Truth Is a Moving Target

Hello there. I'm Tanya Kazanov [music] and you are listening to human and holy. Today we're going to be exploring one of the big questions in every human being's life as a divine and human being which is what is the [music] truth of my spiritual experiences. All of us even when interacting with the truth of the Torah have [music] subjective experiences of the truth. We also have the disappointing reality of feeling very deeply connected to the Torah, to God, to prayer, [music] to our own souls, and then the forgetting of all of those core parts of who we are and [music] being thrust back into the reality of the world. Through chapter 13 of Tanya, we're going to be talking about subjective truth and whether [music] or not subjective truth has a place in the broader picture of the objective [music] truth and oneness of God. This is one of my favorite ideas from the Tanya. [music] It's so original and real and speaks to [music] a very modern, relevant, recurring question that many [music] of us have, which is, are my spiritual experiences actually real? Because I can touch my humanity. I can touch the ways I forget. I can touch the ways that whatever spiritual highs or feelings of love and clarity I have about the divine don't always filter into or trickle into my daily experience of life. So, is that part of myself even true? This idea that I'm sharing with you is located in chapter 13 of the Tanya by the Alterba, specifically the last third of the chapter. But I'm going to catch you up briefly with a summary of where we're at in this chapter, which will give more color and dimension and context to what we're going to be talking about here. And I'm actually going to take the opportunity for this last third where we're really going to talk about our subjective experience of truth and the way that we forget who we are and whether or not that casts a doubt on the legitimacy of our spiritual experiences. I'm going to read that part inside so that you can really see it in the altar of his words because every time I read it again, I think I cannot believe this was written by a kidic rabbi so many years ago. And this answers an existential question that I think every spiritual being has questioning the legitimacy, authenticity and the truth of our spiritual and divine behavior in this world. The question of truth in general of objective subjective truth is one that I think comes up a lot around religion is religion the objective truth of the divine is any experience of truth able to be objective or whole or complete by definition when a human being gets involved with truth it becomes subjective. The phrase subjective truth could be a little uncomfortable to look at because we live in a world where my truth is has become a de facto replacement of any objective vision of morality. On the other hand, we cannot honestly say that any human being gets their hands on truth with complete objectivity. That's not the nature of human beings. any framework for assessing and understanding truth is coming through a subjective humans human being's mind, heart and experiences. But even beyond this broader question of whether or not there is any possibility for real objective truth, there's the individual experience of our own es and flows in our relationship to truth. Our own es and flows, particularly in our emotional connection to truth. how we can sometimes feel it so deeply and how we can sometimes be so disconnected. And this chapter 13 of the Tanya speaks about how within the bayon the character who lives their life in complete alignment with the divine soul through all forms of self-exression thought speech and action through their Torah study through the mitzvos that they do the acts of connection the way that they show up in this world is completely channeling the divine soul through the guidance of the Torah and yet in their inner world they have a human self that is raging and alive and a divine self that also has a voice and the paradigm that the alterbus sets up in this chapter is that each of them have a say as if it's a court case where both get to have a say before one makes a decision and in the Bayanese paradigm in the Bayanese world this human being who is empowered as we all are to show up with agency and to choose which soul has a main voice in her life. This bayon speaks and acts in alignment with the divine soul. But very key here is that the animal soul, the human self, the body, the human consciousness, the consciousness of separateness, the consciousness of the eye, the consciousness of the ego, this always has a voice within the bayon. So even someone whose life is lived in complete alignment with their divine soul never eradicates their humanity. And not that they should either because the transformation and the exchange between the human and the divine self is actually how the divine self how the soul accomplishes its mission in this world. A disembodied soul is obviously ineffective in a physical world. And there's a reason why God created human beings because it is particularly through the vessels of the human body of the human self of the human consciousness of the ego that the divine self finds voice and expression in a physical world. So the goal has never been to eradicate the human self, eradicate the body, eradicate the person. But even deeper within our own consciousness to recognize that there is nothing alarming about a human self that it is that is alive and well within us. There is nothing alarming about a divided consciousness. There's nothing alarming about having different parts of oneself that yearns for different types of things. And the altar of in this chapter actually quotes Rifka when she had Yakov and Asov in her womb. And she was alarmed when she passed by a study hall and her baby kicked. And she passed by a house of those who served idolatry and her baby kicked. And the Alba brings in the example of Rifka when she was pregnant with Yakov and Asov. And she was alarmed because when she passed by the study hall, her baby kicked. And when she passed by the house of idolatry, her baby kicked. And she was concerned this baby was having an identity crisis in her. And she communes with God. When God tells her, "Two people are in your womb." She was able to sigh with