>>Rick Archer: 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 over 525 of them now. And if this is new to
you and you'd like to listen to previous ones, please go to batgap.com and look under the
past interviews menu. This program is made possible by 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 site. My guest today is Rabbi Zvi Ish-Shalom PhD. He is a
professor of Wisdom Traditions at Naropa University, and is the founder of Kedumah, a universal
mystical school that teaches a step-by-step approach to spiritual awakening and personal
development. Integrating the timeless wisdom of the great mystical traditions with cutting
edge knowledge of psychology, science and the somatic healing arts, Zvi gently points
us towards the primordial light of boundless freedom that abides at the heart of our experience.
He is the author of the book The Kedumah Experience. Let me get that on camera, the Primordial
Torah, and he teaches retreats workshops and inner work groups internationally. He's based
in Boulder, Colorado. So welcome, welcome Zvi. I met Zvi out at the Science and Non-duality
Conference in October. And it was nice getting, we were actually going to do this interview
then and I had publicized it, but we were both feeling a little tired, we had scheduled
the interview for the nighttime, we thought it'd be better to put it off and do it over
Skype. So that's what we're going to do now. So Zvi, I've, as usual, I've read quite a
bit and listened to quite a bit of your talks and your book over the past week or so. And
you alluded in both to some very profound, transformative and really rather difficult
in many ways, awakening that you had back in your 20s. Now you're about 40, I guess.
And but I didn't hear much elaboration. So I thought it might be interesting for me and
for the viewers to to give us the whole story about that even if we took an hour talking
about it, or whatever you feel justified is justified to just explain to us what you went
through? And how, what led up to it and how it changed you and things like that.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, thank you. First of all, I'm just so happy to be here. So I just
want to acknowledge that. Thank you for having me, Rick.
>>Rick Archer: Oh, it's really a pleasure. And it was, I felt a kind of a camaraderie
or affinity with you out at, at SAND when we met just very comfortable guy sort of be
with no pretentions and very natural and down to earth. And, and yet, you know, I shouldn't
say and yet, but but because the two aren't mutually exclusive. But reading your book.
You know, I'm quite amazed. The book is basically a transcription of some talks you gave, and
to be able to give such detailed talks, maybe you prepared for them a lot, maybe they weren't
extemporaneous. But there's such a wealth of wisdom and knowledge in them that I was,
I was really impressed. So and one one hint as to how you did that is at some point in
your book, you talk about, you know, having a state or having developed a state in which
when you read the Torah or any wise book, any spiritual book, the the meaning or deeper
meaning kind of jumps out at you, which it wouldn't have had you not undergone a the
shift in consciousness that you did. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, that's right. Part
of that those early experiences that I allude to, in the book, is a certain kind of opening
of perception that so that allows a certain way of perceiving what is hidden behind the
words, you could say. So it's more it's not so much an intellectual or a mental understanding
of it but it's more of a sense of felt sense of what the state is that the text is, you
know, is communicating. So that was part of what really opened up in a more in a more
clear way during that time. >>Rick Archer: And just if I could interject,
and I won't talk this much throughout the whole interview, but, you know, my sense of
that is that the people who wrote these books, were speaking from a certain level of experience,
a certain level of consciousness. And generally, the people who read such books don't share
that level of experience. And so something is seriously lost in the translation, you
know, from and speaking of translations, also, these books tend to be translated, and the
translators don't have that level of experience. So there's a tremendous sort of crumbling
of knowledge on the hard rocks of ignorance. But if you have a level of experience or awareness,
approximate to the that of those who wrote the books, then it the meaning just comes
through to you that the connection is lively. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So
at that time, I was not familiar with other traditions, I had not had experience reading,
you know, sacred texts, or spiritual books from, you know, practitioners of other wisdom
paths. But after that time, and to this day, when I, you know, open up a book or, or a
text, what stick what stands out is more of the frequency, or the vibration of the experience
that's behind those texts. And that's how I'm able, in a way to appreciate and relate
to these other traditions in a in a, in a deeper way that goes, you know, beyond just
the surface meaning of the words. >>Rick Archer: What if the book has been,
firstly, not even written down for a couple 100 years after the person that it's written
about has died? And then secondly, it goes through translations from maybe Aramaic to
Hebrew to Greek or whatever, to English? And then then you read the book? I mean, do you
think that inevitably, regardless of what state of consciousness one is in, you're just
not really going to get it? Or do you think that somehow, the essence survives?
