The Spiritual Experience of Shattering

Most of what I usually call “spiritual experience” is the ordinary everyday sweetness of receiving the miracle of my life through connection with others, through the majesty of Nature, through the beauty that surrounds me. These experiences are nurturing and delicious. They give meaning to my life and fill me with inspiration.

In contrast with these experiences are certain moments that actually seem to destroy my ideas about life, religion and the nature of Self and God. These experiences take away every ounce of certainty and leave me in the most uncomfortable Void. The result of these moments is not bliss or peace, but an absolute shattering of everything that I thought I knew.

I proceed from these experiences and manage somehow to re-create my life, knowing less and less each day. As a rabbi and teacher of spiritual practice I find myself in the increasingly uncomfortable position of knowing less and less, while standing in a position where I’m expected to know more.

Although my daily spiritual experiences of connection fill me with love and inspiration, these extraordinary “shatterings” leave me with an Emptiness that is so vast, so awesome. I try to overcome the tendency to fill that Emptiness with content and explanation. Yet as an artist I am filled with the kind of joy that overflows into the world as color and music and words that might point to the inexpressible.

Though it is difficult to communicate this in words, I will try to describe one of my most profound experiences of “Shattering.” The experience consisted of 3 distinct “moments,” each of them lasting an indeterminate amount of time.

3 Moments

It was a sunny June morning and I was alone in my home in the mountains of northern New Mexico. My meditation room looks out on the Jemez Valley, a wide open vista of winding river, piñon, and cedar, abounding in wild-life, nestled between red-rock mesas. Each morning I sit before this view and close my eyes to experience the vista within.

My meditation practice is one of Intention, rather than attention. Rather than focussing on something (my breath, an image, or a word), I bring the fullness of my intention to just BE in God’s Presence. I continually let go of the content of thought, returning with my intention to be completely present to the Mystery before me.

The 1st Moment

As I settled onto my meditation pillow, closed my eyes and began my practice, I was aware of its theological under-pinnings, which flashed before me very reasonably. I knew that God is a vast unknowable Force or Energy that is completely impersonal, and yet I have chosen to use this idea of a Personal God in order to unlock the power of my devotion and live each moment of my life in relationship to that energy. I knew that placing myself in loving relationship with a Personal God is a kind of “device,” that protects me from the vast impersonal Force that God is, and also calls forth the best in me through relationship. I settled in to my practice knowing why this works so well.

The 2nd Moment

Suddenly there was a dramatic “flip.” Everything that I knew to be true was completely reversed. I was confronted by the countenance of a radically Personal God who sees and loves and knows me absolutely and completely. This intensely personal love was so powerful that it cut through every artifice of my personality. It felt like I was being destroyed by Love. There was a moment of pure terror as “I” dissolved. There was only God. And then came a realization that this idea of God as a vast impersonal force or energy is just a “device” that we use to protect ourselves from the truth of a Personal God. Without this fiction of an impersonal God, we could not survive the power and radiance of God’s loving countenance.

The 3rd Moment

For just one moment I was able to hold both of these Truths at the same time:

The truth that God is a vast impersonal force and we use the idea of the personal God as a device to protect us from that vastness and connect us in a loving way to the universe.

And the truth that God is so radically personal that we would be destroyed by the power of God’s love if we didn’t use the idea of a vast impersonal energy to protect us from that love.

For one impossible moment I knew both of these perspectives to be true, and my mind was blown wide open in holding this paradox. I could only really hold it for a moment.

Holding the Paradox

One way to evaluate spiritual experiences is by seeing their impact on who we are and how we act in the world. The three moments I just described made a profound impact and continues to inform my life. I became aware of my worldview and of the belief systems that underlie my thinking. The solidity of that worldview shattered, not because it was proven wrong, but because I was shown that an opposite perspective was also true.

This experience set me on a path of living from a new perspective that is wide enough to hold the paradox of conflicting truths.

Every time I build a beautiful system for understanding Reality, God who is beyond form, system, or language comes along and shatters what I have so carefully created.

Once again I am humbled. The person that I thought I was feels like she has lost everything. After a while the Joy of Life returns and I begin creating again. New systems of understanding emerge that are wide enough to hold this paradox. And again that system will be shattered and a new paradox will emerge to challenge me once again.

Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev describes two kinds of joy. One kind of joy is “devoid of inner substance; it causes one to be so consumed with empty pleasure that you neither feel nor try to fill your lack.”

The second kind of joy is different and it is the kind of joy I feel after having been destroyed by the shattering kind of spiritual experience I describe. “The truly Joyful One,” say Levi Yitchak, “is like one whose house has burned down; struck by his loss he begins to build anew. Over every stone that is laid, his heart rejoices.”