Tikkun Magazine, September/October 2009
by Jay Michaelson
Millennialism and messianism have long been anathema to progressive religion. In their most raw forms, they are triumphalism undisguised: the good (i.e., us) are taken to heaven, the bad committed to the flames. And, unlike those aspects of traditional religion that seem to cry out for a renewal or restoration, messianism's bathwater seems not to hold a baby worth saving. A utopian ideal, sure; perhaps something for which to strive. But as an actual, future-historical event, the Messianic Age offers little to the contemporary spiritual progressive.
And yet, we ignore the messianic impulse at our peril. Defying common sense, apocalyptic millennialism recurs, again and again-most recently, in the American spiritual scene, connected with the year 2012 (thought by some to be a turning point in the Mayan calendar), but also in connection with Y2K (remember that end of the world?), American evangelicals' support of Israel, some New Christian Right interpretations of the War in Iraq, and so on. The notion of an end-time seems to be as deeply rooted in the human psyche as other religious concepts, and seems to be alive and kicking today. Thus, to ignore such a deep-rooted impulse seems to miss something essential to how billions of people understand themselves and their religions.
So, what options are there for spiritual progressives dismayed by triumphalism and supernaturalism, but cognizant of the seeming centrality of the Messianic impulse? In this essay, I want to share one such alternative: a longstanding Jewish "spiritual view" of global transformation-that the "Messianic Age" is about a change in consciousness, not in politics or religious structures-and explore how we might see it underway today.
To begin, let us recall that Judaism is both a historical and an ahistorical religion. Ahistorically, Jewish time is cyclical: the Sabbath comes every seven days, and our agriculturally timed cycle of holidays renews itself each year. This Judaism shares with other earth-based religions. Historically, though, Jewish time is linear. We Jews tell stories of an ancient creation and hold hopes for a future redemption. We involve ourselves in history-in collective enterprises such as Zionism and individual ones such as righteous action on behalf of the less fortunate.
In this linear mode, one of Judaism's central historical tenets is the belief in a Messiah, a redeemer who in some future time will change, or even end, history. Jewish beliefs about the Messiah have themselves evolved over time. Initially, the Messiah was seen as a military/political leader who would bring independence back to Judea. Over the centuries though, the Messiah came to be seen as a cosmic redeemer who would change the entire nature of reality-even, as in Christianity, a semi-divine figure who would atone for the sins of Israel. Because Jewish law is largely silent on matters of belief, all of these views have held sway at one time or another. Today, many Hasidim believe that the last Lubavitcher Rebbe will somehow return from "apparent" death to unite all the world. Many nationalists believe that an "inevitable" war in the Middle East will bring the Messiah. A handful of ultra-nationalists have even plotted to blow up the Dome of the Rock to jump-start the process. Fortunately, these remain a miniscule fringe.
In contrast to such traumatic and supernatural accounts of messianism, however, there is a longstanding Jewish tradition to regard the Messianic Age as one of evolving consciousness rather than revolutionary history. This view has two major forms.
The first is what Gershom Scholem called the "neutralization" of Jewish messianism, which took place in the Hasidic movement in the late eighteenth century. Contrary to Hasidism today, Hasidism then was a radical, spiritual renaissance. It arose in the wake of a great historical trauma: the Sabbatean heresy, during which one-third of European Jews believed the Messiah had arrived and now walked the earth. After that Messiah converted (under duress) to Islam, the movement underwent a crisis. Many still believed; some followed their Messiah and converted outwardly to Islam, while remaining secretly Jewish. Many were disillusioned. But for most, the messianic impulse remained-and remained unfulfilled.
In response, early Hasidism claimed that the messianic "world to come" could be experienced here and now, in moments of spiritual ecstasy. That is to say, "There is no Messiah, and You're It," in the words of the contemporary writer Rabbi Robert Levine. This redefinition of messianism, which has its roots in older Kabbalistic sources, largely de-historicizes the Messianic Age. In its most raw form, messianism becomes more a state of mind than anything else.