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: I think it depends, I've had the experience of still feeling the essence
come through even after multiple translations and centuries. Somehow, you can still get
a, you know, get a whiff of the original kind of transmission. But it definitely, you know,
with each step that's removed from the source, it gets a little bit more diluted. I find
that the easiest way to, to, to experience the direct transmissions is from transcriptions
of talks, actually, rather than from books that someone sits down and writes. It can
it can go both ways. But there's something about the verbal communication, that for me,
is more kind of immediate in the transmission. It's not edited. It's not, you know, refined
to make it come across in a particular way, but it's very raw vibrationally.
>>Rick Archer: But then you're talking about living teachers, probably rather than people
who lived 2,000 years ago. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, unless, like, for
example, there were there are Hebrew texts that are recordings of oral teachings as well.
>>Rick Archer: Someone transcribe them. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, you know, and I'm
sure it's altered to some extent, over the centuries, but you can get a whiff of the
original. Yeah. And it's >>Rick Archer: Okay, we're getting a little
arcane here. But it's an interesting point. But, um, in terms of you, you personally,
how did you get started with this business? Were you one of these? I often interview people
who had profound mystical experiences when they were little children. And very often
then it fades when they're starting to approach their teenage years. And sometimes then they,
when they get to their late teens, early 20s, they they attempt to recover it. But in your
case, you know, what happened? >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Well, I, you know, I was,
I was raised in a pretty traditional orthodox home. So we lived a very religious life that
I did experience as being as having many rich much richness in terms of the dimensionality
of religious experience. So it wasn't just a rote, kind of, you know, performance of
the, of the tradition, but there were I did experience a deeper connection through those
practices, and, and rituals, I don't remember as a child having what I would call a mystical
experience exactly. But I did I do remember feeling, a sense of connection to the divine.
I would put it that way. And it felt like a certain kind of implicit trust in the goodness
of reality. You know, in those days, I would frame it, you know, the goodness of God, right?
That there was a basic, kind of, like a baseline of benevolence, that infused creation, you
know. So it was a subtle thing, it wasn't like some kind of a fireworky type of opening.
It was more of an ongoing sense of protection. And it was it was marked by these different
deepening experiences in the in the tradition. So you know, at different holidays, for example,
we would go to synagogue and and the particular kind of prayers of that holiday, and the particular
practices associated with that holiday would create a kind of gestalt of richness and inner
vibration that affected me. I would say as a child. Yeah. So I felt connected through
that, through that paradigm. But it wasn't until I was older, really, when I was in my
late teens, early 20s, that I more consciously turned inward, and really started practicing
and studying the more contemplative and mystical facets of the tradition. And that that turning
marked the beginning of a process that, you know, that I this that I allude to, or point
to, several times in the book. But that whole process, which lasted a period of time, had
many different aspects to it, and many peaks and valleys, that culminated in a really radical
kind of shift and transformation that, in some sense, marked like, I would say, like
the beginning of my life, and it was like the end of a former life and the beginning
of a new life. >>Rick Archer: What did you learn? Or practice?
Did you cook something up on your own? Or what, did you find something in the ancient
texts that you could apply as a practice? Or did you have a living teacher or what?
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: You know, I didn't, I didn't have a teacher, in terms of this spiritual,
dimension of spiritual experiences that I was having. I didn't really have a guide in
that sense. I was studying. You know, I had gone through what's called the yeshiva system.
So, you know, these very traditional academies of Jewish learning, which mostly was exoteric
learning. Actually, I would say 99% of it was studying the Talmud and Jewish law. You
know, those kinds of more performative kinds of works, but the, there's this whole rich
inner dimension of Judaism, that it wasn't until my late teens that I really discovered
and that's, you know, the teachings on usually referred to as Kabbalah and also Hasidism
or Hasidut in Hebrew. And those bodies of wisdom really turned me on. Like, I when I
first encountered them, I was like, oh, this is what I've been, you know, looking for.
