Reaching Your Essence - 006 Listening With Your Heart

Reaching the Yechidah: Leaving The View From The Inside

We have begun to explain how we can identify ourselves as a soul, in particular, to identify our essence as being that of the Yechidah in the soul, which is our innermost point.

We will try to reveal it from many angles of understanding, in a way that is not just for the sake of listening, but to really experience these concepts. In deeper terms, we will try here to make these matters recognizable through our soul (hakarah).

The Yechidah of our souls is termed “Ohr Makif” – a spiritual light that “surrounds” a person. Chazal say that the Nefesh is in the liver, the Ruach is in the heart, and the Neshamah is in the brain. The Chayah surrounds the body, and the Yechidah surrounds the entire existence of a person.

Part of the soul resides inside a person, while the deeper layers of our soul are outside us and above us. The three lower layers of the soul known as Nefesh, Ruach and Neshamah are inside us. The Yechidah is not inside us, and it rather surrounds us. How can we connect to it then, if it is outside us? We have to leave the self. If we remain inside our self, we can’t get to it.

So learning about the Yechidah is not about understanding what it is on an intellectual level. It is about connecting to it. A person can be taught information in order to understand something, but learning about the Yechidah is not about understanding it on a conceptual level. When we learn about it, it should be because we want to enter it and connect ourselves with it.

Intellectual Understanding Vs. Heart Connection

If a person gets very sick and was hospitalized, sometimes he has to learn again how to breathe. How do they teach him how to breathe again? It is not about learning how to breathe. He is learning how to breathe so he can actually breathe!

If someone is angry or sad, he is taught how to leave his negative emotions, in all kinds of ways. But can they teach a person how to love? There is no way. You can’t figure out with your intellect how to love.

When you smell a scent, you have to actually smell it, and it’s not enough to learn about smell. Smell is the most spiritual sense because you have to actually experience it in order to know what it is, unlike sight or hearing, which you can know about as long as you learn about it. Moshiach will be able to “smell” the true essence of a person and truly feel each person for who he really is. Thus, Moshiach is called the Yechidah of all souls.

Each of us have own private Yechidah in our soul. It is not a power we use to know or understand things. It is rather a power to breathe a concept.

Deepening Our Listening

As an example, the act of talking can either be experienced on a basic, physical level, and you just hear and understand the words, but if you become connected to what lays behind the words, you come to really experience the words that are being spoken, and it a whole different kind of awareness. It is written, “My soul leaves when I speak with him.” If we would really experience what talking is, we would feel ourselves utilizing our very soul as we talk.

Talking is called “ink of the heart”, in reference to prayer, when we speak what’s on our heart. All words we hear really have two layers to it – an outer layer, and an inner layer. The outer layer of the words is when we understand them on an intellectual level, while the inner layer of talking is to realize what is contained in talking, what lays behind it.

To further illustrate, the words being said here are just the wrapping of the concepts that lay behind them. These words I am telling you are not just for the sake of listening to them and understanding them. We should be interested here in what lays behind the words here.

Words are just a tool we can use to enter deeper into what lays behind them. When we hear words, we try to understand them with our intellect, and this is the external layer of the words. But the inner layer of the words is not something you grasp through intellect. It’s a heart matter – it is to get to the root of what lays behind the words you hear.

A New Kind of Listening: Listening With Your Heart

Now that we have brought these examples, we can understand better how to connect to the Yechidah. We need to have a certain inner recognition of it; it is not enough just to learn about it and try to understand it intellectually.

To illustrate, a deaf person can hear what is being said, but he doesn’t understand what’s going on.

To explain the concept a bit more, when a person is taught how to get to a certain place, he arrives there using his intellectual comprehension. But let’s say you are listening to a song. Is it the same kind of understanding? We can all understand that hearing a song is not an intellectual understanding, but a matter of the heart. If someone is listening to a song intellectually, he is only listening to the technical aspects of it. When we hear a song, we are really listening to it with our heart, and we are not trying to use our intellect. You don’t have to use your mind when you listen to a song. You listen to it naturally, and you are really listening to it from your heart.

If I talk to a person on a purely intellectual level, I ask someone for directions. Maybe I tell him “Thank You”, but my words here are not about connecting to him. It’s not out of ahavas Yisrael (love of Jews). But there is another way to talk to someone – to talk to someone in order to connect with him and have ahavas Yisrael to him.