relief because two different people with two different desires that I can navigate that I can deal with. So the altra invokes this example as a way to look at our own internal consciousness to recognize that there are genuinely different forces within us that there's a human force that is primed by the world primed by the consciousness of separateness primed by the ego primed by the brokenness primed also just by the desire for everything in this world. And then there's the divine consciousness which yearns simply to be reconnected with God, to be one with its source. And they need to work in partnership because if the divine soul was left to run on its own, it would leave the body and become reunited with its source. It would become once again a soul that was absorbed within God. The body plays an important role in keeping the soul tethered on this earth and keeping the soul in the direction of its mission. The body guides the soul towards its mission to the extent that the Balchto says that when a person has a hunger, a physical hunger for food, it can literally be the soul seeing a spark of the divine in that food and knowing that is mine to make a blessing on. That is my spark to elevate. And in this way, our human selves, our nepha bahamus can often lead us to our divine mission and purpose when they're working together. And this is really the key fusion that has to happen in order for the divine soul to be expressed and not trampled on. When the human being becomes a faithful vessel for the divine soul through working through its blockages, through getting to know what the divine soul is, who it is, through aligning its own consciousness with the divine soul and through having that internal conversation and dialogue so the divine soul could be expressed through the human being. Key point is that both of them have a voice internally. Which one gets expressed in the Bayony is the divine soul in every single way in every act of self-expression. How that expression comes about is through that internal dialogue and through the help of God. The altraba describes that the soul has the advantage of being light over darkness. That the consciousness of the soul is the consciousness of light. It's the consciousness of the revealed expression of the divine. The consciousness of ego of kipa is the consciousness of separateness of darkness of peel of concealment. And so inherently there is simply an advantage of the soul's identity over the humans. Meaning there is a resilience to the soul's identity and it is the part of us that ultimately rises to the top. How do we experience the voice of our divine soul? These rituals, habits, routines that the altruist sets up for us become cornerstones in our ability to connect with the divine. One of the main themes to me in the altra of Tanya is that divine self-awareness is something that has to be cultivated. It's not something that happens by mistake. And it's not something that has to be cultivated by finding something outside of us. Very often, it's through stillness. It's through meditation. It's through prayer. It's through talking to God. It's through opening ourselves up to hear the divine soul's voice within. This is why shabas to me feels like such a gift because I experience this rushing in of my divine soul's voice as soon as the energy of shabas descends on my life. As soon as it's a little bit more quiet, a little bit more still, I can immediately feel how a part of me just lifts its voice and it becomes clearer to me who I am, what I want to do, where I'm going. It's this weekly reconnection to the divine soul within. This silence and this stillness is available to us through spiritual practices that allow us to tap back in to that divine soul's voice to access that stillness to stop the world and to look inward to that divine spark and to that connection with God. Through connecting with God we awaken that divine spark because the divine spark within us is a part of God. So it can be through looking inward. It can be through looking towards God which is also inward. But through Torah study and prayer and so on, we awaken that divine soul's voice within. Now we come to the question of subjective truth. Through prayer, I can awaken my divine soul's voice. Through prayer, I can awaken a clarity about who I am. Through prayer, I can awaken a love for God. However, let's look inside. This level of love which is attributed to the ben during prayer through the divine soul gaining strength over the human being. It is specifically through prayer that the divine soul within a person rises to the surface, becomes a stronger voice within than the human self. Generally, they both have a voice and the human being is generally a louder voice in a person's consciousness. It's the identity that the world sees us as that we are born into. And cultivating the divine soul's identity is the work of a lifetime. Through prayer, we can access the divine soul's identity as being more primary to us than the human being. This is a time when our divine awareness encompasses us as a complete reality. When it feels completely true and completely real to us and like the only thing that matters. I want to extend this to being all of those spiritual experiences that we have where we feel really clear about who we are, really clear about where we're going, really clear about what we want, where we're able to access the divine desire, awareness, consciousness within us in a really clear, tapped in way. All of us have recurring moments of this enormous clarity about who we are, where we want to go, who we want to be, this vision of our divine soul coming to life in a really real and transformative way in our life. What happens when that self fades? What happens when I then return to the world and that love feels like a distant memory? Feels like a dream. Was that ever true? Was that ever a true experience? It seems to be incredibly fickle. It seems to be present in a time of prayer, gone as soon as I'm doing karpole. It seems to be something that is I'm able to tap into at certain moments of prayer, Torah study, divine connection, but then doesn't seem to really awaken itself within my life on a day-to-day basis. My human self is the loudest voice and identity within my consciousness. In these