Tami Simon: Hello, friends. My name’s Tami Simon, and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True Podcast, Insights at the Edge.
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In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Moshe Gersht. Moshe is the author of the Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling book, It’s All the Same to Me. He’s a spiritual teacher who has devoted his life to seamlessly bridging the worlds of the Torah tradition, mystical wisdom, the true nature of the human mind, and our collective struggles. With Sounds True, Moshe Gersht is the author of a new book. It’s called The Three Conditions: How Intention, Joy, and Certainty Will Supercharge Your Life. Moshe, welcome.
Moshe Gersht: Thank you, Tami. It’s so nice to be here. Nice to see you.
TS: I want to start right at the beginning by asking you a bit to help us understand how you’re personally processing being someone who lives in Israel. You’ve been living in Jerusalem now for just more than 16 years. And you were there during the events of October 7th. You’re currently in Los Angeles here at the beginning of November as we’re having this conversation, and you’re in Los Angeles to launch your new book with Sounds True on The Three Conditions, a book that’s about joy and certainty, and yet here we are at such an uncertain time for so many of us and a time that’s so sorrowful for so many of us. And I wanted to begin by asking how you’re processing and alchemizing all of this personally.
MG: Tami, thank you so much. I appreciate that. It’s very sensitive of you. And the last month has been very challenging, obviously, for extremely obvious reasons. Everyone’s reeling from lots of pain, a rollercoaster of emotions from anxiety, from impending incursions, and sirens, and bombs falling out of the sky, and grief over what happened on October 7th, and all the loss of life since then. And then, on the other side, there’s a tremendous amount of hope in seeing people coming together and wanting to find ways to use their platforms towards light and goodness and peace. So, there’s a lot of emotions and it’s been a ride these last few weeks.
TS: Now, of course, when you wrote the book, The Three Conditions, you’ve worked on this book, what, for four years, and no sense that it would come out in this kind of atmosphere and environment. And as I mentioned with the subtitle Intention, Joy and Certainty, especially the joy and certainty, I thought, “Moshe must feel really on the spot to be talking about these kinds of topics in such an emotionally-stirred environment.” I’d love to hear more about that for you.
MG: Yes. Certainty, I think if you go based on title alone, you might get the impression that what I mean is “certain that things will turn out a certain way in one’s life,” and, of course, the only certainty in that regard is that nothing is certain, right? Uncertainty in that regard is the most essential facet that we have in our life. But what I’m referencing is not a certainty of outcome, but a certainty of process, and allowing yourself to know full well and stepping into the consciousness that things are evolutionary and getting better.
And so, no matter how dark things might look, no matter how scary things might look, no matter how bleak things might look, you can still hold space for this being part of a greater vision for reality, as it continues to unfold. So I lean deeply into that element of certainty right now, which is within the context of all the uncertainty and within the context of all the fear and the grief, I am still leaning into the certainty that things are going to develop from this, things continue to get better, things are moving in a good direction, in a collective sense.
TS: That’s beautiful and that’s helpful. Help me on the joy front as well.
MG: So joy, and I use the word joy on purpose and not happiness, as there might be nuanced differences in terms of the state itself. Joy, which is associated with a level of peace, love, an undercurrent of people feeling OK, one can still feel a subtle sense or a nuanced sense of joy even when life is overall painful. It’s the joy of being grateful for what’s still good even when there’s many things that can take your focus away. It’s not to be insensitive or to be missing on the fact that when there’s pain, there’s pain and that’s real, but one can be in pain and feel at peace, and one can be in pain and be in just overwhelming sorrow where there’s no room for feeling or being OK.
So the state of joy, when you’re in a time of incredible challenge, which we are, we find ourselves in a great time of what feels like divisiveness and chaos, and yet you can hold space for a bit of light even within all of that. And that is really the byproduct of the certainty and the intention, which is if you can hold space for things still moving in a direction greater than what we might be able to perceive on the surface, to know that there is something underneath the surface that’s still moving us forward, and to know that everyone is truly doing the best they can within the context of their mind, and you hold space for all of that, you can still hold a feeling of peace and joy within you as you go through the pain. But it’s not the joy of jubilation and happiness, of winning or succeeding or seeing goodness be fully expressed. It ranges. And right now maybe we’re on the bottom part of that spectrum.
TS: Can you share with me what it’s like for you inside, feeling both a deep sense of peace and other emotions at the same time, like sorrow, and how they coexist? And what that’s like for you if you were to put it under a magnifying glass?
