“…in the midst of death, life persists, in the midst of untruth, truth persists, in the midst of darkness, light persists.” Mahatma Gandhi

Eighteen years ago I graduated from university and headed for Israel. I was twenty-one years old and after four years of college, thoroughly confused as to what was truly important anymore. Several hours into life beyond the shelter of my parent’s roof I entered higher education with the intention that it would give me the tools and the degree necessary to set out in the capitalist way and make lots of money.

Like many recent college graduates, I returned to my parent’s home after graduation with the tassle, the degree, skills I never imagined receiving from a place of higher learning and some well soiled laundry. I remember the feeling of walking into the house I had left four years earlier and sitting down at the kitchen table. I stared at the overstocked napkin holder at the center of the table and instantly felt empty. The desperation of having accomplished something yet not knowing what it had really been for left me feeling anxious and alone. I had been home a couple of hours before I realized that no matter what I did, I had to do something and do it quick. It was no longer my home but I didn’t know where or what my home was, either.

A few hours later I was packing for Israel. I knew deep within that I was ready to discover what it was I had caught glimpses of in the past that felt akin to “numinous” experiences. Twentieth century German philosopher, Rudolph Otto, popularized this term, numinous, as describing the power or presence of some higher being, perhaps God. I was startled to find that as I walked off the plane, there was no flaming chariot, no cherubim, no pillar of clouds to direct me toward my spiritual experience. Very disappointing.

In fact, my time in Israel was very challenging for several months. I was surrounded by people wherever I went; buying, selling, pushing, pulling. Everyone smoked cigarettes, drank sludgy coffee and seemed really wired and intense. I sat on the beach in Tel Aviv, knife in hand before a huge watermelon wondering if there was anything “numinous” left in the Middle East. It seemed like the power and presence was only to be found in the throngs of young Israelis in uniform with machine guns slung over their backs, or in the cliques of super religious Jews, Christians and Moslems whose connection to their respective faiths all felt very distant and inaccessible from where I sat.

Yet, something did happen. I was quite literally pulled to a small northern town called Tsfat. I won’t get into the details here, but suffice it to say that I had never heard of the place before so as the bus wound up the mountain that hosted the ancient city, I was a bit startled to feel something, almost, well numinous, growing within and without me. My time in Tsfat changed my life in countless ways and opened up doors that continue to require explanation and interpretation.

One of the earliest and most profound experiences was at the Ari Mikva. This is an ancient cave named after The Ari, an esteemed Kabbalist, or magical mystic. The enormous cave carved into the side of the mountain beneath the city contained a deep, cold pool of mountain water. Mikva’s are ritual immersion pools and can be found all over the world, sacred to many faiths and traditions. I had been in Tsfat no more than a few hours when some new friends insisted that I join them in this amazing pool. Before I knew it, I was stripped down and nervously following my guides into the cave. As we moved deeper into the rock, the giggles and chatter of the young men seemed to fade and like the last moments before sleep, I felt as if I were in a dream. If it hadn’t been for the ice cold water at my ankles, I’d have fallen over in some sort of trance.

The water rose higher with each step and the light slowly disappeared. I felt the gentle hand of my new friend on my shoulder and heard his whisper “Get to the center of the pool and dunk yourself in all the directions while you listen.” In an instant, I was chest deep in the icy water, surrounded by the darkest darkness I have ever witnessed. There was silence except for the occasional gasp of air and the coarse, gutteral rumbles of unknown men. I considered that just a few months earlier I was in a college classroom in upstate New York but this was something more than a world away. In that moment I knew this was why I had come to the Middle East. I was strangely calm and slowed my breathing in order to relax my shivering body.

I closed my eyes even though there was nothing to see, and plunged myself down into the blackness. As my head broke the surface of the water on my way back up, I was startled at the strange sensation. I could have been under there for hours or seconds, but it felt like an eternity. I was conscious of a deep feeling of quiet within myself, a sensation of knowing, of connection. I shifted my body to the next direction and dipped down again. Same thing, just more intense. I felt every drop of water trickle down my face as my state of awareness seemed miles deeper than it had minutes earlier. I plunged myself into the dark and wet space three more times, each time allowing myself to push myself deeper into the space.

