Rabbi Rami Shapiro - Buddha at the Gas Pump Interview

[Music] welcome to buddha at the gas pump my name is rick archer buddha at the gas pump is an ongoing series of interviews with spiritually awakening people i've done nearly 600 of them now over the last 11 years so if this is new to you and you'd like to check out some of the previous ones go to batgap.com b-a-t-g-a-p and look under the past interviews menu where you'll see them all organized in several different ways this program is made possible through the support of appreciative listeners and viewers so if you appreciate it and would like to help support it there's a paypal button on every page of the website and there's also a page of other ways of doing it if you don't want to deal with paypal um my guest today is rabbi rabbi rami shapiro i'll just read his bio here rabbi rami is a jewish practitioner of perennial wisdom uh he's an award-winning author of over 36 books on religion and spirituality he received rabbinical ordination from the hebrew union college jewish institute of religion and holds a phd in religion from union graduate school a rabbinic chaplain with the u.s air force for three years a congregational rabbi for 20 and a professor of religious studies for 10 rabbi rami currently co-directs the one river foundation is a contributing editor at spirituality and health magazine and hosts the magazine's bi-weekly podcast essential conversations with rabbi rami and today we're going to do a little bit of an experiment because as those of you who listen to the show regularly know i usually spend a lot of hours during the week before an interview listening to the person's talks and interviews and stuff and reading their book or books but rabbi rami said this he said i prefer we simply have a conversation that isn't prescripted i don't want rick to read anything even though he's written a gazillion books nor am i at all interested in talking about what i've already written but if rick just trusts us to have a conversation about what he is interested in i think that will be more valuable so that's what we're going to do and as rabbi rami said to me a few minutes ago that's larry king style he did a show every night he didn't have time to prepare much for all these interviews and he actually wanted to know as little about the person as his audience possibly knew so that he would ask the sort of questions they would ask and i think that rabbi rami and i and most of you watching this are all interested in many of the same things so i don't think we're going to have a problem with this although i did cheat rabbi rami and i just looked at your website about an hour ago and went through those interesting points about on perennial wisdom on judaism on divine mother on recovery on holy rascals and i copied that stuff down so if i get desperate i'll look at those so good to see you and good to meet you and thanks for doing this well thanks for having me rick it's nice to be here yeah um so i think it's typically we start interviews by just uh getting to know the person a little bit so people know who it is they're listening to and how it is that he knows what you know what he's talking about so why don't you give us a uh an overview of your background yeah let me start by saying you should never assume people know what they're talking about well it's relative especially if they talk for a living which is what i yeah but the basic background is i grew up in a modern orthodox jewish home which i found essentially meaningless to my life and for those of us who are not jewish what does orthodox mean not the guys with the long sideburns no somewhere somewhere in between that's more extreme than right more extreme than than my parents but you know we kept a kosher home i still keep a kosher home you know we did we did most of the rituals but we had no there was nothing behind them there was no spirituality there was no really not no meaning to it other than you're a jew this is what jews do so this is what you're going to do and you know i lived that way most of my you know i grew up there so until i was in high school when two of my teachers in my junior year of high school they uh or i guess it was my sophomore year in in the summer they went to india they got a grant to study what they called asian civilization and when they came back my last two years of high school were steeped in taking electives with them on hinduism buddhism confucianism and taoism and that stuff really spoke to me because what they taught wasn't the ritual what they taught was the philosophy and i was just interested in that stuff so i moved out of orthodoxy as quickly as possible and moved into buddhism i wanted to be a zen buddhist that was my ultimate goal studied philosophy studied religion jewish buddhist in college and then as i was preparing to graduate and go to graduate school to get my credential to be a buddhist studies professor my zen master shizuzaki roshi countered me at a retreat literally backed me into a against a wall and he told me that university graduate school would ruin buddhism for me and that if i really wanted to understand buddhism i should move in to the monastery his monastery was mount baldy outside of los angeles moved there learned japanese because his english was poor and studied zen on the cushion rather than you know in the classroom and i knew i've been there i'd visited the place uh i was not interested if i'm going to a monastery it has to have you know hot and cold running water showers and flush toilets that's that's like minimum for me so i knew i wasn't going to do that but i didn't know what to say and i just blurted it out literally without any you know preconceived expectation i was going to do this i just blurted out roshi i can't do that i'm going to become a rabbi and then he said [Music] i said okay i'll be a zen rabbi but just back off and that's sort of how it went he was right about graduate school it was terrible in buddhist studies i switched to judaic studies very quickly within the first semester and then went on to take my interest in hinduism and buddhism and mysticisms in general and used that as the lens through which i re-engaged with with judaism both as a philosophy and as a practice that's great i noticed behind you there you have jesus on the cross you have some arabic thing you have an ohm symbol you have some kind of a little scroll up in one corner i can't see who that other guy is but you definitely have most most of the bases right a lot of a lot of the symbolism but it's actually mary on the cross you can't tell because it's yikes it's it's a gift i was given uh last i was in israel leading an interfaith pilgrimage and we saw this uh crucifix with mary on the cross holding jesus and it really spoke to me as the crucified mother uh being you know more than the crucified son i think uh you know outside a christian context we've crucified the mother we've killed the mother and we're waiting i think we're living at a time when she's resurrecting and it's going to be what the hindus call the kali yuga it's going to be a time of absolute collapse of human civilization and as a way of preparing ourselves cleansing ourselves for a rebirth well you just gave me goosebumps i'm feeling chills all over because this resonates very deeply with me and let's divert right into this discussion um so perhaps first elaborate on elaborating what you're just saying what it means what the crucified mother really means um and then i'll have plenty of questions yeah i mean we went from of course i'm romanticizing you know pre-history here but we meant we went from a matriarchal society a nature honoring society a mother honoring society both mothers actual mothers uh physical you know biological mothers but also the mother as our archetype of reality and we probably would the onset of agriculture maybe but we everything shifted to patriarchal religion and and judaism is you know at the pinnacle of patriarchy as is christianity and islam but we moved to this patriarchal and parochial kind of religion and that has brought us ecological devastation that's brought us pandemics i think that that when you look at what's going on not just climate change but uh you know which brings on these and i just heard it again someone said oh the storm of the sanctuary no it was the storm of the sanctuary 20 years ago now we've got a new storm of the sanctuary it's a storm a mighty massive unpredicta un unprecedented storm maybe every i don't know really every few decades the same thing with even more often every year we have storms of the century yeah right okay so you know in fires and all this stuff the earth is trying to shake us off yeah you know it's like we're like kudzu and she's got to get you know get the numbers down so it's a more manageable thing but all of this i think is because we've lost the wisdom of the mother of the divine mother you know in in in those jungian archetypal terms and that wisdom is the wisdom of interconnectedness the wisdom of interdependence the wisdom of cooperation mutuality all those things are in patriarchal religions but they're just not emphasized and that devolution into patriarchy is i think the root cause of nine ninety percent of our problems let's say and that the solution is going to be a radical shift but it's not going to be it's not going to be comfortable it's not going to be graceful it's not going to be slow it's going to be it's going to be entailed the collapse of the norms that that we have lived by for for centuries and the question we have to ask ourselves is are we going to collapse mindfully or mindlessly are we going to collapse compassionately or cruelly and are we going to collapse um you know with a sense of grace or just a sense of horror and i think it's all about horror cruelty and mindlessness that's what it looks like to me but it doesn't have to be that way but that's that's i think that's what we're where we're at at the moment and do you know who that's not the way to go do you know who dwayne elgin is i know the name yeah um maybe i can reach it see here i just started reading his book called choosing earth and i've i've interviewed him before and i'll be interviewing him again but um he uh he's saying basically what you're saying but he he lays out three scenarios uh one could be complete collapse which we don't really recover from in the foreseeable future just a sort of a hellscape on earth another could be a complete collapse that's followed by a sort of a chinese style ai dominated you know authoritarian society and the third could be complete collapse followed by a sort of a restructuring and a resurgence into a very bright kind of a heaven on earth kind of age and you know he kind of lay he obviously would we would all prefer the third one and he's i don't know if he's placing bets on one or the other but he said if we play our cards right we could end up with option three it's not too late for that to be possible any thoughts on that well i agree um i don't and and i agree that if we play our cards right we can get the third option i don't know because i haven't read that book but so i don't know what it means to play our cards right but if you asked me you know what would be part of playing our cards right it would be for individuals to take on a kind of spiritual practice that would in jewish terms and in hebrew terms they talk about being of two minds one is uh moheen de cotnu narrow mind ego mind uh egoic mind where it's us against them and me against you and you know i'm i'm apart from nature and god and everything else and the other is called godlet's spacious mind where i'm a part of the whole and spiritual practices every religion has them and i'm not talking about formal liturgical go to church go to mosque go to temple go to synagogue i'm talking about meditative practices though it doesn't always have to be silent sitting cross-legged on a mat but contemplative practices that allow you that allow the egoic mind to drop of its own accord and for you to experience something greater uh that direct experience of the of the vastness to which of which we are apart i think that has got to be part of the mix and if it is i think that shifts us from uh you know to the through that more ideal third scenario that he lays out i absolutely agree and um you know i mean people who are concerned about climate change and all they'll be saying things like well we've got to get off of fossil fuels and we need to get electric cars and we need to get more wind turbines and you know all that stuff which is true and some of them will say you know we need to change our way of thinking we need to be less selfish and short-sighted and so on and that of course is also true but not too many bring in the element of how we achieve that and i think it's exactly what you just said that enough people have to sort of shift into what we might call cosmic consciousness or universal awareness or or what you know just being sort of living their lives in tune with divine intelligence and then when enough people do that then collective consciousness will shift in a big way and that is the most pivotal or fundamental or influential level