It is thus apparent that there are two kinds of hearing. There is a basic kind of hearing, which we use our mind’s five physical senses, our intellectual awareness. There is another kind of hearing which is deeper and more subtle than our physical sense of hearing: when we hear with our heart.

Most people only hear through their intellect, and that is why they don’t reach their essence. Hearing from the heart is to hear from a whole different place; it is to experience what we hear. It is not about hearing information; it is about allowing your heart to experience.

To illustrate further, people often want sympathy, and they don’t always want solutions to their problems. We want others to feel what we are going through. When a person needs therapy, the therapist might give him the best advice, but he can leave very disappointed, because what he really wanted was sympathy. He wanted the therapist to feel what he was feeling. He wasn’t that interested in rational solutions.

If a couple has a good marriage, they listen to each other well. They learn each other’s language. Of course, we can’t build our marriage just through our heart, and if the bank tells us we have an overdraft, we can’t tell the bank to feel the stress we are going through. We need an intellect that thinks. But the rational intellect alone will not help us enter inward into our soul. It doesn’t help us get to the Infinite, which is a concept beyond the realm of the rational.

So in order to hear about the inner point of the soul, it’s not enough to listen to these words with your intellect. You have to experience it. It’s heart information, not brainy information; thus, it is perceived in a different way than what you are used to.

So the tool we need is to get used to listening from a different place in ourselves. When a deaf person learns how to hear, he feels like he has received a gift, a new set of ears. We also have a new set of ears that we need to get.

When we just hear with our intellect, it is a desire to know and understand. Our desire for intellect will not be enough to help us understand spiritual matters. Many people make a very big mistake: they try to understand spiritual matters in the same way that they understand intellectual matters, and they think that you can navigate your way through spirituality in the same way that you use a GPS. They erroneously view spiritual matters as intellectual matters.

With hearing spirituality, each person hears differently. Everyone hears spirituality from a different place within themselves, because it is not the same thing as the regular hearing. Some hear spiritual matters only using their intellect (which means they don’t understand it), while others hear them in a very palpable way which they can actually sense; they really experience it.

We must point out that one should not only attempt to use his heart to hear and never use his mind. If a person shuts out his mind and only wants to use his heart, such is a person is acting only according to his feelings, and feelings alone do not amount to anything.

In order to connect to the Yechidah, we have to first become the right receptacle in order to receive it. This is done by learning how to listen from a whole different place in ourselves. We have physical ears, Baruch Hashem, but you should know that we also have “spiritual” ears.

Chazal say that every day, a bas kol (Heavenly voice) goes out and calls out that everyone should repent. Why don’t we hear this voice? It is because we are spiritually deaf. We need to open up our spiritual sense of hearing.

Most people are deaf to this kind of hearing. We must first realize that we are spiritually deaf, and then we can learn how to listen to inner sounds.

The first step of this is that we need to simply believe that we have in us the Yechidah. After this, we can train ourselves to listen to our Yechidah. It sees and hears differently. It smells and speaks differently. We have five senses; these are revealed to us. The Yechidah also has five senses which we need to learn about.

To illustrate the concept more, Adam on the first day of creation was able to see from one end of the world to the other. The depth behind this was that he saw from a whole different kind of view than the normal kind of view. From where did he view this from? How could he see endlessly? He viewed this from the point in the soul that is unlimited (which we spoke about in the last chapter).

At Har Sinai, there was “a great voice that did not stop”, and it is still going on today. How come we don’t hear it? It is because our hearing is limited, but a spiritual sound is unlimited. You can’t sense the unlimited using the limited. But if someone accesses the sense of hearing in his Yechidah, he can hear it – he can hear an endless voice in Creation that never stops.

There is no end to an ability that comes from the Yechidah. Talking from our Yechidah is endless, because it is coming from the unlimited. We don’t have it because we haven’t revealed our Yechidah. But before revealing the Yechidah, first we need to believe that our Yechidah has these senses, and we also need to learn how to listen to these deep senses.

So first we must believe that there is a place in our soul where we can hear an endless voice. We must reveal that sound. But we must realize that it’s a different sense. It is not reached through our physical senses we are used to. It’s already in us, and we just need to learn how to listen to it.

