Question

Hello and blessings. Since I saw that you have a scholarly connection with Rabbi Kook and Rabbi HaNazir, I decided, with your permission, to bring here (for the first time publicly) something from the personal story of my life. I had hesitations. But since the days of our years are short, and who knows what a day may bring, I said to myself that I would finally share a little. Besides, nobody knows who I am. I should note in advance that people advised me to write a book about what I went through. But right now I don’t see that actually happening.
From childhood I have experienced reality in what seems to be a different sensory way. On a deeper, more religious level. My connection to nature was extraordinary. Nature was lucid to me. I would talk about nature with friends in such a way that only years later, after a friend took LSD, he said he understood what I had been talking about back then. My connection with God went back to childhood, through secluded meditation. The decisive part of my story is that I experienced prophecies from childhood—whether hidden visions without clear meaning, or visions of the future.
As a child I apparently saw the Divine Chariot—wheels and centers of fire all over Mount Meron, with a gust unlike anything I have ever experienced in my life. Even in kindergarten I knew how to say about my father, while he was still alive, that he was going to die, even though I didn’t know what the word meant—and that is what happened. I used to walk around with thoughts of a vision I had, that I was dwelling on a stone rock, many years before I knew there was such a concept as reincarnation in the Gate of Reincarnations of the Arizal. I knew how to say that everything is water before I saw support for that in sources like “for the earth shall be full of knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.” At age 14, twelve years ago, when I became religious, I would say things about the future. Years later people would come to me anxiously because they had happened. I would spend months in secluded meditation with soul-uplifting songs and tears that did not stop. I had a mystical union with the Divine Presence. These are mystical sensations that I will never know how to put into words. It happened to me twice. In overwhelming intensities of light, so that I could not see anything outside, or in waves of light within light spreading through the room, and you keep rising toward it in love until total dissolution. I was mad with love. I was overwhelmed by creation, and intensities of joy impossible to describe enveloped me. No wonder that at that time I stepped out of ordinary life. I was ascetic.
I saw the rabbi to whom I was closest in a vision. Later I noticed that he was like the Sufis in Islam, just in Haredi dress. The Talmud was in his hand, and he drew from it only for the service of God, even if it was from some obscure Rabbenu Hananel. In a vision I saw a prayer book with letters in compartments, unrelated to one another. An aleph that goes and returns. I found hints of this in Kabbalah. I had negative motifs that hinted things to me in advance through colors, and I found them in kabbalistic literature. I heard holiness rising.
At age 14 I told for the first time about a place I had been and about hand movements I made there, but I didn’t know when it had been. In that place everything was green hills whose horizon I could not see. I had hand movements that only more than ten years later I saw and recognized among the Sufis in Islam, in descriptions of the pietists of Egypt, and in the descriptions of Gurdjieff. Behind me there was a house, a place rising upward like a kind of tower. There were stairs in two stages, and inside sat a man with a majestic presence. The purpose was to teach me or convey something to me, but I don’t know or don’t remember what. More than ten years after I had described it, I happened to see through a friend two pictures of Rabbi HaNazir David Cohen, and I pointed at him. I had chills from this man. It was almost clear to me that he was the same person who had been there. To this day I am unsure, also because by nature I am very skeptical, but that is what I know how to tell.
Some time ago I was in contact for years with a Torah scholar philosopher who had left religion. That relationship brought me to bad places, to say the least. Before we met, I had a vision warning me about him, but I suppressed it. He was in a place without night, a dark place. And I saw into his soul. I knew how to tell him what mental illness he had before I knew it about him. To this day that is astonishing to me. Toward the end of the relationship I had a vision in which I saw him in four places. In one of them his face seemed to become younger, but the facial features did not change. In another place he was striking Jerusalem stones, and with every blow the whole stone turned black. In one of the places I saw him while experiencing a serenity I have no words to describe, and for the first time in my life I had a message that you can’t define as either auditory or mental. Subtle. The words were: “He has no how, he has what.” These were words I had not read or heard or reflected on. I didn’t understand exactly what they were really trying to tell me, and I was puzzled by them. I suppressed it. Some time later a book came into my hands by chance, online, called The Voice of Prophecy, by Rabbi HaNazir. I flipped through it and saw those words appear there, along with a whole teaching built on them. I was amazed. The end with that person came when I brought up him and age 15 for some reason. I didn’t know that that was the formative moment in his life—the moment when he began injecting himself with heroin and when all the negativity began from those days. And I only found all that out later from someone else.
After some time, words came to me in an ecstatic moment. The words were “sparks of light.” I had not read or heard them, and I searched and discovered them in Rabbi Kook as well, whom I also did not know. Verses would come to me.
These matters led me back to Judaism with even greater intensity after my leaving religion. From within, and not in commandments and outwardness. A time when I was in a kind of cleaving to God, “renew our days as of old.” And then I gradually lost my grip and felt I had reached the edge and could not go on. Fortunately or unfortunately, I was usually thoughtful and rational. I began to wonder and reflect again, and found my thoughts being carried away more and more, until I left the path again and came to atheism in the religious sense. I read a bit in Carl Jung’s Red Book about the collective unconscious and archetypes. I understood that even if I don’t have full answers for how I knew things, I began taking all this in a different direction.
Today all these things have stopped, and there is much I haven’t shared, and I can’t go into it at length. I saw two expert professors (abroad too, not only here), one in psychiatry and one in psychology. One of them admitted that these were real experiences, and recommended a place for me to move to. I was not diagnosed as schizophrenic, but as being on the schizophrenic spectrum. I cannot talk about the essential things in my life, but I can point toward them. I went through terrible upheavals and unbearable situations, and only the heart knows its own bitterness. I lost my faith and my path, for which I gave my soul all along the way. Those were wonderful days; I am no longer there. And I have no particular connection to everything that is going on in religion nowadays. But my story, even if only a little of it, I decided to share here. I’d be glad to hear an opinion or advice about the sharing. Thank you.