at which change could occur um although all the other levels of change are also necessary the technological stuff and everything right yeah yeah no i totally agree i don't think it's an either or it's a both and yes exactly and that the um that shift in consciousness will actually help those who are developing better technologies and all it'll kind of enliven the field of i think intelligence or creativity and steer things in the right direction because a lot of times our technological advances tend to turn out to be retreats you know we they're unintended consequences from them and just because our thinking hasn't been comprehensive or deep enough or guided enough yeah and and also and and uh elgin if he doesn't i guess doesn't have a fourth alternative i could think of a fourth alternative to the three you mentioned and that is for the very wealthy to get off the planet and go set up some you know utopian society for themselves and there'll be two classes the super wealthy who get to go and then the people who do all the work that they will bring with them you know to to sustain them and i think a lot of people not a lot i don't know the number but that whole singularity movement the post-human movement the off-planet movement let's get to mars let's terraform mars rather than i mean we should work on the earth first yeah and i don't i don't the idea of escape is not necessarily one that i value though almost every religion has its escapism scenario right there's a heaven after there's a life after this life and another dimension another plane it's so much better there you know it's all about getting out of here transcendence can be a drug you know an addiction and i think one of the shifts that happens when we move from the the patriarchal masculine paradigm to the matriarchal divine feminine paradigm is you move from this transcendence to eminence but ultimately you realize that both terms are incomplete without each is incomplete without the other because there is no up or down there's just this infinite i think you called it the divine intelligence or whatever you want to call it this guess this infinite happening uh to translate the jewish word for for god the yhvh the unpronounceable name for god from the comes from the verb to be so there's just this infinite being not a supreme being not a personal being but just being itself or happening itself that includes imminence and transcendence and contemplative practice put you help you realize that you are an expression of that the way a wave is an expression of the ocean and then the work you do on the environment then then the work you do politically and economically and socially is all in its it becomes non-dual and non-zero in other words it's it's always win-win when you realize you can't win unless everybody wins yeah i have a good friend who instructed elon musk in meditation and they were i don't know if he still practices it but they were chatting with each other and talking about what they'd like to achieve and my friend said i'd like to get more people in africa meditating and elon musk said i want to colonize mars [Laughter] so i i want to ask you a question because we're talking about meditation and over your it looks to me over your right shoulder is somebody picture of amma you know oh it's so called hugging yeah hugging saint yeah it looked like her but i wasn't 100 sure yeah yeah yeah so i mean that that's just another example of what the mother paradigm is all about you know rather than and i don't mean to insult my friends who are uh into different traditions but rather than than uh you know bowing down and touching the feet of the guru or the swami and you know i've had this done to me in india and they told me this is not about you it's just the custom and i get all that but to be hugged by this woman who channels the divine so exquisitely it's it's much better it's you're this is i've never done it so have you met her oh yeah i've seen her aside from the pandemic we've seen her every year for about 20 years i've spent quite a bit you've been you've you've been hugged many times yeah right so tell me if i'm wrong because i know i'm just romanticizing it but from what i've read and heard from people who have done it that you feel yourself enrapt by the divine yes and it's a kind of surrendering to her holding you yeah is that fair it is there's something very profound going on i've seen you know in addition to my own experience with her i've watched others for hours on end as as the program progresses and i've seen big tough football player types come up there and just break down in tears you know and uh my subjective experience of it is that she just embodies vastness and uh just and so when i you know have that experience of darshan weather i i kind of there's a what's the word an entrainment and i become vast also more more clearly than i may have already been experiencing and i also feel that she has a deep insight into i've had in instances where i've come up and in the 30 second or one minute encounter i have with her since there are thousands of people in line she taps right into something knows exactly what's going on with me says a word or two or does a word or two and it changes my life like you know she's kind of sitting at the master switchboard all she has to do is tweak a few little knobs and things change in a big way so it's been a powerful engine on my train i i envy you i went to tell you two quick ama stories i went to hear her in nashville i spent hours i don't know she ever went to nashville i didn't know that she didn't so i spent hours listening you know and i'm waiting for her to come out and and then this woman comes out and she gives a talk and then she leaves and i said to uh some of the priests at the temple where this was happening i said wait what about the hugging and they said wrong oh yeah amma just means mother there's lots of amazes i i got i got uh it was you know i misread the advertising but there was a um this is a long time ago a reporter from npr who went to see her somewhere and she was very skeptical i mean this is you know she's interviewing people in line and oh this is silly and she was really i don't know if snarky's the right word but she was very very skeptical but she went through it and so it was her turn and the mic is on and she goes up and she gets this hug and you hear her go oh my god and something happened it was it was so unrehearsed and i was going to say spontaneous but that's redundant it was so spontaneous that it it couldn't have been faked you know it was just an authentic response to what she had just experienced and i think then i'll stop on this track but i think though again never been hugged by her that the kind of contemplative practice i'm talking about takes you to the same experience where you feel the vastness as you as you put it and you feel surrendered to that vastness or to the divine depends on how you want to you know language it but you feel surrendered to that in such a way that you realize your own oceanic nature your own vastness you realize you are a part of and never apart from this dynamic whole and that changes everything uh in our relationships to one another and our relationships to the planet to nature everything changes that way i think people need and it's impossible probably but people need the experience not just reading about in a book not just hearing it over npr but they need the experience of this surrendered transformation in order to know how to engage the world in the way i'm suggesting it needs to be engaged well i don't think it's impossible it's entirely possible um and if all i ever did was see ammo once a year or something like that that would not be adequate for me um you know i i've had a regular practice for over 50 years involving hours a day and it's been very rewarding so you know i just think this spiritual evolution business is kind of a lifelong project and you know if you can find an effective practice and and stick with it um it'll be a life well lived it'll have a profound cumulative effect um so can you tell us what you do well yeah i learned tm when i was 18 in 1968 and i was a teacher of it for many years and these days i'm making this a short story the um went on many long courses six months here and six weeks there and so on and then started seeing alma in 99 and eventually got a mantra for from her which i use tm's style a couple hours a day two three hours a day uh on a regular basis yeah i think i think mantra practice is really vital uh and i'm assuming well i don't know tell us are you sitting or are you levitating nope i got lead in my pants i'm just sitting there [Laughter] but um but um from day one for me it had a huge effect learning to meditate it changed my life i was a high school dropout getting involved in all kinds of difficulties and problems and uh you know within a month or two i was back in school and got a job and you know just turned me around and so you know i met that relates to something you said a few minutes ago as transcendence as an escape i think some people can use it as an escape perhaps but i see it more like you know you when you go to the bank to withdraw some money it's not an escape it's a preparation to go back to the market and then you have some money in your pockets and you can spend the money yeah that's yeah so meditation kind of charges your batteries and then you get back into activity um the gita says yoga is skill in action it it sets you up for more successful life in the world yeah yeah i totally agree with that i don't know if people are familiar with the 10 ox hurting pictures most people are zen buddhism so you know the the um the eighth one if i remember them right the eighth one is just the enso it's blank the the person is gone you know that that uh in the heart sutra gate got a paragotta parasam got a bodhisphaha gone gone gone beyond even the idea of gone um and then the ninth one is nature returns there's a sense of nature coming back and then the tenth one is the seeker now having experienced this great greater reality of which the seeker is a part comes back very large very powerful and comes back into the village as the village elder the sage the you know whatever and whatever you want to call it and and it is it's it's uh but he's riding the ox which means that he is kind of a mass he's established as in the transcendent and yet engaged in in the activity too right yeah i actually have to look at it i don't think he's right in the ox anymore i think the ox has been internal oh he may be right and he's just coming back into the village but the idea is the same that the the the difference between transcendence and imminence is now gone he's fully alive fully awake and now he's just in the world however the world presents itself to to her or him yeah there's another verse in the gear where well there's one verse where krishna says to arjuna transcend be without the three gunas and then a few verses later he says established in yoga or established in being perform action you know so it's just the same point over again that it's you know sometimes meditation has a reputation for being an escapist kind of thing like you know what are you going to do about the world you know you're just selfish to sit there with your eyes closed people said that to me when i first learned um but like getting a good night's sleep or many things we do to prepare for activity it's a it's a preparation you know it makes you more effective in activity and a more fulfilled human being yeah i mean i think so i i agree with you i think that when people are engaged in very important social justice issues um environmental justice i mean there's so many things that need to be addressed and they come at those without and this is obviously my bias but without a spiritual grounding and by that i mean ongoing practice i think it becomes first of all it's very draining i think and second of all becomes very egoic i've got the answer or my group has got the answer and we're going to just do it our way as opposed to the humility that comes with spiritual practice that allows you to engage the world more powerfully but not more violently i guess you might say yeah and and that and this humility is a it's that's a delicate thing too because i've met many spiritual practitioners and i've probably been one myself at times who were not very humble and who did think that their way was the best or you know gave other people a hard time what they were doing and you know kind of adopted this holier-than-thou attitude so i think that they're kind of on the spiritual path there's this balancing act of integration and purification and stabilization and growth and kind of all you're juggling all these balls but humility is an important one and i think also discrimination or discernment is an important one because it's it's sometimes easy to get uh caught up on on tangents caught up in tangents and kind of go off the track yeah and and sometimes it's you know with all the right intention you've had an experience and you go my god this has changed my life you need to do it right it'll change your life yeah and you know and and it's it's done