You may have noticed that, recently, as in just over the past five hundred years or so, most of us started thinking funny.
We like to imagine the human mind has evolved and expanded. We discovered entire continents. We discovered the microbes living upon us, split the atom, and planted a flag on the moon. We conquered starvation, infant mortality, and disease, and got a machine to research our doctoral thesis and make silly cartoons of us with six-pack abdomens. Boy, we must be smart.
It takes, however, a lot of focus to cope with an onslaught of knowledge. And focus, by definition, requires discrimination, limiting your scope to ignore peripheral vision.
That’s one fault line. The other is that we’ve had a lot of messy debates on very fundamental issues along the way and haven’t been very good at resolving them. Instead, we just dumped a nasty mix of competing ideas into a juicer and squeezed out a cocktail of incoherent notions about ourselves and the universe we inhabit.
| It takes, however, a lot of focus to cope with an onslaught of knowledge. |
We live inside this stuff. It is the air we breathe. As the fish know nothing but water, we are oblivious to any other way of thinking. The wisdom of the ancients has become all but inaccessible to us because we cannot help but read them in our own voices, incapable of viewing the world through their eyes.
Plenty of authors have dealt with this cognitive dissonance of secular materialism. Here, I’d like to address the worldview of the layperson who maintains a belief in G-d and morality. The picture may be a tad less absurd, but still quite incongruous. Somewhat as follows:
Once-upon-a-time, a Creator made a world out of some primordial matter while obeying the fundamental laws of nature. It’s filled with wonderful machines, some of them alive, and some, like us humans, containing non-material entities called souls. Since then, this world keeps on ticking, living, and growing all on its own.
The Creator of this world sits somewhere outside of it all, accessible only to hermits and ascetics. Or maybe He floats around as an indetectable, mysterious presence. At any rate, He included in His creation some nice things for you to enjoy. Someone or something else dropped some nasty, real bad stuff into the mix. Be smart, avoid the evil stuff, go for the neat things, and you’re good.
So let’s rip into this fairy tale one misconception at a time. I’ll present an alternative view that attempts to bridge the chasm between the ancients and us moderns. That way, we can better understand what our Torah and its sages are trying to teach us, and what Jews have always really believed in their hearts.
Misconception #1: The World Is Made of Things
Your brain, from its dark place within a small, hard skull, extends its feelers to probe the outside world. Photons tickle the cells at the back of your retina. Waves of air disturbances vibrate sensors deep inside your ear. Airborne molecules bind with olfactory receptors inside your nose. Your hands reach out and explore the textures and shapes of your surroundings.
From all these electrical signals your brain receives and more, it constructs a model of your environment, one that will allow you to get up in the morning, make your coffee, and get out the door.
Now, to operate at maximum efficiency, your brain is forced to make things real simple. If you were a different sort of creature, you would see a different world. But you’re a human, and one of the major strategies of the human mind is to conceive of the world in terms of “things.”
We call something a “thing” when we expect it to persist—unless something happens to break that persistence. If a thing was here yesterday, we don’t look for an explanation for why it is here today. It’s a thing, it just is. Things are distinguished from events, or from energy, which demand an explanation for their persistence.
But the truth is that there are no things. Everything is an event. Everything is energy. Every moment, everything is popping in and out of being again and again.
You know the equation E=mc2. It means that matter is just a concentrated form of energy. All those subatomic particles you had to memorize in high school are actually disturbance-events in energy fields. All matter, and even empty space, is actually a seething ocean of virtual particles that enter reality for a flash, only to be immediately annihilated. The “thing” you just saw a moment ago may look pretty stable, but it’s actually not at all the same thing it was a nanosecond ago. It’s really utterly astounding that it’s still there.
| But the truth is that there are no things. Everything is an event. Everything is energy. Every moment, everything is popping in and out of being again and again. |
What would it be like to experience life like this? The truth is, part of us does just that. But there’s another part of us that drowns it out and shuts it down.
Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor is a neuroscientist. She woke up one morning with a massive hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain. When she recovered, she described what it’s like to experience the world without the verbal, linear side of cerebral processing. It felt, she said, as though she were “an energy being connected to the energy all around me.”
