Interim Results of Self-Work in Spirituality

It's about one year since I started my systematic self-work in spirituality with an unexpected adversity in life as my inspiring teacher. In addition to the lessons of life I've learned through the process of coping with and getting over this adversity I've especially been benefited from the teachings of two spiritual teachers - Eckhart Tolle (through his two books The Power of Now and A New Earth as well as his new School of Awakening) and Leo Gura (through his website and numerous free online videos as well as his Ultimate Life Purpose Course).

As I've progressed in my self-work, I've come to feel the world quite differently. Many of those things and people who once interested me have stopped to do so. They include, among others, academic research (for its own sake), Yiddishism and Esperantism as ideologies-cum-movements, politics and political discussions, to name just a few. These things now seem to me to be vanities devoid of any spiritual meaning, thus a waste of time though I don't deny other people's right to pursue them if they can find enough meaning in doing so.

Also in Facebook many posts by many of the people I'm connected with there simply don't interest me any more. And I'm afraid they on their part find little or no interest in many or all of my posts there. I feel we are living in two totally different worlds. I've just found a convincing explanation for why I've come to feel this way in one of the recent videos by Leo Gura. To make a long story short, our consciousness simply works differently, which in turn affects how we think, feel, and speak (differently).

Leaving Academia

At long last I could decide this week to share with my coworkers the news about my fateful professional decision I had officially made several months before - leaving academia after my two-year sabbatical finishes at the end of September 2020. I had been feeling serenity since deciding to leave academia, but it was only after making this announcement that I started to experience enormous relief. If you are one of the few people who have been following this blog in the past several months and wondering what professional transformation I was talking about here cryptically, you have my official answer now.

Though I started turning over the idea of leaving academia even a few years ago for something that had started to interest me as my second career, it remained mostly theoretical as I was scared to leave my comfort zone. I had to experience divorce several months ago to conquer my fear of uncertainty and failure and take action. This suffering, for which I myself am mostly to blame, turned out to be an excellent teacher and a spiritual catalysis. I found myself starting to contemplate about life in general and my life in particular and could finally take courage to make this fateful decision, telling myself that the biggest risk in life is to take no risk. I still think that if I didn't take this risk now, I would regret that on my last day in this incarnation of mine.

I spend my daytime trying to make my academic legacy - one specialized dictionary of Modern Hebrew for foreign learners, which I'll make available online for free once it has been completed, hopefully by next June - and two weekday evenings taking courses here in Jerusalem for my new career, which is supposed to combine Judaism (especially Hasidism), spirituality, and contribution to the society by helping others help themselves.

"When the Student Is Ready, the Teacher Will Apppear"

They say that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Such teachers can be not only human beings but also life experiences, and suffering often seems to be the best teacher though it depends on each of us and our respective level of consciousness whether we can learn from this teacher. It also happens that suffering itself makes us ready as students so that we may be able to learn and benefit from it maximally.

Such "divine storm" I started to experience about one year ago has totally transformed me internally, inspiring me to make two external transformations affecting me internally in turn.

One of such secondary internal transformations is my newly kindled interest in my spiritual growth through formal education. The new teachers who have appeared for me are Torat Hanefesh School of Jewish Psychology and Eckhart Tolle School of Awakening, where I enrollled last month. In the former I started learning Jewish psychology based on the esoteric teachings of hasidism, or to be more precise, those of Chabad, especially of the Book of Tanya, this week in its Jerusalem campus, focusing on the anatomy of the soul and the rectification of the ego. In the latter I'll start learning, partly directly from Eckhart Tolle himself, from January.

I've also been receiving spiritual life coaching online in parallel to discover (or reconfirm in my specific case) my ultimate life purpose and align my professional life with it. This has been very benefitial, especially thanks to a number of difficult, thought-provoking questions by the coach. As the coaching progresses, the more convinced I feel of the fateful decidion I've made to transform my professional life in a most fundamental manner that seems to scare many of my colleagues. The strongest feeling I've been experiencing after jumping into water by conquering this fear is serenity. Actually what scares me most is not the fear of failure but the biggest risk I might pose to myself by not taking any risk.