MG: Yes, that’s great. The first book that I’d written, It’s All the Same to Me, focuses on exactly this point. There’s a concept in Torah, in Hasidic, called hishtavut , which means sameness, or loosely translated as equanimity. And as it relates to those elements of self, the name of the book is It’s All the Same to Me but that sameness doesn’t mean an apathetic, it’s all the same, and therefore it’s all dull. But the only thing that’s the same is that God force in reality. It’s the underlying current of oneness of infinity that’s there. And when you are going through pain and grief and sorrow and you resist that grief and sorrow, that’s where the tension comes and you’re not living in that state of hishtavut, but to be able to be there with the pain and not to fight it.
And when the tears come to your eyes and you allow them to come through, that cathartic release of allowing yourself to be in the pain, or if you’re feeling anger and allowing yourself to be in the anger, not to necessarily take action and lash out, but to feel the feelings, there’s a peace. You can almost feel it surrounding the emotion. It’s almost like the emotion is being held by something. So it’s not a contradiction to be in pain and be at peace, or even to feel great at other times, but not let that overwhelm you to where you can lose perspective. I think that’s how I feel it internally. It’s almost like there’s a hug around the other emotions.
TS: Do you get a lot of bad jokes about that title, It’s All the Same to Me?
MG: Oh, my gosh. You could only imagine. I mean, my brother said he’s going to write a book called It’s All the Same to Him.
TS: That’s funny.
MG: Yes. So I do. Of course, we do. But it’s good. It’s a good way to start a conversation.
TS: How did you come to that discovery yourself experientially of, I don’t know if I’m saying it correctly, hishtavut, if I’m saying that right?
MG: For me, it first started as seeing it as a concept in books. I started seeing it in the world of Hasidism and Kabbalah all the way back to some of the medieval writings in the world of Torah. And then, of course, seeing that as it reflected in the concept of equanimity that we find in different Buddhist texts. It was still conceptual. I didn’t know how to digest the idea that there can be such a sameness. I understood that there’s levels of frequency within oneself where you can be at a higher state or a lower state. You can feel really good and you could feel really bad. But the idea that all of that can be held in a consciousness of light was still just exactly that. It was an idea, a concept in my mind, something that I was hoping to be true and that I believed in.
And I think the deeper that I stepped into meditation, prayer, and study, a big part of my life for many years, but meditation came later in my journey. As someone who grew up in a home filled with meditation. Anything you grow up with in your house, sometimes you push it off to later before you find it yourself. There was a lot of meditation in my home growing up, so I found other ways to practice. And when I finally did put a solid meditation practice into my day, those experiences started meshing, bleeding into all the other day-to-day experiences. And that’s really where it started to come to life.
TS: Now, you have a very interesting personal story. I didn’t know your parents were meditators, interested in meditation, but you yourself between the age of 13 and 20 were a pop punk musician, achieved some level of success, and then put the whole thing down. Why did you put the whole thing down, and then what brought you to living in Jerusalem?
MG: I love music. What’s the right expression? It is coursing through my veins. That’s the right way. I just feel a deep, deep affinity towards it. And when I was 10, that’s when it became real to me that, oh, this is really what I wanted to do and pursue. It felt like a very clear calling that this is who I am. And so I did pursue that very strongly for all of my teenage years. We signed with a label in L.A. and we toured the country a few times, and the radio and MTV and things were working, if you can quantify it like that. Things were going really well. We were about to go on tour with a group at the time. They were called Good Charlotte, which was a very big group, and they were having really big concert tours.
And it was the confluence of two different events that took place at the same time. One was watching one of my closest friends struggle with drug addiction in the band, which was really challenging to start to see some of what I was always told, the dark side of the entertainment industry and music industry. And while that was happening, we were releasing a new album and someone had come over to me and asked me how long was I going to play music for, which is a funny thing to ask a musician. And I said, “I don’t know. I guess until we’re successful and then I’ll settle down.” And he said, “When’s that?” I said, “When’s what?” And he said, “When is success?” And at the time, I think I told him to grab a drink or something because he was ruining my moment, but I woke up the next morning and every day after that, thinking about that question, when is that? When is success?
And the pondering turned into researching, turned into the beginning of a search for what that was. And I didn’t have the answer to what success was or when you could find it, but I did come to the realization that you might be able to succeed at something you do and still fail at life, that was still a possibility. That you could become great in any field and yet the holistic elements of your reality might not match up to what you truly desire and what you truly want. And so that sent me on a search for meaning, a search for purpose, and how do you get to that place called success?