with the right intention but maybe with the wrong energy and and that comes with practice um and that that take well it just takes a bit of time to get you know to that place of being convinced that there is a way there is a transformation there is a capacity for transformation and not to assume there's only one way to get there yeah um i'm often saying god is not a one-trick pony and you know sometimes when i've had it when i've been confronted by religious fundamentalists i i find myself beginning to discuss astronomy because if you consider the vastness of the universe and the probability of of you know life throughout the universe and and so on you know trillions of inhabited planets probably um although that's a little hard to reconcile if you think the universe is 6 000 years old but um you know it's like and probably a good percentage of those planets or the inhabited planets probably all of them have some sort of spiritual traditions and religions and so on and i wonder what percentage of those think that theirs is the only way you know or theirs is the best probably many of them so it's just absurd when you expand it out that far to think that about anything on our planet being exclusive or unique or yeah i mean the flip side is i mean you don't have to go off world to make the point you know i mean i i just you know rami by myself think that uh i forget how many was it two billion christians on the planet who believe that you know jesus is the only son of god as opposed to all life being a child of the divine uh billions of people who take the the phrase uh from john where jesus says i am the way the truth and the life and no one comes to the father except through me billions of people take that literally and i say to them wrong yeah so so much for humility right you know no no you're missing the point i was once in israel as a long story which i won't bore you with but i was once confronted by this um anglican priest who said uh to me i don't know if you know this term that uh c.s lewis's trilemma i've read c.s lewis but i don't remember that term so this is something he came up with when he was doing the bbc radio shows during world war ii and he said that uh trilemma means that you only have three options in in this situation he sets you up with so he says when jesus says i am the way the truth and the life no one comes to the father except through me is he a liar is he a lunatic or is he lord and in c s lewis's mind no one would call jesus a liar or a lunatic so ta-da you must say that he's lord i was in israel at this anglican center and this uh priest came over and she tossed that at me she knew i was a rabbi and she said so which is it is he a liar a lunatic or lord and i said i reject the trilemma there's a fourth option and to her credit she'd never thought about it she said really what is it and i said jesus is a god-realized mystic that when he is saying i am he's referring to the i am revealed in exodus the the singular subject that is all reality and he's saying i am is the way the truth and the life and no one comes to the i am except through the i am consciousness which she embodied anyone can do that uh i mean there's practice involved but she had never thought of it and again to regret it she said well i have to think about that so it's like i said you know at the top of the show you know i looked at judaism through the lens of mysticism and i look at all religions through that lens and then when i and when i do that i end up with what's called the perennial wisdom that says the i am consciousness is the way the truth and the life and everyone has access to that because everyone is an expression of that yeah and it's closer than your breath you know i mean it's right here it permeates it pervades everything rumi says it's closer god's closer than your jugular yeah yeah so and so that's encouraging because it means that it's not far removed from us um and in fact nothing could be closer and so it should be the easiest thing to tap into really if we have if we just sort of have the trick on how to tap in right i mean it's the hindu the upanishad saying you know tatvam asi you are it you know and that's why it's so hard to get because you're trying to get it as if it weren't you and that false sense of separation is is the problem yeah um that's good there's also a verse in the gita which says um no effort is lost and no obstacle exists even a little of this dharma removes great fear so any step that you take in that direction it bears fruit to whatever extent yeah and once in fact one thing i've often encountered is in interviewing people mostly um they they reach a certain point in their life where they just either get desperate or fed up or just the yearning gets so strong and they just say please you know help me i oh i gotta find this thing and as soon as there's that sincere entreaty that sincere intention stuff happens you know the through the most interesting coincidences sometimes that just that something comes to them that they can begin progressing with so and a lot of teachers say that actually that the desire for god or the desire for realization is the most fundamental technique of all yeah i think that you know when when you reach that point it's what you know we call in recovery you know hitting rock bottom and at that point you're just surrendered and there's no all you can do is say you know it's what andy lamott says there's three kinds of prayer um help thanks and wow so you hit that moment and uh everything shifts for you if if you let it it's it's it's all about living with what the chinese call way way that non-coercive action so you're doing but you're not doing from the ego you're not doing to to get power you're not you're just doing because uh in the moment this is what needs to be done yeah and you know it it's it's what krishnamurti calls choiceless awareness you just sort of know this to be to be true yep it's row row row your boat gently down the stream you're you're just you are rowing a bit you're just sort of you know steering this way in that slightly so your boat doesn't go off into the rocks or branches but the stream is really the thing that's propelling the boat you're just kind of making sort of subtle adjustments like you do with the steering wheel when you're going down the highway right but you can get self-driving cars that's true there goes that method you can actually go to sleep while it's driving people have been seen doing that uh all right we're doing good here we're we're on a roll um and at any point during this conversation just if any thought comes to mind and you want to talk about it just launch into it you don't have to wait for me to ask something well let me just say that i mentioned perennial wisdom and we didn't define it okay yeah good idea take a second to do that so uh perennial wisdom is a four-fold teaching at the heart mr the mystic heart of all religions each religion will articulate it in its own way but the points are basically the same they're very simple point number one is that every life is a manifesting of a singular or non-dual aliveness you can call it god or dao or mother or nature or you know brahman dharmakaya i mean there's you know there's millions of names for this thing but the language aside it's it's a singularity it's just this infinite happening and you and i are happenings of that happening that's number one number two human beings have the innate capacity to awaken in with and as this aliveness number three when you awaken in with and as this aliveness you're called to a an ethical standard to live a certain ethical way and in judaism we would say it's you know the golden rule perhaps or christianity you'd say it's the golden rule but something like that something that recognizes the mutuality and interdependence of all life for the express purpose again to use biblical terms to be a blessing to all the families of the earth that's genesis 12 3. and the fourth one is awakening to this aliveness and living for the to be as a blessing to all the families of the earth those two things comprise the highest calling of any human being and again i think you can find line you can find in every religion ways of articulating the same four points but they're always around they're they're always the same points and that's you know to go back to where we in the very beginning i think that the collapse of patriarchy slash parochialism is going to be the rebirth of the divine or the i can't say rebirth she's not dead but you know a reappreciation of the divine mother divine feminine and uh perennial wisdom will be part of that um shift yeah that's good um i was just i just read an article last night about swami muktananda and how later in his life he had a couple strokes and a heart attack and stuff and and then his behavior became very strange and by even though he was still teaching and quite brilliant in in some ways but you know he began messing around with young ladies and so on and i was corresponding with a friend of mine who used to be with him at that point was one of his sort of people helping him write his books and stuff and we were thinking about it and talking about this idea of the correlation between ethical behavior and enlightenment and uh you may know ken wilbur's idea of the difference what's he called lines of development and um i used to always think these lines of development were quite tightly correlated and that to whatever extent consciousness awoke there would be a corresponding awakening of ethical behavior and all you know intellect and heart and all the other faculties but i've sort of had to conclude after all these years that the correlation is really quite loose um unfortunately do you have any thoughts on that well i would say that it may be correlated if in the following way that um i think i'm not quoting this right but in the talmudic literature in the rabbinic literature somewhere it says you know the greater the saint the greater the shadow that that as you expand your consciousness the shadow also expands and the trick if that's the right word is to take the the energy of the shadow side of our personality and channel it into something good but you're never going to become you know only good and and you can't you can't make you can't make mistakes you can't let the ego get you know get the better of you it's always part of the mix so my my own sense of it is because i've had a lot of teachers and then i found out that lots of them haven't lived up to the hiate i i think you have to focus on the teaching and not attach to the teacher and uh yeah but if the teaching is really worth it salt shouldn't the teacher reflect the effect efficacy of it as best the teacher can but that doesn't mean the teacher's ever going to be perfect no because of that ongoing shadow side so so i don't uh i mean i've had people try to excuse the behavior of their teacher when it's really vile uh um i mean i i won't give specifics because i don't want to insult anybody but i was with a friend who was a disciple of a buddhist who was a raging alcoholic and when he drank him he often became violent yeah and she talked to she was she told the story but she was at a retreat and he was drunk and he became violent and he started to chase her around the room with a butcher knife saying i'm going to kill you and she took it literally and ran for her life and got in her car and drove away and then i don't know how long later but as she was driving away from the retreat she realized she said to herself he was trying to show me my own mortality so she drove back and and sort of said no he wasn't it wasn't what it looked like he was trying to show me my own mortality luckily for her he had fallen asleep by the time she got yeah i i i get what you're saying you know it'd be nice if people lived up to the teachings i think everyone wrestles with it even gurus so i i think we have to be healthfully skeptical healthily skeptical of of our of our teachers yeah and not not expect the impossible but not denigrate the teaching because the teacher can't maybe can't live up to it yeah well first of all i'm rather skeptical of her rationalization [Laughter] and secondly i would again make the point that um you know why do we engage in a teaching anyway well we want some benefit from it we want to become a better person we want to become enlightened we want to you know be more compassionate or whatever the benefits of a teaching supposedly are and i know that nobody's perfect we're all works in progress everyone who walks the earth or has walked it but again you would expect a teacher to embody to be somewhat of an example of the value of the teaching and if he isn't if it's if it's that extreme as you're saying then you really have to question maybe he's just you know he's eloquent or or whatever he has a bright intellect or something but the teaching doesn't seem to have affected him that much unless he unless he would have been even worse if he hadn't been engaged in it well that's what i'm saying that you you can still have respect for the teaching even if not for the teacher uh do you remember eugene harrigal no he wrote a book called uh zen in the art of