Confessing Jacob

Of Isaac’s two twin sons: Esau’s name means hairy – and Jacob came out clinging to his heel (his Achilles’ heel, the weakest point on the hero’s impermeable immortal body). Esau was First Born and slated for inheritance and blessing, whereas Jacob’s name means deceitful, thief, or usurper: one who grasps at his desires by his own power at whatever the cost through his own individual will and might. Now as twins, they were conceived together so how are we to understand this – To me (if Torah is meant to be used as a teaching tool; not just history but more about the nature of the human soul then) this is a story about the consequences of the first stage of returning to God and our divine co-natures after the Fall, e.g. one must recognize that the Ego (the twin activate present in a material body) clings to the physical, it’s twin reality and usurps the birthright of the Soul to “know” the Father.

So what do we see Jacob, our thief, our Ego do? He tricks his father Isaac to bestow the blessing on him, and Esau, being likewise angered wishes to harm his brother and so Jacob flees. We know he marries, we know that over the course of years Jacob becomes father to 12 sons. He has achieved all that he has desired through his wit, through his cunning, and because he did this without divine solidarity, he finds that this life of his has become a struggle; we often think of Jacob as a survivor, and marvel at his consequence and his accomplishments but we must remember that survival is not a word that connotes a sense of God’s majesty or the highest goal of living a good life.

Remember, the Ego toils under its own weight. All desires (save one) produce an element of suffering. There is only one true desire that can fulfill the longing of the soul … and we see Jacob come to this point (Gen. 32) in the wilderness. He is waiting for Esau, now years later. His actions are now coming towards him, he is at a moment of judgment, of being held accountable to his higher nature and his family and his life for all the scheming and usurping, he is his choices. And so he has arrived at a moment of Crisis. He has sent his wives, his belongings and all his children across the river ahead of him to hopefully appease his wronged brother (should he ever be able to follow), and he stands alone in the desert. Where non can be save for testing: in the Bible, one is always sent into the wilderness to be tested. For there are no distractions and it symbolizes that point of no return, when you have hit the wall or the bottom of some spiritual impasse, and you may not move from this spot until you have mastered your choices.

Now Jacob has, at this point, already had the Dream of the Ladder moving Angels up and down from Heaven – so he has glimpsed his future and seen that the Lord has approached him, he vowed long beforehand to participate in this moment but a promise is much different that following through. And it is only in the Wilderness that the Ego (our Jacob) must confess his actions and allow the Soul to be transformed into something beyond the mere physical.

He is told in Gen 31:13 “I am the God who appeared to you in Bethel, where you anointed a memorial stone and made a vow to me. Up, then! Leave this land and return to the land of your birth." Leave this land that is full of things densely foreign to you, return to the land of your fathers, the land of spirit, who made you. Do not cleave to the material, come back Home. The Prodigal son is a story told over and over in the Bible, it is here in the Torah and is the same in the Gospels. We (the collective Human soul) are The Prodigal Son.

Here in Gen 32:25 we read that, “Jacob was left there alone. Then some man wrestled with him until the break of dawn, [and] when the man saw that he could not prevail over him, he struck Jacob's hip at its socket, so that the hip socket was wrenched as they wrestled” (and it continues through Gen 32:28). Now this is an interesting thing that just happened. And more interestingly, there is no description of the man with whom Jacob wrestled actually was. Some say he was an Angel (very popular interpretation by fine artists
over the years) or Jacob’s shadow, an ordinary man or even God himself; here he is alone in the Wilderness, he has arrived at a point of crisis and he knows he can no longer go on doing what he has spent his life doing, because it never comes out the way he planned exactly. Something is amiss, missing, ill fitting, incomplete.

So he has arrived at this moment and the next thing we read about our Jacob is he is wrestling with some force that the Book does not decisively name. And then the man says, “Let me go, for it is daybreak.” And what is good to note here is that neither could best the other. They were in a stalemate, they were equal somehow, but this is Jacob’s only hope, he says: “Not until you bless me.” And this is what the Man/Angel/God replied: “What is your name?”

As if to ask: who are you really? I don’t think he was asking in the same manner as someone signing an autograph: “er—who do I make this out to?” But who is asking for the blessing?

In this Jacob has to be honest. He has done everything up until now on his own cunning and it has left him at this convergence point…

When I was in Jackson a couple of weeks ago, I was invited to attend church by M’s mother, and the Pastor was speaking of this same passage, and he says that at this moment Jacob, here, must confess who he really is. And I agree. Jacob must come clean to himself if he wants to transform, he must be sincere in who he has been until now: The thief, the usurper. In order for us to be free of our Ego, we must not only confess, but recognize that we have let it rule our lives and thoughts to this point, and ask for Blessing from the Man, the shadow or the Angel so that we may move on, evolving into what true Humanity was created to be, soulfully Free.

And so with Jacob’s confession we come to verse 29: “Then the man said, ‘You shall no longer be spoken of as Jacob, but as Israel, because you have contended with divine and human beings and have prevailed.’” Now, the word Israel or Yisrael if often translated at “wrestling with God,” and we see this interpretation in the verse, but, it also names the one true & correct human desire: to go straight to God. It is a verb and a path, both. And so Jacob, or the Ego is purified and corrected by Awareness and Grace. And this is a bright story for us on our travels if we seek or rather find ourselves in the Wilderness, that we must not look at ourselves as victims of circumstance but a soul brought to the edge of opportunity for transformation. Like any other moment in the Torah (and even later on, in the Gospels), all we need to do is ask with all our heart, for when we do then we will find the Wilderness Transformed and perhaps we find ourselves not in a place but a state of mine: imbued, alighted, and filled, our mission and our humanness appears: “Thou hast anointed my head with oil; my cup runneth over/surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life” (Psalm 23:5).