That’s strikingly similar to something Rabbi Schneur Zalman writes in the second book of Tanya. Our minds, he explains, do not allow us to see the undercurrent of creative energy that generates our existence. Instead, we see objects, things, a stable, material world. If, however, our eyes were allowed to see and our minds permitted to grasp, we would gaze in utter astonishment at an entire universe emerging at every moment out of the utter void.
The problem for Dr. Taylor was that she could not function in our contemporary human world this way. Apparently, this “thing” perception of ours has something to do with that left hemisphere. That’s key. You see, the modern world has been shifting steadily over into left-hemisphere thinking for the past 500 years. But what we truly want to achieve is a balance of both perspectives.
Thinking of the world as energy changes everything. For one thing, it’s ultimately all one big field of energy. But what, really, is energy? At this point, we need to shatter another strange idea.
Misconception #2: Energy Is Also a Thing
Energy is defined by physicists as “the capacity to do work.” Originally, the term meant something like “being at work” or “at-work-ness.”1 Like we said, it’s an event, a happening. Energy, you could say, is not a thing, but “a doing.”
But what is it that is doing the doing? Fields? Mathematics? Are those really capable of initiating events, moving stuff, generating life and consciousness?
When Gottfried Leibniz introduced the idea of energy as a measurable quantity around the year 1676, he called it vis viva— “life force.” He understood that everything, even a rock, was alive, and that this life force was divine. In other words, it’s the Creator doing work. And that, he explained, is why no energy is ever destroyed. Simple: G-d can’t be destroyed, so how could His life-force be destroyed?
| It’s quite possible that these ideas that came to be known as “conservation of energy” were influenced by strikingly similar ideas in Jewish metaphysics. |
Leibniz, at this point in life, had been corresponding heavily with his friend, Herman von Helmont, compiler of Kabbalah Denudata, a Latin translation of Lurianic texts. He even made some of his own contributions to the project. It’s quite possible that these ideas that came to be known as “conservation of energy” were influenced by strikingly similar ideas in Jewish metaphysics.
These are teachings that describe how the one Origin of All Life is within each and every creation He made. He’s within their volition, their perceptions, their consciousness, and their decisions. But it’s all Him.2 All energy, in other words, is divine energy. Nothing can exist and nothing can live without a constant stream of the divine.
The world thanked Leibniz for the idea of energy—where would we be without it? But we dumped the “divine” as well as the “life-force” notions out of it. We treat energy as though it's just another “thing.” We fail to recognize how shattering the notion of energy is to our concept of reality. Especially once we hit the quantum world, materialism should have come tumbling down.
But let’s stick here to theology. Once you’ve knocked out the energy-thing idea, another towering idol crashes to the ground:
Misconception #3: The Excluded G-d
A Supreme Being sits outside of the universe, peeking in and interfering once in a while. Or maybe He doesn’t care to look in. Or maybe He does, but doesn’t interfere. Pick your version.
Alternatively, He is right here now, but mysteriously indetectable. Something like the elephant that’s here right now, but you can’t see, hear, touch, or smell it. In what way is it here? It’s here, trust me.
| It’s just that He has made His world so convincingly real, we habitually ignore Him and get on with our business. |
Once you’ve dispensed of the static-thing version of the universe, it’s easy to see that either of these notions are plain absurd. He can’t be outside of His universe, because if He’s not here, nothing can exist from moment to moment. Rather, He’s driving each and every event quite openly.
It’s just that He has made His world so convincingly real, we habitually ignore Him and get on with our business. Something like how we ignore the throb of our own heart or the hum of our nervous system.
Of course, He’s also beyond the universe. He’s much more than a “universe-maker.” He’s infinite and unbounded. But that doesn’t prevent Him from being within the universe He creates, as well, in every event, and in every place.
Here’s a helpful analogy: Imagine you’re watching a movie. It was written, directed, and produced by one very talented perfectionist who supervised every detail.
Now, keep watching the movie and tell me when you see him.
