Lawrence Kushner > Quotes

“So that's what it's all about! You put your whole self in, you take your whole self out; you put your whole self in and you shake it all about. The idea is that by doing whatever you're doing with all of you, you can then take all of you out. The trick is how to do both.”
― Lawrence Kushner, Invisible Lines of Connection: Sacred Stories of the Ordinary

“By reading holy literature as if it were a dream, we gain access to a primary mode of our collective unconscious.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“personal confusion, search, and self-interrogation are more important than any answers could ever be.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“You must protect people who have no social clout because the health of a congregation is measured by its ability to tolerate dweebs.”
― Lawrence Kushner, I'm God; You're Not: Observations on Organized Religion & Other Disguises of the Ego

“Our tolerance for forms of religious expression we disagree with is a precise barometer of our own spiritual security.”
― Lawrence Kushner, I'm God; You're Not: Observations on Organized Religion & Other Disguises of the Ego

“finding a book is no guarantee that you will understand what it means unless there is also someone there who read it to you when you were very young and who may, indeed, have it memorized." (p 154)”
― Lawrence Kushner, Kabbalah: A Love Story

“A kind of journal of forgotten, reworked, and remembered holy moments, too awesome to be simply described in everyday conscious language. It is all that remains of the most penetrating incursion of waking into the earth-mother-Jewish-people darkness of what is not the spirit, but only sleep. But the memory is still there, set in our bodies by our parents or our choice.
We may ignore the dream or we may appropriate it for ourselves, and so make it our own. It is our choice alone.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“And this, then, is the job of the searchers and the dreamers: to reach deeper and deeper into the dream. Peeling away one layer after another. Until we realize that the voice speaking our dreams comes from within us and from without at the same time.11 Until we see at last that the story is true. Not necessarily because it happened in a particular place at a particular time, but because it is within us. It always was. It issues from us. It is ours. The whole ancient hierarchy of meanings.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“The one who pays attention to the dreams, draws on them, and lives them out is blessed, even as the one who dreams is also dreamt. We each take our turn at living out the dream. Like some ageless wave, Scripture flows through us.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“But everyone dreams anyway. And we-from Joseph to Daniel to Freud-have had dreams, read them, interpreted them, hidden from them, and even, on occasion, faithfully chanted them from a handwritten parchment scroll. They are an intimate part of our”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“how he once slipped through the "scriptural text" of his daily life into the primordial light of consciousness itself.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“But we must not think that just because we have words for all the parts of a tree, a tree really has all those parts. The leaf does not know, for instance, when it stops being a leaf and becomes a twig. And the trunk is not aware that it has stopped being a trunk and has become the roots. Indeed, the roots do not know when they stop being roots and become soil, nor the soil the moisture, nor the moisture the atmosphere, nor the atmosphere the sunlight." (pp 54-55)”
― Lawrence Kushner, Kabbalah: A Love Story

“Religion is a more or less organized way of remembering that every ministry points to a higher reality.”
― Lawrence Kushner

“you choose to believe what you want, and you choose to do what you do. First comes life, then comes law. You are still responsible. You cannot hide behind anything. Since when does religious tradition permit you to short-circuit any morally uncomfortable decision?”
― Lawrence Kushner, I'm God; You're Not: Observations on Organized Religion & Other Disguises of the Ego

“As any good teacher of dreams will tell you, you are all the people in your dream. Fritz Perls taught, "[All] the different parts, any part in the dream-is yourself, is a projection of yourself."22 And to ask why we made our story this way and not that way is to reenter our sacred text once again as living participants. We could have made it another way, but chose to cast it in this one. We must be all the parts of our dream, even the ones we don't like.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“Again and again we trade infinite wonder for a handful of statue; we barter the limitless Nothing for the short-term bird in the hand. And when the deal is done, we have become what we serve: things rather than children of light.”
― Lawrence Kushner, God Was in This Place & I, I Did Not Know: Finding Self, Spirituality and Ultimate Meaning

“We must therefore
entertain the hypothesis that there is an important connection between being 'dialectical' and dreaming, just as there is between dreaming and poetry or mysticism."21”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“This is the great dream of which each individual dream is a personal manifestation. Dream is ontogenetic. Myth is phylogenetic. "Dreams and especially myths are a primary medium for intuitive insights into the ultimate nature of human existence . . . [they] are not restricted to ... sleep. They pertain rather to the symbolic dimension of human experience as a whole."24”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“Each person has a Torah, unique to that person, his or her innermost teaching. Some seem to know their Torahs very early in life and speak and sing them in a myriad of ways. Others spend their whole lives stammering, shaping, and rehearsing them. Some are long, some short. Some are intricate and poetic, others are only a few words, and still others can only be spoken through gesture and example. But every soul has a Torah. To hear another say Torah is a precious gift. For each soul, by the time of his or her final hour, the Torah is complete, the teaching done.”
― Lawrence Kushner, God Was in This Place and I, I Did Not Know

“We seek a metaphor for holy words that will return them to us
once again as an ayfz hayim, a tree of life (Prov. 3:18). One that yields heightened self-awareness and God's Word. One that permits sustained intellectual inquiry and Scripture's holiness. One that preserves clarity, but not at the expense of mystery. One whose playfulness does not dilute piety. One whose public objectivity tolerates personal intimacy. In the spiritual code words of our generation: a holy text.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“One should be so absorbed in prayer that one is no longer aware of one’s own self. There is nothing for such a person but the flow of Life; all one’s thoughts are with God. One who still knows how intensely one is praying has not yet overcome the bonds of self”
― Lawrence Kushner, God Was in This Place & I, I Did Not Know: Finding Self, Spirituality and Ultimate Meaning

“The boundary between now and not yet will softly blur. And the clean line between your discrete body and all creation will someday be no more.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“what is the underlying emotional dynamic of the story? "The emotions displayed in the dream are its most reliable elements. The emotion usually corresponds to the latent but not always to the manifest content of the dream."14”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“Isolate and identify the primary elements of the dream text before us. What are the dream's components? One of the most common errors made in trying to understand a dream is the almost automatic refusal to recognize more than one character or element or verbal idea in the narrative, when of course, all the parts are indispensable.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“Genesis’ saying that we are made in the likeness of God does not mean that God looks a little like us, with a face and a body, arms and legs, but that at the time of the creation of the first man and woman, human beings did not know or care about a tangible likeness, about the fact that they had bodies. The awareness of them is an invention of the human self, idolatrously preoccupied with wanting something to look at in the mirror.”
― Lawrence Kushner, God Was in This Place & I, I Did Not Know: Finding Self, Spirituality and Ultimate Meaning

“Recall our own recent, immediate experiences. Since dreams are often initiated by something that happened only recently, we must ask about yesterday's residue.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“Pay especially close attention to the seemingly trivial details and the little discrepancies.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“All creation is patterned according to an inner blueprint or arrangement
that carries within it a genetic memory of everything that ever happens.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“Assume full responsibility for the dream. For "through the dream the man makes the matter his own; it is in his will, and he is responsible for it."19”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“Consequently, they who cleave with all their mental powers to God … [they have lost their] existence like a drop which has fallen into the great sea and has come to its root and therefore is one with the waters of the sea and it is not possible to recognize it as a separate thing at all.”
― Lawrence Kushner, God Was in This Place & I, I Did Not Know: Finding Self, Spirituality and Ultimate Meaning