But there is also a second, hybrid form, which brings together the historical and the ahistorical elements. This view is expressed in the eighteenth-century Kabbalah of Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto ("Ramchal"); the writings of the founder of Hasidism, Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov; and the work of the twentieth-century Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook. The Messianic Age, these sources suggest, is a time at which the consciousness that all is God will fill the earth. And it will come not suddenly, but gradually, as more and more people begin to transcend the illusions of the separate self and realize the truth of their natures. The contemporary Kabbalist David Friedman writes, "According to Luzzatto, the messianic era (the ‘days of Messiah') is the culmination of one huge evolutionary learning process which was conceived with the Universe, born with the emergence of Life, and becomes mature when Humanity easily achieves Divine Inspiration, Ruach Hakodesh" (the complete essay is at www.kosmic-kabbalah.com).
At its apogee, such a change in consciousness becomes an apotheosis, not through transfiguration but through an understanding of the divine state we inhabit already. In this view, the Messianic Age is that which is described in Joel 2:28: "And it shall come to pass afterwards, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. Your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions." And it is how one may understand the epistle of the Baal Shem Tov, in which the rabbi is told that the Messiah will come "when your teachings become publicized and revealed to the world, and your wellsprings have overflowed to the outside ... so that others, too, will be able to perform mystical unifications and ascents of the soul like you." The messianic transformation is a global, gradual transformation of consciousness.
Notice too that the Baal Shem Tov is told that "the wellsprings of your teachings" will be spread out around the world. Naturally, the eighteenth-century rabbi despaired at this news: how distant it must have seemed to him! Yet today, we may understand it somewhat differently. The "wellsprings" of the Besht's teachings-their source, not their final expression. And that source? The nondualistic principle that alzt is Gott, all is God, all is One, separation is illusion. And this source is indeed found throughout the world.
Imagine this Messianic age: a world in which everyone understands that all of us are God. Not one in which each person thinks he or she is God alone-that would be disaster. But one in which the nonduality of Being is understood, in some form or fashion, by all human beings. This would be an entirely different world from the one we now inhabit, free of the conflicts and crises, petty and grotesque, which fill our moment. And imagine what it would be like, right now, to believe that, as Ramana Maharshi has said, "civilization ... will finally resolve itself-as all others-in the Realization of the Self" (Talks with Ramana Maharshi, 256).
Such a time is, of course, far off. But this conception of the evolution of consciousness as messianic unfolding casts new light on the development of religious consciousness from its most primitive to its most refined stages. Religious consciousness evolves (cf. Karen Armstrong's The History of God), as Spirit comes to know itself in history (Hegel). Humanity moves through different stages of individual and communal religious consciousness, each of us at our own rates, according to myriad circumstances. But we move toward one non-supernatural Omega point (Teilhard de Chardin): the knowledge-the intimate knowledge-that all is One.
Now, in our postmodern information age, the noösphere (Teilhard again) is indeed upon us. Already, thanks to global information technology, the hidden mystical teachings of the world's religious traditions are accessible to everyone, as are scientific, cultural, philosophical, and artistic works from the better part of humanity. But even this is just the beginning. The internet, nanotechnology, and wearable computers are but the initial stages of a noetic revolution in which nonmaterial information may displace material matter as the ultimate future of the body. Most probably, we are only a few decades away from being able to upload our minds onto renewable data media. Is this the "immortality of the soul" of which some religions once spoke? What is the meaning of humanity if we are able to transcend the limits of matter? And more proximately, what is the significance of this new knowledge, accessible all over the world-including, for our purposes, the highest truth (singular!) of so many spiritual traditions, that there is really no one either reading or writing these words?
The Messianic Age is already unfolding, in this interpretation, and the gradual emergence and dissemination of nonduality is among its signal phenomena. The wellsprings of the Baal Shem Tov's teachings have indeed spread out throughout the world; they are already flowing on every continent and in every city with unrestricted access to the internet.
Fundamentalists are terrified that religious meaning evolves over time. But from a non-triumphalist, nondual messianic perspective, that is exactly what it should be doing. Indeed, the evolution in spiritual/religious consciousness may be part of a larger process. One description of that process, found in the work of Ken Wilber, maintains that the general progression from stages of conventional consciousness to successive realms of unconventional consciousness (gross/nature mysticism to subtle/deity mysticism to causal/formless mysticism to nondual/both emptiness and form) mirrors the progressions of cultural systems, social structures, even the physical structures that compose the material corollaries to "spiritual experiences," and the orders of complexity of the material world. For Wilber, this progression can be represented as mineral>vegetable>animal>impersonal>personal>spiritual; for the Hasidim, it is domem>tzomeach>chai>medaber (inanimate>vegetable>animal>speech).