If ever I had been “in the moment,” this was it. If ever I had understood the kinds of quotes that people like Gandhi or Jung are best known for, this was it. If ever I felt the deep, penetrating connection to something numinous, this was it. Carl Jung spoke passionately about the Conjunctio, a marriage of sorts, between the numinous and humans, between two lovers, between the sacred feminine and sacred masculine, etc. Yet, in order to experience this meeting between my Self and something bigger, deeper, wiser, etc., it required a certain sense of consciousness.

Consciousness allows me to experience the difference between myself and that “something else” as well as gives me the opportunity to have a unique, personal interpretation of that experience. Someone else would have offered a very different account of submerging in the Ari Mikva, not because it wasn’t true for me but perhaps because they are telling the experience from a different consciousness.

I am committed to understanding, or even just getting to know aspects of my own sense of consciousness, i.e. the voice in my head, the unique way I feel about things in my life, the way I personally experience my heart loving someone. This allows myself the opportunity to know the difference between what I know to be true in the world and what you know. We may have similar ways of relating to the world, but your unique version or texture of understanding will never be the same as mine. Isn’t that delightful?

Conjunctio is a love story. It is the meeting of two parts at some intersecting point where everything that is, was and will be, come together and come apart. It is the place where I experience you experiencing me and it is my consciousness that allows me to register the moment, hopefully using it to grow and connect with myself. There is something about plunging into a dark pool of water that is mysterious and interesting. However, there was something about my experience plunging into that water that changed my life because I was, at that second, able to be present for it.

There have been thousands of moments in my life when I was not fully present, but that one, I was really there. And it has helped me be more present in moments that followed because my consciousness deepened as a result. So, I want to challenge you today when it comes to being fully present, in the moment. What would it be like to encounter someone special in your life and bring your consciousness to it, your full presence, as you plunge deeper into that conjunctio, that intersection of worlds?

Growing up as a Jewish boy in America, grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I often dreamed of being taken away. There were recurring night terrors of trying to find hiding places in my house or a neighbors’ house and then silently waiting to see if I would be safe or if someone close to me would turn me in. The most intense moment of these dreams was typically when a person close to me, a teacher or one of my parents’ friends for example, would open the closet where I sat huddled and would stare at me for a split second, deciding if they would close the door and keep going or start screaming that they “found one.” I woke up from these dreams feeling unsafe, unsettled and desperate to fit in.

After I watched The Social Network about Mark Zuckerberg’s creation of Facebook, I had the same feeling as I did in those childhood dreams. I hadn’t felt those feelings in decades yet there was something very similar in watching the film makers’ perception of Zuckerberg as an isolated, desperate boy/man in a world where he felt he wasn’t enough, wasn’t safe somehow, and that his successes just wouldn’t matter.

We don’t have receive any information about Zuckerberg’s family history in the film. In fact, we hear about his best friends’ father a lot, meet the twins’ father and perceive his influence throughout, yet there is no connection for Mark with his father. Zuckerberg’s dad is clearly absent in mention but dramatically present as a ghost role. This was, for me, one of the most unsettling factors in the film. We are to believe that the man behind the curtain doesn’t have parents and that he is as alone in the world as he seems; or as he forcefully creates himself to be, squeezing even the people who like him out of his tiny bubble.

It’s easy to watch the film or read articles about Zuckerberg and brand him a classic ass hole, as was suggested several times in the film itself (only by women, incidentally). Yet, beneath the ass hole persona is a clearly wounded young man, desperate to connect while constantly disconnecting. The girl he is rejected by in the beginning of the film is the woman he still attempts to connect with at the end of the film. Unsafe,unsettled and desperate. There is more to the character’s behavior than his character, there is his wound.

My grandparents lived long lives beyond the camps and the Holocaust, but I remember the packed suitcases always stowed in the front closet of their Brooklyn apartment. Just in case. There is a tribal consciousness that exists for many Jews, albeit unconscious, that affects the way many of us interact with the world. It is a millenniums old history of working our way into the public trust, only to be rejected when we “get too powerful.”

