AN INNER JOURNEY TO ANCIENT ISRAEL

Here is another practice from my work in Seminary of the Wild.  Trust me that they didn’t tell us to go to ancient Israel.  It was a guided visualization with drumming. The stated purpose, as I understood it, was to retrieve our hearth path stone that would tell us about our direction in life (yeah, I rolled my eyes, since I think this can too easily be shamanism on the cheap and easy).

The journey was to enter into the third eye and then into our heart chakra.  We were told to look around and see the area.  We would then see something holding three boxes that would each have a stone in them. One of them was our hearth path stone.

I saw an altar.  It looked like one of these altars from Ziony Zevit’s wonderful book The Religions of Ancient Israel.  I knew I was in ancient Israel at some sacred place.  It seemed like the altar had three horns, although it was rectangular in shape, so I’m not sure why it didn’t have four horns, one to each corner.  While three horned altars have been discovered, the theory is that they were actually four horned altars that had somehow lost a horn. There was some incense burning on it over some kind of metal brazier.   Then we were told that there was an altar with boxes on it, so I looked past this altar and saw another one.  I wondered if in the Temple and the sacred shrines before the Temple the incense altar came in front of the main slaughtering/sacrificial altar.  I’m actually not good at remembering this kind of detail, proving that I don’t have a priestly mentality.

I saw another three horned altar.  There were three boxes on the altar, as per instruction.  All three boxes were made out of wood. One was plain, one was brown and gold, kind of like a shesh besh (backgammon) board, and the third had a rose. I played a lot of shesh besh the year I was in Israel, and almost none the rest of my life.

I opened the rose one first and that one had a stone from a sheep pasture. A nothing special oval shaped decent sized stone, the kind you would find in a garden or a pasture. Then the shesh besh board box which had a stone of about the same shape as the rose box.  I wondered where it was from and it came to me that it was from Mt. Sinai up on the top. The third box was plain and had a square stone, black, basalt maybe. I thought how could a stone possibly be square?  It felt otherworldly. Maybe it was a chunk of a meteor come to earth?  Then it came to me that if was  from the Dead Sea.  This is the lowest inhabited point on earth, or so I was always taught. 

Then we had to choose a stone, our hearth path stone.  I had no idea how to choose a stone.  Other people later reported that they just knew the stone in this box or that was their stone, but I had absolutely no feel of that.  I pushed back a little on the project of choosing one stone, wanting to choose all three. (This push back was internal, not to the group.  I wouldn’t interfere with the group process). Then I said to myself, oh, you have to choose and sometimes that’s just how it works.  I chose the stone from the sheep pasture, because somehow that incorporated the other two realms.

It felt clear to me that my three stones represented the middle, upper and lower worlds.  This was a vision of unity with an emphasis on this world, a very traditional Jewish orientation that I certainly share.

I’ve had other visions of being in ancient Israel.  One vision of reluctantly officiating a funeral at my family tomb and a number of visions of walking on stony paths in the hills.  In this case I certainly wasn’t trying to go to ancient Israel nor was I following any particular instruction.  I think the setting was meaningful and something to integrate as I do further work with this journey.

I’d love to hear about your experiences that might be comparable in some way.