Prayer and Nonduality   

IMAGE CREDITS: LEFT: MIKE KRAUTTER (WWW.MIKEKRAUTTER.COM), MIDDLE: CREATIVE COMMONS/ BABA STEVE, RIGHT: CREATIVE COMMONS/LOOINL

Prayer and Nonduality

by Jay Michaelson

In the last half-century, theological doctrines once explicitly reserved for the elite have become widespread in the Jewish world. In earlier times, philosophers had their refined conception of God, mystics had theirs, and most people, at least according to the sparse evidence we possess, didn't have much truck with either. In large part, this is still true today; visit any mainline synagogue and you'll find traditional theological notions rarely mentioned in rabbinical schools: God punishing the wicked and rewarding the good, the specialness of Israel and the Torah, and the notion that God hears our prayers. No one in the non-Orthodox Jewish "academy" believes these things in a literal sense, but they have long been staples of mass religion.

Lately, however, the elite/popular division is showing signs of wear. In recent years, ideas about God once reserved for the elite have begun showing up in the mainstream.  Perhaps God is just "the way things are" or "a transcendent moral imperative." Or perhaps, as I have described in a recent issue of Tikkun, God does not exist — but is Existence itself.

This view, known as nondualism ("not two"-ism), has been part of Jewish elite philosophy and mysticism for hundreds of years. It is also, of course, part of many "Eastern" religious traditions such as Vedanta Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism. Yet partly as a result of these latter systems of thought, nondualism has begun appearing in the American mainstream, not just among the elite. "All is one" may be a bit of a simplification, but it is at the bedrock of popular spiritual thought, in multiple faith traditions.

In this article, I will briefly sketch the contours of the nondual view and then explore the particular problems it poses for prayer. As evident in my last article, which discussed nondual messianism, my view is ultimately that nonduality provides the spiritual progressive with a serious alternative to fundamentalism on the one hand, and dry rationalism or vague spirituality on the other. Nonduality allows us to have our theological cake and pray to it too — and if progressive spirituality is ever to become more than an elite phenomenon, it has to take account of the reasons people are religious or spiritual in the first place. In America, prayer is one of those reasons.

As I have written before in Tikkun, nonduality may be understood in at least two ways. First, and traditionally, it proceeds from the theological tenet that God is infinite (Ein Sof in the Kabbalistic locution). Logically, if God is infinite, then every thing is God. "Do not look at a stone and say, ‘that is a stone and not God,'" wrote the sixteenth-century rabbi Moses Cordovero, one of the greatest Kabbalists of all time, "for you have dualized — God forbid. Instead, know that the stone is a thing pervaded by Divinity."

Nonduality may also be understood from the bottom up (from our own experience), as well as from the top down (from the perspective of theology). The bottom-up inquiry proceeds not from a theological tenet but from a very close observation of our perceptions. Where, for example, is the "essence" (Platonic or otherwise) of the chair on which you are sitting? Take it apart mentally: is it in the wood? The legs? Its property of holding you up — which, if you inquire more closely, has nothing to do with the "chair" and everything to do with molecular properties, strong and weak nuclear forces, and all sorts of other things you and I do not understand? Really, "chair," and everything else, is an emergent property that usefully describes reality as we experience it, but doesn't really describe its actual truth. As Joseph Goldstein likes to say, it's like the Big Dipper — it describes something about how things look from a particular perspective, but we all know there is no Big Dipper really, right?

It's possible, if the mind is quieted and slowed by meditation, to notice how thoughts pop in and out, how they are all conditioned by other things, and how the idea of the "self" in which all of us are so invested is, like the Big Dipper, just a useful label that describes how things seem from a particular perspective — not how they are. In actuality, to speak of chairs, selves, and other things as existing in their own right is useful but not entirely accurate.

But if there's no self, what is there?

That question is where pantheism and atheism shake hands, where nonduality in its specifically religious forms becomes quite interesting. God, we might say, is what is left when the self is subtracted from everything else. A Buddhist would say everything is an empty play of conditions: your decision whether or not to keep reading is due not to some homunculus inside your brain but to a myriad of causes, including genetics, what else you have to do today, how well I'm writing, learned behaviors, and so on. A nondual Jew or Christian uses the word "God" to refer to those conditions.

As these ideas have filtered beyond the elite into the mainstream, one regularly hears nondualistic language — talk of the God inside the soul, the God that fills and surrounds everything, and the need to overcome the false distinctions — in synagogues and churches around the country. Indeed, a kind of auditing of Jewish sacred text and liturgy has begun to weed out the dualistic language, replacing the second- or third-person God with the Wordsworthian "motion and spirit that impels all thinking things, and rolls through all things."

Yet this shift is not without its challenges, particularly in regard to prayer. Not just the language of prayer but its fundamental assumptions are rigorously personalistic and dualistic; it implies, and sometimes actually states, that "I" am here and you, God, are there, and that I am asking you to do things in the world. Jewish prayer assumes a relationship between God and the devotee, in which the latter speaks to God. Petitionary prayer even suggests, in a theologically problematic way, that God may or may not choose to exercise His/Her power in response to the petition. Yet even nonpetitionary prayer — thanksgiving and praise being the two other major Jewish types — seems to assume a gap between human and Divine, which prayer seeks to bridge through communication.