And being that I was from a Jewish community in Los Angeles, Jerusalem was the spot that a lot of people go to look for truth and look for meaning. So that’s where I went as well. And I fell in love with what I found there, both in love with the wisdom that I was finding, then I also met my wife there. So between my two loves, I ended up spending the last 16 years in Israel.
TS: One of the things I’m curious about is, as you started to study the Torah, when did it become alive for you, fascinating for you? What lit up for you? And I say that because I was raised in a reformed Jewish family. I heard the Torah read at Temple on Friday nights and, quite honestly, I didn’t connect well at all. I found it very foreign and not easy for me to find a route in to inner spiritual discovery through the Torah. So I’m curious what your route was.
MG: That so resonates. Growing up, I had a very similar experience. In fact, if you’d have asked anybody who knew me in high school the idea that I would end up in Jerusalem studying Torah, that would’ve been the farthest thing from the reality. I wasn’t all that inspired by the ideas that I saw. I mean, they looked like a bunch of nice things, rituals and a handful of good ideas. But like I mentioned before, I was raised in a home that had a lot of consciousness in it. My mother has gone through a lot of her own personal traumas, which put her on a path many, many years before. I was born in a home that was already on this path, so I was hearing so many ideas and living a reality that felt very real, like the actual experience of spirituality and God. Those things were real to me. The soul was real to me. The underlying current of reality and energy and flow, that was all real to me.
Torah did not do that for me, certainly not in high school, and it was only when I came to Israel and I found the world of what we’d call Jewish mysticism or Kabbalah and Hasidic, where all of a sudden, I was hearing Torah and ideas that resonated with that which I already knew to be true, based on how I was raised and my inner experience of life. That was really where the world came together for me. It still took another six years of being in that space before I started to, as you said before, alchemize a lot of the ideas and integrate them into my human experience. Because they were still ideas from two different worlds and then they started coming together. But that’s what it was for me, and it wasn’t a straight path by any means.
TS: I’m still hoping that you’re going to help me have an appreciation of something from the Torah that really gave you language for some of your inner experience, that has been hugely helpful to you, and how that came through those writings in mystical Judaism.
MG: I would say if I had to point to one piece of Torah that’s really changed my life I think it’s something that I think about almost every single day, and if I’m not thinking about it, I’m somewhere conscious of it is the name of God itself, the way that Torah relates to God. There’s a four letter name that’s not pronounced, but so, if you go to any Jewish place, they’ll say “Hashem” or some other name that points to it. But these four letters, the way they’re spelled, the first letter is the letter yodh, which connotes the idea of something constant, always. It is in a perpetual movement. And then the next three letters are he, vav, and he, which spell the word hoveh, which means present or now. And so the absolute or essential translation of the name of God, the way that one is able to, or the opportunistic way of relating to the name of God is the forever now the eternal present, the always here. Pure being, in that sense.
And I don’t know if I ever knew that. I never heard that growing up. It wasn’t an idea that was ever expressed to me, but when I saw it in the books, in Kabbalah itself, everything came alive. It was like, that’s the answer. Because I was always told the story when I was younger, “Where is God?” And then they’ll say, “Wherever you let him in.” But there’s a depth of truth to that, which is the whole idea of God is the ever-present. So whatever is happening for you in this moment, your phenomenal experience of reality is your opportunity to connect to what God is for you in that moment. And that’s how it’s unfolding. So you can’t look anywhere without being in that experience. That is, for me, the underlying quotient that we’re looking at, that if you can work out how to be in the eternal now, you are now in a state of awakening.
TS: That’s beautiful and helpful. Thank you, Moshe. You did it. Thank you. You connected me to four Hebrew letters and a powerful teaching. Thank you.
MG: Oh, you’re so welcome. What a pleasure.
TS: When I think of how you began in our conversation describing certainty. Things are uncertain, but there is this certainty that we’re moving in some positive evolutionary direction of some kind. That’s what I heard you say. There’s some benevolent directionality in things. I wonder if you can connect how you know that, with the definition and name of God that you shared with us. How do you know, especially when you see all these horrible, terrible atrocities happening, and it seems, I think, on the outside to many people, like things are not moving in a particularly good direction at the phenomenal level at all? In fact, it looks like we’re in retrograde motion. Where does this certainty come from?
MG: That’s amazing. And if we can even just backpedal right back into the name itself as a model for this vision. Again, we said there are these four letters and if I had a screen or a board behind me I would write them out and you can actually see it depicted in the shapes themselves. But that first letter is almost just like a dot. It looks like a period you’d put at the end of a sentence, the yud. And then the he looks almost like a little house with a door and a window. They represent the concept of a seed idea that’s bursting with potential but is not yet manifest. And the house represents the impregnation of the idea or of that potential moving from a higher state to something that’s more manifest.
