97 — I YEARN, THEREFORE I AM
It is said that the Great Maggid would convene his inner circle every night to teach them the sacred texts. All of his greatest students would gather. The Maggid would begin to speak, “And God said . . .” and Reb Zushya would leap up, overwhelmed with longing. He would yell out, “And God said! God said!” He would spin around and around like a leaf in the wind, and then faint, unconscious for the rest of the teaching. Every night it was the same thing. The other disciples would tease him. “Zushya, you’re missing all the holy teachings!” This teasing went on for days and days until finally the master said, “Leave him alone; he’s the only one who gets it.”
For the Hebrew mystic, unlike his Buddhist or Greek cousins, desire and longing are sacred. Eros is the yearning force of being. I yearn, therefore I am. To be cut off from the Eros of yearning is to be left in the cold of nonexistence. To yearn is to be aflame.
This longing is built into the very fabric of human existence. In the Hebrew story of the creation of humankind as well as in Plato’s myth told in The Symposium, all human beings were initially both male and female. “Male and female he created them,” reads the biblical myth. Then they were separated from each other. And now they yearn to reunite with each other.
According to the biblical myth recorded in the Zohar, this was the grand design of creation. First, human beings needed to realize that they are essentially interconnected. No human being stands alone. None is essentially alienated, lonely, or separate. Then they must be separated from each other. At this point the longing for reunion begins. That yearning will be the driving force in human growth and spiritual unfolding.
The difference between Plato and the biblical wisdom is that in the latter it is a longing that can essentially be fulfilled. Fulfillment is a genuine option and not an impossible mirage situated over the next hill by a punishing and cruel universe. Yearning is the essential formula of the universe.
INSIDES AND OUTSIDES
This yearning, however, is more than mere myth or metaphor. The interior science of enlightenment teaches us to feel the yearning that lies on the very inside of reality. It is the eye of the heart and the eye of the mind that see and feel the cosmos yearning. All of the longing, desire, and yearning that we have described above participate in the yearning of reality itself. When you yearn, you are an expression of reality’s longing. Your desires are a fractal-like expression of the desire of existence itself. As we saw earlier, all of reality has both insides and outsides. Every event, every person, everything has both an interior and an exterior.
The interior experience of being in love is a set of feelings. They may include feelings of mad devotion, ecstasy, delight, gifting, yearning, wholeness, and fullness of presence. The exterior experience of being in love is reflected in the neuroscience of the brain and in a set of concrete actions taken by the person in love. An entire cocktail of love chemicals are secreted in the brain. New neural pathways are formed throughout our brains and bodies as a direct expression of our being in love. We perform concrete actions, which might include buying gifts, moving to a different city, moving in together, sex, writing poetry, and much more. You yearn for more and more contact, mutuality, recognition, union, and embrace. Such is the nature of being in love. There is a constant yearning to deepen, to expand, and to grow together.
This experience of love with its emphasis on yearning has an exterior. It is called evolution. Perhaps this seems surprising. The popular mind, after all, sees evolution as an objective process described by science. But evolution is not only a dry set of scientific theories. It is the greatest spiritual revolution of our time. Evolution tells us that the universe is not merely a fact but a story. A story is going somewhere. The story has plot and direction. The plot line is evolution. That means that reality is a story. Reality is not only eternal, but it is also evolving. The story has a trajectory.
The emerging scientific understanding: Reality is a story with both interior and exteriors. There is a universe story with plot and direction, and you are personally implicated as a major actor in the trajectory of this story.
— An excerpt from the book “A Return to Eros” by Dr. Marc Gafni and Dr. Kristina Kincaid