archery i remember the book yes and when i was in high school that was man you had to read that even in college and buddhist classes everyone oh you've got to read herego and it turns out that after he became quote unquote enlightened uh through his zen archery studies he went back to germany in the 30s and uh you know he became a nazi how can how can enlightened buddhists become a nazi yeah so well actually many of the nazis were really into um vedic religion and vedic studies i mean i think it was goebbels or one of those guys carried a guido around in his pocket it's possible to take a teaching and warp it to extreme degrees i mean look how many people have been killed by in the name of christianity or other religions you know huge numbers no look look at well you could just because you brought up the gita i mean look at hindu nationalism where there's there's you know priests hindu priests preaching violence against muslims in the name of of you know their their hinduism or you get um you know the some of these ultra-orthodox right-wing orthodox uh settlers in israel who in the name of torah which says you know love the stranger and don't oppress you know the the powerless and you have them you know sanctifying or are sanctioning all kinds of evil vis-a-vis the palestinians so yeah i mean it's it they're they're humans that's that's the problem that's why if elon musk ever makes it to mars it's still gonna suck after a while because he's bringing humans yeah it already sucks on mars i wouldn't want to live there uh nice place to visit yeah yeah don't get don't get stuck there like matt damon i don't know if you watch that movie yeah i'll go with arnold schwarzenegger and uh when he gets there and brings water back i forgot what that yeah good total recall but anyway uh let's wrap up this point but i think there's a bit more we can squeeze out of it um uh just uh i don't know if we've totally resolved it but well you know here's a way of going at it you know what you're saying in the beginning about how um spirituality deeps experiential spirituality on more of a mass scale might be the secret ingredient that could um turn collapse into a brighter future eventually and we we talked about that quite a bit so yeah i agree and and that's why i feel like um you know spiritual teachers sort of behaving so badly it kind of sabotages the the project you know um and it disillusions the heck out of people yeah i can't disagree with that but i still i don't want people to say well therefore i'm not going to meditate right you know i'm not i'm not doing that uh the practice and the experience that you can gain from the practice is what matters to me and not so much the perfection of the teacher oh i agree and you know you there was once a well-known spiritual teacher who somebody asked him how many followers he has and he had you know apparently had hundreds of thousands of them and he said i don't have any followers everyone follows their own experience their own benefits and that's the kind of way i see it i don't care if every spiritual teacher that ever lived turned out to be a scoundrel my own experience is enough to keep me going yeah right yeah all right well we may loop back to this but um let's keep moving here so um another section on your web page was on judaism um and a bunch of quotes and points about judaism and and the way you teach it uh do you want to say some things about that uh unless you want to raise something specific i mean judaism is my mother tongue i think that when judaism is read through a lens you know a mystical lens a lens of non-duality i think it's a very very rich tradition i think that when it's read through a tribal lens it's it's not it's pretty silly you know so i have a a new book coming out hopefully next year called judaism without craziness and the craziness for me is the notion that uh there's one god separate from the universe who created the universe who chose the jews from among all the peoples of the earth that's what we say every you know every time we read the torah part of the blessing is that god chose us from among all the peoples to receive god's one and only revelation the torah because we don't think the gita is as a rebel is revelatory we don't think the holy quran is revelatory so god chose us to receive the torah and gave us the deed to the promised land in perpetuity regardless of who was there before we got there or who was there when we got back i mean that to me is crazy i don't i don't that's pure tribal uh jingoism that's pure marketing it's i mean every religion has it right to say that muhammad is the seal of the prophet prophets is a way of saying our prophet's better than your prophet so join us to say that jesus is the only son of god is the same thing it's all it's all about marketing and every religion is trying to market itself as the true faith because they on the surface they don't agree all right you can't it can't be that god has a son and doesn't have a son right because islamic judaism say uh no god doesn't have kids so it can't you can't have it both ways so maybe all of those things are a bit crazy and the mystics have it have it right so i mean judaism is a tremendously rich tradition that tries to integrate what you were saying before the the transcendent with the imminent and it doesn't see you know it's not as in some christianities you know faith alone it's faith and works you know it's that your belief in the divine sends you into the world to be a holy being so it's something that i absolutely respect when it's not hanging from what i call the you know the craziness i mean i i keep a very jewish life you know i observe this about the shabbat in my own way i observe kosher in my own way but it's always my way not the way my parents did it yeah for some reason as you were saying that i was reminded of um when i think it might have been voyager 1 went out pretty far in the solar system and took a photo of earth from that perspective you could see earth as this little tiny dot and carl sagan made some comment about how you know looking at that little dot and then considering that all the bloodshed and the wars and the fighting over little tiny bits of territory on that little dot you know to to dominate it for some little short blip of time in the vast scheme of things just the absurdity of that and uh yeah yeah i mean there is a terminal absurdity to human thinking right i mean it's just it's a craziness but when you were talking about voyager 1 i thought you were talking about uh the first star trek movie that's where my mind i remember that movie actually the guy who started that lives in my town forget his name veger he kept saying veger now what do you suppose it is why is it that people become so myopic why is it become they become so narrow-minded and focused and you know my way is the best way you know uh kind of a thing what is it about human psychology that because i doubt that the ver the r revered founders of any religion were talking that way although some of their words are interpreted to mean that kind of thing but i if i don't think they could have been so small-minded and yet have have had such an impact yeah i mean first of all we don't know what any of them said if any of them you know we don't even know if they they all really know they're historical figures and we certainly don't know what they said but i think the reason why people are so myopic is that people are frightened i think fear is the motivator we are so afraid of dying that we want to have some get out of death free card and that's what religions peddle either it's reincarnation or you know some some heaven realm that you can get to if you if you follow the rules properly or you have the right beliefs we're always trying i mean that's part of the addiction of transcendence if it's these other heavenly realms or or take it outside of normative religion i mean you say oh you know this life is like a school or life is a school and you go from grade to grade to grade i mean all of that is in my mind is simply a way of avoiding the fact that you die nobody wants to die and we're so afraid of what that is that we create systems that offer us promise us a get out of debt free card and then you're afraid that the system isn't true right so how do i prove my system is true and your system is wrong well the standard way of doing it is to show that your god is false and my god is true and the only way to do that is for my god to kill your god and the only way for my god to kill your god is for me to kill you and so we have ongoing religion religious wars trying to prove who's god is really god in order to prove who's got the true get out of death free card the way around all of that is to realize that in a sense well the ego dies sorry it just does rami comes to an end i just took some i think it's called uh oh i don't know what it's called it's one of those longevity things you can do on the internet and it says i'm gonna die when i'm 91 which i think is an upgrade from an earlier longevity thing which had me dying in se at 77 which is only a few years do they base those on like whether you smoke and how how old your parents were and all that kind of stuff exactly exactly so so but i'm still gonna die you know my mom's 92 maybe i'll make it that far maybe i won't but even if i do eventually i'm going to die and but i have no fear around that because what you think happens when you die it really depends on who who you think you are now and i think that i am simply god rameen and your god rick ing you know and and your two dogs that's god dogging dog and uh so so the extent to which i'm identified as rami in my own mind that's the extent to which i don't want to die or i fear death but when i realize that's not my truest self then there is no death in that sense you know rami's gone but my truest self which isn't separate from anything else is you know the wave returns to the ocean but the ocean continues to wave so that takes away the fear and if there's no fear it's hard to get people agitated enough within their religious system to want to kill other people um i was listening to a guy the other day and he was saying things like well if you believe in reincarnation then you'll be reincarnated you'll be reincarnated if you don't you won't and he went on with half a dozen other things like that if you believe it then this and if you don't believe it then that and you know the whole while i was thinking that that's like saying if you believe the earth is flat okay the earth is flat but obviously there's an objective reality that really doesn't care what we believe and that works the way it works and is the way it is regardless of whether or not we understand it and so why couldn't you know some of these beliefs about what happens when you die be like that maybe there really is reincarnation and it it happens regardless of whether we think it does well that's true i i think the reason that i am not inclined to go in that direction because of course the opposite could be true no it's it's not reincarnation it's heaven and hell and if you're not the right kind of religious person you're going hell so uh so it doesn't really help but the reason i i'm not drawn to that is because the people who speak to me the great saints and sages of humankind have all gone beyond this and i'm thinking about you know people like ramana maharshi uh who said you know they say you know don't leave us when he was dying don't leave us he said where can you go i mean it's just all this so when you look at the great saints whether it's uh someone like mansur al-hajj in suvism who said i am truth or jesus or i mean abraham abalafa who said behold i am god and god is me or you know i mean you find this stuff in in every religious tradition the realization of your true nature being this oceanic reality because all of those saints across human history or throughout human history across human cultures seem to come to the same realization i find it much more i find it convincing of course you could say but there are billions of people who think no you know that i personally am going to hell um i mean i've been at seminars where i was singled out because they were they were christian seminars where i was singled out as the only non-christian in the room and people said you know you're going to burn in hell for all eternity and you know it doesn't bother me because it's just something i do not believe in it's it's just so far from my you know what i consider to be a credible belief but it is tremendously motivating if you're open to it because then you go crap i don't want to burn for all eternity how do i not burn and this one seminar was a battle of the protestantisms and they were saying well you don't burn if you become a southern baptist and someone says no no you got to be a presbyterian like how do you know so i you know what i told him when they said what do you think and i said well i like dante's circles of hell and i'm hoping to make it to the first circle because that's where all the cool people are buddha and plato and all the loud tzu i want to hang out with them in the first circle of hell it's okay did you ever watch