This December marks my second holiday season writing Poetic Interconnections: Exploring Spirituality and Science. Looking back over 2009, it’s very clearly been a year of bounty and blossoming for me. Many of you reading this blog post were attendees at my first lectures and workshops. I met others of you during my presentation at the Science and Nonduality Conference in San Rafael, CA. And some of you discovered this blog solely over the internet, querying Google with unlikely combinations of religion/science terms and finding me! All year, I’ve been honored and touched by your thoughtful participation and enthusiastic support. Thank you!

Though I study and celebrate all world religions, my own background is Jewish. So as I sit to write a holiday-themed blog post, I have Chanukah on my mind… Like many Jews, one of my primary associations with the occasion is food. For me, Chanukah isn’t so much a festival of lights as of latkes—the fried potato pancakes customary to the holiday meal. Accordingly, I offer you this quick, silly poetic interconnection between spirituality and science, in honor of Chanukah:

Many of us love latkes, but few of us realize their spiritual implications. The process of frying can be a metaphor for redemption. When we heat oil, its molecules accelerate, raising its vibrational energy. While frying, excess water and impurities from our latkes purge into the oil. The resulting cake is crisp and clean.

Imagine the heated oil as God, and a latke as you. Surrender yourself to frying, immersing yourself in a higher vibrational energy, and feel your tears and vices be absorbed and absolved. You’ll emerge from the pan purified.

 

 

Happy Holidays! Peace and blessings to you.

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Sunday I had the honor and pleasure of speaking at an “Artist Beit Midrash” presented by Jewish Artists Initiative in Los Angeles, CA. Traditionally, a Beit Midrash is a study group in which weekly Torah readings are mined for deeper meanings. This group was unique in that it centered on a general theme instead of a chapter of scripture. That theme was the Jewish doctrine of Yetzer HaTov and Yetzer HaRa—the good and evil inclinations in the human soul.

Are human beings fundamentally good or essentially evil? Jewish philosophy proposes we’re both, observing that we seem to possess equal potential for doing right and wrong. In classical Judaism, the Yetzer HaTov is analogous to an angel on our shoulder reminding us to obey God’s law; the Yetzer HaRa is like the devil on our other shoulder urging us to break it. Our work, classically considered, is to side with our angels.

From a more spiritual perspective, our good inclination can be thought of as a tendency toward altruism: prioritizing our community, environment, and sense of God over our immediate self-interest. Our evil inclination can be thought of as a tendency toward greed: pursuing self-gratification even at the expense of the people, ecosystems, and divine energies that surround and support us.

Spiritually speaking, our work is to accept both our good and evil inclinations—and to keep them in equilibrium. Judaism asks that we balance the self-concern necessary to honor our God-given individuality with the social, environmental, and spiritual conscience needed to love and sustain the world.

Nature asks a similar effort of all its creatures.

Evolutionary biology theorizes that those of us best suited to our natural environment survive and reproduce, passing our genes to subsequent generations. If we don’t fit well with our surroundings, we can become better adapted using two approaches: competition and cooperation. Competition requires us to become more powerful than those around us also striving for food, shelter, etc. The predator with the sharpest teeth wins; the prey with the fastest legs also wins. Cooperation requires us to become more sociable with those whom we share a habitat. Here, whoever partners best wins: bee and flower, algae and coral, etc.

It seems to me that the energy of competition is analogous to Yetzer HaRa and the energy of cooperation to Yetzer HaTov. In nature, either inclination pushed to its extreme can cause a creature to ruin itself, its community, and/or its environment. Only a dynamic balance of self-concern and care of others, rivalry and mutualism, creates an environment in which we can evolve, and keep evolving.

So… Since the 16th century, religion and science have been competing for a vital title: Truth. Many people believe these two ways of interpreting our world can’t ever be harmonized. This blog exists to point out commonality-after-commonality between spirituality and science, begging this question: After centuries of competition, isn’t it time we consider some cooperation?

Your comments welcome.

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