Adar II - How to Live Authentically, With or Without a Mask
“More real than real.” I remember feeling, and maybe even saying that, as I removed the eye mask and sat up on the couch which had held me for many hours and through worlds. If my first psilocybin experience was realer than most of what I had experienced up to that moment, had I just encountered my real, true self within a world in its more-fullness? As I removed the mask, was I still that more authentic person who now knows and has been known more deeply, or have I returned to my former self with only the memory of that knowing, now, unknowing? In these scant moments, psilocybin had taught me how to reorient myself to the light of Purim, all year long.
What I think I mean by “authenticity” here is close to Lionel Trilling’s distillation of the slippery concept: “It is understood to exist wholly by the laws of its own being, which include the right to embody painful, ignoble, or socially inacceptable subject matters.” In the psilocybin space, there was the content of my consciousness and my heart, images and felt realities beyond what I could willfully imagine, “wholly existing “ on its own terms and seemingly without any of the filters, constraints, self-editing, or masking which is part of human life (mine at least—I won’t speak for you.) Fullness of gratitude for the circumstances of my existence—even the painful and shameful realities of loss and the acceptance of things which couldn’t have been any other way than how they unfolded. In a way, it was an experience of being totally transparent and free to simply see and feel things as they were being shown or expressed.
The desire for this type of open disclosure, for removing or thinning the veils between ourselves and ultimate reality are a central objective of Jewish rationalist, contemplative, and mystical traditions and practitioners alike. In the words of Rabbi Menahem Mendel of Premishlan (b. 1728), a radical student of the Baal Shem Tov: There are masks between the Holy One of Blessings and a person. And during the time of prayer, you have to exert all the energy of your mind, making the words that you say shatter and break through that separating barrier until you are able to cling to the Holy One in devekut (Darkei Yesharim, p. 7). While prayer and spiritual practice are often the most active sphere of bringing down these walls between authenticity and intimacy, there are other voices who wished for this type of transparency to be the status quo. The Piacezner Rebbe writes in his guide to creating communities of spiritual practices and integration: Our desire is to tear aside in one motion the entire mask spread across the totality of life. Then, in an instant you will see yourself standing before the Holy One’s glory in the midst of a great camp of angels and seraphim—and you being one of them. This encounter with ultimate Divinity not only puts us in touch with reality as it truly is, but transforms or evolves those who seek and find this unadulterated essence into something a bit more than human. Terence McKenna called this the “encounter with the Transcendent Other,” where an individual or a entire culture can come into contact with “Nature without her cheerfully reassuring ordinary mask of ordinary space, time, and causality.” In this way, “…we are introduced to ever more novel information, sensory input, and behavior and is thus bootstrapped to higher and higher states of self-reflection.” (FOTG, 41-42). The work of the Jewish mystic, or the Jewish psychedelic explorer, is to heal and let go of the layers of culture, trauma, fear, and shame which limit or entirely obscure our entire being.
Yet, this determination to see and be as things truly are is seems to be one side of a paradox that has spanned multiple mystical traditions. Beautifully and succinctly expressed by the 15th C. Sufi poet 'Abd ar-Rahmān Jāmī:
“I said to my rose-cheeked lovely,
‘O you with bud-like mouth, why keep hiding your face, like flirting girls?’
She laughed and said,
‘Unlike the beauties of your world, in the veil I’m seen, but without it I’m hidden.”
In the spirit of hiddenness and revelation, costuming and disclosure, I’m also thinking beyond the authenticity captured in the Hasidic Idealism stated above, to something more playful and grounded. I think about Max from “Where the Wild Things Are,” and the sincerity of his inner and outer transformation by wearing his wolf suit and traveling to place where he could be his true self, at least one of them. In this way, there would be no Max, wild or otherwise, no story about his journey to there and back again, and no book about him, without that costume. He and the mask are synonymous, and he is still completely who he is whether he wears it or not. With it, he encounters exile and misunderstanding, a sense of belonging and leadership tinged with longing, and homecoming and reconciliation. This sense is conveyed in a passage from the Zohar which wonders how Moshe’s could even meet God on Mount Sinai in the first place:
Rabbi Shimon asked: Wasn't the Holy Blessed One upon Mount Sinai, and [in this regard] it is written, "The glory of God appeared like a consuming fire on the mountain top"? (Shemot 24:17) So how was Moshe able to ascend the mountain? However, [the answer is found in:] the verse [that] states, "Moshe went into the cloud and climbed to the top of the mountain" - he went into the cloud as if he was wearing a garment. [That is,] he dressed himself in the cloud that he entered, and, wrapped in the cloud, he approached the fire and was able to get close to it.
Wearing his cloud costume, according to Rabbi Shimon, was the only conceivable way for Moshe to come to the place where the Wild God was. There is no encounter without the mask, veil or garment, because there is, in some Heisenbergian way, nothing to encounter without it. As Elliot Wolfson describes this particular aspect of Chabad mysticism: Put simply, there can be no lifting of a final veil, no defrocking of truth to an ultimate nudity, for in the eventuality of such an absolute exposure, there would truly be nothing to expose. Put even more simply, the most secretive of secrets is the open secret, the secret that is so fully disclosed that it appears not to be a secret. (Open Secret, p.64) Hard as we may try to find the real realness, in this body, or in this life before all the cosmic debts are settled, authenticity may be found in the the sincerity of play, the pretending of childhood that is so much from the heart, it becomes the Real.
May this year’s extra Adar give us plenty more time to work with the masks that bring us closer and farther away from our truest selves, to approach Spirit whose name is Truth, in this time when truth seems elusive.
Hodesh tov,
Z