You won’t see him anywhere. And yet you see him everywhere, in every line of every character, in every prop, and in every scene. Ingeniously, he has managed to squeeze himself into every detail. And yet, the story and the characters seem so real.
Of course, the actors are their own people. In G-d’s world, beneath everything is nothing but Him. He is like a storyteller who tells a story and it immediately becomes real.
G-d is everywhere. He may be there surreptitiously, hiding with patterns of nature and random events. That’s how he makes it all look so real. But for anything to exist and to live, He must be there.
But, hold on, does that make us all puppets? Or, perhaps…
Misconception #4: Helpless Machines
This is the belief, principally a product of the 17th century, that all creatures, perhaps even you and I (depending on who you ask) are automatons. Nothing is making any decisions. Volition, agency, will—all these are illusions. G-d built us, wound us up, and now we go. Or perhaps we are droids and He runs us by remote control from His skyship.
Alternatively, G-d is entirely out of the picture. We just came to be the amazing machines we are due to external circumstances such as natural selection—with no one in particular doing the selecting. And now, we continue to be directed entirely by those same circumstances. Nothing comes from within.
If you’ve accepted the ever-present G-d idea, maybe we’re all puppets. G-d’s hand animates us from the inside.
All these are just other ways of locking G-d out of His universe. If He is truly everywhere, He must be within the subjective experience of His creatures as well.
| If He is truly everywhere, He must be within the subjective experience of His creatures as well. |
And He is. The Creator invests His intelligence and His will—indeed, all ten sefirot—within each of His creations, so that each one is endowed with its own will and makes its own decisions. That’s how deeply He is embedded within His creation: Even your free will is Him.
Creatures may be limited by their nature—no lion ever chose to go vegetarian. As well, we are all deeply conditioned by experience. But there are no dumb robots in G-d’s universe. Everything is alive, and everything runs its own life. And in the sum total of all decisions, a divine process unfolds. Because it is all divine from the ground up.
(Some have suggested that each being of the universe is a nodal point at which the entire universe makes a particular decision. This is getting way beyond my paygrade, but it sounds so neat I had to mention it.)
Think of the universe along the lines of a computer network. When electronic computing began, you sat at a dumb terminal and asked the mainframe computer to add two plus two. Today, everything, even the smart light bulb, gets its own processor. The Internet doesn’t sit in any particular location—it’s processing power is distributed among (at this writing) some 30-50 billion servers, networking equipment, smartphones, PCs, and IoT devices. Plus, of course, the billions of people who are providing input.
Your own internal neural network is similar in this way. It’s distributed over approximately 86 billion neurons in your brain, not counting the hundreds of billions that lend their voices from the rest of your body. Yet you are one person, with one mind.
G-d’s universe is also a distributed network—but of countless nodes and with realtime decisions happening at each one. It functions as a single whole because He is a single whole.
That’s the amazing thing about this universe, that it combines seeming opposites: Oneness and multiplicity. G-d, apparently, is big enough to handle both.
Misconception #5: Evil Forces Have Nothing To Do With G-d
Now we’re getting down to the practical nitty-gritty. Now you can see what good and bad are essentially all about. Bad doesn’t necessarily mean sinister and destructive. Anything that conceals the true reality is bad. But once you’ve ripped off its mask and embraced the divine energy within it, it becomes good.
Basically, you are in a garden of delicious nuts and fruits. But none of them are ready-as-is. Everything that G-d created in His world requires peeling or shelling before eating.3
Nevertheless, there are some really sinister things in this world. As Rabbi Chaim Vital writes, most of life is real tough and it's the wicked who run the show. How is this possible if the underlying reality is truly good, and it’s all G-d’s garden?
The easiest way to wriggle out of this is to set evil outside of G-d’s domain. Someone or something else is responsible. He’s not involved.
Jews, however, believe that there is only one G-d. Like we said, nothing can exist, never mind live, think, choose, or take action without its Creator’s vital energy flowing into it at every moment. Otherwise, it too would be a god.
In general, Torah provides answers. In this case, Torah creates a question. The one thing that is simple to know is that the easy way out is not a way out.
