Want to hear a secret?
A secret isn’t just something you’re not allowed to tell. In Hebrew, sod, meaning “secret,” can be read as an acronym for seder vada’at: order and knowledge. So where are the secrets? Let’s begin with the answer: they are found in simplicity.
For a moment, set aside the commandments and living according to Jewish law. Those matter too, but they aren’t the point here. The simple starting point is that there is none besides Him. Everything comes from one Source, the Creator, and His true name is love. In Hebrew, I connect ahava, love, with aleph, one, and hava, together: oneness.
That Source multiplied itself into us and created a world, olam. I connect olam with he’elem, concealment, because the Creator is hidden within it. This world was made for us to play in. But we’ve forgotten that, and instead we fight, survive, and hurt.
“Everything is known in advance” means that the events of life are already known and aren’t under our control. You can argue with that, but we don’t truly control even our thoughts. If you disagree, tell me what you’ll be thinking two minutes from now.
The rules of the game are very simple: do you identify with what happened, or don’t you? Something happened that made you feel bad? It hurts, but it has already happened. What matters now is how you relate to it. Simple. Simple. Simple.
The great secret is asking questions. Anyone can connect with the Creator and ask for answers. You don’t even have to call Him the Creator. He will answer if you call Him Charles. What matters is understanding whom you’re speaking with and where your freedom of choice lies.
“A searching question is the entry ticket to the world of knowledge.” – Monsieur Chouchani
Episode summary
In episode 56 of The Truth Hurts (HaEmet Ko’evet), a podcast in Hebrew, Gili and Tal speak from the difficult stretch between Holocaust Remembrance Day and Israel’s Memorial Day. That year, the past no longer feels distant. National memory, present pain, and personal consciousness all meet in the same place.
From there, the conversation turns to the “secrets” of reality. Gili describes the Garden of Eden as a state of consciousness and argues that the secrets of Creation aren’t hidden in complexity, but in simplicity. Through images of radio frequencies and parallel realities, the conversation asks what human beings can control. The answer offered here is that we cannot control life’s events or even the thoughts that arise, only the attention, meaning, and identification we give them.
That is why asking questions becomes the heart of the episode. For Gili, questions create an intimate conversation with the Creator and help us choose what deserves our attention. The discussion moves through spiritual identity, love as oneness, reincarnation, science, illness, different religions, and the meaning of Israel before closing with Eden Golan’s “Hurricane” and a return to the same answer: only love will win.
Episode transcript
Episode 56. Good morning, Gili.
Tal, how are you?
These are such hard days. We’re between Holocaust Remembrance Day and Memorial Day, and this year it feels especially heavy. We’re experiencing these days through a different kind of consciousness.
I understand what you’re saying. At the same time, I look at this moment and see how strangely it pulls the past and present together. In earlier years, a Memorial Day or Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony could feel like something from long ago. You pictured the Holocaust like a film, and the soldiers of the War of Independence as figures from another time.
Then you wake up and say, “No. It’s now. It’s now. It’s now.”
Of course we can look at the sadness and pain, and we’ve talked about them so much. But how surreal is this? What could make the past more tangible than a 91-year-old grandmother from Kibbutz Nir Oz who survived the Holocaust and is now going through another Holocaust? It’s unthinkable.
There are unbearable things happening here. But let’s turn for a moment to the secrets of reality.
We’re always talking about reality.
Yes, and last time we spoke a great deal about creating reality. A week later, here we are, moving from one gateway of sorrow to the next. We’ve been living in this situation for almost a year. So let’s try to understand: what is the secret? What is happening here?
In Hebrew, sod, a secret, is an acronym for seder vada’at: order and knowledge. We’re speaking about the human journey of consciousness.
I always thought the Hebrew letters stood for a joke: “The neighbors can hear.”
That works too.
But this is a journey of consciousness. When we use the words “Garden of Eden,” we don’t mean a physical place. We mean a place in consciousness. I also hear a Hebrew wordplay in Gan Eden: hagana al ha’adinut, protecting tenderness.