It Must Be Felt

I, along with my mother and millions of others, am reading Eckhart Tolle's book, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose. It happens to be Oprah's new Book Club Selection. Not that this is the reason I picked up, nonetheless, I am currently within the first fifty pages.

This book is the inspiration for this space of mine.

First let me explain what is Soma. The word soma means Body. You have probably seen in use in terms of the Somatic. But, furthermore, it is the degree of being-ness when the material or the physical turns into God. In kind with the final desired outcome of Alchemy, it as a state of conscious- ness. Soma is also the name of the Vedic God of Bliss. *Bliss is: blithesomeness; gladness; the now, the highest degree of happiness; blessedness; exalted felicity; heavenly joy. And the way that these two identifying definitions combine in mind is the outcome that I am looking for.

I have spent the last (nearly) nine years struggling with The Body, it's physicality, it's spirituality, the trust it demanded from me, the faith in my intuition that I was unwilling to give, as well as an obsession with purity and health (not that purity and health are inappropriate things to be desirous of, but anything that becomes obsessive has already crossed the line of both). What I did not realize was that I was missing a sense of connectivity to my own life. I abused my body with food and thought and then would become malevolent with it for doing what I was (indirectly) telling it to do. I detested the fact that I was girl... in fact I still have trouble admitting to myself that I am a (gulp) woman. I was afraid to be because I was afraid of being myself. I have done everything I could to try and stack the deck in (what I thought was) my favor... but for all the "winnings" and accolades that came with that path, it has only further severed my ability to recognize who I truly am, and furthermore: I'm exhausted. Thus, I have named this new space: Somatique (a french version of somatic, or the body) because I intend it to be a documentation of a new understanding into a journey of seeing and experiencing My Body with a blissful attitude.

Aha. Back to Tolle. On page 38, he begins to tell the anecdote of "The Lost Ring" and it goes as such:

"When I was seeing people as a counselor and spiritual teacher, I would visit a woman twice a week whose body was riddled with cancer. She was a schoolteacher in her midforties and have been given no more than a few months to live by her doctors. [...] One day, [...] I arrived to find her in a state of great distress and anger. What happened? I asked. Her diamond ring, of great monetary as well as sentimental value, had disappeared, and she said that she was sure it had been stolen by the woman who came here to look after her for a few hours everyday. She didn't understand how anybody could be so callous and heartless as to do this to her. She asked me whether she should confront the woman or whether it would be better to call the police immediately. I said I couldn't tell her what to do, but asked her to find out how important a ring or anything else was at this point in her life. You don't understand, she said. This was my grandmother's ring. I used to wear it every day until I got ill and my hands became too swollen. it's more than just a ring to me. How can I not be upset?

The quickness of her response and the anger and defensiveness in her voice were indications that she had not become present enough to look within and to disentangle her reaction from the event and observe them both. [...] I said, I am going to ask you a few questions, but instead of answering them now, see if you can find the answers within you [...]. I asked, Do you realize that you will have to let go of the ring at some point, perhaps quite soon? How much more time do you need before you will be ready to let go of it? Will you become less when you let go of it? Has who you are become diminished by the loss? [...] When she started speaking again, there was a smile on her face and she seemed at peace. [She said] The last question made me realize something important. First, I went to my mind for an answer and my mind said: 'Yes of course you have been diminished.' Then I asked myself the question again, 'Has who I am become diminished?' This time I tried to feel rather than think the answer. And suddenly, I could feel my I Am-ness. I have never felt that before. If I can feel the I Am so strongly, then who I am hasn't been diminished at all."

Tolle goes on to say that this is the "Joy of Being." And that you can only "feel it when you get out of your head." He says: "being must be felt."

The woman then says, "I now understand something Jesus said that never made sense to me before: 'If someone takes your shirt, let him have your coats as well.' [Tolle then says:] That's right. It doesn't mean you should never lock your door. All it means is that sometimes letting things go is an act of far greater power than defending or hanging on."

I have for too long held on to things that are not real. And when I say that they are not real it is because I have created them out of fear. The old saying, "there is nothing to fear but fear itself" is powerful. Because fear is the great immobilizer, it clings to irrational rationalizations and convinces you that there is no hope, you are alone and ultimately you are about to die (more on this topic in the next post). A wise man in my life recently took apart that word for me: rationalize. And by doing so, we discovered that the word ration is tucked in there, slyly in plain sight. To rationalize is to do things or place things into portions. In other words, you are never able to see or experience the bigger picture, the kit-and-caboodle, the whole enchilada.
Fear removes you from seeing what is true and real about you in any particular moment. I have fought the present moment for years, even when I know better.

Tolle does say that there is one thing we do know, that: "life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you are having at this moment."

So there it is. This new journey you are embarking on with me is due to the realization that Being must be felt. And so I intend to do so. I intend to Be.

I highly recommend reading the book

*If you are interested in more of the background to all this, although I'm sure pockets will get filled in here or there, you can visit my old blog Somewhere in the Body-Life.