The Thing I Feared Most to Write

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Visit Naomi Wolf’s Substack.

Some days it seems as if the dark forces have won.

A friend sent me a document from the Department of Defense website that reveals a full-spectrum propaganda/information management program, aimed at…us. I don’t understand how our little boats of truth can survive the resources and personnel directed against us.

A loved one has kidney damage. A loved one has heart damage. A loved one is going for surgery. An elder’s heart simply burst. An elder fell. An elder now walks with two sticks.

I pray for everyone continually and I remember the days when we rolled around in health, heedlessly, barely noticing, as if we were pressing grapes without measure into an endless vat of wine.

Now that past is past.

Loved ones who are young look pallid, with a yellowish glaze across their cheekbones. I look, hoping they will not notice, for evidence of living capillaries, for the blush of life.

They have grey-blue shadows, under their eyes, that that never go away. Their cheeks are hollow.

I pray all the time. Now that I believe a great harvesting of human life is underway, a great shaking-out of the human project, I have no more excuses. I feel that our current conditions have been brought about so that we are in an X-ray moment spiritually, in which we cannot be lukewarm or equivocal.

We must choose this day whom to serve.

Joshua 24:14: ¹⁴ “Now therefore fear the Lord and serve him in sincerity and in faithfulness. Put away the gods that your fathers served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. ¹⁵ And if it is evil in your eyes to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell. But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

I have to write what I have longed not to write; what both good Christians and good Jews have advised me never to write.

I have to write it now because what happened to me, that I do not discuss, has comforted me and instructed me and guided me in this terrible time.

Who knows; this story may comfort you as well.

####

Some years ago, I was writing a book about female sexual and reproductive health. I was scared to complete and publish it, since that would mean that I would have to speak publicly about female sexual biology and physical desire, which were at that time still somewhat taboo subjects. The theme of my book was that the sexuality of women, and their gift of fertility, were sacred treasures, and that these should be treated by society (and by women themselves) with great respect, and not degraded or debased.

I was afraid I would be attacked for bringing these issues into daylight and speaking about them frankly (I know that my former fears about this in today’s much more brazen time now sound quaint). But I was so very fearful that for the first time in my life, I suffered a writer’s block.

I was immobilized.

I happened to be in Portland, Oregon. I was wandering along a charming shopping area, 23rd Street, downtown. It was a cool, wet day. That vibrant Northwestern drizzle, green and misty, was a fragrant veil against my face.

Victorian houses lined both sidewalks. Stores offered handmade chocolates and tie-dyed cotton skirts. Cafes with fresh-ground coffee, gift shops with scented soaps, all beckoned.

On the basement level of one of the Victorians, a wooden sign read: “Counseling”.

Having nothing better to do, and thinking that a random chat with a stranger might ease my inability to write, or at least that it could not hurt, I walked down the steps.

I was in an unmemorable hallway: standard-issue chairs and beige carpeting. I sat in a chair and waited. The door opened; an unremarkable woman gestured me into her office. I found myself in a space as bland as the waiting area had been.

The counselor was about forty. She looked like a mom who had gone back to work. She wore an Oregon-standard suburban-lady outfit: leather clogs, khaki slacks, a bright cotton sweater. Her shoulder-length light-brown hair showed a feathering of grey at the temples. Her pleasant, open face was bare of makeup.

She gestured me to sit on a little grey couch. I glanced at the credentials framed on her wall: an MSW license. There were cozy pillows, the splash of color in a Mexican rug, and — that was it. There was nothing else suggestive or unusual there. I don’t even remember her name.

I explained to her my writer’s block, and she responded that her method used hypnotherapy. I was comfortable with this, as my mother is a sought-after past-life regression therapist. While I am agnostic (as is my mother) about whether what her clients experience are actual “past lives” or simply the immense narrative power of the subconscious mind, I knew that various people had used that methodology to get to the heart of their concerns quickly.

Certainly, as a writer, I recognize that the subconscious mind is nothing to belittle. It holds both terrors and riches. I also knew enough about phobias (writer’s block is a phobia) to know that my subconscious mind could indeed hold the key to why I was unable to face the blank page, and that it could possibly show me what I needed to do to move past that immobilization.

The counselor explained that she would put me into a light meditative state. I was comfortable with that as well.

I closed my eyes.

“Ten, nine, eight…” She counted, in a quiet, soothing voice. She had explained that I was to walk down a staircase and count with her, silently, with each step. “Seven, six, five…” I was to count with her until I reached the bottom of the staircase.