Let’s take that a little further. We say there are secrets of Creation. Why aren’t they revealed to us? I believe we’re living in a time when those secrets are already coming to light and are available to us, yet we spend years waiting for someone to show us where they are.
The answer is simple: they are in simplicity.
But being simple isn’t simple.
As the saying goes, “If it isn’t simple, it simply won’t happen.” Remember, we always say that we live in a universe of questions. Part of the healing work is to ask questions so the Creator can answer.
And He answers?
He answers.
That is the greatest secret: asking questions. Beautiful souls, if the answer is complicated, it isn’t the answer. Things are meant to be very simple.
I first heard that line from someone in the military. I used to work in a government ministry alongside many military people, and they often told me, “Gili, if it isn’t simple, it simply won’t happen.” I loved it. I thought it was brilliant, and it applies perfectly here.
We’re talking about conversations with the Creator. That conversation is one of the great secrets, and above all it should be simple. If the subject makes someone uncomfortable, they might say, “The universe is speaking to me.” That’s fine.
You know people who say that.
Is it all right to call it the universe?
Call it whatever you like. But understand that the universe is a garment of the Creator. Everything that takes form, including the universe itself, comes from the Creator.
The universe speaks through people, events, a telephone, or a radio. Everything here serves the Creator. We only need to learn how to receive what comes through.
Think of tuning an old radio. You turn the dial until you find the right frequency. Once you hear that station, you know other stations are broadcasting at the same time, even though you can’t hear them while you’re tuned to this one.
That is life.
I know it’s an exaggerated example, so let me bring it down to earth. Maimonides writes in The Guide for the Perplexed that some gateways to understanding reality are closed to human beings. He says there are several realities, but some are simply inaccessible to a person. That doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It means the gates are closed.
Now move forward to 1905 and Einstein’s special theory of relativity. He says that at speed, all times and all realities exist simultaneously. How does that connect to Maimonides? It supports the idea that all realities exist at once.
So what do I experience? I experience the radio station I’ve tuned into. That doesn’t mean there are no others. In the language of quantum physics, we call this collapse: you collapse into one reality, but it isn’t the only reality.
Right. The question is which reality you choose to collapse into.
And what do we want? We want to feel good. We want joy. So how do we collapse into the good?
First, we discover what we are. Once we know who we are, we can live in greater harmony. If you know who you are and who everyone else is, life becomes easier to face.
Can anyone still believe that a human being is only matter, only the body? Can anyone still doubt that souls reincarnate? We now have billions of testimonies. Thanks to modern life-support technology, there are billions of accounts from people who experienced death and returned. Look up near-death experiences on YouTube. What you find is astonishing, and it makes so much sense.
I also recommend two books that I find illuminating. The first is Dying to Be Me, an extraordinarily powerful book. It helps us understand who we are and what we’re doing here. The second is Shorashim VeShiurim BaZman (“Roots and Lessons in Time”). Both are relatively short, focused books that can bring clarity to the question of who we really are.
Here’s the short version: matter isn’t ultimately real, and science now proves it. That can be difficult to grasp when you’re speaking into a microphone you can see, a microphone we bought with our hard-earned money. How could it not really be matter?
But when researchers examine matter closely, they find that everything is made of atoms. Break down those atoms, and they are 99.99 percent empty space and only 0.0000 percent matter. I find it astonishing that schools don’t teach this. They still teach classical physics without showing children another way to look at reality.
Scientifically, not just spiritually, we’re being told that everything is energy. And what is energy? Energy is consciousness.
Now let’s return to our starting point. We understand that we have no control over life. We do, however, have a choice in how we identify with what happens and how we respond. Even before I respond, what meaning do I give an event? Will that meaning bring me joy or sadness?
We came here to embody and reveal the Divine. Life is a playground inviting us to discover God within ourselves. What happens to us shapes us and returns us to our Source. And what is that Source? The Creator. The Creator is love. No matter which direction the discussion takes, we come back to the same place: the Creator is love.