emo phillips's skit about hey he wa he runs into a guy who's about to jump off the golden gate bridge and they start having this conversation and you know what i'm talking about no no it's hilarious you know um dan remind me and i'll put that in the show notes on this and you can watch it too but very funny skit can't can't go into it right now um but um with regard to ramana maharshi and others that we could mention um you know what you were saying earlier about sort of the both and perspective of things where it's transcendent and it's imminent or you know it's unmanifest and it's manifest and and both you know dimensions or all the dimensions have their significance well you know ramana said that his cow was the reincarnation of some woman who had served him devotedly earlier on and uh that the cow got enlightened when she died or maybe it was the other way around the car no the cow got in line i think there was the woman earlier um and they built they had a shrine for the yeah at the end the cow so uh it's not like he didn't believe that reincarnation was a thing and he actually often referred to it but just that it wasn't the ultimate thing um it's what they call it vedanta vyava haraka satyam the transactional reality um it's still like you know a room full of pots is it's only clay but there are pots you know and and you don't deny the existence of the pots that's just sort of the no but if you break a pot it's not going to reincarnate as another pot true but metaphors have their limitations yeah no i mean my my i mean i i appreciate what you're saying i i think that even someone to me is just an example of how even someone who is so awake uh as ramana maharshi still is a product of his culture and this is you know this is what comes out i mean i i've studied for the last couple of decades i guess with a student of his not not direct one generation removed and um michael james or somebody like that no no no somebody no one's ever heard of he he keeps way below the radar he's an indian guy um anyway when he explains this stuff you know he he explains it without the trappings of indian culture and so you know he looks at reincarnation as i mean the way the way the ocean continues to wave but it's never the same way of coming back the the thing with reincarnation often is it's just another uh it's just an another way of being addicted to ego that this woman became back as a cow well no that makes no sense or the cow could become a woman that means there's something essential about the woman that came back as a cow or as something essential about the cow that becomes something else there's nothing essential except the non-dual reality itself so i have no problem with saying you know the ocean waves in you know without end but no wave itself ever comes back but then you say well wait a minute what about people who remember past lives well i don't have a problem with that because there's only one living thing that's the ocean if you like that's the divine reality of which you are apart and if you are sensitive enough and i'm not but if one is sensitive enough to tap into more of the oceanic you can maybe you do have you know akashic records karmic karmic memories of other things the ocean was doing the problem is we then identify it with meat oh that was me i mean i know a number of people who believe they were cleopatra i know nobody i mean this is i'm not making it up and i know number of people who say i was i'm a reincarnation of queen cleopatra nobody that i've ever met was ever reincarnation of the woman who had you know who cleaned up you know when when cleopatra took a dump in the bucket right no one was where we are i was the woman who took the bucket out and cleaned it no one was ever that reincarnation so i i think you have to be i think the eagle the ego is very powerful very subtle and can just weave itself into all of these different things none of them speak to me uh at the moment when i'm dying maybe then maybe they're like oh no i'm gonna come back this is not done i didn't you know i didn't i didn't do enough i want to get more stuff yeah i'm gonna play with this a little bit more with you not not to win an argument or convince you of anything but just to play with the idea because there's some other wrinkles of it that you've probably considered but maybe we can hash them out um one is the whole near-death experience and out-of-body experience phenomena you know where people go out of body i've spoken to many of them and experienced something that they couldn't possibly have known um and then they come back and you know like there's this famous story where somebody was undergoing surgery and they left the body and they well there are many stories where they hear what the surgeons are saying and what music they were playing in the room and all kinds but then they actually there's one woman who saw a red sneaker up on the roof of the hospital and sure enough somebody went up there later and found the sneaker um so if that those kind those kinds of stories suggest that there is a subtler aspect to our makeup which is not just the physical body and uh go ahead you're about to say something yeah no i i mean i don't i don't disagree with those i don't challenge those experiences uh just like when you read uh autobiography of a yogi i've i i just recently reread it when i read uh when i read it the first time i was like what are all these you know these cities these powers that all these people but i read it the second time and i read it with a more hopefully a more mature mind and well there's a guy colin wilson who has this metaphor of an 88-key piano keyboard and that most of us only play the keys in the center chopsticks like some of us yeah right or but but some of us through near-death experience through psychedelics through meditation we can play more keys and i would imagine that there are some people who can play the entire keyboard and i think that when you die uh or if you have this you know near-death kind of experience you're playing more of the keys you can i would say i would go even farther than the two examples not only can you see things because your your perspective is is larger than just what's you know between your eyes are behind your eyes i i think that that you might even be able to perceive um you know what what might be considered the the enlightenment experience through near death i was once corresponding with oh gosh his name just went out of my head but one of the major not moody but someone else uh near death researcher this is back in the 80s and 90s bruce grayson he was it he was at yale um i can't remember my apologies gary schwartz no you can throw out all the names i i can't remember i can't remember the guy's name but anyway i wrote him once and i said here's what people experienced during meditation because he was a scientist he wasn't interested in meditation and then it sounds to me exactly what you're describing in near-death experience and he wrote back and said no i think it's the same thing that you're dropping you know the limitations of the body mind and experiencing the full to mix my metaphors here to to experience the full 88 keys of human consciousness so yeah i have i have no problem with accepting any of that and to take it back to the autobiography of yogi i assume it's possible to do things that look like magic to me because i'm only playing a few keys but that someone who can play the whole keyboard can do and i'm just mesmerized i don't understand how they do it so i'm not limited i hope uh to say no to any of this stuff right my limitation comes when i imagine that when someone says to me so i am other than the universe or the you know the divine consciousness um that i don't have room in my experience for separation yeah no neither do i and um and i take all sorts of beliefs and ideas like this as hypotheses that are interesting to explore did jesus walk on water okay maybe he did maybe can that be tested could we find somebody else who can walk on water and you know and just because we can't doesn't mean he didn't do it um but you know it's not just picking that as one far-out example so i'm really open to all this stuff um but nothing that happens is separate from oneness and all kinds of things and yet uh in the same breath all kinds of things happen so if it's true that when the gross physical body dies the anamiya kosha as they call it there are still the subtler coaches the subtler sheath left all of that it's an appearance in oneness but and it's not separate from oneness but we still living life involves engaging with appearances even if we don't take them as ultimately real um yeah right i could i could follow you in that direction right and so that woman who saw the red sneaker on the roof of the hospital and i could cite many other examples how was she able to do that because her physical eyes were in a body that was being operated on under anesthesia there must be some subtler mechanics of perception which are independent of or the the growth or physical body and you know so if that yeah yeah go ahead now as i said the question is is consciousness a byproduct of the brain or is the brain simply a way of tuning into consciousness what do you think about that and i i think the second yeah me too yeah i think the brain is like a receiver like a radio and that them yeah right and that the um you know spiritual practices or and other things simply help you fine-tune the radio so you can get a you know you can reach a broader spectrum yeah and if the radio gets damaged it doesn't mean that the music isn't still playing that other radios can't pick it up but it's just this particular radio yeah okay but again analogies have their limitations and what we're saying here is that you know in addition to the universal music so to speak the the electromagnetic field which radios detect um that's that's as far as that analogy goes but what we're saying here is that there could be a sort of a jiva or a subtle essence to our makeup that survives when the body dies and that could therefore take on another body and um and sort of near death to me out of body experiences are an interesting bit of evidence for that and then you then we get into all kinds of um you want to answer that phone or just or no no i i should turn the phone you want to do that you can do that there's actually nobody calling it's just somebody trying to sell you a car insurance or something no it's it's something with my um and i can't even get the phone off my phone there it goes yeah it's something whether you get these phantom rings uh-huh there's nobody somebody's no no it's not even there's no phone involved it's some wacko thing weird with uh and it happens all day long yeah i can't get it interesting uh so my only issue here would be does that subtle consciousness that takes on a new body is that rick you know is that rami uh and i would say no that that it wouldn't be identified but most people want it to be whatever their after life scenario is they want it to be recognizably them i mean when people say to me you know i'm gonna die go to heaven i'm gonna see my grandparents well that means that your grandparents are going to be recognizable to you and that you're going to be recognizable to them and that somehow it's the ego that goes or when i've had people say to me well you know uh they're going to hell because they do x y and z and then you say well is the soul that goes to hell is that the person that you're you know is that the ego and they said no no it's totally different so well then why punish the soul for what the ego did yeah good point you know what right i mean so this stuff gets very convoluted it's i'm infinitely fascinated with it i could talk about it all day long but the work is you know playing as many of the 88 keys as possible in order to make the world you know a more a more holy just compassionate place yeah um so we won't talk about this particular point all day long but perhaps for a few more minutes though well just that here's the point for you um just that if we consider you know spiritual evolution to be sort of a vast spectrum of possibility like you say you know we're playing two or three keys we want to be able to play 88 keys um chances are we're not going to be able to play all 88 keys in the in the span of one lifetime but maybe we'll double the number of keys we can play we'll go from four to eight or something so you know it would seem that if if this is true that there is some essence to us that continues to evolve along a vast spectrum that you know it'll be good to have multiple opportunities to to progress um you know get to sixth for that for that yeah whatever that essence yeah yeah right i mean that i i would i would get that yeah i mean i i'm not going to disagree with that i mean on what grounds so um but i i don't know if it's true that you can't wake up in a single lifetime i mean maybe you say oh i think you can people who do or you could argue people who do have had multiple lifetimes to get ready for that too yeah so so there's there's that but um young aranda said yeah in his autobiography that um i don't know if it's true or not but he said that