I did so.

I was surprised to find myself descending rough golden-white stone steps, hewn as if by coarse chipping. The flat risers of the stairs blended in curves, not in squared edges, into the stone walls that flanked them, as do the Herodian and other ancient steps unearthed by archaeologists. The steps were exactly like the ones I had walked down in the Old City in Jerusalem, where I had lived for a couple of years as a child, and then as a teenager.

“…Four, three, two, one.”

I was at the bottom of the stairs. Her voice, now distant, explained that I would see a door in front of me.

I faced a rough-hewn wooden door, held together not with nails but with leather cords.

“Now open the door and tell me what you see.”

I opened the door.

#####

Before me a man in his early thirties, sitting on a rough wooden bench.

I was now in the room with him.

The two of us were in a crude, stone-walled workshop, like the simple, ancient workshops in the Old City that are still in use, half hewn out of the hillsides’ golden rock. Deep shadows pooled in the corners.

The man was seated at a worktable. I saw that it was held together by wooden dowels, not by metal nails. The man wore a simple robe, made of light brown fabric closer in texture to hemp cloth or to burlap than to modern woven cloth. The edges were uneven, unhemmed. He was barefoot; the floor was made of packed dirt — the golden sandstone dirt of Jerusalem; and I saw that his feet were dusty. The soles of his feet rested on the golden dirt of the floor. The frayed edging of his robe, his feet, the table’s surface, were all dusty. It was the dust of premodern poverty. He was obviously poor.

I understood glancingly that I now was in a meditative, or hypnotically relaxed, state. It was as if I had left my conscious awareness far above, and had dropped to a much deeper level, below normal cognition; it was as if I had reached a deep well of awareness inside my being, full of still water.

I gazed at this being in astonishment. I knew exactly who this being was.

I knew that he was Jesus.

What I saw was incredible.

But it was also terrifying and upsetting.

My reactions were completely split. My awareness was torn in two.

My subliminal mind, where I was mostly present, was overjoyed. I had never been happier in my life. I was in the presence of my best friend, whom I did not consciously know, but whom, subconsciously, I thought I had lost forever.

Hot tears welled from under my closed lids, and spilled down my cheeks. I was crying as if I had waited my whole life to cry like this; as if these tears had been in me, dormant, forever.

But even as my subconscious mind was rejoicing, I could far above me feel my conscious mind — my personality, my biographical self, my ego — freaking out; appalled; twisting about like a hooked fish, in a desperate effort to escape.

My conscious mind was horrified.

I am a Jewish lady.

This was the wrong person.

This was not whom I had wanted to see.

####

I recognized that this was Jesus the way you recognize your own child across a crowded playground. My mother has bright red hair and on hot weather, carries a Japanese parasol. When she lived in the West Village, she was the only person who looked like this. I recognized this being in front of me the way I would recognize my red-haired mother, carrying her parasol, from across the traffic on Sixth Avenue.

I felt that I was in the presence of my lost love; my home; my soul’s best friend.

I became aware that this being was emanating light. But it was not like any emanation of light I had seen in the world of my waking life, or even in art-historical depictions of haloes or of saints — or of Jesus himself, for that matter.

The room in which we were present, was dark; there was no modern illumination in it. But millions of rays of light came out of this person, multi-directionally. These rays of light were brightest where they emerged from around his body, and faded a bit into the surrounding air, at a distance of a few feet away from him.

These rays of light were unspeakably captivating to observe. They shifted and moved, in a multi-directional way, whenever this being shifted or moved. They were alive.

At one point his right arm moved closer to me on the workshop table, and the light rays flowed toward me from his arm, as well as flowing vertically and horizontally and in all simultaneous directions. When I watched these light rays shift and move around this man, I understood that this light energy was also a form of love, and that it was also a form of music.

I understood, in other words, that light — all light, but also especially this unearthly light – was on the same spectrum as love; and that all light, material and divine, was also on the same spectrum as sound. I also understood that this light was the primordial energy of earth, and that it healed.

This being was crafting a beautiful spherical glass or crystal object. It resembled the blue-glass eye symbols worn to ward off evil, that are still produced by craftsmen in Jerusalem’s Old City. But this object, I understood, represented the “third eye” of higher awareness. Its purpose was to be placed eventually — with work and struggle — in the foreheads of human beings. This was our job; to evolve so as to attain this integration of the lovely spherical crystal object, this divine object, into ourselves, our human awareness.

