Lugnasa and the 99% Full Harvest Moon

Tuesday gratefuls: Ninja blender. Figuring out the veggie paradox. Celecoxib. Allows me to stand long enough for short cooking. Pain lessened. Over my dislocation created by possibly shorter life span. Feeling grounded in my life again. In part thanks to the pain treatment. A beautiful photograph. Taken by me. Header. Serious thinking. Tarot. Jessica Roux.

Sparks of Joy and Awe: The Sky at dusk on Shadow Mountain

Kavannah: Yirah

One brief shining: Each night after the lights go dark, the window’s cranked full open, the fan turned on, and I’ve taken my last look at the Stars through the Lodgepoles, I fall into a revery of thought, never knowing where my mind will carry me but always happy for the ride, this idea bouncing off that one, triggering another turn of ideas or images, pure and unguided inner joy. Today’s post is about last night’s journey.

Thinking about the day as my head lay on the pillow, body stretched out and at peace. As I try to do each night, I consider the middah I chose. Did it come to mind? Did I experience its manifestation? What were the specific moments when that happened? How did I feel? Then, and immediately afterward. What did I learn?

Yirah. Awe. Wonder. Amazement. [(fear)] Yirah, the Hebrew for this sudden feeling of openness, of seeing clearly, often got translated, by Jews and Christians alike, as fear. As in the phrase “Fear of the Lord.” Bad translation. Bad. Down boy. And I say boy advisedly, because Fear of the Lord has a decided patriarchal connotation. Bow down to the King, the one who rules you, makes you obey, has the power of life and death over you.

Rudolf Otto defined the Holy as containing an element beyond the ethical sphere, which he named the numinous.* Stripped of what Otto defines as its element of moral perfection, which he has to assume because he’s writing within a Christian context, the holy, the numinous, is in my opinion what we mean by the word sacred.

Yirah opens a neural pathway for experiencing of the numinous. Which, again Otto, can be both terrifying and fascinating. In Yirah, in awe, wonder, and amazement we find the gateway to revelation. And what is revelation? An experiencing, however brief or long, of the numinous, the holy. The sacred.

I reclaim a possible connection to Kant here in his use of the word noumenon. Below the author of the Wikipedia article says the numinous is unrelated to Kant’s idea of the noumenon which refers to: “…an unknowable reality underlying sensations of the thing.” Kant also called this the ding an sich, the thing in itself, whatever an object of perception is without the observer.

What I believe Yirah opens us to is just that: the ding an sich, the thing itself. Reality as it is, not as we confuse it with our preconceived ideas, our biases, our values. I think you could also call it the field out beyond good and bad where Rumi invites us to meet.

What is that reality, for which I now claim the word sacred? A place where the mystic bonds of each to each and all to all become, however briefly for us, accessible. So in cultivating the middah of yirah we strengthen the inner muscle that allows us to see beyond the surface to the ligaments and tendons that link us to the Tree, the Friend, the Lodgepole Pine, the Mountain, the Ocean, to our Lover, to our Inner World and in it to the Collective Unconscious. Those connections which tie us inextricably together, a roiling, boiling mass of creativity, of newness that we try, hard, to ignore because experiencing it directly is to experience, perhaps, the terror of dissolution, yet also a deep fascination. Oh, so this is what the World is really, really like?

An important observation here is that this is not a logical nor a conceptual process. It is a sensory process, in other words, a process stimulated by seeing something, hearing something, touching something, tasting something. It is in no way faith. You might call the experience of yirah a mystical moment, whether long or short.

So when I took in whole cloth the bulk of Black Mountain and realized a moment of wonder, what happened was a brief, bodily experience of all the links and bonds that tie me to Black Mountain and Black Mountain to me. When I watched Great Sol’s light fade into night and the colors entranced me, I saw into the mystic bonds that tie me to Great Sol, to the dusk, to the coming night, to the vast distances between Shadow Mountain and our Star. When I experienced, for a moment, myself as part of the Arapaho National Forest, a human among Trees, I felt one with each Lodgepole, Rock, Stream, Mule Deer, and Elk.

And one more bit. Yirah, then, is a sensory event which peels back the gauze of day-to-day illusion in which we see and treat everything as separate from our body, ourselves. The midot, all the character traits we study in mussar, I think, are ways we can open ourselves to the world, ways we can become a moment for the other to experience yirah and us as bonded to them. A give and take, a push and pull, a way perhaps of becoming holy, sacred.

Yirah is the gateway for revelation. revelation the gateway to the sacred. The sacred is seeing the links that bind us to the all and the all to us.

*”…while the concept of “the holy” is often used to convey moral perfection, which it does entail, it contains another distinct element, beyond the ethical sphere, for which he coined the term numinous based on the Latin word numen (“divine power”).^{[2]: 5–7  (The term is etymologically unrelated to Immanuel Kant’s noumenon, a Greek term which Kant used to refer to an unknowable reality underlying sensations of the thing).” He explains the numinous as an experience or feeling which is not based on reason or sensory stimulation and represents the “wholly other”}

“The Holy, according to Otto, is a mystery (Latin: mysterium) that is at once terrifying (tremendum) and fascinating (fascinans).   ^Wiki