The third letter is a vuv which is a straight line. It just looks like a line top to bottom that goes on the space, which again connotes and reflects the idea of being able to now draw that from within the womb, the Mother Earth reality, and to bring it and move in the direction of it being manifest. And then, of course, the final letter is a he again, which is the expression of that which is showing up in our life, the final manifestation of what this is.
Again, when you look at that name, although there’s an eternal presence, but it’s an eternal presence that has motion, that is moving from a seed of an idea, a seed of potential, and is moving from top to bottom. And that’s far from overnight. The same way that the gestation process takes time to go from seed to birth, we are in a movement of life. All of life reflects itself and we are in a fractal system as far as we’re concerned.
Everything is reflected in everything else. The same way that it takes time to go from one place to another in this 2D or 3D reality that we’re in this dual world that we find ourselves in, it takes time to get from a beautiful pristine idea to the manifest reality. And so there’s a line in A Course in Miracles that I think about often, which is, “With infinite patience, you get immediate results.” And so that’s the work, is to step into the infinite patience knowing that we’re moving in that direction.
TS: The title of your new book, The Three Conditions, conditions for what?
MG: For a supercharged life. So then I guess the question is, what’s a supercharged life? I think about in sports, weather conditions are really important. In flying, weather conditions are really important. In business, everything has its conditions. The perfect storm will allow the release of whatever it is you’re trying to do to come out. Contextually, when I use the word conditions, that’s what I’m speaking about. And what a supercharged life is, we are going to have to go through this thing. You weren’t asked if you wanted to be born, not at least consciously. Maybe our souls were asked, or our higher consciousness was asked, but you were born and we showed up here. Here we are in this life, in this body, and we know that we’re going to be here for some time and then we check back out to wherever it is that we’re going.
And the question is, how do we live the space in between? The in-between, the meantime, I always like to think about, people say, “Well, what are you going to do in the meantime?” All of life is the meantime. So how we go through this human experience can either be done on one level or it could be done at a much higher level where you feel and experience the love, the joy, the peace, the goodness, the purpose, the enthusiasm, all of those wonderful things that we look for, the fulfillment that we are all called to. And these conditions create the space by which now you’re living up here and not down here. And, of course, it’s an ebb and flow no matter where you are. That’s the nature of reality. But where your baseline is shifts, and if you oversimplify the three conditions, intention and certainty are about the belief in self, and belief in divine or cosmic guidance in the universe. So I am good, and life, the underlying element of life, is good.
The degree by which a person associates or makes those assumptions in their mind as they go through this world, they’ll experience that joy, which is that third condition. From that place, two shifts happen. One is psychological and one is spiritual or energetic. The psychological shift is you are now open-minded and open-hearted in the process, which means you’re not holding on to negativity. You don’t live in perpetual resentment and resistance to life. You are looking for opportunities. The silver linings, living with gratitude, those all become natural psychological benefits of living in those states. And then, of course, energetically or spiritually, when you are living in that higher state of consciousness, your frequency is raised.
So the mirror effect or the law of resonance, whichever version of what you put out is what you’re going to receive, that’s a truth. That’s a spiritual truth across all traditions. And so when you put yourself in that place, you are changing your life. Your entire reality shifts by going into that space of understanding or realigning with the truth of who you are and what life is.
TS: Now, you mentioned I am good and the world is good, the totality is good, the totality that we’re in. And I wonder if you can address that person who says, “I’d like to be there. Of course, I hear these things, but the truth is there are moments when I don’t feel very good. In fact, I feel unlovable or worthless or I’m not sure if I’m good. And I certainly am not sure the whole of this world is good, especially when I look out and see the violence. I want to be there, but I’m not there yet.” What would you say to someone on that journey? What will help them?
MG: Sure. There’s probably a handful of things I might say to this person, but the one that comes up for me in this moment is the reminder that what you focus on, you feel. And there are many things we can put our attention on at any given moment. We can never put our attention on everything at any given moment. That’s just not how life works. And so with that in mind, whether it’s a belief in self or a belief in the goodness of humanity or of the world, how it’s unfolding, our essential choice is, where do we place our attention in those moments? So for instance, if I’m sitting with somebody who has a hard time believing in their own essential goodness, maybe they don’t feel worthy of that next step in their life, a relationship, a job move, a big decision, I would ask them to think about and to start and truly give attention to, “Where have you already done good? Where do you already know you’re good?”