To be clear, a human being is not the Creator, but the Creator is the human being. The Creator contracts His consciousness in order to take form within me.
Imagine playing with a 4- or 5-year-old girl. You have to contract your own consciousness to meet her where she is. In the same way, the Creator contracts His consciousness to meet us where we are. We take form here like little gods, and we have the freedom to connect with the Source, with the Creator’s consciousness.
There are no real barriers. The barriers are only physical. This goes beyond self-awareness. It isn’t enough to know that I was created; I have to understand that I am also the Creator. I am the Creator myself.
If I can connect with Divine consciousness, what does that mean for my thoughts? Knowing I can connect doesn’t mean I always manage to. The first step is to admit that I have terrible thoughts that produce terrible emotions. From there, it is easy to fall into sadness, anger, or even depression, and the numbers are staggering. Look at the rates of mental illness and depression. Why are they so high? Because there is no connection, no inner dialogue, and no understanding of reality. People get caught in reality’s sad, painful film without understanding what they’re experiencing.
And then the question becomes more complicated: I don’t control my thoughts either.
We’ve said that people have roughly 60,000 to 80,000 thoughts a day, while 4,000 or 5,000 recurring thoughts receive most of our attention.
Let’s pause there so we don’t get lost. Before we debate the exact number, the central point is that my thoughts aren’t under my control. Think of 80,000 thoughts a day. How could you control them all?
Let’s be precise: between 60,000 and 70,000 thoughts a day.
But you have to know that all those thoughts come from the same Source. Once you understand that, you relate to them differently. People say, “I thought,” as though the thought were identical with the self. But the thoughts that come to us aren’t under our control.
Dr. Benjamin Libet conducted a fascinating experiment that shows brain activity before a thought reaches a person’s conscious awareness. That means some higher power is sending the thoughts. In my worldview, that power is the Creator. The Creator sends me piles of thoughts, 60,000 of them. What am I going to do with all those thoughts?
This is where free will enters. I can choose whether to identify with those thoughts. Asking questions is the method: Does this thought fit the spiritual nature I want to embody? Does the feeling that follows it fit who I want to be?
If I understand that I’m a spiritual being, that God is within me, that I’m a daughter of the King, is anger true to who I am? If I’m genuinely connected to the Source, is irritation?
Suppose someone annoys you again and again, and you’re too stubborn to let it go. Eventually, beautiful soul, you have to turn inward and ask questions. If I know that I’m a soul and identify with that truth, then I can understand that this situation is also a manifestation of the Creator. I can rise above it, step back from it, and ask: Are sadness and insecurity true to who I am?
This inner inquiry is the entrance to the Garden of Eden. To enter that state of consciousness, we must question rather than identify with the event and everything it stirs in us. On the level of the soul, our task is to witness the event, not become part of it or get swept into a storm of emotion.
Simply put, if you don’t react to something, you don’t identify with it. If you don’t identify with it, you complete that lesson. Identification is where our freedom of choice lies, and questions support that choice.
Where do we begin? With the understanding that everything comes from Him. “There is none besides Him.” Everything is for our good, because otherwise He wouldn’t have sent it. Everything here is one.
Research offers another way to look at oneness. Your hair, your shoes, the trees, the zebras in Africa, and stardust are all made of atoms. Everything is made of the same material, and every created being is an embodiment of the Creator.
If the Creator’s true name is love, then He seeks reunion with Himself through everything that comes from the same Source. Everything is love. I also connect the Hebrew word ahava, love, with aleph, one, and ava, like one father. The idea is to become one.
Oneness is the highest form of love. The love we experience between people is an attempt to approach the Creator’s love. Consciousness is our strongest instrument, and it has different levels. A person’s level of consciousness depends on the purity of the heart.
Only I can know whether a kind-looking action comes from my ego, or whether I truly see the whole and understand that everything is one and comes from the same Source. An egocentric action isn’t aligned with the Divine part of me.
We’ve spoken a lot about creating reality. We’ve almost talked it to death. Creating a good reality matters, because otherwise we remain stuck. But I want to be precise, because people misunderstand the phrase.
