The goal of tiferet is “the development of the human being to his greatest potential.” –Rabbi Shimon Leiberman
When the end appears, it’s best to let it go. Our appreciation lies in knowing the process has arrived full circle, to a whole (even in what we may interpret as a hole).
Before the Flood
As spring blossoms and nature’s gorgeous transformation uproots our apprehensions of last winter, the fluttering of wings appear, frozen daylight turns the frigid aire into a warm evanescence spread by bees, fluttered by butterflies, and floating with dandelion seeds. Green waves of light approach.
In our primary encounters with others, Beauty takes us so delicately under its whim. Usually, encountering us by complete surprise.
Glowing eyes across a room, the distance of which slowly draws to a close in our perception creating a negligent withdraw of the boundary of self-separation. Have we been together this entire time? From gaze to becoming closely held, our common interest piques through night-long conversations, ultimately leading to the touching of two sets of lips. Behold! Paradise exists.
The Flooding Of Tiferet
We become immersed through touch: our each other, with sight upon the eyes, fragrances upon the nose, like sugar and salt upon the tongue, even the mind sense – intellect- is elevated.
Strongly held, we dare not move for sake of our past selves and the lessons they’ve taught us. To repeat the same mistakes, again and again, destroying this now, this here, her eyes, his touch, and our ephemeral glare, the sin of separation later becomes our only choice in matters of the heart. For we cannot be together in these weathering conditions for long, and so our physical commitment lasts not longer than it need. The feeling of solitude unjustly encroaches despite our strains at grasping for one another. Before such idle feats become of us, a fusion occurs within the infinitude of our locale, an immersion if you will, where two become One under the thundering rain and lightning sun of a bind so convinced that even change is impermanence that we become left to nothing more than a now where only choice becomes our demise (and thus equally of our remainder). If only it would hail today and trap us thus in this stronghold of embrace…my deepest desire is to become that which we are already.
If nature teaches us anything, even Beauty follows the rising of the moon. Imitations of love fail, origin is always paid its blasted dues, and we are left alone like in the very Beginning. Life desires nothing more than spontaneity, stark awareness, and ensuing transition. We are here to know, but how does this knowledge help our extraction of one another? We beg, and refuse to choose clarity. For even though the obvious is given, it is rarely discussed and appreciated. The purity of an instance of knowing is ruined by our attempts to possess knowledge. The quest of questions towards some formative knowledge surmounts our ability to connect beyond the shallower regions of the mind, thus creating a lack of depths in our relations with the world. We do not deny logic, rather we refuse to allow its control over our interactions and experiences in order to cultivate an urgent necessity towards seeing that our attempts at gaining, in fact turning, knowing into knowledge results in a lack of insight into the wholeness of reality (and thus a lack of knowing ourselves entirely). Throughout this process of Self-denial, the ever-present experience of the unpossessed is bypassed in order to attain some intriguing notion of another. Majesty is sacrificed to self-conceited justice, a demarcation of the whole where our apprehension of another, regardless of our reasoning, becomes nothing short of an attempt at weeding out our own discrepancies, our own self. Blinded by our judgment our inner most desire is never achieved. Consolidation is abandoned, coalition disbanded, and the loss of embrace shatters the mirror of our own reflection. What will allow us to last? Who will choose to deny nature’s way and create their own? I am begging to hold onto this moment. Have I peaked and if so, are you my catalyst?
I cannot bare this question any more, the world’s hold upon me and my attachment to it. We’ve been ripped apart. Barren waste, the sands of time confined drown my eternal nature. We ask to be taken away earlier than our given purpose and for what? With whom and to go where is my solo care. But there are other alternatives in the mix; I retort, yet this Power too is not mine. Losing control over the Beautiful, the Good, and the True. Ultimate distance now…… thick clouds of suffocation grow amongst us…… gasping in I-I.