In a week when Rahm Emmanuel returns to Chicago from the White House to run as the first Israeli mayor of a major U.S. city and when Rick Sanchez is fired from CNN because of his anti-Semitic remarks, it is hard to argue that the tribe continues to strive to feel safe, settled and part of the society that has embraced us better than any other in history. It is hard to argue that Mark Zuckerberg is/was consciously playing out a need to fit in as a result of being Jewish, but it would be equally challenging to argue that it doesn’t exist somewhere in his unconscious, tribal self.

How does one enter the collective relationship status for an entire tribe?

When I was a boy, my dad took me to one of his favorite childhood spots, Nathans Famous Hot Dog stand in Coney Island.

“What makes them famous, Dad?” I asked with the exacting simplicity and demanding tone of a five year old.

“Because everyone knows about them! And because they’re the best hot dogs in the world.” My father loved him a good Nathan’s frankfurter. It made him feel five years old, perhaps.

I had come to question adult answers to very specific child questions by this point. In the rapidly expanding gray matter tucked away in my bushy skull, it seemed illogical for it to be possible to have more than one answer to a perfectly good question (think of my early Star Trek influence), so I was cautious to accept answers as real truth under these circumstances.

Yet, as so many times it happens, even the passionate yet illogical answers we receive as children have a way of weaving themselves into the way we look at the world as adults. So, the Nathan’s Famous incident had a greater impact on me than perhaps the “Sky is Blue because…” incident or the “rocket fuel doesn’t work in automobiles because…” moment.

The belief that everyone knows something when it is famous and that something famous must be the best has significantly influenced me on my journey, sometimes in a good way, and sometimes in a very confusing way. Since we live in a society mildly obsessed with famous people, places and things, it has been hard not to be impacted by the spin we place upon certain people.

We met Richard Nixon at a Soho restaurant several years after he had resigned from the presidency. My mother got him to autograph a paper napkin and I remember him smiling and jostling his hand at me from across the round table. He seemed nice enough to my pre-political self. I hadn’t seen Frost-Nixon at that point.

That same year, 1976, my mom took me to the Museum of Natural History where we toured the Tutenkhaman exhibit. We stood outside in a long line on a sunny spring afternoon with thousands of other fans gathered to see perhaps the most famous dead person on the planet, with surely the best coffin. I was mesmerized as much by the hysteria surrounding this dead pharaoh  as the exhibit itself. Surely better than a hot dog with god knows what inside of it.

I was pretty much cool-crazed on Bruce Willis in junior high school, especially during the hit show Moonlighting. My friend Chris and I would get on the phone at 9:58pm every Tuesday night as the credits rolled and begin reciting our favorite one liners. “Do bears bear?” “Do butters fly?” “Do pickets fence?” The witty banter between Bruce Willis and Cybil Shepherd were sublime and we never got enough of Bruce’s flirty, smart-ass grins. They fit perfectly with our hormone riddled, heat-seeking bodies and the trajectory into high school.

You can imagine how hard I squeezed my burgeoning psychic abilities into manifesting a meeting with Mr. Willis the first time I made it to Los Angeles as a 15 year old young man. It was at Catch a Rising Star, the stand up comedy club, that I conjured him. He sat by himself at the bar with a Molson Golden lager (remember those) and stared ahead at the bar, occasionally smiling at a joke from onstage. My friends, already very impressed that I had come through on my predicted star sighting, nudged me out of my seat to go and meet L.A.’s Famous.  I walked up alongside him with a napkin and pen in hand (think Dick Nixon), and with my best charm, fed him his own line back to him. “Mr. Willis, do bears bear?”

“Aw, not now kid, after the show.” And he turned back to his beer.

Nixon was friendlier. I was crushed. Moonlighting went off the air the next year and Demi Moore left him for Ashton Kutcher, eventually. Just saying.

A few years later we were in L.A. again for my cousin’s wedding and as we rode the elevator at the Beverly Hilton, Roseann Barr hopped on, alone and vulnerable to east coast star force newbies. She was even worse than Bruce Willis had been, squeezing out a snarl to our advances. It’s not like we tried to run off with her purse. Famous, yes. Best? Oh, come on.

