The River of Light Quotes

“By reading holy literature as if it were a dream, we gain access to a primary mode of our collective unconscious.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“personal confusion, search, and self-interrogation are more important than any answers could ever be.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“And this, then, is the job of the searchers and the dreamers: to reach deeper and deeper into the dream. Peeling away one layer after another. Until we realize that the voice speaking our dreams comes from within us and from without at the same time.11 Until we see at last that the story is true. Not necessarily because it happened in a particular place at a particular time, but because it is within us. It always was. It issues from us. It is ours. The whole ancient hierarchy of meanings.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“A kind of journal of forgotten, reworked, and remembered holy moments, too awesome to be simply described in everyday conscious language. It is all that remains of the most penetrating incursion of waking into the earth-mother-Jewish-people darkness of what is not the spirit, but only sleep. But the memory is still there, set in our bodies by our parents or our choice.
We may ignore the dream or we may appropriate it for ourselves, and so make it our own. It is our choice alone.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“The one who pays attention to the dreams, draws on them, and lives them out is blessed, even as the one who dreams is also dreamt. We each take our turn at living out the dream. Like some ageless wave, Scripture flows through us.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“The story is not about someone else. It is not even about you. It is you. The one who "lives" in the dream is the one who dreams. Just as the dream softly pulses beneath everyday waking-noticeable only when the din and clatter of daytime is stilled by sleep-so the one who remembers a dream brings a new facet to waking.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“This is the great dream of which each individual dream is a personal manifestation. Dream is ontogenetic. Myth is phylogenetic. "Dreams and especially myths are a primary medium for intuitive insights into the ultimate nature of human existence . . . [they] are not restricted to ... sleep. They pertain rather to the symbolic dimension of human experience as a whole."24”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“As any good teacher of dreams will tell you, you are all the people in your dream. Fritz Perls taught, "[All] the different parts, any part in the dream-is yourself, is a projection of yourself."22 And to ask why we made our story this way and not that way is to reenter our sacred text once again as living participants. We could have made it another way, but chose to cast it in this one. We must be all the parts of our dream, even the ones we don't like.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“We must therefore
entertain the hypothesis that there is an important connection between being 'dialectical' and dreaming, just as there is between dreaming and poetry or mysticism."21”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“Assume full responsibility for the dream. For "through the dream the man makes the matter his own; it is in his will, and he is responsible for it."19”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“What first occurs to us on remembering the dream/reading the text may be the most important thing.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“We must not allow embarrassment to distract attention from elements that make us uncomfortable. Disgust and dread are the sorts of feelings we frequently marshal to conceal deeper layers of our psyche.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“Pay especially close attention to the seemingly trivial details and the little discrepancies.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“Recall our own recent, immediate experiences. Since dreams are often initiated by something that happened only recently, we must ask about yesterday's residue.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“Isolate and identify the primary elements of the dream text before us. What are the dream's components? One of the most common errors made in trying to understand a dream is the almost automatic refusal to recognize more than one character or element or verbal idea in the narrative, when of course, all the parts are indispensable.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“what is the underlying emotional dynamic of the story? "The emotions displayed in the dream are its most reliable elements. The emotion usually corresponds to the latent but not always to the manifest content of the dream."14”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“If Scripture be like a dream, then methods of understanding the dream are, at least in principle, valid for learning Scripture.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“If a group of people can have a psyche and think of itself as an organic being, then surely a people should also be able to dream. A series of motifs and archetypes should keep reappearing and seem to each individual dreamer, as Jung suggested, to emanate from a transcendent source.8”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“We seek a metaphor for holy words that will return them to us
once again as an ayfz hayim, a tree of life (Prov. 3:18). One that yields heightened self-awareness and God's Word. One that permits sustained intellectual inquiry and Scripture's holiness. One that preserves clarity, but not at the expense of mystery. One whose playfulness does not dilute piety. One whose public objectivity tolerates personal intimacy. In the spiritual code words of our generation: a holy text.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“But everyone dreams anyway. And we-from Joseph to Daniel to Freud-have had dreams, read them, interpreted them, hidden from them, and even, on occasion, faithfully chanted them from a handwritten parchment scroll. They are an intimate part of our”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“This consciousness is never still, not even for a moment. It will not be photographed or even named. In its wanting to become aware, it rearranges itself in one pattern after another. Feel it now in the blinking of your eyes. The moisture on your tongue. The gentle filling and emptying of your lungs. It rises unnamed through us, the incessant motion of the four creatures bearing the chariot in Ezekiel s vision: human, lion, ox, and eagle, running and returning. Creation is in us. The plan the Creator used reappears everywhere:”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“how he once slipped through the "scriptural text" of his daily life into the primordial light of consciousness itself.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“Is it not at least occasionally the case that we set out on a clear and simple mission and return with something undreamed of? Whether or not we accomplish our original intention becomes unimportant.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“The boundary between now and not yet will softly blur. And the clean line between your discrete body and all creation will someday be no more.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“allowing the river of light-the deepest currents of consciousness-to rise to the surface and, without anxiety, animate our lives. We are thus blessed to return to the scriptural text of our ordinary lives and live out its dream. Not to leave life but to learn how to be fully present in it.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“All creation is patterned according to an inner blueprint or arrangement
that carries within it a genetic memory of everything that ever happens.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

“We participate in a perpetual organic conversation with our universe.”
― Lawrence Kushner, The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness