Changing Perceptions With Experiential Knowledge

MyLife Essay Contest

How can I create meaningful change in my life and become the person I always wished I could be? We all have aspects of ourselves we don’t like, that we wish we could remove, or at least improve, enabling us to become better, different, more successful, more effective. How do we accomplish this? How many times have we tried the same methods, working on ourselves, New Year resolutions, motivational speeches and programs, Mussar works, only to repeatedly find ourselves in relatively the same existential situation? Are we destined to simply “keep trying”, hoping that one day we will conquer the challenges we face, yet fearing that the battle we fight today will continue to be the same battle we fight in ten, twenty, or thirty years from now? Perhaps this is inevitable, and successful, meaningful change is an elusive goal that can never be attained. But what if our failure to grow in our struggles fundamentally stems from how we perceive change, and how we think about methods of change?

The goal of this essay is to convey an effective, and powerfully catalytic method for personal growth, change and success, based on the teachings of Jewish thought found in Chassidus. Sometimes, when thinking of “Jewish thought”, or “Chassidus”, we think of “religion”, and “God”. I hope to illustrate that Chassidus teachings, and indeed, all Torah thought when understood deeply, are fundamentally universal reality based truths through which we operate and interact with each other and our world. Frequently, religion is viewed as some kind of external system, attempting to impose its will on us, to force us into our proper role as “servants of God”. This is largely a misunderstanding and misapplication of basic Torah concepts regarding our relationship with the Source of reality, which we call the ein sof, the Endless One. In actuality, the Torah is simply a description of this reality, which includes the inner world of the human being, as well as the broader reality of the Endless One, Hashem. In other words, it’s not imposing an external system to which one needs to conform, but rather it communicates an accurate description of who one already is, one’s hidden true self. It is the guidebook to externally manifest the deep inner self that you know you possess, the real you.

Toras HaChassidus is the most powerful and deepest facet of Torah thought in that it unites all of the theoretical/spiritual and practical concepts of the Torah and brings them into the realm of the experiential. Toras HaChassidus is also known as Toras HaSod, literally “teaching that which is secret” and Penimiyus HaTorah, “the Internal Teaching”. The Pietzetzner Rebbe explains that it is a secret not because it is forbidden to transmit it to others, but because it is not possible to transmit it directly. It is experiential, and it is only possible to convey an experiential truth to someone who already has some basic internal knowledge ( מסכת חגיגה פרק ב משנה א ). It’s like trying to convey the flavor of peanut butter to someone who has never had it. One can say “it tastes like peanuts”, but that only helps if they’ve tasted peanuts. One can say that it is creamy, but they have to have some prior experience of that texture. There is no direct way to transfer experiential knowledge to another. Ironically, it is this knowledge sought by everyone that gives us certainty and conviction. This type of knowing is called da’as, and it refers to connective knowledge, or internalized, personalized knowledge .(ליקוטי אמרים פרק ג)

Let us explore an example to highlight the distinction between experiential knowledge, and its opposite, empirical knowledge. Imagine you are an engineer and you are on a hike in the mountains. You reach a cliff with a very deep drop. The mountain continues on the far side of the cliff but the gap is too wide for you to jump. On the side you see a long, thick branch that might hold your weight and could be used as a bridge. As you are an engineer, you use your measuring tools to measure its density, thickness, stability, as well as any other factors you feel are necessary to ascertain its usability as a bridge. Based on your calculations, the branch should hold your weight. Then you find two boulders, separated from each other by approximately the same distance as the cliff gap. You place the branch on top of the boulders, and walk across it, jumping up and down on it in the middle a few times. You now have two very different types of knowledge about the capacity of the branch to hold you, and one of those ways of knowing is far more personally meaningful than the other. While a person might cross the bridge using only the empirical analysis, there is no question that the experiential test will authenticate the knowledge of the stability of the branch far more effectively. Empirical knowledge is knowledge that I can attain, that I never knew before, but that remains external to my sense of self. Experiential knowledge, conversely, enters into my sense of self, deeply enough to actuallyalter my perceptions of reality. Empirical knowledge tells me that the branch can hold me, but my inner self lacks conviction. I still fundamentally perceive the branch as a risky gamble. Experiential knowledge changes my personal perception of the branch, to its being something that can hold me.