reincarnation was edited out of the christian doctrine at the council of nicaea because it it was felt by the whoever that it gave people too much sort of it would make them lazy like i'll do whatever i want and i'll keep you know working on it next time around it they they wanted them to focus in on being a good person right now and uh well by good person they wanted them to focus focus in on following the rules and letting and being controlled by the powers of the you know the nicene of the council so yeah right i mean judaism too has a reincarnation tradition uh it's not mainstream but but it also has that yeah all right well we pretty much exhausted this uh this topic but um whatever it is i find it interesting i mean the idea of understanding i apologize for all the noises coming out of my neighborhood what's that the ice cream truck that's an ice cream truck coming by yeah wow i used to drive one yeah he comes by every day never stops huh no one ever buys ice cream i i think he must be dealing drugs i don't know how he makes a living yeah it must be getting warm down there to have an ice cream truck we're gonna have some snow in the next day or two but um in any case um what was i just about to say i was saying something remember it was another lifetime yeah anyway maybe it'll come back if it's important but um oh i know what it was just just that um with all kinds of subjects like this i mean it's fun to talk about them and all and uh i don't think it's just sort of you know party conversation or sort of idle gossip because i think that understanding how the universe works is an important component or should be of spiritual development and it's certainly an emphasis in probably in in the your tradition certainly in vedanta you know yoga just sort of really sorting things out and getting a clear understanding of things um and i'm sure that there have been many you know christians who've focused on uh understanding of course these traditions have different understandings but whatever however they go about it it seems to me that we you know we have an intellect we have a heart we have a mind we have these different components and cultivating each of these faculties to do what it's designed to do as fully as it can be done seems to be part of the holistic development that i would consider to be spiritual evolution yeah i i absolutely agree i think that at minimum you know just in in the embodied existence that i have i mean there's five dimensions that i'm aware of you know body heart mind soul and spirit yeah and there may be subtle gradations within all of those and i think that um we need to develop practices on each of those dimensions you know it's it's not enough to just sit on a cushion uh there's got to be a you know in the retreats that i that i run when we used to do retreats pre-covet every morning we started with uh qigong and we did meta loving-kindness meditation every day and we did mindfulness practice and self-inquiry and study we we tried to to work on all five dimensions over the course of of every day of the retreat uh but i i think that some people are more inclined well switch let me switch metaphors to the to the four yogas you know karma bhakti jana and and uh so so some people are more inclined to devotional practice so they're they're bhakti people and some are more inclined like i am to jeanna the more in the intellect but i remember ramdas said once that start where you are but eventually if you stick with it over a lifetime they won't all be equal necessarily but all four of them all four categories of practice you know will will be manifested you'll manifest them in your life when i first heard that i was much much younger i thought now i'm never going to be a bhakti person or i'm never going to be you know a karma yogi person but he was right i mean if i listed them karma karma yoga would probably be on the bottom because i'm too lazy to do anything for other people but no you are you know i would have i would have thought bhakti would have been something i could never do but it's now it's it's though it it challenges my normal world view my my bhakti practices of devotion to the divine mother are central to my daily practice and i never would have imagined that yeah and all the great non-dual masters from you know shankara shankara said the intellect imagines duality for the sake of devotion and uh ramana was very devotional devoted to arunachala and the sargadatta you know after the the main group would leave he'd break out the symbols and they'd have bhajans practice and papaji was very devoted to krishna so all these guys had the devotional component and no you know they would not have said oh it's all just one and so you know devotion is is a delusional concession to you know or anything like that they all consider them important yeah i mean i i when i started to move in that direction i was adamantly opposed to what i was experiencing because i was no it's just the non-duality you can't have this thing it's this makes no sense i was um i mean i went to a number of teachers i won't go into it but try to get rid of the experience that i was having and i was finally sitting with andrew harvey once we were we had been teaching together in in the phoenix area we were at the phoenix airport and i said to him i'm having all these experiences of the divine feminine i'm you know seeing images and hearing voices and all this and i said you know this violates my non-dual theology this is you know i don't have room for this and i won't go into all the things he said but in his delightfully loving mocking way he basically said you don't really if if you think there's non-duality and duality you don't understand non-duality that if it's all the one reality then it can manifest as kali and mary and you know sophia all these different characters i was experiencing or krishna or you know whoever whoever happens to be so he helped me get over my intellectual resistance to the experiences i was having yeah like i was saying earlier you know the heart is a faculty and and if you're going to be undergoing a holistic development it's bound to develop and you're going to start you know having experiences in that in that way so hey you just kind of like um gave a little hint there to something they haven't discussed which is would you be willing to talk more about your the experiences you've had uh you know like you started experiencing these divine mother things for instance i mean how did that manifest and what were what were your experiences and you know yeah well i mean there were a lot and it'll get boring but the i'll give you some examples so i first started having this kind of visual because i'm more of an auditory person but i started having these visualizations not on purpose but i was sitting in my home and i lived in miami florida i was reading the herald miami herald newspaper and they had this gorgeous uh i guess icon of the virgin mary it was just this watercolor it was i couldn't take my eyes off of it and it really took up the you know above the fold as we used to say when you got a real paper newspaper and i flipped the paper over to see what gallery this was or what jerks this was in and because i wanted to go see it and it turns out it was an oil slick on the side of a bank building and i think it's clearwater florida and thousands of people were making pilgrimage to it it's it's she's called our lady of clearwater and i don't like crowds i wasn't going to go see it after reading that but it was clear that this was not an oil slick that this was uh an uh an appearance of the divine of the divine mother as mary and then i started seeing her everywhere and again i wasn't comfortable with it but i couldn't make it stop and then i started having auditory uh experiences and in judaism when the ancient rabbis would experience would hear the revelation or hear the voice of god they called it a bot cole b-a-t-k-o-l and it literally means bot his daughter and cole is voice they heard the daughter's voice even though they they thought it was the revelation of god and god for them was so steeped in masculine imagery when they heard god they heard not charlemagne but or george burns you know they heard a a woman's voice and i started having the same thing though i identified it as you know kali or mary or in in the uh the hebrew bible tradition lady wisdom that who appears in this eighth she's mentioned a lot but she speaks for herself in chapter eight of proverbs starting in verse 22. anyway i started having these auditory things and she would say stuff to me some of it was personal about you're so stupid can't you do this right for once but uh and that may have been my mother on speakerphone i could i could have mixed it up from my mother to the mother but uh one of the most moving ones and i'll share this i was leading this um group interfaith group uh pilgrimage in the in israel-palestine and we were in nazareth and i'd never been there i'd lived in israel for a year at one time year and a half another time i'd been visiting many times never ever went to nazareth for some reason but nazareth is called mary's town because that's where she's from you know jesus of nazareth and i'm sitting by what's called miriam's well or mary's well and it's all stone it's closed off now but that's was the town well and there's a beautiful but very old and very faded icon of mary uh attached to the stone and i had this practice by then this is just a few years ago i had this practice that whenever i was at a catholic place where there were mary statues i would always do the devotional you know hail mary full of grace you know practice so that's where i was in nazareth and i was just doing it like i always do hail mother hail mary full of grace that um the lord is with you blessed are you among all women blessed is the fruit of your womb jesus holy mary mother of god pray for us sinners now and into the moment or unto the moments of our death so i was doing that because that's something i just do and then i heard this voice this bot call in my head but at least in my way i understand it no it wasn't my voice and she said stop doing that she said that's not your mantra she didn't say mantra but that's not your mantra she said recite this and what i received was so it's the hebrew for lady wisdom so it's hail full of grace the divine is you blessed are you and all women and blessed is the fruit of your womb all being holy mother fount of wisdom guide us seekers now and into the moments of our death and that's become a daily practice for me since then so it's been years uh but not that many years so so those kinds of things happened to me and it took me a long time to make peace with it but with the help of andrew harvey sister jose hobde i don't know if you know who she is uh she's deceased now but uh franciscan nun and a native american medicine woman i mean i had a lot of teachers around this who helped me become comfortable with my experience and now this devotion you know you know using mala beads and reciting the the hill thing is a major part of my spiritual practice so you know i'm hoping it's not ego projection you know but i'm i'm always willing to say you're kidding yourself but that's not how i experience it so i'm not making any claims other than i'm taking my experience seriously yeah that's great and um i think that some seems like a healthy approach to it so do you think that um when you have when you had that experience and it sounds like you've had a lot of different experiences um you said i hope it's not an ego projection do you think that there's actually some kind of celestial being that is communing with you that is imparting some wisdom to you or communicating you know like that well you know i don't i don't i think she is simply um my access point you know she's the archetype that for whatever reason speaks to me if i want to experience the divine as i don't know i don't say other but other right i mean you said it really well before that but i can't quote you um about these different um i mean ishwara kind of things these personal deities that that people have so i i see her as as my archetype or my icon for listening more deeply or experiencing more deeply the greater reality of which we're all apart but i don't think there's separate beings out there floating around but um would you regard humans as separate beings floating around or i mean if you make a concession to duality or to that satyam transactional truth um aren't aren't there billions of separate beings in the world even though ultimately they're from that from that transactional perspective yeah but even even then i know it i i think i know at a higher level that that you and i it's just god talking to god you know in that in that sense yeah both are true here's here's one way of breaking it down um we could say on one level nothing ever happened okay and then on another level we could say stuff is happening but it's all divine and perfect just as it is on another level we could say stuff is happening and there are problems to deal with there's starving people over here and the disease over there and all that kind of stuff and i don't think we need to