A Holiday of Non-Duality and Unconditional Love

Haman the Agagite, looking somewhat repentant

Today is the Jewish holiday Purim, and I'm thinking differently about it than I ever have before. 

A favorite mentor of mine, a psychologist of great influence who has somehow managed to keep his name largely off of the internet, once suggested to me that philosophies of Eastern religion could be a useful balance to the Abrahamic traditions of my Jewish upbringing.

To me, Judaism is four essential things:

—a reverence for the knowledge transmitted through the written word

—a commitment to repairing the world 

—honoring and caring for the strangers among us, the outcasts of society

—an ongoing process of wrestling with the divine

I am committed to each of these things, but with them comes a weighty duty and a busy verbal mind. There is ongoing questioning, ongoing identification of what is in need of ‘repair’ and an ongoing sense that there is urgency to change things, especially when it is clear that a large portion of the world is more invested in tribal self-protection than care for the helpless.

I don’t think it’s an accident that a religion with these values is associated with neuroticism, a tendency to complain and rather dark forms of creative expression. But I’ve always loved the mystic edges of every religious tradition. I love the Sufi texts of the Muslim tradition and I love the Kabbalic ones in Judaism. Since September I’ve sat in weekly study with a small group of Orthodox Jewish women, reading and learning together, and the things I’ve learned almost entirely subvert my overt impressions of the religion of my upbringing.

Take today, for instance. It is the Jewish holiday of “Purim.” I’ve always associated it with storytelling, revelry, drunkenness and costumed festivals, but the shorthand I used describing it to non-Jews was false, something like “Jewish Halloween,” or “it’s cool because it’s centered around this woman who charmed a king with parties and liberated her people.”

I’ve always heard that you’re supposed to get so drunk that you cannot tell the difference between an accursed villain and a blessed hero—but I didn’t realize until I sat with these women yesterday that the implication is that this is a holiday that sanctifies and celebrates non-duality. We read text after text that talked about this holiday being a preview of a world to come, when there would be eternal sabbath and no need for rules, because we’d come to recognize everything as holy, even that which we perceive as evil.

We read also about the implication here that from this vantage point the divine loves us without judgment—that on other holidays we might strive for right-action and atone (Yom Kippur), but on this day even mundane work tasks or partying like a mad man are the same and beloved.

It all gets a little tricksy for me because the deep texts remind me of the overarching themes of my favorite bits of religion, but then you go to a Megillah reading (when the story of Esther is told) and still hear about patterns of rules—that it’s a blessed day to give to charity, to give to your neighbors, that it’s best to prepare with a fast. All this talk of best practices seems to get away from the notion that there’s no differentiation between  an evil-doer and a saint.

I suppose the way that I make sense of it comes back to me from my own experiences of dissolving into oneness, when the parsing out of differences ceases for a blissful moment in my mind and I enter a state where all is one, all is holy. There are extreme ways of going into that too—DMT journeys, for example, or, as I recently learned, states of pain so intense that they turn a corner and just become undifferentiated sensation. These peak states happen, and then you descend from the mountaintop, back into a reality where we function among differentiated others, where it’s useful to learn people’s preferences, where you have a more pleasant time if you manage to find work that feels meaningful and you can figure out habits that keep you in states of relative peace with your body, with sleep, with finances.

There is duality and a collapse into non-duality. Both exist. From some plane it is absolutely the same to have a life of chaos and a life of loving-kindness. I can understand why Charles Manson came back from acid trips thinking of murder as just state changes in matter. But I am human, and invested in harmony. 

So—one holiday a year of non-duality, of unconditional love, when anything, anything you do is absolutely fine—this makes sense to me. And it makes sense to me too that if the world reached a state of “eternal sabbath”—if we were able to find some way into harmony more gently, there probably wouldn’t be a need for so many laws or fasts or rites of purification.

I think about this in mundane ways too—like how much I like the principles of Intuitive Eating, but how almost anyone I know with a mainstream commercially desirable figure has either a serious health condition that stops them from digesting food properly or a punishing dietary and fitness regimen to attain that body, and the process is largely fueled by anxiety. That seems to be a kind of hell to me, but I do believe that some people have figured out a pattern more akin to the “eternal sabbath” bliss state, where either they’ve come to peace with the beauty of their unpunished body, or they’ve been with their stringent habits long enough that the effort doesn’t feel like hell. For the people I know who seem the most at ease with physical form, generally they’ve found some sort of middle ground, where there’s bliss in  gentler discipline. And perhaps there are some people born who have given this no thought at all, who are simply drawn to what nourishes them, move joyfully, and feel totally at ease in their skin, but I have yet to meet such a person.

To forget oneself, to be one with all, holy, holy, holy… it is the missive of today’s Jewish holiday, but it is certainly not unique to the Jews.

Every religion of significance has some text enumerating this collapse into singularity. It is the Tao, the vantage point of the Buddha, a thing happened upon in transcendent meditation or states of psychedelic revelry. “All is one,” non-duality. It is an important enough concept to be a major component of formal attempts to codify revelatory experiences—the metric used by Johns Hopkins, Berkeley and other places where psychedelic journeys are studied for impact makes two of its seven questionnaire categories about states of unity, measured both internally—a dissolving of the sense of differentiated self—and externally—a recognition that you and I are one and the same, star-stuff, from dust and to dust again.

And to be beloved no matter what… certainly any god worth believing in has some measure of that. The divinity I wish for, the one I hope influences my life, both loves me unconditionally and wants me to attain my potential. So I’m in a process of learning how to become what it is I am meant to—and dissolving, again and again, whatever expectations I have placed upon my life or my capacity for service that aren’t meant for me.

So today I dissolve again. I give to charity but let go of my sense that it isn’t enough. I wish for peace in the world, but also recognize the peace that comes when you let go of the rejection of reality. Blessed are the heroes, cursed are the villains. Blessed are the villains, cursed are the heroes. 

I do not need to drink to enter a state in which these things  are without differentiation. And tomorrow, and tomorrow, and forever I will begin again, weaving out of distinction and non-judgment as it suits the moment.