This evolutionary understanding can also help spiritual progressives relate to problematic texts and traditions from the past. There is no experience apart from interpretation, not merely because mystics must interpret their experiences according to the language and culture they know, but because those linguistic and cultural structures condition the nature of the experience itself. Perhaps "I" will "have" a "vision" of "angels," but all of the quoted terms are cultural constructions. The structural/historical conditioning of experience is unavoidable, so much so that it makes little sense to speak of "experience" or "God" or "mysticism" apart from the stages in which such experience is interpreted. Put simply, God looks different depending on where, and when, you stand.
For example, from what Wilber (following the integral approach developed by the philosopher Jean Gebser) calls the magical stage, God looks like the provider who answers all of your (egocentric) needs. From the mythic stage, God-as understood in your faith tradition exclusively-is the sole source of salvation, and everyone who doesn't believe in Him is doomed. From the mental-rational stage, God is a moral principle and the Bible a useful, though flawed, teacher of ethical truths; other teachers may also be valuable. From the pluralistic stage, God is love, expressed in a thousand ways by a thousand religions, all deserving of respect. And from the integral stages, God is variously Nothing, and all of the above.
Experiences of all types are available to all kinds of people. But the same experience will be immediately contextualized and interpreted according not only to one's religious/spiritual/scientific tradition but also one's "stage" of religious development. Perhaps an experience of light is a spirit, or an angel, or the Agent Intellect, or an opening to the Infinite-all interpretations of luminous internal light found within Jewish mystical sources. Or perhaps it is merely an experience, which opens the soul but which, in and of itself, brings one no closer to God than waiting in line at the post office. The point is not that there is a True God perceived in these partial ways; rather, these partial ways define what is meant by "God."
In the beginning, our ancestors were animists and polytheists. They believed in "power gods," nature spirits, warrior deities, and fertility goddesses. Eventually, some came to venerate one sky god above all others, insisting that all the Divine energies in the world were from a single source alone. Later, philosophical thinking refined these notions of this single source, away from an anthropomorphic deity and toward an impersonal Oneness. Mystics experienced the One in love, and in so doing resacralized the whole world as the veiling and unveiling of the Beloved. Everything became seen as the costume of God. When we gaze into the mirror of the Infinite, we cannot help but project the contents of our minds onto It. And all of these projections are partial truths.
Finally, if a transformation in spiritual consciousness is to take place, it must by definition be an inclusive, integral, and non-triumphalistic one. In contrast to adolescent images of God (or gods), nondual messianism does not exclude other traditions. Nor, I maintain, need it depict "earlier" stage religious experiences as variously imperfect approximations of this one true one (as Wilber himself often appears to do). Yes, early stages are partial, but so are all but the ultimate ones. Thus, unlike, for example, rationalistic religious Reform movements, the view of messianism as the gradual, global evolution of consciousness toward nonduality entails no patronizing allegorization of myth and narrative, no reductive confusion of the prerational with the transrational. It entails neither the offensively naive privileging of mythic-stage gender roles, nor the erasure of mythic power in the attempt at egalitarianism.
Utopian ideal? Exactly-and that is exactly the function of the messianic urge, here reconfigured away from nationalism, triumphalism, and supernaturalism, and toward the dawning of enlightenment. Will everyone be Christian or Gnostic or Jewish in the Messianic Age? Will a magical chariot descend from the sky? Of course not. Rather, the nondual wellsprings of the world's mystical teachings will water a thousand plants in Eden. A biodiversity of spirit will flourish that, as in ecology, nourishes the whole by supporting difference. Consciousness will shift until such a point at which even the lion may lie down with the lamb.
We don't have to wait until 2012, or any other magical time, to begin doing this work. Imagine the great shabbat, the great resting and relinquishment, that could unfold if we believed that all concepts are masks. Our certainties and pronouncements would be interrupted by little notes of uncertainty, of unknowing, of remembering that the mystery lies beyond our grasp and that even sacred totems are only best efforts. We return, perhaps unexpectedly, to a state of wonder-both at the One and at the Many. As Jews have said for millennia: speedily, in our days ...
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. This is the first of a series of columns for Tikkun.
