Heshvan - Our Pillars of Creation
In my conversations with psychedelically engaged Jews around the world, most people are seeking support to integrate previous psychedelic experiences or assistance with designing an upcoming experience that meets their spiritual or religious needs. As these individuals report back on their experiences in psychedelic spaces as Jews, however, a serious question is beginning to emerge as a major issue for our community, sometimes as a curiosity, often as a mournful confrontation: “where do I actually come from?”
Questions of ancestry and lineage seem to be baked into contemporary psychedelic discourse in a number of ways. In Indigenous settings, healers, shamans, or “wisdom holders” often derive their authority to work with, and distribute, sacred plant medicine from their hereditary ancestry or having studied under a particular teacher and see themselves in their lineage. Similarly, in Western contexts, therapists also affirm the lineage of the modalities they utilize in their practice, even if those lines go back a mere hundred years. These sacred plant and fungi species and their psychoactive compounds even have their own evolutionary line, traced through phylogenic mapping. And of course, users of psychedelics in many different settings can encounter memories of relatives and ancestors they may or may not have met, patterns of human behavior inherited through mimetic/genetic absorption, and historical systems of oppression and wounding. Invariably, when Jews enter into these spaces, they can be confronted with the discontinuity of their own ancestral lines, their families’ lost histories or the disappearance of memory. When intimate knowledge of people’s family narratives can only stretch back one or two generations, they wonder, how can I heal what is lost to the void?
This comes up, as well, when Jews begin to directly encounter spiritual, religious, or mystical content in their psychedelic journeys. Whether they are devotedly secular or modern Orthodox - having an embodied sacred adventure, a meeting with the Divine, hearing urgent messages from the Beyond - for most of us, our modern religious educational and institutional lineages did not prepare us for such things! While not all of us are descendants of Kabbalistic or Hasidic dynasties, the flowing lineages of teachers and students who could pass down knowledge navigating these supernal, intimate realms became rarefied and narrowed to a few precious streams. Urgent spiritual questing meets a challenge in pedagogy and literacy: if much of this ancestral wisdom exists mostly in books written in specialized languages and idioms, the Jewish psychedelic seeker needs other avenues of connection and support.
Where do we ultimately come from? How far back can we trace our lineages, especially when we feel desperate to heal them?
As we begin the annual Torah cycle again, our ancient understandings of humanity’s lineages and genealogies are on full display. Yet, the earliest lineage we are taught begins with the individual, the first human. In a radical retelling of the creation story, Rabbi Isaac Luria, the “ArI,” one of the greatest innovative teachers of the Jewish mystical tradition, shares that the desire to create a human being was somewhat of an afterthought. After five days of coming into existence, all of creation became conscious of the fact that it was differentiated–the rock could not grow, the plant could not roam, the animal could not speak. Each creation, seeing it lacked something the other possessed, cried out to its Creator, “How can I connect to You in my limited capacity?!” Hearing this, the Creator entreated the cosmos, light and darkness, water and sky, land, all the flying, crawling, walking creatures, saying “Let us create a human in Our image,” asking each of them to give of their inner qualities to create the human together. Dependent on all of creation, yet ultimately free, the human can ally with the created world, but is ultimately responsible for its protection and preservation. We reflect the sufficient abundance of all reality back on itself. This is our fullest lineage, our truest point of origin, our pillars of creation.
There will be time for rabbis and books and God equations(go seek them out!) and for detangling in your intergenerational web, but for so many of us, the histories and practices of our families of origin will not be easily recovered. Yet, the Ari’s extradimensional insight into this one verse reveals the possibility that we are never separated from our ancestors. They live in us, always surround us, are ready to support us, and depend on us. A Jewish psychedelic view of ancestry allows us to heal our lineage by expanding the boundaries of where we think we come from.
With blessings for a grounded, elevated 5783.
Z