(No one actually spoke in this experience that I had; it was all fully silent. I experienced the transmission of meaning as if this was how communication really is in some other dimension – that is, it was immediate, effortless and mind-to-mind, without the need for physical words or the struggle of cognition. Time was meaningless too; my thoughts or observations and the insights that accompanied them, unfolded all at once; the insights appeared in my mind as if they were placed inside my consciousness with no effort from me.)

I understood that in the process of crafting this symbol of higher consciousness, human beings were supposed to co-create the object alongside this divine craftsman. He could not do it alone without humans’ help, and humans could not do it alone without his. This co-creation was a human project, or the project for humans.

In this state, I realized that any of us could have these rays of light/love emanating from us always, similarly – that that was our human birthright. I understood that we could all radiate this way, with this light/love that healed and that was magical. The only thing that kept us from doing so was our ignorance of our own divine condition or our stubborn rejection of it.

“Sin” or rather “error”, I saw, also dimmed our capabilities, and our innate light. Ignorance of our true nature, and “sin” — meaning bad decisions, weak decisions, self-serving choices, unkind choices, and finally, choices to align with dark forces — were, I understood, a kind of grime or unpleasant opacity that dimmed these rays of ours, day by day, if we decided to choose harmful acts and thoughts.

The way our bad choices over time dimmed these rays functioned like the willful damaging of a beautiful technology. It was as if bad, selfish, or ignorant decisions gummed up the light/love transmitter’s effectiveness, a functionality that is the basis of how we are created and of how we are supposed to work as humans in the world, while using the medium of our lives.

I must stress that when I say “sin”, I did not understand this notion in the classical sense of shame in front of the Divine, or of the Divine’s disgust with us. There is almost no word for what I mean here instead of “sin” in the presence of this being. Imagine a word that encapsulates a horrible, self-sabotaging, regrettable mess. There was great love and compassion and understanding surrounding the human-ness of this dark gunk, these bad choices. But I did see that the complicating, deadening, darkening consequences of bad choices were inevitable; the grime or residue that resulted from our bad choices was part of the natural law governing how we were made and governing the moral universe into which we humans were born.

I also saw that the golden rays that emanated from this being, were coextensive with the raw material of our entire human lives as well – just as our human lives were coextensive with this being’s golden rays – and that they also constituted our human dimension, as well as being the stuff of the love between humans, human love of animals and theirs of us, and our collective love of God’s creation.

I saw that every human being is born to align with these harmonious rays, that undergird a person’s life almost like grooves on an old record. The moral choices of that person become like the needle.

The golden grooves, in effect, are God’s will, which always harmonize us with the greater universe and with our lives’ missions, and with love.

I saw that if people choose to contradict God’s will and the natural moral order of the universe, or if they defy it, or if they scramble and defile the paths that God’s sense of harmony has set out for them, all they are doing is creating their own environment, their own conditions, now and in the future. I saw that all they are doing is scratching their own otherwise beautiful “records”, and making their own lives’ music inharmonious, ugly, or worse.

I saw that they then bring difficulty, disharmony and eventually catastrophe upon their own lives’ conditions; and that all of this is not God’s “punishment,” but is generated entirely by their own doing.

By seeing this (and “seeing” is the wrong word; I was just receiving this somehow), I had the following insights.

One is that there is really no such thing as stealing; there is no such thing as lying; there is no such thing as cheating; there is no such thing as secret adultery; there is no such thing as fraud. There is no such thing as “getting away with” anything through deception or concealment.

People who believe that there is, are simply unaware of the workings of the universe.

There is no such thing as lying, or theft, or fraud, and so on, because everything, everything is seen and accounted for and known. Everything one does is inscribed in this record of one’s life, a record that then affects oneself, one’s conditions, the music one makes for oneself, one’s family, the world.

You don’t hurt anyone else, in other words, ultimately, I saw, in the deepest reality, by bad actions; you first and most without exception, hurt yourself.

The corollary to this insight was a beautiful and comforting one. What I described in the paragraph above is true because no one’s life record is unimportant to God. No one’s life is unimportant to God.

No one’s. Indeed, everyone’s life is a central concern, to God. How is that possible? Humans can’t do it themselves, or imagine it, but that was what I understood: that God’s awareness is so vast that somehow everyone can be at the exact center of His love, even as everyone else is also always at the exact center of His love.

