What is Yechidah?

This retreat has touched every aspect of my life. It’s impossible to know where to begin or how I would summarize it to others. Some days, it is entirely about God, and the oneness of all reality - sometimes, the basic nonexistence of all reality except as a series of projections of universal mind. Other days, it is about my anger, patience, distraction, personal relationships. career choices. In a single day I will zip from total contentment and quiet, perfect concentration doing a walking meditation, to extreme irritation and anger, certain that this path is one of world-negation and Sheepism. Marx to the extreme. There have been ups and downs emotionally, intellectually, spiritually. Even my body has gotten a workout. Beyond the back pain and all of that, I’ve come so in touch with my body as ‘energetic system’ I’m almost ready to stop scarequoting that. I feel a range of emotions in the body, and in the face primarily, and am learning things about body and mind every day. Like, delayed reactions. Yesterday I had a 4 hour samadhi with basically no deep insights. It was pleasant, it was quiet, but it was very blank. Last night and this morning, though, the brain is cooking and alive!

I do this writing on retreat because it is part of my process, and an important drive in ‘me.’ I do this writing also because I know when I’m just writing to write or because I’m bored, and when I really have something to say that I want to record so I can think about it later, and think it through now.

Many topics in the hopper, some of which are falling through the holes.

Yechidah is not “your” soul. It’s not another layer of your four souls. It is the One. At the deepest level, you are God. As Tolle said (I’ve stopped even noting synchronicities because they seem to be just part of life so much. Like, when I open one of the books, I have great confidence - maybe even complete confidence - that the Universe will bring me what I need. I have never been disappointed. Of course, some of this is due to my own openness. And some of it is due to my wisdom in choosing which book to open at which time. But some of it... I don’t know. I dare not say.) ... as Tolle said, “The Now is inseparable from who you are at the deepest level.” That gave me some good thinking. Does deepest equal truest? In a sense, it does - most fundamental, most real. On the other hand, we wouldn’t say that the foundation of a house is truer than the structure. It’s the ground, the ultimate reality. That’s not quite a good analogy since the foundation there is separate from the structure. Well, we can do a semi-Buddhist scientific reading. Is it truer to say we are molecules, or we are bodies? The Buddha is big on pointing out the molecules - not that he knew anything about that specifically, but constituent parts. This seems like the right direction because, of course, we don’t live our lives on the level of molecules so we wouldn’t even see them if we didn’t look closely. Skandhas, you could say, to be more faithful to the system. Whereas, you don’t need a sage to point out that we also live on the level of bodies and society. It’s just a question of how close you look. The shocking part is, when you look really closely, you see there really is no there there. There is no self, no part of the chair that is ‘chair’ separate from legs, cushion, etc.

It’s so interesting that Plato basically dealt with the same question, at the same time as the Buddha. He also seemed to recognize, hey what is a chair, really? What makes a chair a chair? So he comes up with this theory of forms, that there is such a thing as chairness. Of course, it has never been clear to me, in 15 years, what exactly it means to say a form exists in this way. I guess Plato means on a conceptual level, clearly there is an idea of a chair, and we can sit and come up with what are the necessary elements. This is helpful for ethics, because we can do the same with a human. Of course, that depends on Reason to get free of culturial biases and actually say something, which maybe it can’t do. Then again, Buddhist ethics also tend to be a little bit skyhook-y. Oh, we should be generous. I mean, I agree, of course, but based on what, exactly? Leads to less cruelty, cultivates compassion. All stems from the first noble truth – Buddhism is Rortyism. We don’t know why, but suffering stinks, and so we want to act in such a way as to minimize it.

Back to yechidah. This is the deepest level, on which ‘you’ do not exist. I think the Kabbalah is very wise here. Not in other places, perhaps, but definitely here. There is the level on which everything is God. Nirvana. No self, no problem. Personally, I’d like to hang out there a bit more. It’s blissful, and relatively free of suffering, and it’s just spacious, wonderful, God. Yet there are strata of reality layered on top of that foundation, based on our faculties of body, mind, and heart. Sense-doors, mind-sense-door, and, well, the heart.

Okay, what I was intending to sit and write about was visions. I had a beautiful one this morning. First I’ll recount it, and then I’ll talk about visions.
[And I'll do that in a separate post.]