I went on to meet lots of “famous” folks in my 40 years. Had the pleasure of meeting Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan before a Berkeley Bowl concert, someone who was the best Qawaali Sufi singer in the world, famous most places outside of North America. I saw him exiting an Indian restaurant just hours before I would attend his concert and I screeched my pick-up truck to a halt, jumped out and charged him. His bodyguards promptly stopped me and then the Master waved them to let me through and he gave me a most satisfying bear hug. A pleasing memory.

There have been writers and teachers, spiritual guides, gurus, movie stars and newscasters. Some famous, some the best. Just last summer I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Pollan, Sonia Choquette, Louise Hay, Wayne Dyer, Cheryl Richardson, Caroline Myss and a score of others. Granted, many of them were on a Hay House cruise so it was like spearing fish in a barrel but it was all rather pleasant anyhow.

So, what about all these famous people, places, and things? Some call them Proper Nouns. I suppose because most of them require a certain proper behavior when one interacts with them in public. Stand behind this line, don’t move from that spot, pretend not to notice me unless I acknowledge you first, make sure you don’t overstay my kindness as I’ve just listened to your story about why you are so excited to be meeting me… it goes on.

To be truthful, there are lots of very real famous people who act as normal as the next person. There are also a fair amount of wing-nuts who might have traumatized some of the more well known folks roaming the planet with unusually poor boundaries and creepy vibes. Still, I continue to wonder what really makes a person famous. In this day and age, a person can become famous for shouting at the president during a speech or throwing a shoe at another one. Fame can come from waving a light saber around and posting it to YouTube or just telling a reporter that this group of people or that is bad. Instant Fame.

Hardly the best, though. It takes something more to be the best. Being the best is like being Superman. The best is like writing poetry like Hafiz or Rumi. Singing like Ella or Louis. The best is a Gandhi or a Jesus. Top-of-your-game kind of best. I suppose what made Nathan’s hot dogs the best for my dad had little to do with ingredients, proper cooking or even toppings. It was about that epiphany experience when he first realized the greatness for himself. What makes something or someone the best is our relationship to that thing or that person. What if I was in a bad mood when I bit my first Nathan’s hot dog? Would it’s greatness shatter my melancholy and its truth change me for life?

When I was a senior in high school, almost a quarter century ago, my father and I visited some of the best east coast universities this country has to offer as I narrowed down my pool of targets. As my dad surveyed the ivy buildings, manicured lawns and glossy marketing materials, I read the social vibe of each school, studied frat boys’ party week-end T-shirts, noted which student unions hosted fast food chains, and having just recently been deflowered, compiled a list of which schools had the prettiest girls.

I was almost seventeen and while I found the requisite student volunteer led campus tour to be a necessary part of the decision making process, my father saw these tours as real data collection opportunities. “How many first year students receive financial aid?” “What’s the percentage of matriculating students who are in-state applicants?” “How many professors have tenure?” All perfectly intelligent things to ask for a man about to pay for a private college education for his first born son.

Yet, it was always the same question he posed on every tour that made me feel uneasy, even a bit embarrassed. “How many books are in the library?” he would ask with all seriousness.

This school had a million; this one half a mil but boasted a huge archive. Another focused more on their inter-library network that allowed for a “staggering” five million books at my beck and call. I cringed each time because never in a million years could I imagine needing a million books. It had been only a year before when the two of us visited used car lots to find the right ‘first clunker’ and my dad was visibly irritated as he checked under the hood, studied gas mileage claims and accident reports while I sat in the driver seat testing the sub-woofers.

I wanted four wheels because I wanted freedom and a place to listen to really loud music. I wanted to go to college because I wanted freedom and a place to listen to really loud music while kissing girls.

This was before the age of the Internet that so many of us take for granted today. I remember the university bookstore salesman pitching the $3300 Apple Macintosh SE personal computer to my parents as the only way the modern student can keep up with the challenges of campus life. “There’s even an ivy league school up north where they require each incoming student to have a computer and they all digitally transfer their term papers to professors!” That first computer was an expensive word processor and fancy game console; my first Mac had 94% less capability than my IPhone 3GS.

