, after all, whose battle for survival has already affected me and many of my colleagues. For privileged people like me, the worst can still be turned off. The two worlds exist simultaneously, and I shuttle between them depending on where I place my attention.

And then there are times when the oscillation itself is disorienting.

2.

I experience this oscillation in a second way: pendulating between what Jewish mystical practice sometimes calls the “human point of view” and “God’s point of view.”

The human point of view is temporal, sequential, and linear. It’s 9pm, later it will be 10pm, and in the morning it will be tomorrow. I am a person with a history and with a Default Mode Network full of identities. I am worried, grateful, safe, in danger. The rule of law matters. My bank balance matters. My family and loved ones matter.

From what the Jewish mystics call “God’s point of view,” however, all of those things are empty (ayin). Says Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, the founder of Chabad Hasidism, there is no difference between the world before creation and the world after creation. Think about that for a moment. Everything is empty, everything is God, nothing else is real.

That’s the theological version anyway. In practice, this oscillation has more of an emotional, embodied tone than an intellectual one. Something approximating “God’s point of view” can be cultivated in spiritual practice: meditation, prayer, psychedelics, and cultivating flow states in any number of ways. A few days ago, for example, I was listening to a musical setting of the Om Mani Padme Hum mantra, the Jewel in the Lotus. A lot of my consciousness sunk into the timeless, already-awakened consciousness (or at least a chill vibe) and all of the vicissitudes of ordinary life, from torture in El Salvador to traffic on the Garden State, were just waves on the ocean.

And then I could snap right back into the horror.

And then rest back into the nature of mind.

Hinei El Yeshuati, Eftach v’Lo Efchad, wrote Isaiah: Here, God is my salvation, I will trust and not fear. Let’s say that ‘God’ here denotes that expanded consciousness, in which all impermanent things (i.e. nearly all things) are hevel, vanity and emptiness. If I can say Hinei – Here – this consciousness saves me from fear.

I don’t have trust in outcomes. I know enough history to know that things often turn out very badly. But I have trust in this presence, in this present-moment awareness. It feels atemporal. It seems unknowable. I can rest in it.

And it is half of the story. The other half, of course, is the gigantic pile of shit that 2025 has become, thanks to the rage of the mob and the duplicity of its enablers. That is where the work is.

In some philosophies of mysticism, the human point of view is illusion, and the divine point of view is enlightenment. But in most Kabbalistic and Hasidic presentations, this is not so. In fact, both points of view are true. They are, in one metaphor, the upward-pointing and downward-pointing triangles that make up the Star of David. After all, only in the world of finitude and boundary do the commandments of the Torah have any meaning. In transcendent peak experiences of oneness, nowness, and immanence, such distinctions are effaced. Those moments are profound and life-shaping, but they are only half of the Plan. Moses doesn’t stay up on the mountain, bathing in the radiant beauty of the Divine presence. He comes down and sets up a court system, because the rule of law is sacred.

So it’s Both/And, of course.

3.

These are nested oscillations. Back and forth, from spirituality to justice, from distraction to dread, from emptiness to form, from a long term unknowing to an immediate knowing, from beauty to brokenness, from turning toward God to turning toward human beings. Ratzo v’Shov, in the Jewish metaphor: running and returning.

For the last several months, this oscillation has been my primary spiritual path.

I am, due to both luck/privilege and twenty five years of developing these contemplative skills, able to step back from the excruciating vulgarity and rage of contemporary politics. I remember, as Hakeem Jeffries said, that leaders come and go but God “sits on the throne.” Everything passes. Everything happens not for some discernible reason but because of countless causes and conditions. I have no idea where any of it leads. Doing so feels like self-care, which Audre Lorde memorably described as political act. It’s even, if you’ll pardon the mystical pun, Self-care.

And then — back into the fray, whether I like it or not. I’d like to say that this oscillation back to political engagement is part of some righteous moral calling to avoid spiritual narcissism and work to alleviate the suffering of others. But to be honest, it’s just how I’m wired, I think. I know people who can ignore the news for days or weeks at a time, and I am just not one of these people. I get itchy knowing that bad things are happening, and that maybe I can help in some small way, and so I turn toward them.

Sometimes, the oscillation turns into simultaneity. As I wrote about a few weeks ago, I experience something like what Bertolt Brecht called “complex seeing,” attentive both to the intimate tragedy of suffering and the complex systems — economic, political, psychological, spiritual — that bring it about. Somehow I hold my rage and my equanimity. All of this is all too real, and also, somehow at the same time, evanescent.

And then I get lost again.

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For further reading:

• Paul Krugman, The Third-Worlding of America

• Ezra Klein, The Emergency is Here

Not about the catastrophe:

• Jules Evans, Skinwalker Ranch and the rise of UFO political religion

• I’ll be speaking on Gendering the Eunuch: Talmudic Discourse and Trans/Queer Temporalities at Harvard Law School, April 22

• And I’ll be speaking on Psychedelics, Sufism, and Kabbalah: Mystical Techniques, Spiritual Paths at University of Wisconsin, April 24

Thanks for your support, everyone. If you’re celebrating Passover or Easter this week, many blessings to you. If not, I wish you blessings too, but only if you want them.