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Prayer and Nonduality

by Jay MichaelsonIn the last half-century, theological doctrines once explicitly reserved for the elitehave become widespread in the Jewish world. In earlier times, philosophers hadtheir re

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ned conception of God, mystics had theirs, and most people, at least ac-cording to the sparse evidence we possess, didn’t have much truck with either. Inlarge part, this is still true today; visit any mainline synagogue and you’ll

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nd tra-ditional theological notions rarely mentioned in rabbinical schools: God punishingthe wicked and rewarding the good, the specialness of Israel and the Torah, and thenotion that God hears our prayers. No one in the non-Orthodox Jewish “academy” believes these things in a literal sense, but they have long been staples of massreligion.Lately, however, the elite/popular division is showing signs of wear. In recent years,ideas about God once reserved for the elite have begun showing up in the main-stream. Perhaps God is just “the way things are” or “a transcendent moral impera-tive.” Or perhaps, as I have described in a recent issue of Tikkun, God does not exist— but is Existence itself.This view, known as nondualism (“not two”-ism), has been part of Jewish elite phi-losophy and mysticism for hundreds of years. It is also, of course, part of many “Eastern” religious traditions such as Vedanta Hinduism and Mahayana Buddhism.Yet partly as a result of these latter systems of thought, nondualism has begunappearing in the American mainstream, not just among the elite. “All is one” maybe a bit of a simpli

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cation, but it is at the bedrock of popular spiritual thought, inmultiple faith traditions.In this article, I will brie

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y sketch the contours of the nondual view and then ex-plore the particular problems it poses for prayer. As evident in my last article, whichdiscussed nondual messianism, my view is ultimately that nonduality provides thespiritual progressive with a serious alternative to fundamentalism on the one hand,and dry rationalism or vague spirituality on the other. Nonduality allows us to haveour theological cake and pray to it too — and if progressive spirituality is ever tobecome more than an elite phenomenon, it has to take account of the reasonspeople are religious or spiritual in the

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rst place. In America, prayer is one of thosereasons.

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As I have written before in Tikkun, nonduality may be understood in at least twoways. First, and traditionally, it proceeds from the theological tenet that God isin

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nite (Ein Sof in the Kabbalistic locution). Logically, if God is in

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nite, then everything is God. “Do not look at a stone and say, ‘that is a stone and not God,’” wrotethe sixteenth-century rabbi Moses Cordovero, one of the greatest Kabbalists of alltime, “for you have dualized — God forbid. Instead, know that the stone is a thingpervaded by Divinity.” Nonduality may also be understood from the bottom up (from our own experience),as well as from the top down (from the perspective of theology). The bottom-upinquiry proceeds not from a theological tenet but from a very close observation of our perceptions. Where, for example, is the “essence” (Platonic or otherwise) of thechair on which you are sitting? Take it apart mentally: is it in the wood? The legs?Its property of holding you up — which, if you inquire more closely, has nothing todo with the “chair” and everything to do with molecular properties, strong and weaknuclear forces, and all sorts of other things you and I do not understand? Really, “chair,” and everything else, is an emergent property that usefully describes realityas we experience it, but doesn’t really describe its actual truth. As Joseph Goldsteinlikes to say, it’s like the Big Dipper — it describes something about how things lookfrom a particular perspective, but we all know there is no Big Dipper really, right?It’s possible, if the mind is quieted and slowed by meditation, to notice how thoughtspop in and out, how they are all conditioned by other things, and how the idea of the “self” in which all of us are so invested is, like the Big Dipper, just a useful labelthat describes how things seem from a particular perspective — not how they are.In actuality, to speak of chairs, selves, and other things as existing in their ownright is useful but not entirely accurate.But if there’s no self, what is there?That question is where pantheism and atheism shake hands, where nonduality inits speci

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cally religious forms becomes quite interesting. God, we might say, iswhat is left when the self is subtracted from everything else. A Buddhist would sayeverything is an empty play of conditions: your decision whether or not to keepreading is due not to some homunculus inside your brain but to a myriad of causes,including genetics, what else you have to do today, how well I’m writing, learnedbehaviors, and so on. A nondual Jew or Christian uses the word “God” to refer tothose conditions.As these ideas have

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ltered beyond the elite into the mainstream, one regularlyhears nondualistic language — talk of the God inside the soul, the God that

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llsand surrounds everything, and the need to overcome thefalse distinctions — in synagogues and churches around the

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country. Indeed, a kind of auditing of Jewish sacred text and liturgy has begun toweed out the dualistic language, replacing the second- or third-person God with theWordsworthian “motion and spirit that impels all thinking things, and rolls throughall things.” Yet this shift is not without its challenges, particularly in regard to prayer. Not justthe language of prayer but its fundamental assumptions are rigorously personalisticand dualistic; it implies, and sometimes actually states, that “I” am here and you,God, are there, and that I am asking you to do things in the world. Jewish prayerassumes a relationship between God and the devotee, in which the latter speaks toGod. Petitionary prayer even suggests, in a theologically problematic way, that Godmay or may not choose to exercise His/Her power in response to the petition. Yeteven nonpetitionary prayer — thanksgiving and praise being the two other majorJewish types — seems to assume a gap between human and Divine, which prayerseeks to bridge through communication.To be sure, there are ready nondualistic answers to the traditional theological prob-lems of prayer. The

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rst of these is to treat prayer as a contemplative or ecstaticmeditation practice. In the contemplative mode, the words of prayer are meant notto address a distant deity, but to

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ll the mind with salutary re

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ections on bene

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-cence and grace. Pre-prayer, I am thinking of my mortgage payments and to-do list.Post-prayer, when it works correctly, I am thinking of the miracle of my own diges-tion, my luck at being able to support myself, and the daily wonders of human life.Thus, prayer is less about whether God is listening than whether I am.Prayer may also be an ecstatic practice, in which the letters and words of prayer,perhaps aided by song, vigorous movement, visualization, and heartrending devo-tion, become a technology for personal transformation. Here, the change is lessfrom ignorant to grateful, than from ignorant of unity to knowing it — a “knowing” that is less an intellectual concept, as in the paragraphs above, than an Adam-knew-Eve, in-your-kishkes kind of knowing, the way you know the deepest truths,the way you know that you’re seeing right now. Shifting the mind from looking atthe details of life (and identifying with some of them) to becoming aware of its unitytakes place, in ecstatic prayer, by burning away the self. It is this ecstasy, ratherthan the cooler practices of contemplative meditation, that is the primary spiritualpractice of Hasidism. Even more than in contemplative prayer, however, whetherGod is listening is not the right question to ask, because God will appear if “you” drop out. The sentences of ecstatic prayer matter less than the words or even theletters, and the letters matter less than the excitation of the heart.Understanding prayer as meditation, whether contemplative or ecstatic, does rec-oncile somewhat the theological contradiction of a nondualGodhead and dualistic prayer. It also has a long lineage in