We don’t create anything here. The Creator has already created every state and every situation, and everything is known in advance. Our choice lies in the meaning we give an event. The outcome may then change, although we don’t determine the outcome either. Our thoughts still matter.
Are my thoughts positive? Do they rest on the faith that everything is for the good, or do I experience life’s events through sadness and suffering? I create my experience of reality through my attention.
Here’s the simplest example. About a year and a half ago, I was losing a frightening amount of hair. People told me, “Beautiful soul, you’re over 40. You had your hair straightened. Accept it. Hair gets thinner. It happens.”
It felt like some kind of loss of strength. So I decided to give my hair attention. Nothing more complicated than attention: noticing how I washed and combed it, and using treatments I thought would nourish it. And now, beautiful soul, I walk around with a lion’s mane.
Why? Because I gave it attention. I could just as easily have criticized myself: “Look at you. Your hair is thin and weak, and it keeps falling out.” I might have ended up wearing extensions.
Anything you give positive attention to receives love. Love is the highest rung, a force that can restore something to its original form. These are very high levels, so I won’t get into them here. I chose a simple example.
Maybe one day we’ll record an episode about appearance, including hair, body shaping, and facial shaping through consciousness.
We will. But let’s return to the idea that thoughts are sent to me. If I don’t control my thoughts, then even the thought of traveling to Thailand comes from Him. We think we’re choosing, but my choice is where I place my attention. Attention then develops into action.
The great secret, as we’ve said, is asking questions. Anyone can connect with the Creator and ask for answers. You don’t have to call Him the Creator. You only have to understand that you’re speaking with a consciousness greater and more developed than ours.
My best friend calls Him Charles. It works beautifully for her, creating intimacy and a whole relationship. We’re told that we can ask whatever we want and receive an answer. Imagine that.
We came here to learn love, but not necessarily the love we already know. Human love is often egocentric. Even the altruistic love we model for our children can depend on conditions.
We’re speaking about another kind of love, a force of oneness in which you love everyone. Why? Because you know that everything is the Creator, everything is one, and everything comes from the same Source. The game is simply whether you identify with something or not.
If I haven’t convinced you yet, consider this: identification reaches all the way down to the cellular level. We have consciousness in every cell of the body. Science tells us that the whole body changes within a year. So if the body is constantly renewing itself, why does illness remain?
Because of cellular memory. The moment you identify with something, you give it existence. It reproduces itself, and the renewed body continues to follow the old program. This is why you don’t free yourself from illness. The more completely you identify with the illness and become the illness, the more it reproduces itself, all the way down to the cellular level.
That’s the point we wanted to make today.
There is meaning in the existence of the State of Israel and in the world’s religions. I believe they all exist for a reason: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and other traditions. Each person connects with a different path according to their level of consciousness.
That doesn’t mean Jesus is bad. But belief in Jesus can take a person as far as the level of consciousness Jesus reached, while belief in Muhammad can take someone as far as the level Muhammad reached.
And what are we called? Israel. I connect the name to the Hebrew yashar El: straight to God. We are connected directly to the Creator and can reach the highest level of consciousness.
So our recommendation for this week, and for life, is to identify with good, joyful things that move you forward. Choose what aligns you with the level of your soul, with generosity, kindness, and love that depends on nothing. The entrance to the Garden of Eden is asking questions.
And speaking of Eden, let’s play this week’s closing song: “Hurricane,” Eden Golan’s Eurovision entry. I listened to it on repeat on my way here, and it brought tears to my eyes. It’s powerful and deeply moving.
The song is so relevant, no matter how much they tried to cut and adapt it so no one could accuse us of being political. Come on. This entire competition has been political for 2,000 years.
But let’s leave that issue and focus on Eden. She’s wonderful, and the song hits hard. Put it on at full volume and listen to the end. Connect with the power within you. Choose to identify with good, life-giving things. Ask questions. Ask questions. Receive answers.
I have an answer: only love will win.
[The episode ends with Eden Golan’s song “Hurricane.”]