And in the beginning, it’s usually one or two pieces where they can say with certainty, “I’ve done this in my life,” or “I have this quality in my life that is good.” And so we then focus on that and expand on that. “OK, well, paint me a picture of what that looks like and what does that feel like?” And the more you spend time in that space, quite often they find now a third or fourth or fifth piece to add to the puzzle. And the more you lean in to focusing on what’s already going well, you don’t need to fabricate anything, there’s already so much good that’s within you, that starts to shift the way you feel. And once you shift the way you feel, that will, in turn, shift how you think. And so now your thoughts start moving more and more in the direction that you put yourself in.
The beginning is pushing the snowball up the hill, but once you get to the top, it’ll roll very nicely down the other side. What you focus on, you feel. It’s the same with the world. You can turn on the news and focus on everything that’s going wrong, and there is value in knowing what’s happening on the planet for sure, and we have to have empathy for all the pain that’s taking place, but if that becomes your localized attention where all your attention just is on the bad or on the struggle, of course, you’re going to feel like it’s not a good world. There’s a great book called Factfulness, I can’t recall the name of the author in this moment, but he died in 2016 and he brilliantly put a book together pointing out all the facts on how the world has just gotten better.
And these were facts, they were not opinions of where life has gotten better just over the last 100 years, 500 years, 1,000 years. And when you make that your focus, you can look at the world and you can be positive because things are getting better. But it just depends where we’re putting our attention.
TS: Now, Moshe, you gave this image of rolling something up a hill and then at a certain point it’s going to roll down. I wasn’t 100% sure I understood that practically, in my own life in working through some sense of challenge or difficulty that’s stuck inside my head. Can you help me understand it?
MG: Yes. Maybe a good example would be a person who went through some form of trauma and now they’re aware enough that they want to seek help. And so they want to sit with a therapist or a teacher, a coach, someone to help them move through that. Quite often, and I would even venture to say the majority of the time, it’s actually a painful process. It’s actually hard in the beginning to go back to that pain and to rehash it and to share it, and then to move through some system, CBT, a DBT, an IFS, something, whatever modality you’re going to work through as you work through the challenge and the pain. And that’s like rolling the ball up the hill. The same thing is true when you’re feeling negative about yourself and I’m asking you to look at the positive. In those moments, in the beginning, that’s actually hard.
Your momentum has pushed you in the other direction, so now you starting in your default is minus. You already have a negative self-concept in that moment. So to help hold someone’s hand and move them back up the hill, that can be a challenge. It’s actually asking them to exert some energy in those moments. But there does come a point along the way, whether it’s a long-form journey or just in a small casual conversation with your friend over coffee, where if you can stay conscious and continue to focus on the good in the person you’re sitting with—a good facilitator is always seeing the goodness in the one they’re sitting with—they do get to the top of that hill and then it starts to go on its own and you can start creating an engine within moving in the other direction. And it doesn’t happen every time and it doesn’t happen every day, but that’s the vision that I see.
TS: In reading The Three Conditions, one of the parts of the book that really got my attention, it was towards the beginning and you were talking about your own journey and being in Jerusalem and how you started teaching and how you were teaching beautifully, but then when you weren’t in the teacher’s chair, some of your own challenges were still apparent in your life and you would be short-tempered or overeat or something like that. First of all, you don’t hear very many teachers confess that. They go from whatever they were struggling and now they’re the terrific spiritual teacher, and they don’t necessarily describe those years of the process that probably go on for a long time for a lot of people who teach where there’s still so much material that’s being worked out behind the scenes. I’d love to know a little bit more how you personally worked out a lot of your own unresolved material even while you were teaching so beautifully.
MG: I appreciate that very much, and I have spoken to so many teachers along the way. We are human beings having this experience, and even when you’re growing, you’re never all the way there. The destination, the goalpost continues to move as you move in that direction. There was a time in my life where you’d show up and you’d give over your intellectual wizardry to a round of applause and to people saying, “Wow, that was so beautiful. That was so deep. That was so brilliant.” Whatever it is that they had said, made my ego feel really good in that moment. Then I’d come home and crash on the couch feeling imposter syndrome, feeling shame, feeling guilt of not being good enough. “I could have done this better. I could have done that better.” Or, “How could I share this idea? I’m not living there fully in this moment. I was living there when I wrote the class. I’m not living there today.” There’s a dissonance in that. “Am I even allowed to share this idea if right now it’s not true for me, even though I know it’s true in a greater context?”