Things change quickly. Within a few months at college I realized I wasn’t the fraternity type, didn’t want to be an investment banker and I actually cared about things besides girls and music.

Last month I attended a presentation given by the Vice President of Google on the future of the Internet. Aside from her astounding extrapolations she discussed one of the most crucial issues facing civilization today. Who owns the Internet? The question of who owns information, whether data can be proprietary, and whether the wealthy of the world can pay for faster, more complete information is something that has been troubling me for some time.

My father understood something about information that I am only just beginning to comprehend. In the past, the number of books in a library meant something because it was somehow connected to class, privilege, and on some level, knowledge.

Since the proliferation of the Internet, however, everyone has had access to books, magazines, photos, films, and just about everything really. Kids at a dusty desktop in Botswana have gobbled up the same level of access as kids in suburban Copenhagen. Relatively free, relatively accessible, relatively connected. The number of books in that Botswana library didn’t matter nearly as much as it did only a decade before.

What we did with that information, all of us, around the world, was fair game. In fact, each one of us had the raw material, INFORMATION, to convert into knowledge, POWER.

The fact that our little planet has been speeding so quickly into the future has had much to do with this democratization of information. The fact that universities care more about their mainframes today than their library circulations has leveled the playing field considerably, and we have all gained as a result.

The notion that access to high speed Internet is a luxury rather than a human right is the type of thinking that steered Europe into the Dark Ages a millenium ago. The belief that some people are more entitled to information than others is a dangerous slope that we must be sensitive to today, not tomorrow or somewhere down the road.

The day the Bible was mass produced was the beginning of the end to the “type” of control organized religion had over the masses. Limiting freedom of information and in turn, the doorway to knowledge, is a manipulation of technology that must be quickly exposed for what it is. Freedom means a lot more to me today than it did when I got my first set of wheels.

I have been passionately connected to my dream life since I was a very young boy, even two years old. In fact, the first dream I can recall involved me in a baby carriage staring up at a magician dressed in black with a dark fancy mustache, shifting the colors of a wand with his slight of hand as I carefully stared at his eyes, not bedazzled by the tricks. Magic. The dream to this day leaves me with an uneasy feeling.

As an early dream, perhaps this “big dream” (as psychotherapists like to describe those night visions that remain in our lives because they are in some way transformational) was one of the most influential messages of my life even if it never occurred in my waking existence.

“Beware the magician,” cautioned my psyche, long before magic was anything but the stuff of birthday parties and street side card tricks. Perhaps I had been exposed to a magic show as a baby or glimpsed the imagery of the man in the black top hat on my parents television set, however, regardless of the concrete stimulus or inception for the dream, the emotional message itself was a clear download from the collective unconscious. Wisdom for Life, 101.

This was a message conveyed to me as a young child from a realm beyond my parents wagging fingertips and fuzzy Sesame Street characters. Information that I would need throughout my life, perhaps, a “note to self” for when I was to encounter a person who implored me to watch the colors and lights, not the information deep within their eyes.

Perhaps it was self-fulfilling prophesy that I have needed to rely on this subtle skepticism for the better part of my life, a life full of teachers, gurus, and not a few magicians.

Yet, this unconscious need to look into the eyes of a speaker, teacher or guide and truly listen to their message through a trans-personal dialogue, one that transcends word or action, exists at my core and serves me each and every day as I make my way through the oftentimes complex landscape of life on this planet.

All as a result of a dream.

C.G. Jung said: “A person’s soul is a complicated thing and it takes sometimes half a lifetime to get somewhere in one’s psychological development.”

Ain’t that the truth? And yet, I believe I have not been on this journey alone. Yes, there have indeed been beautiful people with whom I have journeyed and learned from, and yet I speak of the unconscious. Both the personal and collective unconscious continually offer cautionary tales, dramatic reminders about past lessons and poignant directions with regard to my unique process, a unique link in a chain of unique links. Through these daydreams, night dreams and in-between dreams, I believe our psyches are lovingly coached and conditioned to encounter life with even more tools and insight than we gained through the sum of our nature and nurture.

If that’s not magic, I don’t know what is…