As the Rebbe once remarked, it must be that G-d does not want us to make peace with the existence of evil in His world, otherwise He would have given us much better answers.4 More on this at chabad.org/147843 and chabad.org/1209
Misconception #6: The Neutral Bubble
This is perhaps the most crucial notion to pop. Because this really changes the way you live.
If G-d were outside the world and you wanted to be holy, you would also have to escape the world to be next to Him. You would divest yourself of all material concerns and focus on other-worldly matters. Even that would prove futile overall, so you would look forward to escaping human form, most likely through death.
Alternatively, you could avoid the exasperation and just celebrate life while you have it. You wouldn’t be doing anything wrong. G-d made a nice world, put you inside it, and now you’re enjoying it.
However, once you’ve got straight that G-d never left this world and is running the show from within, it becomes obvious that there is no neutral ground. It’s all His ground. That’s His divine energy you are eating and drinking. Those are His roses you’re stepping on, His air you are breathing, and His ocean you’re dumping your junk into.
That’s good news, right? You don’t have to escape anything to grasp the divine. It’s all right here, within each thing. How could there be anything that is not holy?
| You don’t have to escape anything to grasp the divine. It’s all right here, within each thing. How could there be anything that is not holy?
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But it’s also shocking news. What a chutzpah of this falafel ball I was just eating to pretend it is anything other than an artifact of divine energy!
A businessman once asked the tzadik, Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk (Poland, 1787-1859), “Rebbe, where is G-d?”
The tzadik answered him, “Wherever you let him in.”
You see, the businessman lives in a world made of things. Each thing has its place. Therefore, the question: In which place is G-d?
The tzadik lives in a different world. His world is nothing but divine energy. At each moment, G-d is regenerating a world out of the void with that energy. That being so, G-d is everywhere. If you can’t find Him where you are, it must be that you are not letting Him in.
Imagine this: You knock on the front door. Someone finally opens and asks what you want. A voice yells from the kitchen, “Tell him we’re busy!” Nevertheless, your host kindly informs you that you can sit quietly on a chair in the lobby until he has time to speak.
“But it’s my house!” you exclaim.
The same here. If your life belonged to you, there would be nothing wrong with making your own objectives and living as you please as long as you don’t hurt others. You’re actually a nice guy just for acknowledging the existence of a Supreme Being once in a while.
| It’s not your house. Your Creator is paying the mortgage, the taxes, and the utility bills. You’re just here to fix the plumbing.
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But it’s not your house. Your Creator is paying the mortgage, the taxes, and the utility bills. You’re just here to fix the plumbing. If you want a bite from the fridge, you better ask for it. And if you’re going to smell the roses or breathe the air, ask for that, too. And, by the way, that falafel ball…
As the Zohar explains Solomon’s words, these are all activities that are “under the sun.” Meaning: They pretend this world is a closed system and there is nothing higher. They break the flow of the spirit of holiness into our world. They deny entry to their own host.
I’m not going far enough here. If He just owned the world He made, it would be decent of Him to afford you some privacy. Like, what’s He doing putting cameras in my bedroom?
But He doesn’t just own it—there is really nothing here but Him. The world as we conceive it is one big lie. In truth, every event and every detail of this world is actually G-d’s private mansion. And it’s your job to let Him in.
How do you let Him in? By keeping mindful of your purpose in this world, saying a blessing on your food and for everything G‑d gives you, trusting in Him on every step of your journey, immersing yourself in His Torah, and filling your life with the mitzvahs He asks of you.
That way, you crack every crazy nut that comes your way and uncover the shiny, sweet truth hidden within.
Six New Ways to Understand Your World
- There are no things. There is only energy.
- All energy is G-d at work. All energy is essentially divine energy.
- Since it’s all His energy, G-d is everywhere, within everything.
- Since G-d is within everything, everything is alive.
- Even evil gets its energy from G-d.
- That being so, there’s no neutral ground. There’s only that which reflects its true reality and that which hides it. Your job is to crack the shell and coax out the truth of everything that comes your way.