Those are just a few elements. Or when somebody would come to my home and we’d have a group sitting around a table and someone would ask a question, I felt like I had to know everything. As soon as you start teaching, you feel like, “I’m supposed to know it all already.” And maybe I did or I didn’t have the answer, but whatever shows up, I’m going to have to make sure that it gets there. And never lying or fabricating anything, but that pressure, that feeling underneath of needing to be a finished product, the anxiety that comes with that, that was so hard.
And it wasn’t until, really, I think the major shift for me happened, I found a great therapist, a great facilitator who could sit and work with me on this very specific thing, which was speaking about who I am vis-a-vis the teachings that I’m teaching and my own personal process and the people that I was sharing this with. It was so important to have a mirror, to have a mirror of somebody look at you and say, “You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be,” and to let the parts of you that are still searching for external validation be seen. “OK, so there’s that part of me and that’s allowed.” A part of the journey is being OK with that, not shoving that down or repressing that part of your ego of saying, “Oh, look, I have that. That’s still the way I think. That’s still part of my belief system.”
Again, I think I was probably 25 or 26 when a lot of this was going on, in my mid-20s. I was really young and still wanting to be successful, just redefining things. Maybe the biggest breakthrough happened for me in that process, and maybe this is helpful for those who are feeling something similar, is giving up the notion that you’re supposed to be anything in this. Allowing yourself to be a complete vessel for whatever comes through, trusting that if you’ve studied and you’ve learned and you’ve had your life experience, and whatever it is that you know, check everything else at the door. You’re never supposed to be finished. There is no finished.
Speak to any great teacher who’s lived through life and now maybe they’re in some golden years and they’re in, I don’t know, their 70s or 80s, and they know maybe there’s a good 30, 40 years left if life continues to go well, and they’ve been there, they don’t hold onto the same things that younger teachers hold onto. They’re just showing up, having a conversation, and trying to impart whatever wisdom they have and being present with those there. So, for me, that was transformational, being able to have that. There are other pieces, but I think that was the biggest one.
TS: We’ve talked some about how you understand and teach uncertainty, and also joy as a peaceful equanimity with whatever might be happening emotionally. We haven’t yet talked very much about intention as one of the other three conditions. A lot of people talk about intention, and I notice that often the question that comes up for me is, how do we make sure that our intention isn’t just a type of mental projection? How do we have it really go all the way through our being so that intention is our full soul force, not just some part of us that’s stating something, but we don’t really have the whole musculature of our being behind it? And I wonder if you can talk to that.
MG: Yes. At least when I use the word intention here, I’m referring back to touching the essential intention for life, why we are here, why we came. It’s a realignment to that higher inner knowing that sometimes we feel and sometimes we don’t, but to connect to that space of intentionality within us, which is, I am here for something, which means that I have purpose, which means that there’s an essential goodness to who I am, there’s a worthiness to who I am, there’s a desire to create as part of who I am, there’s a doing element, I’m here to do something and express my being. That version of intention, it’s not so much about setting intentions, which I think maybe you were referring to before of, “I’m going to set my intention to—fill in the blank.” I’m going to put my mind to filling the blank.
Get that job, write this book, fill some stadium, whatever it is, a person might have their goals. This is less about goal setting and more about returning. It’s a return movement to self, allowing oneself to be fully authentic in their nature. And I think when one is setting intentions, now to your question, from that place of being connected to your soul intention, I think there’s a line that I wrote in the book that “our soul intention is our sole intention, our S-O-U-L intention is our sole intention,” what we truly want is coming from a deeper place. And when we touch that place and allow it to come through, so it’s not just a mental thought, but it reverberates through your whole being, because you’re already starting from I feel closer to who I am, I know who I am, and I want that to be expressed.
And for someone, it might reflect in their job or maybe it reflects in a relationship, or it might reflect in the fact that they want to spend more time in nature and now they want to move out of the city. So you don’t need to set your intention to get there. Not that you don’t need. That’s the wrong language. It’s not that this element of intention that I’m describing is about setting a goal, but it’s about when you’re connected to the essence of who you are, now you’re always going to be moving in the direction of your goals from a place that feels authentic and real.
TS: A couple of times in our conversation, you’ve talked about this notion of goodness, inner goodness, knowing, feeling, sensing our goodness and the goodness of everything. And I’m curious if you could describe what that feels like to you, if there’s a feeling quality, and if you were to rest and sit in that goodness and speak from it, what it feels like.
MG: I love the question. It’s a good question. It feels expansive, warm. It feels vivid. It’s almost like a leaning into reality where the colors of yourself and of life are vibrant. So that’s the feeling space of it. And almost the association with others, with that which is outside of your being, is joyful. It’s a feeling of unity, of connection. It’s a sensing. It’s a sensing of rightness, capital R Rightness. Not like right and wrong morally, but like, yes, it feels yes. It feels right. It feels aligned. It feels good.