I am choking now; a ruptured sack of bloody aortic fluid catches within the passageways of my scarred esophagus. (Apparently smoking is still not working.) Finally, the beautiful hands choking me overturn to Mercy. Thou art a reality I never did possess! Rarity occurs yet again, and what was seemingly lost in the chemistry of two’s physical embrace is found as none other than the timeless alternative always before us, indeed that very heart of reality which brings us together in the first place, an experience so dear to the vital pulse of the universe itself that without one we are nothing more than numb non-entitled forms.
The taste leaves my mouth quite bitter from the Beholden. Never has the desire to cling been so strong, as if I would forgo my entire being to become one with Beauty. Did we stare too long into each other’s eyes, the touching of two souls so strongly throughout the midnight blue that four hues fused? Or were my awakenings of pure terror of the beginning and of the end, indeed the terror of the tremendum, an experience of a deluge so vast beyond human conceptualization that its flooding entirety of a procession before me overtook the reigns of my self-control? Was this simply a guise of protection, some self-preservative instinct fulfilling its purpose? Was I quaking the entire time? Perhaps the shaking of my atomic state was being called to a higher vibration or to some degree greater than it could possibly be on its own? For this I am lost. And for this I am wonder.
After the Flood
Beauty has the capacity to shake us to our very roots, to the center of our being, to being Nothing, to the point of ruining that which even Beauty considers dearly held. Devastation to such a critical point of wreckage that it destroys the likeness of the other in itself. The loss of innocence at first sight with every sight needs constant apprehension of perception between one another. Beauty desires to see itself as Beauty, with Beauty, in Beauty, and of Beauty. And in its pure tenacity to comprehend itself, Beauty’s devastating blow destroys what it wishes to find in the other, that which it already possesses in itself, a basic vicissitude in and of and beyond its being, quality itself. Asking who am I, instead of who are you and finding some differentiating factor of divide, when all it wants is that which it is. Such confusion must we undergo. It’s as if we come together until we come apart.
Beauty unrestrained by our strength of judgment becomes destructive whether we allow it too or not. This is beyond our own choosing. Confined to things, the Beautiful will come to pass as all things do. There is nothing we can hold onto because we do not possess this world or the forms of it. The greatest gift is waking daily and knowing the blessing of being awake. A life truly free: one of consciously choosing, responding, acknowledging, and appreciating. This is our confusion as a materialistic society. Nothing gained or taken, simply the mass confusion that there is some thing to gain, some place to be, some one to have, a Heaven waiting. What we forget and our daily challenge to recollect is the here and now unpossessed. The Beautiful in one thing is present in the Other, in another, one another, it is simply our perception which is displaced.
Reality is here waiting for recognition -either constantly chosen or reformed continually through another means. As one thing dies and another appears, Beauty as a transcendental experience is everlasting. Yet in our detachments, or rather in our desires to attach, to possess, to hold onto, to cling, to grab, our very thirst prevents the quenching of what we most desire: to be coddled by Beauty, to be caressed by nature’s fingertips, the return of an Aphroditic hold if you will, of being safely covered by the Tree and embraced by the Mother. And so, just as newborns cry when they are “ripped away” from their mothers’ womb, so too are we placed down and forcibly put aside in settling our natural reserve as a species, as an entity. In time and in the due course of the natural world, all form is ripped away and we are forced to reckon with Nature’s unrelenting cycle of growth.
A Constant Rain That Is Dry
No thing is holding us nor can hold us permanently in matters of self-protection. Our consolidation needs no motherly figure. Our determination is to examine the Beautiful within us, seeing that which firstly will not be lost nor gained, but a reality within/without in which the dissipation of our illusion towards possession, perfection, and comparison collapse upon one’s examination. For only then are we re-emitted to the all-encompassing world womb of Shekinah. And of course, only then is a now where constant rain that is dry whets our appetitive thirst, where the unsatiated totality of self-desire becomes suchly Self-desire, where inconvenience and matters of uncertainty, especially of the heart, and where all which is apparently opposed to us comes to dissipate in a relaxation far beyond the anxieties of the mind. A great release takes place within the universal man/woman and where once there was found to be a knot, now, it is seen as not. A true vanishing act beyond the sophistications of even the greatest magician, a place where one can finally release into a flow beyond personal control and comprehension.
May you all discover this reality before you now.