Seeing New Perspectives In The Same Thing

To try to understand this, let’s compare this to a person looking at a painting. If he looks at it for five minutes and then another five minutes, he sees a whole different picture than five minutes ago. The more a person looks at a picture, the more details he notices in it, and it’s not just that he notices more in the picture; he reveals a whole new picture than what he saw five minutes ago. There is always more to uncover in something. This helps us understand the concept we are describing: how we can see that nothing ever really has an end, because there is always more.

A person reads something and thinks he understands the material. He thinks he knows what it’s all about. He thinks that there can’t be more to understand than what he sees. His perception is entirely based on what he has seen or read. But there is always more depth to everything, because there are so many layers to everything in Creation.

Chazal say that there are seventy interpretations for every possuk. Are there only seventy? There is really no end to how many ways there to interpret a possuk.

Even the recorder in front of me is full of depth, much more than we understand. There can always be more discoveries to its inner workings. 

We know that more and more discoveries are always being uncovered about the body. Any scientist knows that the body is an endless study.

Understanding spirituality is not limited to the physical sense of sight. Just because we can’t see it with our eyes doesn’t mean that it’s not there. Spirituality is a whole different kind of sight than what we see physically. Even when it comes to physical sight we see how limited it is, because a microscope can show us much more.

The Ramban says that the root of all mistakes is that people don’t see what they believe. Aristotle knew so much, but he only believed in something if he could see it. “Seeing is believing”, people erroneously think. If a person can’t see something, he doesn’t believe. People think that if they can’t see a spiritual matter, it must not exist. That is the root of all mistakes, because understanding spirituality is not at all like how you see something physical.

Imagine if they would said 1000 years ago that there will be a microscope which can see further into anything. No one would believe in it…

When people want to always know exactly “what to do” in matters of spirituality, they are using their understanding of the physical to try to understand spirituality. Such understanding is superficial and will not help one to understand the spiritual. If a person reaches an inner understanding from his soul, he understands that really there is no such thing as exactly “what to do” in spirituality. It’s not something that can be given exact guidance.

Let’s go further with this concept.

Let’s say a person reads and learns about something; does he have a hard time reading it again? Some people can easily read something again, because they forgot about it and they won’t mind reading it again. It feels like they’re learning it for the first time. But other people can’t read something again that they have already read; they have no interest in doing so. What is the root of this?

It is really because such people only use their intellect to understand something. They don’t know how to really experience their knowledge.

If people would know that by hearing something again that it is a way for you to experience it again – then there would be no end to what we would be able to hear! We can read the same words of Chazal and understand new things each time. It makes no difference if you heard it already, because each time you hear, you can uncover a new depth of understanding to the very same words you keep hearing.

When you eat the same food again, why do you enjoy it? You’ve already tasted it! It is your heart which is enjoying a new taste each time in the same food.

Chazal say that a person should have a lev shomea, a “heart that hears.” What this means is that a person should develop a whole new kind of hearing. It can change a person’s entire life around.

When a person gets married, it’s a huge change from being single. So too, hearing the inner senses of the soul is a huge change from your regular hearing. You can hear a new sound in the same words you hear. This is not just to receive new intellectual understanding in something, but to hear it differently. It is to use the power of “taste” for spirituality, which we mentioned earlier.

To give another example, the love that a spouse feels towards the other in a marriage can be a new feeling each day. It’s the same spouse, but you experience love in a different way each time that you love your spouse.

Practically Developing This Inner Ability

When a person looks at a picture one day and the next day he looks at it again, he can ask himself what he sees in it today that he didn’t see yesterday. This gets him used to the concept we are describing. Or, a person hears a song today, and the next day he can hear the same song, and try to notice something new he didn’t hear in it the day before.

After this comes the next, deeper stage: listening to yourself. You will reveal a new “you” with the more you do this. You can keep uncovering more depth to yourself with the more you listen to yourself. The soul is vastly deep. Self-recognition is never the same each day; you can keep noticing more about yourself. You can uncover more layers in yourself. This is how you can begin to enter inward.

Listening To Yourself: Discerning Your Inner Motivations

Our soul has many layers to it. Recognizing yourself doesn’t mean to know your weaknesses. That’s just a part of it. We are referring to a power of inner recognition.

