In the Jewish religion, the idea of conscious awakening was not common at the level of the simple, nor at the level of the raz, but more at the level of the sermon and the secret, that is, mainly in Kabbalah and the Zohar. However, there were those, mainly in Hasidism, who represented this idea. One of them was Rabbi Nachman of Breslav.
Rabbi Nachman was unusual, different and unique against the background of other Hasidic rabbis. And it should be remembered that they themselves were exceptions against the background of Orthodox Judaism, which advocated the existence and observance of laws and mitzvot while Hasidism spoke about different things. Hasidism returned the personal experience, the subjective level, to the center of the discussion. Today there are even those who find in R. Nachman’s teachings elements of depth psychology and existential psychology.
Rabbi Nachman loved to tell stories. When he saw that his teachings were not really being taken in, he chose a ‘bypass road’ to resistance and started telling stories. Here is one such story of his. It does not belong to those stories that were accepted as R. Nachman’s stories, but is found in the margins of R. Nachman’s stories, in a book called: “Book of Wonderful Stories” published in 1972. The name of the story is “The crazy grain”.
The story of the crazy grain
“One time, the king said to his lover, the other to the king, when I predict by the stars, I see that every grain that will grow that year, whoever eats it will become mad, so he will hold a council.”
The king knows that the grain is dangerous, that is to say that it will cause madness, and hence the king and his adviser need to consult a counsel and this is what the king asks his wise adviser. And then the same consultant answers:
“They will prepare grain for them so that they will not have to eat from the aforementioned grain.”
That is, it is possible to keep the unpoisoned grain for the king and a few other privileged protectors – so that they will not have to eat the grain that the masses will eat from. But here the king answers him:
“If we alone will not be crazy and the whole world will be crazy – then it will be the other way around.”
That is, says the king, if everyone eats from the grain and becomes crazy and we don’t eat and become so-called normal, then in their eyes they will be the normal ones and we the crazy ones. And of course that’s out of the question. As he says to him: What kind of advice do you give me, because even if we eat the grain that won’t make us crazy, it won’t actually help us and we’ll end up in the madhouse anyway because we won’t be normal, that is, we won’t belong to the norm.
“Therefore, of course,” adds the king, “we will have to eat the grain as well, but only if we mark a mark on our foreheads, so that we will know in any case that we are crazy, and if I am looking at your forehead and you look at mine, we will know from the mark that we are crazy.”
Look at your forehead and you will see the sign that you are actually crazy
So far the story of R. Nachman. One of the interesting interpretations that can be attributed to this story is an interpretation of the anti-psychiatry current, mainly in connection with the approach of the psychiatrists Thomas Sass and Ver. d. Liang, that insanity is highly relative, and cannot be unambiguously defined, and that it is what the establishment at a given time defines as insanity and it defines it that way because it constitutes an exception to an accepted norm.
That is to say, this story actually attacks the usual square view of what it means to be a decent person and says that madness is not something unstable in a person’s soul, but a deviation from a social norm.
Therefore, not eating the new grain will not help the king and his advisers because the psychiatric status of the king and the ministers will be determined anyway neither according to substantive tests nor according to the rules of medicine, but according to an exception to the general norm.
But the more significant interpretation is that we are really crazy, that is, sleeping and dreaming. We see ourselves as sane, as people with reason and common sense and soundness, but Rabbi Nachman comes and says that we made a mistake; We have already eaten from the grain. Look at your forehead and you will see the sign that you are actually crazy.
In other words, the parable of the grain comes to teach us that to a certain extent we are crazy, and what is it to be crazy? A madman is a person who lives in an unrealistic world, a world of dreams, a world that has its own reality that does not fit objective standards (the madman lives in a subjective world that he created for himself). And therefore, since everyone behaves in a certain way – the madman seems unusual. The story tries to show us that everyone lives in some kind of subjective world, in some kind of world of their own, that is, there is a thesis here that says that the world – as we perceive it – is a world of image, or even of fraud, that is, it is a world of phenomena. The world we are looking at is not the real world. This is a world in which there is concealment, concealment of the real world.
The idea of concealment is one of the basic ideas of Hasidic thought. This is an idea of the Baal Shem Tov as it is presented by his student Rabbi Jacob Yosef.
And here comes Rabbi Nachman and says that despite the concealment it is possible to discover something from it, and how? Well, when we look at the mark on the forehead and we say to ourselves that we are crazy – we are actually admitting to ourselves that we do not see the real world, we realize that the world is not as we see it.
And this ability to know that we are living in a fraud and that the real world is hidden from our eyes is very unfriendly to the intellect, to the common sense and rational, the one that likes to touch objects and know that they are solid, to know that the world is what it seems.
And why is it similar? For a person who is in a dream in a dream, and he realizes that he is in a dream and he wants to wake up but he can’t. To look at the mark on my forehead or on the other’s forehead, or to look in the mirror is to understand that we are in the dream, and knowing that you are dreaming when you are dreaming, is the beginning of the path of suffering towards awakening from the dream.
The consolation of the story is the secret of the sign; We can come to the understanding that we are crazy (meaning asleep), although this understanding does not help us to be saved from this situation, but at least we can know that we are there.
The Sisyphean way and the short way
Actually there are two ways to get out of this state of sleep. One way is the Sisyphean and mechanical way in which you know while you are sleeping that you are sleeping, and this knowledge will create uncomfortable sleep, which will lead to increasing flashes of wakefulness, which will eventually lead to fuller wakefulness. Another way is a sudden awakening, a quantum leap into consciousness.
