Moses Come Fly With Me Quotes

1:315-316 WHITE-BIRD SENTENCES In my dream large white birds, larger than geese, were flying. As they flew, they were praising. I understood the bird-language. One was saying, I praise you in all circumstances, and another was saying the same in other words, and another in yet other phrasing, but I could not remember what I should say. I interpret this dream to be telling me to be continuously grateful, no matter what, in my waking life, and also to remember that there are a hundred thousand ways to praise. These white-bird sentences begin in nonexistence, where creation makes entity from nonentity. What flows through us as praise comes from where Moses and Jesus are standing with the other friends of God. Another night in the state between waking and sleep I saw a gazelle coming toward me with an open mouth. It put my whole head in its mouth and turned its lips in arcs around my forehead and chin and the sides of my head. The gazelle-maw got larger and larger. It could have swallowed my whole body. About to lose consciousness, I began to chant, No power but yours, no power but yours.... The strange malevolence that was trying to devour me went away. Peace came. Now I know how epileptics feel. In another dream I was eating salty food. My gums became brackish. I woke with a salt taste in my mouth. Events happen here that no one records. Universes overlap. We are led in ways we will never understand. It should not surprise anyone when the angel Gabriel comes and take Muhammad away in an instant. Someone asked, If the commands of God are preeminent, then what choice do we really have in life? Between the words preeminent and commands lies a great mystery. The divine essence is not like anything, nor can we examine it or its effects. Try to trace to a source just one thing that has ever come to you. Now imagine you are blind from birth and that you have never seen this world or recognized any of its meanings.

logical but ungrounded ideas. It’s not the ethical self that wants to live by someone else’s “oughts.” It’s not the spiritual self that wants to fly nonstop to heaven. True self is the self with which we arrive on earth, the self that simply wants us to be who we were born to be. True self tells us who we are, where we are planted in the ecosystem of life, what “right action” looks like for us, and how we can grow more fully into our own potentials. As an old Hasidic tale reminds us, our mission is to live into the shape of true self, not the shape of someone else’s life: Before he died, Rabbi Zusya said: “In the world to come they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”18 Memo to myself: stay on the ground, turn around, ask, and listen. True self is true friend—it’s a friendship we ignore at our peril. And pass the word: friends don’t let friends live at altitude.