My own early background in the late 60s and early 70s was in Buddhist and Hindu traditions, but once I experienced what meditation was it became clear to me that it would have to be reflected somewhere in the Jewish tradition.

You can't have a spiritual tradition without some kind of meditative practice. And it turns out that there is a word in Hebrew for meditation, written in English as hitbod'dut and translated as "being alone with oneself."

From a non-meditative point of view, to be alone with oneself is seen as a very selfish kind of activity, one that isolates people, takes them away from “real life.”

From a meditative point of view, meditation does exactly the opposite. To move into oneself is to move from a restricted to a more expansive sense of self, a concept the rational mind often has difficulty with.

The meditative path I'm talking about is a spiritual path, and I use “spiritual” and “spirituality” in a very specific sense. “Spirituality” is the degree to which perception is inclusive rather than exclusive. I have this artificial scale inside my head, a continuum. Experiencing confusion, aloneness or alienation would be on the non-spiritual side; experiencing harmony, belonging, inclusivity and oneness would be on the spiritual side.

When we understand that all of Reality is a manifestation of the Divine, we can appreciate that our experience at any particular moment reflects the nature of our own level of consciousness. We are not separate from that which we perceive, but one with it. Our inner states determine how open or how closed we are to the larger energies that might be available for us. We are most available to perceive and to receive that which is in harmony with what we believe, and what we believe is specific to the rung of being on which we are standing at any given moment. Because of this, it is proper to say that our experience of Reality--which is also our experience of God--reflects for us our own level of awareness.

We get ourselves in trouble when we assume that our current belief, and our current experience, is all there is. At every moment I know that I am awake to some aspects of Reality and asleep to others. At any moment I know I can awaken to perceive the "more" to which I had been closed. Reality is always greater than my abilities of perception; there are no limits to the levels of awareness to which we might awaken.

A spiritual path is one that supports us transcending each of the realities we "know," and there is no end to the spiritual path. Each of us on such a path is discovering the fuller nature of our interconnectedness. And on this path, we awaken, we become more aware, and then we again collapse into more limited habitual states of being. Our task is to find ever more gentle and compassionate ways of calling ourselves back to the fuller nature of the Reality offered us, and to the more inclusive nature of our own Identity.

On a mystical level, there is only One Consciousness, there is only One Mind, there is only One One, and no matter where consciousness opens its eyes, God Is. There is nowhere to be outside of God. There are just more contracted spaces of opening our I's, and there are more expansive ones.