And here we come to the idea of alchemy. Gurdjieff speaks of a change of state of consciousness, a change from the state of a sleeping person to that of
In the Jewish religion, the idea of conscious awakening was not common at the level of the simple, nor at the level of the raz, but more at the level of the sermon and the secret, that is, mainly in Kabbalah and the Zohar. However, there were those, mainly in Hasidism, who represented this idea. One of them was Rabbi Nachman of Breslav.
Rabbi Nachman was unusual, different and unique against the background of other Hasidic rabbis. And it should be remembered that they themselves were exceptions against the background of Orthodox Judaism, which advocated the existence and observance of laws and mitzvot while Hasidism spoke about different things. Hasidism returned the personal experience, the subjective level, to the center of the discussion. Today there are even those who find in R. Nachman’s teachings elements of depth psychology and existential psychology.
Rabbi Nachman loved to tell stories. When he saw that his teachings were not really being taken in, he chose a ‘bypass road’ to resistance and started telling stories. Here is one such story of his. It does not belong to those stories that were accepted as R. Nachman’s stories, but is found in the margins of R. Nachman’s stories, in a book called: “Book of Wonderful Stories” published in 1972. The name of the story is “The crazy grain”.
The story of the crazy grain
“One time, the king said to his lover, the other to the king, when I predict by the stars, I see that every grain that will grow that year, whoever eats it will become mad, so he will hold a council.”
The king knows that the grain is dangerous, that is to say that it will cause madness, and hence the king and his adviser need to consult a counsel and this is what the king asks his wise adviser. And then the same consultant answers:
“They will prepare grain for them so that they will not have to eat from the aforementioned grain.”
That is, it is possible to keep the unpoisoned grain for the king and a few other privileged protectors – so that they will not have to eat the grain that the masses will eat from. But here the king answers him:
“If we alone will not be crazy and the whole world will be crazy – then it will be the other way around.”
That is, says the king, if everyone eats from the grain and becomes crazy and we don’t eat and become so-called normal, then in their eyes they will be the normal ones and we the crazy ones. And of course that’s out of the question. As he says to him: What kind of advice do you give me, because even if we eat the grain that won’t make us crazy, it won’t actually help us and we’ll end up in the madhouse anyway because we won’t be normal, that is, we won’t belong to the norm.
“Therefore, of course,” adds the king, “we will have to eat the grain as well, but only if we mark a mark on our foreheads, so that we will know in any case that we are crazy, and if I am looking at your forehead and you look at mine, we will know from the mark that we are crazy.”
Look at your forehead and you will see the sign that you are actually crazy
So far the story of R. Nachman. One of the interesting interpretations that can be attributed to this story is an interpretation of the anti-psychiatry current, mainly in connection with the approach of the psychiatrists Thomas Sass and Ver. d. Liang, that insanity is highly relative, and cannot be unambiguously defined, and that it is what the establishment at a given time defines as insanity and it defines it that way because it constitutes an exception to an accepted norm.
That is to say, this story actually attacks the usual square view of what it means to be a decent person and says that madness is not something unstable in a person’s soul, but a deviation from a social norm.
Therefore, not eating the new grain will not help the king and his advisers because the psychiatric status of the king and the ministers will be determined anyway neither according to substantive tests nor according to the rules of medicine, but according to an exception to the general norm.
But the more significant interpretation is that we are really crazy, that is, sleeping and dreaming. We see ourselves as sane, as people with reason and common sense and soundness, but Rabbi Nachman comes and says that we made a mistake; We have already eaten from the grain. Look at your forehead and you will see the sign that you are actually crazy.
In other words, the parable of the grain comes to teach us that to a certain extent we are crazy, and what is it to be crazy? A madman is a person who lives in an unrealistic world, a world of dreams, a world that has its own reality that does not fit objective standards (the madman lives in a subjective world that he created for himself). And therefore, since everyone behaves in a certain way – the madman seems unusual. The story tries to show us that everyone lives in some kind of subjective world, in some kind of world of their own, that is, there is a thesis here that says that the world – as we perceive it – is a world of image, or even of fraud, that is, it is a world of phenomena. The world we are looking at is not the real world. This is a world in which there is concealment, concealment of the real world.
The idea of concealment is one of the basic ideas of Hasidic thought. This is an idea of the Baal Shem Tov as it is presented by his student Rabbi Jacob Yosef.
And here comes Rabbi Nachman and says that despite the concealment it is possible to discover something from it, and how? Well, when we look at the mark on the forehead and we say to ourselves that we are crazy – we are actually admitting to ourselves that we do not see the real world, we realize that the world is not as we see it.
And this ability to know that we are living in a fraud and that the real world is hidden from our eyes is very unfriendly to the intellect, to the common sense and rational, the one that likes to touch objects and know that they are solid, to know that the world is what it seems.
And why is it similar? For a person who is in a dream in a dream, and he realizes that he is in a dream and he wants to wake up but he can’t. To look at the mark on my forehead or on the other’s forehead, or to look in the mirror is to understand that we are in the dream, and knowing that you are dreaming when you are dreaming, is the beginning of the path of suffering towards awakening from the dream.
The consolation of the story is the secret of the sign; We can come to the understanding that we are crazy (meaning asleep), although this understanding does not help us to be saved from this situation, but at least we can know that we are there.
The Sisyphean way and the short way
Actually there are two ways to get out of this state of sleep. One way is the Sisyphean and mechanical way in which you know while you are sleeping that you are sleeping, and this knowledge will create uncomfortable sleep, which will lead to increasing flashes of wakefulness, which will eventually lead to fuller wakefulness. Another way is a sudden awakening, a quantum leap into consciousness.
And here we come to the idea of alchemy. Gurdjieff speaks of a change of state of consciousness, a change from the state of a sleeping person to that of
Gabriel