For example, a person needs to buy a broom, so he can sweep the house for Shabbos. Why is he going to buy the broom? If he looks deeply into himself, he can uncover many reasons he has. There is no one reason that is motivating him. He might even have ten reasons why he wants to buy a broom. It’s not just because he wants to buy the broom for Shabbos. There are more inner motivations he really has. He can learn how to feel those inner motivations.

To illustrate this concept, in sefer Michtav M’Eliyahu, Rav Dessler wrote that once a student of his had a nightmare in which he dreamed that he killed his son. He woke up terrified and ran to his teacher to ask him what such a thing meant, and how could he dream of such a thing. Rav Dessler told him that “Sometimes, you get annoyed at your son, like when he wakes you up in middle of the night for a drink, and you get so frustrated with him that for a few seconds you wish he wouldn’t be there. Because you had such a thought, you were able to dream that you killed him.”

The source of understanding ourselves is that we believe that our soul has many layers to it, depth within depth. In order to get to our innermost point of the soul, we need to learn about the more outer layers of our soul that cover over it, the map. So we need to come to recognize ourselves.

You can’t discover your self-recognition in any sefarim store - you can only find it within yourself. You can only understand yourself by being aware that you have many layers in yourself, and that your essence is in the innermost point, which is the Yechidah. We need to hear the outer layers of the soul and then to get to hear the soul’s essence, so we need to hear from a different place in ourselves.

The Power To Have Inner Experiences

Here we will not discuss how to hear the outer layers of our soul, and we will focus on how we hear the inner layer of the soul. In order to hear it, you can’t hear it intellectually. You hear it through your heart. It is called the power of touch in your soul (mishush). The Yechidah is really how you “feel” yourself. We feel if something is hot or cold. But we need to use our Yechidah all the time to feel it.

The Yechidah feels one thing alone, while our hands feel different things. Only our Yechidah is the inner way to touch. In order to feel something, we need to have contact with it, and we think about it. But to hear the Yechidah, we must learn how to do one thing alone: take one thought alone and keep focusing on it.

To focus on one thought alone is not just about learning how to concentrate (which is also wonderful); it is the tool you can use to enter inward into the soul. That is its purpose. How do we concentrate on one thought alone? Isn’t this impossible? The answer is, if you experience what you do, you will be focused.

A chassan and kallah are very focused at the time of the chuppah. They are not spacing about; they are completely immersed in the experience, thus their thoughts do not wander.

After the wedding, though, the wife is washing the dishes, and her thoughts are elsewhere; she has many things on her mind. How can she concentrate? Her thoughts are in one place, her heart is in another place, and she is doing something else entirely, trying to change the diaper as she’s doing other things. Compare this to the focus she was having when she stood under the chuppah.

The lesson from this is, when a person is scattered inside himself, he cannot access his inner layers, and then he can’t experience himself.

The inner voice of the Yechidah is really the way to experience the actual soul. It is a way to constantly experience. Most people are too busy and don’t have time to experience themselves, thus their Yechidah is never revealed.

The way to access the senses of the Yechidah is to experience what we do, which is to remain focused on our thoughts in one action alone – to be in it totally, which gives us inner unity. This is the tool we can use to enter the Yechidah.

A person on this world goes through many experiences and he likes to relay them to others: “I went here, I went here, I saw this and this”. But the truth is that you really can’t relay your experiences to others. No one else can experience what you experienced. You can get another person to feel a pull towards what you experienced, but not more than that.

Experiencing Vs. Renewal and Excitement

What is the main deterrent that holds people back from reaching their Yechidah? It is because people aren’t really experiencing the moment. People only have experiences at extreme occasions, such as a wedding, or a very sad occasion. But people are not experiencing life itself! In order to experience life, you need to experience it always!

The happy or sad occasions of life come and go. They are subject to change, and they vanish. We need more than those rare exciting experiences. We need to experience the essence of life.

When a person has a child, he experiences it. When a person makes money, he experiences it. But to experience each day – people wonder: what is there to experience?! But it means to experience the essence of life itself, each day. And this is a constant experience.

We can’t develop our experiences based on extreme occasions in our life which come and go. If we experience our very daily life itself, we have the tool to get to our Yechidah. But if all a person experiences are the major events and occasions of life, which are extreme moments, as well as fleeting - he has no real inner experiences.

We are speaking of how to listen to the inner place in ourselves. It is really about learning to listen to our constant experience of life.