TS: I like it. Thank you. OK. One more big topic I wanted to talk to you about is the anatomy of a transition, if you will, because you write so beautifully in your own life about how you’ve made such huge identity transitions. You went from successful musician with a record label deal to studying the Torah in Jerusalem. And I want to speak directly to that person who’s in a transition, who is let go, either they have let go of something or they know they need to let go of something right about now, and they don’t know what the new thing is yet. There’s a lot of uncertainty and fear and we could say darkness. What’s the new thing? Is it going to work? What have you learned from your experience that could be helpful to that person?
MG: For many years, when I looked back at my experience, trying to identify how I was able to walk away from that, what was going on inside of me, and I try to analyze and remember what makes that leap, and then I think about it in smaller contexts in my life today, the recurring theme is one of trusting your intuition, trusting yourself, and having faith that you don’t need to know the destination. But there needs to be unknowing. You don’t need to know where you’re going if you know that this is wrong. Sometimes you know, “The place I’m in isn’t the right place.” But if you don’t have a direction at all, if it’s completely blank, so then I guess in the meantime, you’re waiting for clarity. It’s hard to make a move if you don’t have some inkling as to where you should want to go.
But if you do, if there’s something inside of you that’s calling you, and it’s saying, “That is where I’m supposed to be,” there’s something there. So my feeling has always been, lead with your gut and check with your mind, meaning your soul, your heart is calling you somewhere. We have a mind because sometimes it’s coming from the wrong place. It could be that it’s an ego-driven place. So we want to check and make sure and use our mind in all our decision making. But it’s not about leading with what makes sense up here all the time. We have to honor the soul as it speaks through us in our heart, in our gut, in our calling, and have faith that we are moving in a direction that is good for us.
If you check with your mind and it comes out that maybe it’s dangerous ,or it’s such a high risk that the cons might outweigh the pros there. So then there’s a time to sit and reflect deeply about, “OK, well, how much do I really want to take that risk?” But barring such a maybe potentially catastrophic risk, your heart is there. It’s leading. The universe is good. God is good.
We move in that direction. And maybe the last point on that, and then we’ll close that question, is, if you think you have to know where you’re going, if it has to be clear, sometimes that ends up being a block. Because sometimes you don’t get there right away. Maybe you need to be in 18 months of what you call the darkness. That dark night of the soul is real, but what’s born on the other side of listening to your heart and listening to your soul is the soul that you’ve now co-created. It’s the self that you’ve now co-created. That’s the direction we’re going in.
TS: You write in The Three Conditions that when these three conditions are met, you become like a spiritual antenna, is the metaphor that you used in terms of what you receive and also what you transmit. Can you tell me more about that being a spiritual antenna?
MG: Yes. I like that a lot, and I think we touched on it a little bit before when we spoke about living a supercharged life. When you are in that alignment, when you are in that space, you have different insights that you don’t normally have. The type of days you have and how they unfold, they look differently. Your behaviors are different. Your relationships look different. You are saying the right things at the right time. You are pausing at the right time. You find space for silence at the right time. There’s less ego. That’s what I mean by an antenna. You are allowing yourself to be in the world and tuning into things that either might be coming in your direction, or that maybe people in the room don’t sense yet, and you can pick up on that. You become a channel to a certain degree.
Some people literally are channeling thoughts and ideas in those moments, and sometimes it’s just a sensitivity, sensitivity to self. You know when it’s time to get up and leave a room. You don’t know why, but you know it’s time, and it’s time to enter a room. You can sense when a person needs to hear something more loving. You become more empathetic in that sense. You can also sense when you’re around someone who might be emotionally dangerous and you need to step away. There’s a certain openness that comes when you’re in that space. You’re also drawing new experiences into your life that are, again, when you’re in a heightened space, what you’re putting out, you are receiving. There’s a mirror effect in this reality and that will be reflected back to you. And so you can tune into that, which, again, it’s like a radio station.
You go to a certain station, you hear a certain song. So when you’re on a station of love and joy and peace and goodness, you’re in that alignment, you see more of those things. More of those things show up for you. And as you’re aware, there’s a number of anecdotes in the book where, of course, I try to live as an embodiment of these ideas to the degree that I can, but I can’t create the events. I can only try to co-create the inner experience. But then when the miraculous events show up or the synchronistic events show up, you can begin to laugh at the frequency by which they start showing up the deeper you lean into that space. It’s an equation.