specific spiritual acts, my divine self becomes the louder voice. Let's look back inside. husma. When compared to the rank of the tadikim, of the righteous who are completely transformed to good, who serve God with absolute truth, this level of love that the bayani experiences during prayer is not called true service at all since it is fleeting and it is gone after her prayers, after her divine experience. As it is written, the language of truth will be established forever, but a tongue of falsehood is only for a moment. This is a line from Mish which defines truth saying that truth is consistency. Truth is something that endures. Truth is something that is true at all times and in all places. Something that exists and then no longer exists is not a true experience. That sadic is someone whose experience of loving the creator is one of absolute truth. She does not forget her divine soul. She serves God with consistency, with endurance. This is the mark of truth. The bayon on the other hand is a human being. We are inconsistent by nature. We feel our connection to the divine and then we forget it. We It is fleeting. It is by definition fleeting. We experience a connection to God and then we no longer do. What is that and how can we call that true? Truth is something that is established forever. What is the truth of the human being's experience of connection with the divine if it does not last? If it does not endure, if it is not consistent, if it doesn't last forever, Nevertheless, in relation to the rank of the bayon, it is considered a perfect service in terms of their level of absolute truth. Each one according to her level amongst the different levels of aban absolute truth for them is every person according to their level. The these three words are mind-blowing to me. Ms. Shalm absolute truth for them. Because the bay because the regular person who is empowered to act in alignment with her divine soul does not have the inner makeup, the inner capacity, the inner wholeness, the inner balance to experience objective truth. Her situational subjective temporary truth is the most that she can offer at her level. And therefore, God qualifies it as true. The true experiences that we have, the situational experiences that we have of divine connection that we may judge looking back at as not being 100% authentic because it didn't last forever was the absolute most that we were able to give in that moment. And the spaciousness here, the opening to recognize that when I offer everything I am capable of in this moment, that is absolute truth to God. Because every person is on their own level of divine service and every moment asks something different from us. And even if something does not last eternally in our lives, it is an absolute experience of truth because it is the most that we can do because it is ms la shalah. It is your level of absolute truth. This is why comparison is something that it's just not available to us in our spiritual divine service. looking at someone who seems to have less of a divi of connection to their divine service. Looking to someone who seems to be on a higher level of divine service. There is nothing but our own experience of truth and the maximum that we have to offer. There is nothing but what level of life we are on, what inner world we have and the maximum that we can give from that place and the maximum amount of truth and love that we have to offer to Hashem. And even when those parts of ourselves are awoken and then seem to be rescended, the alterba continues mis I consider their love that they achieve during their prayers also as the language of truth that will be established forever. And you see here how we shift to saying it is the language of truth. It is the edge of truth. It is the lip of truth. And because truth is so true, even if you touch the edge of it, even if you touch the lip of it, even if you only touch the language of it, even if you only touch the glow of it, you are still touching truth since [snorts] it is within the power of their divine soul to always reawaken this level of love by increasing its strength during prayers on a daily basis. And here the altar of offers. It's not simply a remaking of what truth means. It's saying whatever I have to offer in this moment maximum that I can showing up completely even if it doesn't last. This is my experience of truth and this is objectively the most truth that my body and my heart and my soul and my mind can experience. It is also that because it is a point that we can come back to. This is a proof that it is true within us that truth lives within us because whenever we create the conditions to reconnect to the truth, we are able to access it. This proves that the truth within us actually is eternal. Yes, it may seem inconsistent. Yes, it may seem like something that completely es and flows. Sometimes I feel it, sometimes I don't. When I create the conditions for it, I always come back to it. This is a touch point I always come back to. And I love thinking about this in terms of creativity. Anyone who loves to create knows that we go through seasons of creating where we feel like creativity is just coming out of us and we want to create at all times and we go through drier seasons where it feels like our creativity has been disconnected from us. I really experience that during times of pregnancy when the creation of a child seems to zap me of my creative energy and I just feel a lot more dried up in that way and the physical symptoms of pregnancy certainly don't help that. it doesn't really create the conditions for you to really just be in that creative flow. But with my first pregnancy, I remember thinking I was young and I remember thinking, I will never create again. I had been so accustomed to a life of writing and creating and always just being immersed in this creative flow. And suddenly it was all stripped of me and I would take out my paints and nothing would come. I would take out my pen and I would feel so dried up, so depleted. There was nothing there. And I thought I'll never have this creative flow again. But then the creative flow came back and then it was taken from me again. And then the creative flow came back and then it was taken from me again. And this is where we really see that what changes is not