Praying towards the West

Living on the edge between land and sea, in the State of California in the USA, was all I had ever known when I met my Basherit, the love of my life. We met for the first time in the doorway to our future home, the sun directly behind me as the portal opened to reveal the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. My head began to bobble, I noticed, unconsciously as if I were from far away, in the east, in India. The shadow I had cast allowed her to see me without squinting in the low-lying sun, as it made its way across our bright blue sky. She bobbled her head in return, saying later that the peculiar action was to maintain the effect of a halo around my head. But, we both understand only now that it was actually to preserve the vision of another world. Unknown to either of us at the time, we stood at the entrance to a portal, one which offered us a vision into the world to come.

Living in the West, both of the continental United States and in the greater world, we had been raised strictly with science and rational thinking. This was particularly difficult for me as an artist, because these precepts could never actually explain the voices I heard, or the inspiration I often acted upon, except by using mental illness or madness as its cause. But I knew, even as a young child, that I wasn’t insane, and that inspiration came from elsewhere, beyond random associations occurring within brain matter. But, this awareness of sanity was troubling at the time. I can still remember feeling like a forgotten extraterrestrial experiment, wondering about small and mostly unseen things: “What caused particles of sand to hold together at the beach, why did the sun set over the ocean in a slightly different place every day, why did I have nails on my fingers and toes, and why did they always grow?” Biology and environmental sciences had answers, of course, but I wasn’t actually interested in those. I was interested in why I had asked the questions in the first place, which is eventually what I set out to understand, in the East.

By the time I had graduated from high school, in the early 80s, I had been thoroughly indoctrinated into a west-centrist way of thinking. I believed that if science hadn’t explained something yet, it was just a matter of time before it did. All the while, this internal conflict which I had had matured over the years, both believing what my society taught me, that science was the aphrodisiac I worshipped, and also knowing that this worship conflicted with the internal truth that I knew in the core of who I was, in my mind, even in my soul, whatever that may be. It had become my compass, this internal conflict, the tool I trusted, and with which I set out to find my path forward. So, I traveled east to the place where west-centrist thinking had begun—Europe. My travels first found me zigzagging eastward across the US and Canada on a bus, living in the back seat, and camping in city parks along the way. When I reached the Atlantic Ocean, which I’d learned somewhere meant ‘eternal,’ I flew further east still, to London, a bit closer to my genetic roots. Then, for a few months, I rode a train throughout Europe, without any sort of plan, whatsoever.

During my travels, I learned what I could about the place I found myself in from information centers and museum bookshops. I slept in hostels or behind train stations and I ate where I could. Everywhere I looked I asked the questions I needed to ask in order to understand where inspiration came from, and why there were voices in my head questioning the knowledge and beliefs I’d nurtured. Yet, everywhere I found myself was the same, whether in the historical depths of Rome or Florence, in the northern mountains and fiords which had birthed my namesake’s Viking roots, and even in the politically charged borders between west and east in East Berlin. I found that the stone and canvas, the gardens and architecture, and the sociology of each society I visited, all led back to the West. True east, I realized, was further still.

So, after I made my way back as far west as I could go, back to where I was born, at the Pacific Ocean in California, I inched my way east little by little; first by moving the little family my Basherit and I made to the Midwest, to Colorado. In Boulder I sought out the most ‘East’ mindset I could and I joined a community called Jewish Renewal. My problem was that I hadn’t yet found my inner Jew because I had only recently become one. In my studies over the years, delving into Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and Hinduism, Jewish thought and practice had floated to the surface as a way to understand my inner dilemma. I couldn’t just renew something I had never had… so, after learning what I could, traveling towards the east took me further still. From the Midwest I moved my family to the Middle East.

With the goal of being closer to the world, we settled on the western coast of the Promised Land. Israel was east according to our west-centric conditioning, but on an actual map it was right in the middle of everything. Living in the center of the world could enable further travel, Africa, Madagascar, and even Indonesia… but, the center of everything was much grander than only that. Israel has been with humanity from the beginning, from the essence of how we believe. The precepts written into our societies in the West stem from the gift we were given here, in the center of the world, both metaphorically and literally.  

Israel in Hebrew can mean ‘straight to God,’ and in English transliterated it can be ‘is real.’ Both are true, from my experience. I started as far west as I could have, and went east. I landed to live in the center, and I found that branching out into the south, north, and even back west just pushed me further east. All that was left was to find the source, to find the East we all dream of, to truly understand ourselves. I am back now, in the center of the world, back in Israel, the Promised Land, after spending some time in the East this summer. I traveled to India, seeking an understanding of what it was to live in a place of personal, intense, belief and awareness of living, of life in our world. While there I found what I was looking for behind every turn. The East is filled with history, belief, and resolute understanding of what it takes to be in the self. The West can easily learn from the East, but I also found that bringing it all home is the job of the Center.

At one point, on the rooftop of an old-city haveli-hotel, after finding on my phone’s compass the direction of Jerusalem to pray towards, I looked around and discovered others also praying on other rooftops. Each was an old man, like me, but each was practicing their own modality to find their center. I noticed, however, that none of them were facing west. Each of the other Yogis and worshippers were looking in different directions from each other, some at a specific point in physical space, as they made offerings to their temple's god, looking into the eye of an image or statue to focus their attention, and there were others focusing inward, stretching their bodies as they reached Ayurvedic nirvana. Because I was in the East, I prayed west, towards the city that birthed my people. I prayed towards Jerusalem, towards the Temple Mount, as Jews around the globe have done for thousands of years. I had finally, after many years of praying east, and some even praying north or south, found my center in the East while praying towards the west, towards Jerusalem, the Center of the world.

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