He sees us all; not searching us out punitively, but because he loves us all in ways beyond human capacities to understand.

There is no concealment possible, because God’s love is so capacious and immense and intimate and detailed, that every one of us counts immeasurably to him. He made us transparent to him, and he made the moral conditions of the world as I described a few beats above, because he so loves us and attends to us so minutely.

I understood that “sin,” or horrible choices, could only happen because people did not understand how important they were to God. They made awful decisions when they thought that they did not matter to God, and when they were persuaded that God was not encompassing them.

If they knew how loved they were, I understood, they would never make such choices.

In Matthew 10:29 Jesus says:

^“Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground outside your Father’s care.^”

I felt that this was what I was experiencing, or being shown. If God can be mindful of every sparrow’s fall — and indeed the fall takes place inside of God’s care; even in death the sparrow is not abandoned — how can we doubt our own centrality to our Creator?

I gathered that when you align with God’s will in your life, which is pretty simple, and live as if you know you are creating your own moral reality minutely, then blessings from the universe are drawn to you. There may still be tragedies or obstacles or difficult times that are inevitable (I was not given to understand why); but by remaining aligned with God’s will nonetheless, the challenges turn ultimately into blessings, even though all of this takes place in a pattern too big and complex for us at that given moment, to see.

There was another insight I received into the well of my awareness.

This person gestured toward an area above his right shoulder. It showed a manmade wood-and-metal image of a Crucifixion.

Then he gestured to an area above his left shoulder. It revealed not the visual Stations of the Cross as they exist now, and have for the last five hundred years or so, in religious iconography — the painful moments on the way to Jesus’ own execution. Rather, he showed me a replacement series of visual “Stations of the Cross,” but drawn from his life.

In one scene, he was feeding the hungry. In the next, he was speaking lovingly to a woman with an issue of blood. Next, he was healing a paralytic. Then he was protecting a woman about at risk of being stoned due to conventional hostilities. He was eating with prostitutes and tax collectors, the most hated, marginalized people in society.

He conveyed — indicating these two images to his left and to his right — something like: how sad it is. Everyone looks at my death, but they ignore my life.

I understood from this, as Matthew 3:9-10 explained, that “I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up Children for Abraham.”

Jesus’ having been raised from the dead was not the most important of God’s miracles revealed by his life on earth. (This is a paragraph that I dread and am in terror of writing, as I fear offending people or sounding disrespectful to religions. Please know that I am not proselytizing or advocating, merely describing a very subjective personal experience). The love he showed was the greater miracle.

I gathered that when we emulate that life, we too release light, and are capable of healing and of bringing about wonders; not at the scale he did, of course, because we are human, but echoing these abilities in our own more humble ways.

The message I took away was that those people erred who turned toward his resurrection as if believing that his death and resurrection was all it took for them to be “saved”. The real miracles, the real lessons of his journey with us on earth, were embedded in his life.

His life was supposed to be like a primer lesson for us.

We were supposed to emulate his life. That was what God actually wanted, not ritualistic observances of any one or other kind.

That had been the point of his life.

He was warning — not in a punitive way, but in a sad, regretful and also sombrely cautionary way – that many people preferred to engage in religious dogmatism and ritualistic performance at the expense of caring for the outcast, visiting the sick, feeding the hungry, as so on; at the expense of doing justice and mercy every single day.

They did this because the former was less work.

People who harm widows and orphans and the poor, but who proclaim their piety aloud, and make a point to showcase every gesture of their dogmatic worship, really are like “whited sepulcres.” [Matthew 23]

People engage in empty religious performance and call that “salvation,” because that is easier than actually trying, day by day, to emulate the examples of his life, and be a good person.

I also got the sense of something like: “We really meant what we said.”

Like, “It’s really serious.”

Meaning: It really “were better for [someone] that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.” [KJV Luke 17:2]. Meaning: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And a second is like it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyrself. On these two commandments hang [depend] all the law and the prophets.” [Matthew 22, KJV]. That really is the heart of all devotional practice that God desires.

The impression I had was that much of religion was a human effort to evade the responsibility of actually walking with God.

People will do almost anything, I took away from this experience, to avoid simply visiting the sick, caring for the orphan, helping the widow; being kind; making peace.

When I gazed at that man, in his rough robe, with his bare feet; wiry, thin, clothed in his poverty; seated at his rough bench; a dark man with dusty hair and a beard, and with extraordinarily gentle, calm, accepting eyes — in all his poverty and humanness yet emitting somehow light rays in every direction that were also rays of love, and also elements of sound or vibration, shining and multiple like the strings of a living golden zither— I understood that religion was often an evasion.