There are deeper layers to this inner world of da’as. The Ba’al HaTanya (ליקוטי אמרים שם) describes our inner selves as formed of (at least) two different aspects. One is called the sechel (intellect), and the second is entitled the middos (character traits). He posits that all manipulation and modulation of the middos depends on the dynamics of the sechel. In other words, achievement of any kind of permanent change in personal or interpersonal habits, can only be as a secondary outgrowth of a change in the sechel. Attempts to simply alter or pressure change in one’s middos, may bring some level of short term success, wherein behavior can temporarily change, but it will generally not be permanent. One will find oneself in the common perpetual cycle, taking on new resolutions while seeing little real growth. Real growth lies in the realm of the sechel, which we must now analyze in order to reach our goals.

The sechel, as the Ba’al HaTanya describes it, is formed of three parts, referred to as chochmah (abstract, fundamental thought), binah (extrapolated developed thought) and da’as (experiential knowledge). Chochmah means thoughts or ideas that are so abstract that they are undeveloped. They exist in our minds in potential, but they are somewhat dormant. They can be uncovered through binah, also sometimes translated as understanding, wherein we ponder the abstract and extrapolate its implications in the real world. When you take abstract buried thoughts and accurately extrapolate all of their implications, you can reach an “Aha!” moment, a da’as moment, where you suddenly “grasp” the concept deeply, as it resonates with some part of your experience, and it impacts your lifestyle. When your understanding of a concept or idea comes into the inner realm of the da’as, your perception of reality matures and shifts, leading to a resulting change in behavior, in the middos aspect of yourself. Your deepened perception and altered behavior will give you a deeper experiential knowledge of the reality and truth of the given concept, which will then drive an even deeper conceptual understanding. In other words, binah (conceptual extrapolative understanding) leads to da’as (experiential knowledge), which then leads to greater binah and then to greater da’as in an unending ascending cycle. This is the meaning of the statement of our Sages in Pirkei Avos (3:17) that without binah there cannot be da’as and without da’as there cannot be binah.

The purpose of the chochmah-binah-da’as model described by the Ba’al HaTanya is to give us control of the tools necessary to consciously and actively form our own perceptions. Our perceptions (our de’os, plural of da’as) are our silent companions through life, always with us, but very often invisible and taken for granted. It is in the realm of perception, however, that all real change takes place. If you struggle with change and want to alter your behavior, it is not enough to simply “work on” a different behavior pattern. Let’s say your issue is that you are always late. You can start setting alarms, getting friends to remind you, leaving yourself notes, but none of those things will necessarily create lasting change. In order to really grow, you have to analyzehow you fundamentally perceive being late. If deep inside you believe being late is not such an issue, that means you perceive yourself as being fundamentally adequate, and you don’t believe that you need to change. This will undermine any resolutions or tactics you use to alter your behavior. If, however, you change the way you perceive yourself and your behavior, that perception will lead to the automatic outgrowth of different behavior patterns.

Let’s give one last example. Imagine you are a speaker at an event. As you are making your presentation, you suddenly notice that there are two people in the front row who are incessantly conversing with each other. Everyone else in the room is silent and attentive, but these two audience members can’t seem to stop talking. As you continue speaking, you find yourself getting increasingly irritated by these inconsiderate attendees. You struggle with your feelings, trying to rise above them, using all kinds of mental tactics. After the event, as you are moving through the crowd talking to various members of the audience, you come across the two people who were talking. Your irritation flairs as you stand near them. As you walk closer, you suddenly realize that they are speaking a foreign language, and it dawns on you that the reason they were talking was because one was translating your speech from English for the other to understand. Your perception of them as irritating and inconsiderate people dissolves and is replaced by a deeper perception that is more aligned with the reality. As this happens, your feelings of negativity fade away. You don’t need to work on your emotions to keep them in check. The new reality obviates your emotional response and renders it irrelevant.

In conclusion, the purpose of Chassidus, and all of Torah living, is to help us to develop our own perceptions to reach clarity about ourselves and the world around us. My hope is that the above examples and ideas clearly illustrate the fundamental difference between Torah thinking and religious thinking. Torah is not really a question so much of belief as it is simply an accurate blueprint of the way things are. Concepts like experiential knowledge are as real as life, and I think the same is true with regards to every other Torah concept, whether it is a discussion of intangible ideas like life after death, or even the deeper understandings of the ein sof self. When approached analytically and holistically, the Torah is an incredibly integrated, real, inclusive, and personally relevant description of us, our world, and our relationship to each other and Hashem. These deep inner truths are relevant to all of mankind, and are fundamentally embedded in successful human relationships. Modern secular books, like 7 Habits of Highly Effective people, essentially embody and reference the deep teachings of Chassidus Torah. As the generations continue to evolve, I expect it is only a matter of time before all the people of the Earth realize the true depth, relevance, and accuracy of the Torah descriptions of life.