To be sure, there are ready nondualistic answers to the traditional theological problems of prayer. The first of these is to treat prayer as a contemplative or ecstatic meditation practice. In the contemplative mode, the words of prayer are meant not to address a distant deity, but to fill the mind with salutary reflections on beneficence and grace. Pre-prayer, I am thinking of my mortgage payments and to-do list. Post-prayer, when it works correctly, I am thinking of the miracle of my own digestion, my luck at being able to support myself, and the daily wonders of human life. Thus, prayer is less about whether God is listening than whether I am.

Prayer may also be an ecstatic practice, in which the letters and words of prayer, perhaps aided by song, vigorous movement, visualization, and heartrending devotion, become a technology for personal transformation. Here, the change is less from ignorant to grateful, than from ignorant of unity to knowing it — a "knowing" that is less an intellectual concept, as in the paragraphs above, than an Adam-knew-Eve, in-your-kishkes kind of knowing, the way you know the deepest truths, the way you know that you're seeing right now. Shifting the mind from looking at the details of life (and identifying with some of them) to becoming aware of its unity takes place, in ecstatic prayer, by burning away the self. It is this ecstasy, rather than the cooler practices of contemplative meditation, that is the primary spiritual practice of Hasidism. Even more than in contemplative prayer, however, whether God is listening is not the right question to ask, because God will appear if "you" drop out. The sentences of ecstatic prayer matter less than the words or even the letters, and the letters matter less than the excitation of the heart.

Understanding prayer as meditation, whether contemplative or ecstatic, does reconcile somewhat the theological contradiction of a nondual Godhead and dualistic prayer. It also has a long lineage in Jewish tradition — beginning with the very word for "pray," l'hitpallel, a reflexive verb that indicates that prayer is something one does to oneself. The oft-repeated notion that prayer is "the service of the heart" is actually a poor translation of avodah sh'balev, which really means "the service that is in the heart." In other words, prayer happens in the heart, not somewhere else. In fact, what's remarkable about Kabbalistic, philosophical, and other "elite" theological reflections on prayer is how rarely ordinary conceptions of prayer arise within them. Some philosophers regard prayer as salutary reflection on one's life, others as a way of circumscribing the selfish inclination — but you won't find many who think prayer makes God feel better to be praised or warms Him up to fulfill our requests. Popular discourse is full of exclamations that prayer actually works, but in the elite literature, amid volumes describing the transformative power of prayer on the individual, there are few claims that it actually sways the mind of God.

Indeed, even those texts that do suggest that prayer actually works do so by means of theological-mystical doctrines such as the Kabbalistic understanding of theurgy. Some Kabbalists believe that prayer is effective because of the combination of letters, for example, while others hold that it works because of the symbolic correspondences of the words. But almost none say God hears prayer in the ordinary senses of those words; it fits neither theology (mystical or philosophical) nor the experience of a people persecuted for many centuries.

In my own work, I've tended to follow a similar line of thinking. In my book God in Your Body, for example, I talk at length about the modalities of kneeling (barchu), listening (shema), and standing (amidah), the three embodied "movements" of traditional Jewish prayer. I understand kneeling as kneeling-before: voluntarily subjugating the selfish desires to something which is greater than them. The other modalities involve listening to the truth and taking a stand for what we believe.

But all this seems to miss the point of why we pray in the first place. Transforming prayer into meditation or magic or self-reflection turns it into something other than prayer, which has to do with the yearnings of the heart. It takes only a moment's review of the Psalms, still the ur-text of Jewish prayer, to see that Jewish prayer is, at its core, devotionalistic in nature. Even Maimonides, the great rationalist, understood prayer as a time for the heart to open. And while the mind may know the oneness of philosophical reflection and nonduality, the heart knows the two-ness of presence and absence. Devotion implies a devoted-to. It implies duality.

Moreover, who can really say that when the chips are down, they don't turn to a "primitive" theological idea of God? In the hospital, in the trenches — at such times theology goes out the window, and the heart cries in a language the mind can neither approve nor understand.

Devotion can be embarrassing for thoughtful people. Those of us who read literary magazines and have a stake in culture and art are trained to develop our minds, and we are rewarded, with money and degrees and plenty of approbation, for displaying the mental dexterities that show us to be successful and advanced human beings. Sure, there is talk these days of emotional intelligence, and elite culture is itself a concept increasingly under attack. But within the few remaining institutions of that culture — and perhaps increasingly so because of their self-awareness of being under a kind of attack from vulgarity on the one side and reactionary fundamentalism on the other — there persists not only the concept but also the system of rewards for certain kinds of rational behavior. I am not referring here only to universities and academies. The skill sets that advance one economically in the worlds of business and the professions are likewise those of the mind, not the heart.