All religions were beside the point that this Being was making, except to the extent that they help and support people, like guardrails or like walking sticks, in being kind to one another and in acting justly.

Being kind to one another really was the only point.

The only point really was love.

He had certainly said that, over and over.

He hadn’t been kidding, and neither had YHWH. They had meant it. It was true.

We just kept willfully misunderstanding them.

####

This is the last part of this experience, that I have feared for 14 years to write.

I fear that the minute I describe this event in my life, I (and the experience) will be thrust into some theological box or other, which would be really a prison.

Though this experience crystallized my inner life — meaning, my choices in almost every situation thereafter were far more clear to me; I had a great sense of peace and direction — I knew that if I acknowledged or mentioned this experience in any way, my material and social life would be thrown into disarray, if not into complete chaos. It would mean disruption and distress and confusion, to offer up in any public or even closed-circle way, an account of what I’d encountered.

I did not want to become anyone else’s poster child for their faith system, which I still did not share. I did not feel I had “become a Christian.” I did not want to become a coda to someone else’s label or ideology.

I also wanted to dismiss this experience as a phantom, an hallucination. But that was not possible.

I knew this experience had been more real than was my waking life. It was the most real thing I had ever experienced

The whole thing was a confrontation with a dimension more authentic than the one in which I moved from day to day.

I am not leaving my faith.

I am not Christian.

I am Jewish. I remain Jewish.

More than ever.

My experience transcended anything theological.

My experience was anti-dogmatic.

By this experience having been “non-theological,” I simply mean that my experience was of a being — a reality — a blessed dimension available to all of us; not available to us only if we are Christian, and not withheld from us if we are Jewish or Muslim or atheist, or anything else.

My experience was that this is a blessed dimension available to us all by virtue of our being human.

At the risk of offense, I did not feel that I was in the literal presence of God.

I felt that — and here is where language fails — I was in the presence of God’s communication with humans; or in the presence of his expression of his love to his humans.

I felt that this being was “of God” the way your mother’s hug is “of” your mother; or her perfume, or her voice, is “of” her; not separate from her, but also not the totality of her.

####

After I emerged from this state, I processed, haltingly, a bit, with the counselor, what had happened. She was not surprised. Strangely, similar sessions had taken place in her office before. I looked carefully around her office and did not see anything suggestive of what I had just undergone. I listened to the tape recording she had made of the session, and there was no suggestion from her at all.

I left, and I struggled.

Yes, my writer’s block dissolved. Yes I finished my book.

For years, I would wonder why this experience took place when I had been unable to complete a book about how precious is female sexual and reproductive health. Why would Jesus possibly care about that? It seemed — well, random.

Then in 2021-2024, I would find myself faced with the task of explaining to anyone who would listen, that the human race was in peril because a group of demons had decided that female sexual and reproductive health was theirs to subject to a damaging new medical technology, in order to mock, destroy and manipulate it.

If I hadn’t written that book in 2012, I do not think I would have recognized early, how serious were the dangers that faced us via this technology; and I would not have been inured to speaking in public in 2021-2024 about uncomfortable details related to female sexual and reproductive health.

I now know, from that long-ago experience, that time, and maybe even fate itself, are like a skein of yarn in a knitted afghan. Imagine an afghan made of yarn, bunched into multiple folds. A single skein can be pulled right through these multiple folds. If you are traversing the “unfolded afghan” (time unfolding in a linear fashion in your life), you have no idea that a thread has been drawn right through multiple time periods in your life and that it is pulling you mostly invisibly in a single direction.

I don’t know why I had this experience. I don’t think it is because I deserved it in any special way. I literally have no idea.

But I do know, looking back at my life, that without having been privileged to have had that experience, I could never have done the work I did in the last couple of years, trying to warn humanity of an existential evil.

Indeed, I could not have survived the last couple of years, emotionally.

###

Mostly what I felt when faced with this person, this being, was: what good news. What good news.

Humans; we are not alone, we are not bereft; we have a friend. We have a champion.

We are not alone here on this spinning planet.

It is all okay.

#####

I then went on a journey of many years, reading and praying and searching.

I sought out and talked to many religious leaders of many faiths and denominations, to try to understand what had happened to me.

In that, I was almost always disappointed.

I will tell you that story,

Next.