They told me to look up—
to surrender to something greater,
external, transcendent,
the God of ladders and heavens,
of confession aimed skyward.
But when I prayed—truly prayed,
not the rote mechanics of petition
but the wordless reaching
that begins when language fails—
I found no upward.
Only inward.
Only down,
beneath the chattering nefesh,
past the storming ruach,
deeper than neshama’s knowing,
to the place where asking stops
because the asker dissolves.
יחידה
The singular one.
Not a power above me
but the innermost point—
the spark that was never not divine,
the knot the mystics say
was tied before separation
and never untied.
They spoke of absolutes—
honesty, purity, unselfishness, love.
Noble ascents.
But the yechida knows no ascent;
it was never elsewhere.
At the limit,
when all structures thin,
I did not find rescue waiting
like an answer descending from above.
I found the veils worn transparent,
the light already present
finally able to appear.
Not salvation from outside
but recognition from within.
They ask: Who do you pray to?
And I cannot say Ein Sof,
cannot rehearse the metaphysics of tzimtzum,
the dialectic of yesh and ayin
that fills essays with footnotes
and quenches no thirst.
I pray to the self that is not a self.
To the watcher behind the watcher.
To what remains
when identities exhaust themselves
and something still breathes.
Call it yechida.
Call it chelek Eloka mi-ma’al mamash—
a literal portion of God above.
Call it the still, small voice
that sounds like thought
yet knows what was never learned.
Maps describe movement outward—
belief, surrender, confession, repair, seeking.
Necessary paths.
But my movement spirals inward:
strip, descend, loosen, dissolve—
until even the one who descends
is forgotten
and only ground remains,
wearing a human face.
This is not inflation,
the ego masquerading as holiness.
This is annihilation—
the recognition that what falls away
was never the Self to begin with.
Bittul—
self-nullification,
the Hasidic art of stepping aside.
Not submission to an alien God
but dissolution of the alien self,
the one assembled from fear and grasping,
the one that required masks
to feel real.
When that one loosens—
again and again,
in prayer, in silence,
in the refusal to cling—
what remains is not absence.
What remains is yechida:
the self that was divine all along,
hidden beneath garments,
waiting to be recognized.
So when they say higher power
I hear deeper power.
When they say outside
I hear inside-out.
When they say surrender
I hear return.
The topology inverts,
yet the practice holds.
And in unlikely places
people rediscover
what mystics always knew:
that the God we seek
has been seeking us
from within.
Not higher.
Deeper.
Not outside.
Inside-out.
Not surrender to another.
Return to Self.
I practice recognizing
what was never lost,
clearing the debris
from a sanctuary
that was always holy.
Not becoming spiritual.
Uncovering what is.
Not finding God.
Allowing God
to find itself
in this vessel
that somehow still
carries fire.