So who wants to admit that we remain, on a primal level, in some need of primitive notions of prayer and supplication? Even less so because those who do admit to such a need are either weak-minded, or brutish, or both. Fundamentalists, New Agers, and the various potheads and dope fiends of religion and spirituality — these are the people who "need" to cry out to God. The only question for the thinking class is, which is worse: the nasty dogmatism of the evangelist or the fuzzy banality of the California-spiritual.

In this regard, nonduality — whether conceived mystically or philosophically — has more in common with the insecure skepticism of the slightly embarrassed religionist than with the zeal of the prophet. It agrees that traditional prayer is intellectually incoherent. If everything happens as it must, rather than as it should, then what is the point of wishing really hard for it to be otherwise? Indeed, to do so increases delusion, craving, and the denial of What Is, which in nondual Judaism is our best translation for the Ineffable name. Even the idea of "how the world should be," including as conceived by traditional monotheism, is counterproductive, if it is construed not as personal imperative but as judgment upon the way things actually are. As an aspirational ideal, "should" remains essential. But as a desire? Something for which we pray?

Ironically, when nondual contemplation actually succeeds — that is to say, when the truth of nonduality actually penetrates through the veils of ego and delusion — dualistic prayer language suddenly flows much freer than it did previously. In those precious moments at which nonduality is the truth and ego is the delusion, more than the illusion of separation drops away. So too do inhibition and the pretension of knowledge. A great "I don't know" replaces the arrogant (and ridiculous, if we consider the limits of human knowledge relative to the size of the universe) claims to metaphysical certainty. This "I don't know" is not the defeatism of one too lazy to think rigorously. It is the negative theology of the Cloud of Unknowing, the limits of reason according to Kant, the limits of language according to Wittgenstein, the mystery of Being according to Hegel and Heidegger. This "I don't know" is the absurdity of Zen, the transrational of Ken Wilber, the transcendent keter of Kabbalah, the impossible unity of emptiness and form. It is that toward which art gestures, the mystery that is rendered banal by explaining, the poetry lost in translation.

From this un-knowing springs a kind of permission given by the mind to the heart. Of course, prayer is absurd. Its language is primitive, outmoded, and ridiculous — nearly as ridiculous as love itself. Nor is it strictly necessary. But to those of us who seek to be connoisseurs of the self and to know the intimations and stirrings of our souls, to go without the self-abnegation of prayer is like forgoing music or wine. Yes, life goes on. But without the heart being allowed to cry in the modality of prayer, some of its flavors are drained out, like the industrial foods that pass for produce today.

And so prayer flows from surrender — chiefly the surrender of "I." In the progressive Jewish world today, one often hears a language of wrestling: with problematic texts, with ideas, with that in which we don't believe but struggle. But in the nondual view, the wrestling of Jacob with the angel is the wrestling of the One with the One. It is not a contest; it is an embrace, an act of love in which God is the only lover. It is a Divine role play, with the individual one moment taking on the submissive role, allowing, begging, being pressed to the ground, and the next assuming the dominant role, insisting, demanding, expressing the will. It is none other than the drama of prayer itself, once the demands of the intellect bend to the dance of the imagination.

This is nondual prayer, set loose from the repressive shames of the self and the preposterous fantasies of theology. It is the heart dancing, imagining, and, of course, projecting. Unlike naive prayer, it does not assume the existence of a separate Deity who will answer the petitions of the sufficiently pious. Unlike rationalized prayer, it does not masquerade as meditation or magic. And unlike the avoidance or hesitation of the overly uptight or sophisticated — the religious equivalent of hipsters too cool to dance to simple music — it does not submit the needs of the heart to the cynical auditing of the intellect.

To be sure, the edifying notes of chorus-sung hymns can elevate the refined soul to heights of aesthetic pleasure. So too can the dull responsive readings of American Judaism inculcate, in some, the ponderous ethical values of tradition. But give me the guts and tears and life-blood of a prayer unashamed of its nakedness, pleading and demanding, shuckling and clapping, or, at times at which the soul is in constriction, just going through the motions in the hope that something, somewhere, will loosen.

Is prayer preposterous? Is it susceptible to dangerous fanaticism and pathetic delusion? Is it, like other erotic acts, unsuitable for polite conversation? Of course. But I too am often preposterous, susceptible to danger and error, and impolite. I am also, often, trapped, running to and fro in the service of pointless demands that need to be forcibly interrupted. Nonduality may be the truth, but practice is needed to see it. And the practice varies with the need. Sometimes, the mindful space of meditation quiets the nonsense that masquerades as sense, so that the sense that looks like nonsense can remind me of its truth. Sometimes, the body is the key. And sometimes, what's needed is the courage to give the heart its due. Sometimes I need to pray even for that.

Jay Michaelson is the author of Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism, from which this article was adapted, and other books. He is also a columnist for the Forward, the Huffington Post, Zeek, and Reality Sandwich magazine, and director of Nehirim: GLBT Jewish Culture & Spirituality.