sort of lock into one level to the exclusion of the others i think we can sort of expand our scope to incorporate all three simultaneously and so you can say paradoxical things in the same breath and be comfortable with both sides of the paradox yeah i'm comfortable with that yeah okay so paradoxically i would say that yeah of course there are celestial beings and angels and all that kind of stuff they have their realm of experience or existence we have ours and and there actually is some overlap so that we can commune with them are they with us um and that doesn't violate the ultimate essential oneness of things yeah that's that's the key that that people realize it doesn't violate the essential non-duality yeah um and the the sort of the duality bit is kind of necessary for living life um otherwise you wouldn't be able to put a spoon in your mouth yeah right right absolutely yeah in fact there's a well i want to go into it but there's a there's a saying in vedanta faint remains of ignorance they concede that it's ignorance but they say you have to have it in order to actually live or function yeah right right right and it's only ignorance from the absolute perspective the relative perspective it makes totally yes exactly um okay good um so anything more than you want to say that you know over the course of your journey that have been significant interesting milestones like i i just feel like that thing you just said about you know having some of these connections with with mother mary or whoever that was is fascinating have there been other things like that along the way because you do seem to have a sort of mystical dimension where you you know yeah i'll tell you something that just that happened a couple of years ago i was sitting with my um my teacher this indian fellow from the ramana maharshi tradition and he's in his late 80s and we were just sitting and chatting i mean he doesn't he doesn't teach he doesn't do workshops he doesn't do anything he just lives in a little townhouse and if you know about him he'll you can call him up and you know if he's up to it he'll you can just come and hang with him so you know i was in town and i you know asked to come and see him so we're just sitting in his living room and we're just chatting and then and i've known him a long time and he says to me what's your spiritual practice i said what do you mean you know what my spiritual practice is you know i do self-inquiry and i ask the question who am i and he says are you and i are you no that's all he said was are you and then i wasn't but i wasn't not it was the weirdest thing rami was gone but aware and i've had experiences where you drop body mind and there's nothing and then you come back but this was not that this was everything was still there and yet it wasn't but i but it wasn't you know there was awareness but there was no aware er or something i don't know how to put it but there was no language i couldn't speak i i wasn't me i was just aware of what was happening and it went on for a while now what a while means i don't know because i had no sense of time and then when it it ended i said what happened and he said i'm tired you need to go now you know so i i don't know what he you know we never came back to it i never talked to him again about it but that was an experience very different than what i have with the divine mother because with the divine mother rami is there having an experience or listening or seeing or somehow interacting with this other dimension or this this avatar from another dimension whereas in this it was it was completely different and there was just an incredible stillness but i i mean i can't say i was aware of everything because there was no i there there was just i don't there's no language for it i have no idea but but to me that seems like an as an afterthought that seems like the flip side of what i was experiencing when i'm having these dialogues with the divine the divine mother so yeah i mean just you asked for another thing so that's just another another thing ultimately though it's just back to sitting cross like it every morning you know oh that was cool oh i got to go back to the the questions yeah you can't get hung up on any of these things um and i think it's completely um legitimate and probably normal to shift into different modes of functioning i bet you even the great sages of antiquity did that there would be a time when it sort of depends on the circumstances and what you're engaged in you know i mean sometimes there needs to be a more manifest engagement or maybe a more devotional engagement or sometimes you know no engagement you're totally withdrawn but but i think over time these things tend to integrate more and more so you know you could be driving down the street or jogging or something and yet that sort of silent nothing is happening nobody's there dimension is lively in the midst of i'm breathing heavily because i'm jogging you know um that all kind of integrates after a while yeah jogging i don't have a problem with that happening while you're jogging while you're driving you should pull over because you know that that's a little yeah and it's and and it happens to people even without a specific practice it does because i think you know i think we all have the entire 88 key keyboard and sometimes maybe you just fall in through grace to playing you know parts that you never you never even knew existed yeah i have a friend who's been going through a stage recently where when she drives she has to avoid looking at the sky because if she looks at anything vast she slips into so much vastness that she's not even aware that she's driving anymore she has to like whoa wait wait pull over you know so and so it's a matter of integrating because eventually that won't happen yeah yeah um okay so um you also say in your notes that um you're a recovering food addict you seem to be doing pretty well with your recovery because you don't look overweight to me um but you're you're a compulsive overeater and you've been clean for 13 years yeah well you're not always when you when you when you when you have a food addiction uh sometimes it can be you know bulimic and you don't you don't have to be obese uh and even when your your eating is okay and your your weight is okay it's the mentality around food that's just you know i i still have the the the triggers are still there um one of the things i learned during the last year of lockdown was now you can hear my dog um one of the things i learned during the last year of lockdown was the the attraction i had to certain um restaurants that i would go to and you couldn't go and i realized wait i was doing this addictively i didn't didn't even know i had an addiction and i would say oh restaurants are fine because they limit your portions and all you know so it's okay but i lost 20 pounds in the last year because i couldn't go to these places that i was going and i wasn't overeating at those places but i was i was just eating poorly at those places if that if that makes sense so i never say i'm you know i'm a recovering you know food addict i'm not i'm i'm working at it day by day but i would never say i'm really clean because the triggers are are there i mean i know there is a bag of fritos on the other side of this door that my wife is enjoying that that is calling me with the same intensity as the divine mother it's it's another kind of bot call it's interesting uh you know being a food addict is different than being an alcoholic because you can get rid of all the alcohol in your house and not go to bars or just go anywhere near alcohol but you have to have food you know you can't get rid of all the food and right right and sometimes in 12-step world there's oh you're a food addict that's not as bad i'm a drug addict that's the real that's the real addiction or i'm out you know they they play who's who's the bigger addict which is a sort of egoic silliness but um i mean i have a lot of friends who are recovering alcoholics and i i wouldn't change my addiction for theirs even though you say well you just don't go you don't buy it you don't go there uh it's it's all it's all madness to me so i don't i don't say i don't have a hierarchy of addictions do you think people get addicted to things like food or anything else because there's not enough internal fulfillment and so outer cravings kind of get the upper hand well i think that could be part of it i think with food because that's the only one i really know i've never literally have never had a drink even in when you when you're supposed to have wine with various holidays uh i always used grape juice so i've never had a drink uh and i've never had experience i've had i've smoked marijuana twice in high school it just made me hungry yeah so that was my only drug experience but uh so just from my my food experience i know that there are psychological there's a psychological dimension to it that's absolutely true i would say it's you know when i'm happy i want to eat when i'm sad i want to eat so there's always that element to it but there's also you know i'm just speaking from food now there's also the industrial food uh you know the the the business of of food where food is deliberately made with too much salt sugar and fat in order to hook you i mean that's people are just evolutionarily designed to consume salt sugar and fat and knowing that it's like when they would put tobacco you know in cigarettes and nicotine and cigarettes because they know it's it's going to hook you um and they knew it was addictive the same thing with the food industry so my thing i think is more on the salt part but it doesn't matter i mean i i i love all salt sugar and fat things uh so so it's part part me part psychological part physiological and and part cultural or or maybe you know economic because the the industry is designed to hook me on i mean they even tell you when with frito lake potato chips you can't eat just that's true yeah well that's their business model and that's my addiction problem so i don't eat any remember that um alka-seltzer commercial remember i can't believe i ate the whole thing yeah right right uh all right enough about that topic um what's this holy rascals business about here yeah holy rascals those are people who have too much respect for religion to leave it in the hands of marketing professionals you know those are people who see the craziness and religion but don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater so you know i would say people like ramana people like sagadata maharaj ramakrishna i mean jesus would be a holy rascals he you know jesus was reforming judaism not creating christianity but you get someone even says let's say someone like either rabbi saul of tarsus or saint paul however you want to look at him you know he had some incredibly radical things to say that the church is buried because it's not conducive to you know maintaining the hierarchy uh you know when he says there's no jew or greek slaver free male and female in christ jesus there goes the three major sociological divisions of his time and he said no when you're part and people say that means the church first of all the church maintains those divisions up to this day but i don't think he's talking about the church i think he's talking about christ consciousness and when you enter into that kind of i am consciousness or whatever you want to call it all those divisions fall away i mean that's holy rascality teaching that stuff within the context of a tradition so what i think we need is more holy rascals people who will even from within their tradition i'm not saying you have to leave your tradition but from within the tradition to find the great mystics and teach that material i mean when when i go to again things change in the last year of covid but when i used to be invited to lots of different churches i would talk about let's say the gospel of thomas which now people at least have some sense that there is such a thing but there was a time when people had no idea what that was and that's from is that from the dead sea scrolls that they got no gnostic gnostic gospels it's technically not gnostic i guess but it's one of the nag hammadi texts right in the in the in the desert and you know jesus opens it up the first it's 114 sayings of jesus and the first one is anyone who figures out what the hell i'm saying won't taste death and um in other words here come 100 now 13 113 koan that jesus is teaching that are integrated into the new testament the gospel of thomas has no narrative there's no story because jesus says x jesus says why but their quran koan-like statements and you've got to figure them out when he's you know when you can make the 2-1 and the male like the female and the female like the male and you know all those kinds of things you know when you can achieve that kind of yin-yang integration then you experience the kingdom of heaven well you can't build a church on that you can build a genre koan practice on something like that um so so there are these wild characters throughout human history and now in different traditions and outside traditions but these incredibly brilliant wise open-hearted people