Chanukah Day #6 | Living My Life as a Chick in an Egg

Pharaoh has a mysterious dream. We read in this week's Torah portion mikates. He's standing by the Nile River when out of the Nile ascend seven fat cows, handsome, robust, sturdy, grazing in the reed. But following them, a second set of seven cows comes up from the Nile. They are ugly, lean, emaciated, and gaunt. And then the ugly, thin, skeletal, and lean cows eat up the seven handsome, healthy, and fat cows. Pharaoh wakes up. He ultimately summons Joseph from his prison cell to decipher his enigmatic dream. But here is an interesting enigma. When Pharaoh repeats the dream to Joseph, he adds an insightful detail we didn't hear about the first time around. As the dream was happening, Pharaoh tells Joseph that as the ill-formed, emaciated, lean, and ugly cows swallowed the first healthy, sturdy, fat cows, one could not even tell that they consumed the seven fat cows. "They look just as lean and bad as before," Pharaoh tells Joseph. and then I awoke. Why is this detail added only later in the repetition of the dream? The holy kajnet samagit, Rabbi Israel Hopstein passed away in 1814 was one of the greatest Polishic masters. He presents in his work of Odisall a moving psychological reading of the story. We each operate on two levels of consciousness. One is a divine consciousness in which we channel the cosmic infinite intelligence and love of all of reality. The other is an ego consciousness focused on survival. Each soul channels its energy through seven experiences and emotions. In the Hebrew language, they're known as gura teres and malus. Love, awe, beauty, victory, gratitude, connectivity and surrender. That's by the way why the manora in the holy temple had seven lamps because of these seven emotions for the soul. In the divine soul we experience and embody love of God. Love of cosmic infinite oneness and bliss. We also experience awe and respect. We also glorify him. We see the glory and harmony of infinite oneness everywhere and in everybody in every squirrel and in every tree and every bush and every leaf and every atom and every neuron and every cell. We also experience victory. We battle toxicity, falsehood, darkness, dysfunction, coping mechanisms, cobwebs taking us out of oneness. We also experience gratitude and humility. We also seek intimate connection and we surrender to God's vision and plan so we can channel it at every moment of our life. These are the seven handsome, beautiful cows. But I also have another seven internal experiences which can easily swallow up the first. I am attracted and crave things that will distract me from my essence. I fear people and things outside of God. I glorify things and objects and people outside of truth. I fight for my ego or for my insecurity and for my coping mechanisms. I bow my truth to please others. I crave intimacy with the wrong people and energies and I surrender to my trauma. These are my emaciated seven cows. They don't fill me internally. I feel good for a few minutes, days, or weeks, but the inner void, guilt, shame, anxiety, and fear remain present. I remain tortured inside. I seek relief and gratification through these seven emaciated cows. I figure out how to distract myself non-stop. I learn how to cope well. But inside I am emotionally lean and emaciated. But as the Kashnit samaged writes 200 years ago, people don't know what they don't know. As I am in my emotional slumber dreaming, I don't even know that my inner blissful consciousness has been hijacked and swallowed up by my coping mechanisms, by my survival skills, by my trauma, by my dysfunction because I don't know what I don't know. I am in exile, but I think it's redemption. It's too scary for me to see the truth. So, I delude myself that I am functional and fine. I can live my entire life and I speak from personal experience as a chick in an egg believing and thinking that the egg comprises all of reality. I find comfort in that egg. I build palaces in that egg. I construct my career in that egg. I get validation in that egg. I become a successful person all in that egg. And then when my egg cracks open, it's painful. I am disoriented. What's the first thing that happens when I wake up and I see outside of the egg? I discover that my seven beautiful cows were swallowed up and I never even knew. The saddest thing about my trauma was that I didn't know I was in trauma. I thought this is normal. I thought life was supposed to be miserable. That our heart was supposed to be shut down. That I'm supposed to be so self-conscious. The first stage in waking up is realizing how my seven beautiful cows have been swallowed up to the point that I don't even know that they were there. But the very fact that there is an eye that can observe this truth means that a part of me, my truest essence, remains whole, unsoiled. That is the tiny jug of pure oil. The essence of your divine soul which can never be devoured. The inextinguishable flame of your core purity and holiness will end up liberating the seven divine emotions from captivity. Happy Kaneka.