The Ein Sof is constant. If we want to access its light in our soul, through our Yechidah, then we must already be familiar with what it means to experience the same, consistent reality, and we must not seek new understandings it. Rather, we need to learn how to experience.

The Yechidah in us contains everything we need. We have layers and layers to ourselves. We need to experience life; there are experiences of our Nefesh, Ruach, Neshamah and Chayah. But the deepest experience you can have is to experience your very self, which is your Yechidah. This is what we need to learn how to listen to.

The Yechidah is not just called so because it is “one” collective piece. It is because it always experiences one experience.

What does that mean? How can you keep experiencing the same thing alone? Doesn’t that sound boring?

We can compare this to a person who has a wedding on every night of the week. In the first wedding he goes to, he’ll be happy. When it comes the second wedding of the week, he is less excited, and the when it comes the third wedding of the week, even less. His excitement eventually dies down until it is gone completely, and he has no joy whatsoever in attending a wedding with the more and more he attends weddings so much. Why? His happiness was based on a feeling of renewal, and now the renewal is gone, because the joy of the wedding is not “new” anymore to him.

If a person learns how to enjoy his very essence, he can have constant experiences. If not, he will feel like he has no renewal, and that will lead him to feel that he has a void inside, and he won’t be able to fill it. Perhaps he will look for some sefer to read that will revive him, or some new and exciting idea, but in reality, nothing can help him, because his problem is that he seeks renewal, since he needs renewal to feel content.

Chazal say that the fish keep jumping out of the water to receive new drops. But their real vitality, which they don’t realize, is contained in the water they are already in. The Rambam says that all oneg (pleasure) is in yourself, in your soul. You don’t have to search outside yourself for pleasure. All you need to do is learn about yourself, and you will find the greatest pleasure there. Your “I” does not seek anything new.

We want to get to our inner essence, which we are learning about here. Everything is in it. To learn how to listen to our inner self is really to learn how to recognize that we really don’t need renewal! Our inner essence contains everything we need, and we just need to listen to our essence.

People always want to hear the news, or what new music CD came out. But you can take the same old things you heard and keep listening to them and hear new things.

Who would want to review the same words again and again? What’s new? But the truth is, you can keep experiencing the essence of the same words. You can hear the same shiur again and again and hear new things in it each time you hear it; you don’t need to give a new look to the room you’re hearing the shiur in or switch around the tables and chairs to make it feel like a different and fresh experience. Rather, you can hear the same words, again and again, and keep experiencing them anew each time, although they are the same old words.

People tend to seek renewal and changes, but this holds back the way to reach the Ein Sof. The Ein Sof of Hashem is unchanging, and you can’t keep understanding “new” perspectives in it. It is rather something you experience more and more with the more you connect with it, even though it is something that always remains the same in its essence.

The outer layers of our soul – our Nefesh through our Chayah - require renewal. It searches for new things. It’s boring when we hear that people are having children, because everyone is having children, because it’s not news to us. So we need to have some “new” things going on in our life in order to satisfy the outer layers of our soul.

But if we want to get to the inner point of the soul, the Yechidah, we must familiarize ourselves with the concept that our essence is not about finding renewal, for it is connected to the Ein Sof, which is unchanging. New things are certainly interesting, but they don’t get you to the inner point of the soul.

The Baal HaTanya said Moshiach will come to reveal how all is one, which will fully reveal the Ein Sof  of Hashem. You can’t feel “new” understandings in the Ein Sof.

Renewal Vs. Consistency

So you need to believe that there is a way to keep experiencing the same thing, constantly, which doesn’t change, even though it does not feel new each time. The way to get to our essence is to realize that a constant experience is deeper than the feeling of renewal from new things.

This is a change in perspective that we are not used to.

Many times people tell me after Tishrei ends, “I miss the Yomim Tovim, when I was on a much higher level.” I tell them, “Winter is better. Winter is the best Yom Tov - because it’s the same each day, you don’t get overwhelmed by the changes of the festivals. You can just keep experiencing the same thing again and again without getting thrown around between all the changes!”

So entering our essence is about seeking to experience something, constantly, and it is not about finding something “new”.

I hope that we will succeed in learning how to listen to the more inner layers of our soul, until we can finally arrive at listening to the very innermost point.