the consistency of the flow. What changes is the trust that it will return. The trust that this belongs to me forever because I'm a human being and human beings have creativity within us. Sometimes we are not in alignment with it because of distractions of life, because of other things that are taking our energy, other things taking our resources. But by definition, there is a flow that I will be able to return to within myself. And every person has this flow of energy through that. You may experience it as creativity. You may experience other flows in your life that you become connected to and then distant from. But what really changes in the journey of life is recognizing that this is actually not as inconsistent as I think it is. This is something that lives within me completely and will never be gone. What will change is my access to it. And the same is true of the divine soul. The bayony can always return to the divine soul's voice. The bayony will always return to the divine soul's voice. The human being always returns to the part of oneself that has the advantage of light over darkness. That has the advantage of connection to God over concealment of the world. We always come back to our souls. The fact that we come back is proof that it's eternal. The fact that we come back is proof that it's unchanging. Yes, my access to it is experienced differently on different days, different experiences of life. I may be distracted. I may be consumed by so much else. I may be blocked by my own questions and pain. But I always come back to this. And that's the definition of truth. It's endurance. The fact that it doesn't change. I'm going to skip a couple lines and continue with this couple lines from the bottom of the end of the chapter ad room. The attribute of truth is a boundless inheritance with no upper limit extending to the loftiest heights. Truth has no upper limit. It is connected to infinity. It extends higher and higher and higher. So every time we come away from our experience of truth and we return to it, we often access a deeper level of truth, a more expansive level of truth. It's very easy, I find, to look back at past experiences of our connection to God, Torah, prayer, and to recognize the shallowess of that experience, to recognize how we were not going that deep. And then uh through life experiences, through forgetting and coming back, through deeper study, through deeper connection, we return to the same framework but in with so much more depth. Was the first experience lacking truth? The first experience was also touching the language of truth. But truth is boundless and we are able to touch deeper and deeper and deeper levels of truth. It does this does not compromise the first level of truth that we touched. Everyone always loves to say that new couples are not in love, they are in lust. And I I loved how my mother I grew up with my mother saying, "Of course, young couples are in love. It's only that the love gets deeper over time." The first experience of falling in love is true love. Why isn't it true love? Why would we call it lust? It may not be the deepest level of love that a person can access, but it is absolutely love. What happens over time is that we access deeper levels of love and connection with that person, and we experience a more mature experience of love. The same is true of truth. We experience a subjective, more shallow experience of truth. That does not make it less true. It is still truth just as it is still love. Over time, through forgetting and coming back, we access deeper and deeper levels of that truth. To me, this really makes the case for the moving target of our divine connection. How having a fixed goal and target in our divine connection is not true to truth. Truth is something that expands that we go deeper with that asks different things of us on different days. I remember Raisel Dich in a podcast episode maybe 5 years ago come as you are saying how one way to differentiate between the divine soul's voice within and the voice of someone else that may have been planted within you is to ask if that voice is unchanging. If the voice is unchanging, asking the same thing from you at every single moment from at every single season, saying God wants you to be doing exactly what God wanted you to be doing 5 years ago in the exact same way. That may be the truth of someone else outside of you that became lodged inside. An expectation, an external expectation that you've internalized as God. Because God asks different things of us at different moments. We are always put in different circumstances. And truth is asking something different of us at every single moment. Truth is a moving target at every moment that we experience the divine, that we experience Hashem, that we experience our connection to our souls, we are asked to give the most that we can in that moment the most depth that we can and trust then that even when we forget and even when we come back and experience more deeply, this does not compromise the levels of truth that we access in times that came before. This does not compromise the truth of our experiences even if they did not seem to endure completely. One, you see that the voice of the soul does endure completely that we always come back to it just as that creativity that we lose connection with. And two, this is the absolute truth that we had to offer in this moment with the level of our humanity that God gave us with the level of depth that we had in that moment. And hopefully we will go deeper and deeper in that journey of truth to experience more depth in our connection to be able to offer more to give more to surrender more to be more present with Hashem and to experience more depth in our experience of truth because the levels of truth are boundless. I want to end with a poem that I wrote about this chapter. truth. A wind passing through me where my feet are. Yakov and Asus's dust storm [music] inside me. Skin when you are close enough to see its [music] pores. I turn over my own imperfections like a leaf that has fallen at my feet. It all seems so random. Here's what is true. I am always changing. The same thing is never asked of me [music] twice. My throat finds a song. Is it [music] true? Next question. I [music] sing and sing and sing. Thank