Passover, Holy Week, and the Psychology of Self-Absorption

Two days ago, I shared a post called “The Opposite of Spiritual.” It was a response to a wonderful question, submitted by a regular reader of this column, that asked, in essence, “Is there some innately spiritual thread that runs through all people, people of different religious traditions, even people who don’t resonate with any religious tradition?” In reply, I suggested that one way to get a sense of what spiritual thread might be, and what “spiritual” means, is to ponder what “not-spiritual” means. Just as we understand up, hot, and loud in contrast to their opposites—down, cold, and quiet—“spiritual” is also something we might understand in relation to its opposite. And the opposite of spiritual, I offered, is mechanical. My main point was that spiritual experience and spiritual practice interrupt the automatic-pilot, stimulus-response patterns of thought, feeling, and behavior we could do in our sleep. Not unrelatedly, to be spiritual, say many of the world’s enduring religions, is to be awake. (You can read the question and my response by clicking here.)

I thought I was finished with that question, but yesterday I had an experience, a spiritual experience, that brought forth this coda.

Before telling that experience, though, I want to tell you first that the response I almost wrote two days ago was not, “The opposite of spiritual is mechanical,” but “The opposite of spiritual is self-absorbed.”

There’s a body of teachings in Tibetan Buddhism called the Lojong, and one of the Lojong sayings is: “All dharma (teaching) agrees on one point—lessening one’s self-absorption.” That message is quite consistent, it seems to me, with the Judeo-Christian teaching that the greatest commandments are to love God and love your neighbor, commandments which are trying to pull us out from the gravitational force of self-absorption. (If you need convincing that self-absorption is real, that it is a source of suffering for you and for others, and that it is worthy of religion’s effort to lessen it, I invite you to set a timer to go off ten minutes from now and, when it does, notice what you happen to be thinking about and how it’s affecting you.)

All right. Now the experience.

Yesterday afternoon I was sitting on the porch reading. My attention was wandering, from the words on the page, to something else, something about me, then back to the book, to another something else about me. In and out of various portals—as it goes when I read, or when I do most anything else.

We live in the woods at the bottom of a mountain. The air was still. It was quiet.

And then it wasn’t. Suddenly there was a strong rush of wind, a tsunami of wind. I heard it before I felt it. I looked up. A hundred yards away, the wind was raising up leaves from the ground, 10,000 leaves, and blowing them toward me.

I remember driving across Illinois one December, many years ago, and seeing a flock of birds moving across the sky, the largest flock I have ever seen, before or since, easily a thousand birds, flying together, and it was majestic. I was alone on the interstate. I took my foot off the accelerator of the machine I was operating, rolled down the window and let the cold air in, and lost myself in wonder.

The leaves flew, the wind blew, hard, cold, toward me, onto me, past me, beyond me. And then a backlash wind. I don’t know how these things work. But it was as if the first wind created a vacuum in the air around me, and now the vacuum sucked it back.

It was a dharma wind. Whatever story I was following at the moment—in whatever universe I had entered, most likely one with me center-stage—that gust of dharma blew it completely apart. There was wind. There were leaves. There was no “I.”

And then it rained, a hard rain, with thunder. And I thought, today is the first night of Passover, and tomorrow is the first day of Holy Week. (I’m writing this the day after the experience, so now the first night of Passover was yesterday, and the first day of Holy Week is today. And I have no idea what day it will be when you read these words. But in the spiritual realm, time is fluid, so I think we’re good.)

And what I make of that association, a day later, is that Passover, Holy Week, and other religious occasions can be like a rush of wind and leaves that interrupts the self-absorbed, mechanical, sleepy, whatever-ness of our lives and whooshes us into awake-ness, awareness, and aliveness.

Can be. Spiritual observances and spiritual practices can be mechanical, too. I’m Christian, and I can tell you that most of the Holy Weeks of my life have felt mechanical to me, and that, because they feel mechanical, I have tended to lose interest and not engage them with much attention or energy. That’s not Holy Week’s fault, by the way. It’s my mechanicality that makes them mechanical. I’m guessing I’m not alone among Christians in this regard, and I’m guessing there are some Jewish people reading this who have felt this same way during Passover.

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My small point here is: spiritual and religious practices can feel like a day with no wind. But my larger point is: spirituality and religion can be like a wind that comes from nowhere and interrupts the habitual self-absorption that diminishes us, dulls us, and makes us hard-hearted and violent. To say it somewhat more poetically, perhaps, spirituality and religion come from the same place the wind comes from, and when they blow into whatever space we are occupying, the space on our porch, the space in our mind, or the space in some community of others, they change that space and the “we” or “me” that occupies that space.

Source: cottonbro/Pexels

You don’t have to be Jewish or Christian to appreciate the power of Passover and Holy Week, and you don’t have to accept the literal-historical truth of the stories at the center of these seasons to appreciate the human-experience truth they represent. Passover recounts the story of the Jewish people’s exodus from Egypt, their liberation from slavery to freedom. But Rabbinic scholar Avivah Zornberg, also a deep reader in psychoanalytic literature, says that Egypt is not just a geographic place. It is also a psychological place, a spiritual condition. In The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus, she notes that the Hebrew word for Egypt is very similar to the Hebrew word for constriction. She writes “The pun often found in Chasidic writings associates Mitzrayim (Egypt) with meitzarim (straits). Egypt becomes a country of the spirit, constricted and, in a real sense, inescapable” (Zornberg, pp. 17-18). Passover, then, is not just a time to remember religious history and renew connection with others. It is an opportunity for the constricted, mechanical, self-absorbed landscape of our inner world to expand.

Holy Week is like this, too. On one level, Holy Week is the story of the last week in the life of a man named Jesus. He is a preacher and healer from the country. He comes to the sacred city of Jerusalem and spends the week arguing intensely with the religious establishment and turning over tables in their Temple. Near the end of the week, the religious establishment enlists the assistance the political establishment, which executes him. According to the story, Jesus could have employed his spiritual power and escaped this fate, but he surrendered himself to death. Then on the first day of the next week, Jesus rises from the dead and begins appearing to his followers. As with the Exodus story, some people consider the Holy Week story to be historically accurate, and others do not.

But whatever our opinion about its historical truth, Holy Week is a story of conflicted humanity that is intrapersonally and psychospiritually quite true. The Christ within us is that which knows what is true and good in each moment—and more than knows it, lives it. Knows and lives not just what is true and good for me, but what is true and good, period. The Christ in us is always challenging the self-absorbed establishment within us to open our eyes and see this moment, open our ears and hear it, open our hearts and be here now in it with a love bigger than self-absorption. And the establishment is always killing this Christ, in us and in others. Always. It is what the mechanical does. But the Christ keeps rising. Always. It is what the Christ does.

So here you are, reading. Wandering in one portal and out another, mechanically, perhaps, or some degree of self-absorbed. And here comes a double-shot gust of Judeo-Christian tradition, which you don’t have to be Jewish or Christian to feel, which you don’t have to fully understand to be affected by, and which, if you think you do fully understand, you probably don’t. Roll down the window, and let the wind blow back your hair.

This is a question-and-answer blog for therapists, therapy clients, and others interested in the intersection of psychotherapy and spirituality. If there's a question you'd like to see addressed in a future post, please contact me through my website.