The Ivri Way: (4) Achat

4. AchatGoddexx is loveTapping into the power of a personal relationship with loving non-dual non-patriarchal gender-fluid Mystery***

Leonard CohenFrom a speech given in 1964

“I believe we have eliminated all but the most blasphemous ideas of God. I believe that the God worshipped in our synagogues is a hideous distortion of a supreme idea—and deserves to be attacked and destroyed. I consider it one of my duties to expose [the] platitude which we have created.”

The Izbitzer/R Mordechai Lainer of Izbica

The God of yesterday becomes the idolatry of today.

"The atheism of the average OTD person--as a rabbi---I think it's way more sacred than the religiosity of many ultra-Orthodox people and I really want to honor that."

Emmanuel Levinas Loving the Torah More than God”, in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism

The path that leads to the one God must be walked in part without God.

The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe.

R' Arthur GreenEhyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow

Kabbalah teaches that there is a secret unity of all Being, hidden within the multiplicity and diversity of life as we experience it. God and universe are related not primarily as Creator and creature, which sounds as though they are separate from one another, but as deep structure and surface. God lies within or behind the facade of all that is. In order to discover God - or the real meaning or the essential Oneness of Being - we need to turn inward, to look more deeply at ourselves and the world around us. Scratch the surface of reality and you will discover God. The path to God is thus more like peeling off the layers of an onion than climbing a ladder to the sky. The "journey" of the seeker to God is only a metaphoric one. We, in fact, discover Oneness of Being by staying right here, paying as close attention as we can to the present in which we live. But if we are to speak of journeys, the mystic offers us a journey inward, an inner opening rather than a vertical ascent.

However a parent treats a child, that child will grow up and call it love.

Abraham Joshua Heschel As quoted by Rabbi Art Green in "Abraham Joshua Heschel: Recasting Hasidism for Moderns"

I have come to sow the seed of sight in the world,
To unmask the God who disguises Himself as world.

Carl Jung

The person who thinks they can live without myth, or outside it, like one uprooted, has no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within them, or yet with contemporary human society.

For more on the Goddess
visit: https://www.sefaria.org/sheets/600390?lang=bi

Octavia ButlerParable of the SowerEarthseed: The Books of the Living

All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
The only lasting truth
Is Change
God is Change.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks The Dignity of Difference

We encounter God in the face of a stranger. That, I believe, is the Hebrew Bible’s single greatest and most counterintuitive contribution to ethics.

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel1963 Religion and Race conference in Chicago

Any god who is mine but not yours, any god concerned with me but not with you, is an idol.

Carl JungLetter to Bill W (a founder of AA)

[The addict's] craving for alcohol was the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God....
You see, Alcohol in Latin is “spiritus” and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum.

Attributed to Carl Jung

All addictions are a low level search for God.

R' Jericho Vincent

In high-intensity religious settings, when God is imagined as a perfect parent, a rush of oxytocin can reopen the otherwise stubbornly sealed circuits of our early attachments. It’s a powerful hack—and a dangerous one. That openness leaves us vulnerable to harm, and, as with every attachment relationship, some harm will come. But in a radical theology of love and ethics, justice and joy, we can learn to toggle between our full adult self and our core childhood self, healing slowly, and learning to meet future setbacks and ruptures with growing resilience, clarity, and grace.

Christopher BerglandOxytocin, Spirituality, and the Biology of Feeling ConnectedPsychology Today 2016

...A wide-range of recent studies have highlighted oxytocin’s potential ability to promote empathy, trust, social bonding, and altruism. That said, oxytocin also has a potential dark side. Under certain circumstances, oxytocin can hardwire fear-based memories associated with post-traumaticstress disorder (PTSD).

To test how oxytocin might influence spirituality, the Duke researchers administered the hormone to one group of men and a placebo to another. Those who received oxytocin were more likely to say afterward that spirituality was important in their lives and that life has "meaning and purpose." This was true regardless of whether or not the participant reported having faith in a particular organized religion.

Participants who received oxytocin were also more inclined to view themselves as interconnected with other people and living things. They gave higher ratings to statements such as “All life is interconnected” and “There is a higher plane of consciousness or spirituality that binds all people.”...

The Ecstasy of an Open BrainRadioLab 11/8/2024GÜL DÖLEN: Yeah, I mean it is—it's a very powerful—powerful drug. And it does have these very profound effects on people. So then we thought, well, if MDMA is able to induce a massive release of oxytocin, which—there was some evidence from other labs showing that—we thought maybe this would be a really cool way to reopen this critical period by triggering this massive oxytocin release that could prepare the neuron to learn from its social environment again.GÜL DÖLEN: If we gave MDMA in a social context then it was able to reopen the critical period, but not if we gave MDMA in an isolation context. So in the case where they were by themselves having MDMA, they did not reopen their social critical periods. Context matters, right? It's not like people are going to Burning Man and just having a dance party and coming back cured of their PTSD. It's the right—if you give MDMA in the right context. So if you pair MDMA with therapy, then you get these remarkable results....MOLLY: Gül says that when you use a psychedelic in the right context, it actually opens up the brain at a cellular level so that the neurons can reorganize themselves. And in that reorganization, they can create new patterns and new pathways that allow for learning and maybe even healing. So really what these drugs do is create a window of opportunity...,

Goddexx loves you just as you are, completely independent of your accomplishments and weekday productivity. In the words of Max Ehrmann:
[B]e gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the
stars; you have a right to be here.

Rest reminds us that our purpose may invite us into focused action, but our worth is not bound to outcomes. To practice sacred rest, or Shabbat, before sundown on Friday set up two candles, preferably on your dining room table or somewhere in the heart of your home. Before lighting the candles you can say this incantation (if you are Jewish by biology or conversion, this incantation can be a preface for the traditional blessing). This incantation (or any part of it) can also be said at other times:

כֹּֽה־אָמְרָה יהוה בּוֹרַאֲתֵךְ וְיוֹצֶרְתֵךְ קָרָאתִי בִשְׁמֵךְ לִי אַתְּ׃
Koh amrah Shekhinah: karati vi-shmeikh, li at.
Thus speaketh the One: I call you by your name. You are mine.

יָקַ֧רְתְּ בְּעֵינַ֛י נִכְבַּ֖דְתְּ וַאֲנִ֣י אֲהַבְתִּיךְ׃
Yaqart b’einai, nikhbadet, va’ani ahavtik.
You are precious to Me, and honored, and I love you

אַל־תִּירְאִי כִּ֣י אִתָּךְ אָנִי׃
Al-tira’i, ki ittakh anokhi
Fear not, for I am with you.

(From Isaiah 43:1-5)

INCANTATION

This incantation is a variation on the Shema, the ancient and central Ivri prayer recorded in Deuteronomy 6:4.

שְׁמַע עִבְרִ֖י
יהוה אֱלֹהֵֽינוּ
יהוה אַחַת
Shema Ivri
Ya Eloheinu
Ya achat

Listen boundary crosser
Life, our power,
Life is one