TS: Now, Moshe, you’re currently in Los Angeles as part of the launch tour, book tour for The Three Conditions, but I presume when this tour is over, you’ll return to your family in Jerusalem.
MG: That’s correct, yes.
TS: And I’m wondering, how do you imagine being a spiritual antenna human transmitting light and healing when you return? What do you imagine? What do you imagine will be helpful? How can you embody that helpfulness? I’m just curious what your thoughts are about that.
MG: Well, it’s hard to say exactly, because I’m a very present-moment individual. We don’t know what the world will look like in three and a half weeks or whenever it is that I’m going back. And I pray it looks better than it does today. There’s no guarantee that it will. There’s no guarantee that we’ll have more or less listening ears to this type of message. Whenever a challenge like this shows up on the surface, one of two things happen. Either it is an impetus to fall deeper asleep into some spiritual unconsciousness, or it’s an opportunity for great awakening. And I think we see both happening in the world right now, for sure. There’s a lot of awakening that’s taking place. People want a better world, and the darker things get, the more we desire things to be better.
So it’s hard to say exactly what that might look like in three or four weeks, but I do imagine that it is a furthering of the last chapter of The Three Conditions, which is about remembering the light of consciousness, the light of our life, the light of God, the light of love that unifies all forces in this reality. That for me is the most essential message of anything that I’ve ever taught, which I want everyone to live a happy life and a good life, an essential life. That’s what I am called towards. But beyond all of that, it’s a godly life. It’s a life filled with love and light and connection, which means getting beyond our egos individually, nationally, globally. There’s so much invested. It’s thousands of years of history invested in a battle and a fight, which is a challenge.
So you can’t walk up to someone who’s filled with hate and hate them into love. That doesn’t work. But what you can do is you can stand as that beacon of light, as that beacon of love, of kindness and empathy, of being able to hold space for those who are suffering, for those who are anxious, for those who are grieving. You can be that light for them. And in that sense, we are light workers to the world, and we raise the frequency of this reality when we independently go to that place without condemnation. There’s no remedy in condemnation. That’s not what we’re here to do. If you see evil, if I see evil, you point to it. And so there’s an awareness towards behavior and action that is reflecting that which is cut off from the source that’s not a desirable, long-term vision to reality.
And to the degree that I can use my platform to bring more light into this world, that’s what I feel blessed and called to do. And I really don’t do this often, but I do urge and I call on anyone who has the capacity to amplify messages of light, of love, of peace, of connection, of unity, of remembering that we are one family, we are one race. And if we can do that, we will create a better world together.
TS: One follow-up question. I’ve heard people say that there’s a connection between the increased challenge and crisis and our potential for awakening to this unified love and light. How do you see that connection between, if you will, crisis and spiritual awakening?
MG: Sure. I think it’s true. I think history has proven time and time again that on a long enough timeline, when we see crisis, it awakens people to change. It’s almost like on a small scale if a person finds out that they have a health scare in their body, it awakens change towards better health. I think, on a global scale, we do the same thing as human beings. Whether we believe it or not, we do love ourselves. Even if we don’t believe that we do. We want to be here. We want ourselves, our children, grandchildren, we want the perpetuation of humanity and of goodness in this world. And so sometimes the darkness is so strong that it reminds us that we can’t let it live there unchecked. And so now we’re forced to create new ways, new pathways, either to eliminate the cause of whatever it is that’s darkness.
In the body’s case, the source of a disease, the source of a lack of health, and if you can cut it off at the root so then it does not continue to fester and grow. Sometimes it needs to be removed so that the rest of the body can continue to flourish. But we make those decisions and we make those changes for the good of the body.
It is my belief that human beings all are made in the image of God, that there’s a spark of light that’s there, and the challenges force us to find it. If there’s a collective dysfunction in our psychology, which there is to a large degree, it forces us to make better decisions going forward. And I think we’ll see a lot of beautiful things coming after this. Spiritually speaking, in Kabbalah, for sure, in Torah, for sure, there is an idea that there is, the words are [Hebrew], we go down in order to go up. And the metaphor is that you have to bend your knees to jump. Sometimes we go down to get higher. And I think we’re in that type of inflection point right now.
TS: Moshe Gersht, I have so loved talking with you. What a warm, kind, and illuminating conversation partner you are. Just beautiful to be with you. Thank you.
MG: Oh. Thank you so much. Feelings are so mutual.
TS: Moshe Gersht, the author of a new book, The Three Conditions: How Intention, Joy, and Certainty Will Supercharge Your Life. Great to know you. Thank you.
MG: My pleasure.
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