Meeting an Enlightened Person

When I walked into the classroom, and saw an olive-skinned Lama sitting hands clasped on bright orange robes, the sense of an inner vision coming true raced through my blood. Was this the teacher I had been looking for? My husband had organized a two day workshop at the university with Gendon, a Tibetan Buddhist monk who was also a doctor of Tibetan medicine, residing in Israel, at a kibbutz in the Negev Desert. As I had to teach anyway, I thought I would stop in.

I stopped dead and gazed. The monk was so silent and centered. Years of living in a monastery had made him vibrant, lithe and strongly built. Frank had told me he soothed end-of-life patients. It seemed to me that years of working with dying patients had made him tender. Years of prayer and meditation, simple diet according to laws of health, had given him great energy and power of concentration.

When he began to talk, I knew meeting him was going to heal me. Though I came in Monday feeling tired and weak, I began to feel vitality and tranquility, sweet golden nectar in every word he spoke. He spoke about the effect of the stars on our mental and bodily health and how to read dreams and omens and why we should eat warm and healthy food. He also talked a lot about karma.

Chin in the palms of my hands, I leaned forward to absorb his words and to grasp a point where religions meet, a shared point of universal truth. The idea of tikkun in cabala and in Hasidism means fixing. We are reborn to fix some blemish in our souls. In Buddhism and Hinduism, they call it karma.

Karma is the law of reincarnation. Karma explains the relation between cause and effect in human existence by placing causes in previous lives. This world is only a world of effects. All human beings incarnate to this world to reap the fruit of their thoughts, beliefs and actions planted in previous lives.

If the fruits of our karma are good, we are radiant, healthy and happy. This may be what Christians call "grace." Religious Jews call this being blessed, righteous and walking before God.

If the fruits of our karma are bad, we have unhappy lives. But karma may also be the crust of thinking and feeling habits which imprison us and make us unlucky. Karma can be felt as a substance which sticks to our insides and curses our existence. The sticky stuff can melt though; the darkness suddenly lifts and we think and feel differently. All at once we see light streaming from beneath the walls we have built. At this moment we understand that we create the thought and perceptual patterns which confine us and prevent us from grasping the true nature of existence.

Every person should look for and pray to meet a wise teacher who can open the soul. In this way we can uncover the secret workings of cause and effect, the law that runs through our lifetimes. A wise teacher can help us do this because he or she is a highly evolved being. A real teacher is someone who in previous lives has done so much spiritual work in past lives that in this life his enlightened mind is so strong it shines for others. But if it is tainted with ego and love of power over others, it is not light but poison.

If you meet a real teacher, a person who is modest and unassuming, know that he or she is a gold nugget sent to you because you have directed your intentions above. Now I feel opened, lifted out of the rut of my mind and heart.

Reviving a Poisoned Dog the Biblical Way

Our German Shepherd was six months old when she swallowed poison which our municpality spread in order to kill rats. My husband was out of the country when Tagar went into convulsions and began having violent spasms of diarrhea. There was no vet in Kiriat Arba that day, so my children and I put her on a folded carton and slid her into the hallway and sat around her stiff body hopelessly watching her die. It seemed that she already had rigor-mortis; her limbs stuck out straight like pieces of pipe. The diarrhea stopped as her systems began shutting down. Even the convulsions stopped. It seemed that her breathing had ceased too. Shmulik called some friends over to help bury her. By the time they came, we noticed a fluttery movement in one of her legs, Estie said, "Maybe you can do something Ema with meditation?"

A healing verse popped into my mind. It was from The Book of Kings. Elijah spreads himself out on the body of a widow's dead child and chants a phrase with God's name in it. In the Bible, the boy miraculously revived. Quickly, I made a few changes in the wording so we wouldn’t be using one of the explicit names of God. "We are going to say Chai Tagar Chai, which means "Live Tagar, live!"

"Chai Tagar Chai. Chai Tagar Chai!"

Our voices merged together as we repeated Elijah's magical plea again and again. We began to move our bodies in a rocking movement which religious Jews do. It helps propel the soul upwards, and then helps the soul re-land in the body. Tagar responded with twitches in her muzzle. Her eyes fluttered open then closed. Our plea rose in volume. Live Tagar, live!

But Elijah spread himself over the body of the child; hands on the child's hands, mouth on the child's mouth, a spiritual resuscitation! I didn't feel comfortable about putting my mouth on the puppy's mouth, but I did go and sit on her as my children continued their chanting. She twitched some more, then I got up. Slowly she raised herself on to wobbly legs and found a corner to get away from me. We cried and hugged each other.

Though it took Tagar two more weeks to finally regain her strength, she was living proof of the healing power of Biblical words.