who are bringing out a different way of understanding these conventional teachings that all of us have grown up with that's that's what i call the holy rascal it seems to me that most you know great mystics like jesus and others you know in their time very few people understood them but they certainly made an impact you know so they really got the ball rolling and then once the ball was rolling a certain administrative mindset type people moved in to kind of organize it you know that old joke about god and the devil walking along the road and god picks something up and puts it in his pocket and the devil says what was that and god said oh that's just the truth and the devil said oh give it to me i'll organize it for you so yeah yeah so there do seem to be these different sort of personality types you know and some and administer marshy mahashyogi used to call them the second-rate minds the administrators even though he needed them um yeah and there's a place for them but it shouldn't be at the top of the spiritual food chain yeah yeah and and then some of them are like people like i love alan watts you know when i was an undergraduate my buddhism professor who was really my my mentor he took me aside once and he said what do you want to do with all of this what's your goal your career goal and i said to him i want to be the jewish alan why and he said alan what no that's crap that's what i want to be the jewish alan watts so alan watts was a holy rascal i think but a very brilliant and serious practitioner was he a practitioner i heard that he just talked the talk really well but didn't do a lot of deep practice no i think he practiced i mean you know maybe not uh well i mean i don't know enough about him to say he had a specific tradition i don't i don't remember him writing about that but but i think he did he did practice i think um he was very engaged in uh chinese calligraphy as a practice and he worked with him with some powerful gary snyder other powerful practitioners so i think i think he had a practice but it may not have been a um brand name perhaps yeah um one more point i want to make about the whole thing with the administrators and all is that you know they take over but then they find they they feel threatened by the mystics you know um because the mystics are always going to be rocking the boat and then you know getting to the inner meaning of things and and so you know they end up killing them or banishing them or or something like that and so that you you know very quickly end up with the kind of outer shell of religion and but no no remnants so really of what the orig the founder of it was was teaching or saying seems to yeah there's a there's a tradition in judaism called the lamid vovnik means 36. that says this comes from a guy named rabbi abaye 1600 years ago he taught that there are always 36 people alive on the planet who are awake to the divine feminine he used the word the divine feminine and then doing this work of being a blessing and in his time he meant 36 they were not 35 not 37. it's changed over the sanctuaries but there are always these 36 people and he called them um sadiq starring hidden saints and he said they have to be hidden because if they're outed they get into big trouble and martin buber had this theory that jesus was one of the 36 and that he was outed like because he always says to people when he does miracles don't tell anybody right you know when his mother says fix the wine problem he says ma it's not my time right let's just keep this below the radar because what happens is what happened they they like you said you know they they kill people like that um uh the guy who said al-haq i am truth the sufi they killed him yeah i think they dismembered him or something yeah so you know it's the work has to be done below you know the surface but you know we we started out our conversation talking about how the times are such that there's going to be a big collapse and um and you you suggested it might happen rather quickly and we talked about how perhaps an upsurge in spirituality which does seem to be happening in the world will be the um the saving grace and it will enable things to kind of turn around eventually and and will end up in a better world but maybe we'll see what you think about this maybe we're going to evolve into a time where um dead religions that have lost their inner juice don't dominate the planet and that mystics become more normal and more predominant more you know in the majority and that we could have a real um sort of experience based uh spirituality become uh predominant in the world do you think there's any chance of that i have no idea but i certainly would love to see that happen you know you see that religions are the brand name their members are they're they're leaking members yeah um i uh i forgot another statistics but but it's been very rapid in many christian churches certainly in in synagogues because the the the outer form has no juice like you said and people are looking for something more than that um so yeah i think but they don't go quietly into that night into the night right they go kicking and screaming and fighting so the same thing maybe with political parties uh the same thing with you know lots of things that people do we're gonna turn to the darkest most violent way of of having this collapse happen but yeah i think that the mystics are the threat to the establishment and the hope of the rest of us yeah there's one thing that if i don't ask you about it it's going to bug me later because i thought well that's very interesting and but then we moved on to other things and that was the thing you were saying about um how the greater the saint the greater the shadow and explain that a little bit more i mean jesus was a great saint for instance so what was his great shadow or ramana or any of these others i mean go ahead yeah i i don't i mean i i can't tell you you know if i can talk about jesus a little bit i mean you know jesus curses the the tree for not bearing fruit off season yeah you know uh jesus says to the samaritan woman who's asking for for help he calls her you know he's not gonna what uh he basically calls her a dog and then she says but even dogs get the scraps off the the person's table i mean he he had he he had some of the built-in cultural biases of the jews of his time so so you know you could say that was that was his shadow but perhaps no worse than the typical jew of his time so i mean it's not like you know um mother teresa also has her hitler side or something like that it seems that people become predominantly good um as they rise to say i think yeah i mean i i mean i just i don't want to have a whole philosophical discussion on it because i don't have it thought out that way but what i was getting at is that that consciousness is not um you know it has its its inside and it's young side and it and and there's a balance and a flow and that the the the the um the greater what you know what i said the greater the saint the greater the capacity for sinning it's because their consciousness is so great and so the the pull of the negative i think is also very strong on on these people but most of them or i don't know about most let me not say that but people that i like like ramana they've managed to channel that energy into something positive but they still have a body they still have a psyche they still have you know the these desires uh that they can work with maybe sublimate though i'm not sure that's the way to go but to at least channel them in in the right direction of being a blessing but it's not like they don't have a dark side it's not i don't think that's possible i think that everyone has a shadow and that a lot of the spiritual work has to be to embrace your shadow i'll give you just uh an abstract idea here but in in the book of leviticus in chapter 19 verse 18 you know love your neighbor as yourself in the hebrew it's you shall love your neighbor as yourself the hebrew bible is in the scroll version not the printed ones you pick up in a store but the original scroll texts they have no vowels and so you read value breathe vowels into the consonants and in the jewish tradition you can breathe you have the standard vowels and then you can breathe other things if it brings out uh additional meanings so there's a rabbi in the uh 19th century eighteen hundreds uh reb nachman of braslov who said you can read veyahafta love your neighbor as yourself but you could also read it they ahafta laura which means love your evil as yourself and he said unless you can embrace your own shadows he didn't use shadow he said evil jung comes much later but unless you can embrace your own dark side you're just going to project that onto other people so my thought was is that the more light you experience the more aware you are of the darkness that you have as well and that you can bring that darker energy into the light in service to the light but you don't really wipe out the dark energy when you think you're free from the dark is when you're probably the most dangerous yeah you would be if you thought you were free and clear um but perhaps we kind of uh purify our darkness i mean it's not like ramana was tempted to do um you know horrible things all day long and had to fight with it he he just sat there and radiated and marinated in bliss um yeah i'm not saying that it's a fight it could just be um you know you just you just naturally are channeling that energy but and maybe there are exceptions i i have no idea i think it's just dangerous to imagine well like we were saying before about uh the buddhist teacher that he had no dark side therefore he wasn't trying to kill me with a book yeah yeah when he was dying of his alcoholic excesses and was all sorts of delirious people were claiming that he was having visions you know that they were some kind of spiritual thing but you know he was really just his brain was fried um right well you're you're trying to salvage your story yeah yeah but anyway that's an interesting point we'll wrap it up in a minute um this it's maybe worthy of you know another conversation sometime or certainly something we can all think about of how i mean you know spiritual development is said to be a process of kind of increasing the light but perhaps that illuminates you know dusty corners and you know hidden things that um had been hidden from us and um you know there's that saying of what is it what's that saying i don't know i forget blind spots of course um you know people everybody has their blind spots and i kind of have always assumed that the spiritual process is a matter of not only illumining the illumining them and having to sort of stare at them like this ugly mess in the corner of the room all the time but you know being able to clean up the mess because we now see it and then thereby thereafter being free of the mess because it's been cleaned up and maybe there will always be new messes to clean up yeah that's what i'm saying so what you're calling cleaning up i'm talking about channeling that energy yeah in the other direction yeah purifying it yeah yeah all right good well is there any um are there any mysteries of um of life that we haven't resolved today no got them all mailed is there anything you'd like to say in conclusion uh no i think we we covered it and anything i would say probably just open another conversation yeah get me going again right great well i've really enjoyed this um i don't think i'm gonna stick to this policy of not knowing anything about the person because i really do like that you know i enjoy this you know spending my time walking in the woods and getting to know the person while listening to their talks or whatever but it was it worked with you well i'm glad it worked yeah good all right thank you for having me on rick this is a lot of fun yeah it really was um and so thanks to those who have been listening or watching and uh i forget who my guest is next week i think it's a lady named sh yeah it is shari ami who had a near-death experience and the week after that is father richard rohr so that'll be great cynthia borjeau said how did you get him are you oprah or something he said no i was just really persistent have you had cynthia on this yeah a couple times including recently yeah i love i love yeah she's great so thanks for those to those who have been listening or watching visit the website um where i'll have links to various things such as some of rami's books and to his website and his other he has a couple of links here and while you're there you know if you want us excuse me sign up for the podcast or anything else just explore the menus and you'll see what's there and we'll see you next time thank you romney thank you rick have a good whatever stay away from the fritos yeah now i'm going to go either no no don't do it [Laughter] all righty we'll talk to you later all right thanks [Music] you

Channel: BuddhaAtTheGasPump

Views: 11,870

Keywords: Judaism, meditation, Christianity, mysticism, death, reincarnation, spiritual development, rabbi rami shapiro (author)

Id: vlIXX9ZF1G0

Length: 123min 35sec (7415 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 21 2021