Mystical Family History and Philosophical Reflections

CHAPTER 1: IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS More than a half-century of naive persistence and driven search for unity in the biophysics of mind and personal spirituality as the basis for healing transformation has led me into many laboratories. The motivation may have been genetic. My father said that we were descended from several generations of Jewish mystics, none of them able to attain the salaried status of rabbi or cantor. These ecstatic men lived lives of peripatetic eccentricity, stirring congregations with provocative insights and uncomfortably personal inquiry. But only for a little while. Soon they were asked to leave the synagogue and often their Eastern European Jewish townships called shtetels as well. My father, in the first generation of our family without rabbis in over a Century, was a businessman-musician, who in the early mornings studied Talmudic commentaries. He taught me about why it was that most interpretations of the book by the rational, physician, lawyer, philosopher, Moses Maimonides, called Guide for the Perplexed, were in error in their assumption that man cannot understand God’s nature with his mind. He took issue with the opinion that the union of a person’s intellect and Spirit with Him was not possible as long as a person was living. Ibn Tibbon, Maimonides’ best-known early translator and interpreter, relegated the cognitive, analytical, physical and alchemical transformational sciences to the earthly, not spiritual realm. My father disagreed. He espoused the work of the 13" HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013504