This is this is speaking to my, to my heart and soul in a way that the more normative
teachings were unable to touch. And so I really just dove in to study and it was mostly self
self-study, you know, self-guided study. I just started reading texts and getting hold
of whatever I could and, and I started meditating according to some of those practices and that
combination of deep study of mystical texts and practicing the tradition that I had, you
know, that I was so intimate with for my whole life, but from this different angle, more
from a contemplative mystical angle, is the combination of those two things that really
sort of began an inner shifting inner transformation that really initiated and catalyzed this process
for me. >>Rick Archer: And so what was your experience
of that shifting? >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Well, there was a lot to
it. I mean, I would have to, you know, Rich Archer
We have time. Zvi Ish-Shalom
Yeah, at some point, maybe I'll, I'll write about it.
>>Rick Archer: The little snippets that you did write about it that you mentioned in some
of your talk sounded pretty profound and pretty intense.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, it was pretty. It's true. I would say that. And it's something
that I often don't talk about. So I actually think I think this may be the very first time
that I'm really sharing some of those sharing some of those details.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah. Some people are reluctant to talk about this kind of stuff, because
it's intimate. And they also don't want to sound like they're tooting their horn, you
know, isn't it cool what I experienced? But I don't know, people find it fascinating.
And I don't think. You know, it's like, if you read Yogananda s book or something, you
don't think Yogananda is sort of some egomaniac for talking about these profound experiences
he had. You think, wow, it's possible for a person to have those kinds of experiences.
Isn't that great? Maybe I could have them. So you know, that's my orientation is that
if we hear people's experience, it can inspire others to, you know, aspire to the same sort
of thing or something, something that would be comparable for them.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, totally, that totally makes sense. Traditionally, there's another,
there's also another reason why that some of those experiences are not shared. And that
has to do more with, you know, not wanting to somehow erroneously present these fantastical
kinds of experiences as something to be sought after, or that as some kind of, as holding
more value in some sense, then, you know, a more gradual, progressive kind of path.
So we don't want to, you know, the risk is, you know, that it would create more attachment
for people to, to have it go a particular way. So I'm happy to talk about it, but I
just want to have that, so that >>Rick Archer: That's really important. I
mean, I, you know, I spent years and years, decades in a, you know, particular meditation
group, and I just wasn't the flashy experience type. And some people were and there were
definitely times when I was envious. I think, Jack, why aren t I having those things, but
in the long run, it becomes evident that that's really not that important. That some people
are just wired that way. Others aren't. But the significant development is, as you say,
more incremental, more gradual, more and more abiding. It's just not fireworks.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, exactly. And in our school, in Kedumah, we emphasize really the
gradual, step-by-step kind of layer-by-layer path, since it, it is a more integrated and
more sustainable path for most people. You know, I, my experiences, early on, were very
explosive and that brought with it also a lot of difficulties that are weren't really
necessary, you know, if I had had a more progressive path. So you know, so it's important, I think,
for our listeners to appreciate that it, you know, if you don't relate to some of these
experiences that I describe, that doesn't say anything or mean anything about, about,
you know, your, your inner state, and in terms of the value of your path.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah, and also, I mean, some of the people that, in my experience, who
were having these flashy experiences back in the 70s, you know, ended up just going
off the deep end in one way or another. I mean, I saw one, one woman that was in the
paper getting arrested for drug possession or something. I mean, it's just, it's just
don't, it's interesting. It's interesting to know that people can have these things,
but it's, if it's not happening to you, don't sweat it, and it's no guarantee of any kind
of long term. significant development. But having having said that, you know, usually
you read people like Ramanuja, or the Buddha or various others, and they definitely they
had profound experiences. So it kind of goes with the territory. But if there's not a tight
correlation between that and ethical development or, you know, permanent establishment in being
or any such thing. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Exactly, yeah. If anything,
it's sort of the other direction. People who tend to have these explosive experiences tend
to be less integrated. And, you know, you know, more difficult for them to actually
kind of mature into a, you know, a full >>Rick Archer: Yeah, they might be biting
off more than they can chew. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah. Yeah. So I would say,
now that we're now that we're clear about all that,
>>Rick Archer: set the stage here, >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: we've established all the
disclaimers, >>Rick Archer: yeah,
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: I would say that my, my personal path or those early experiences,
I could divide up into two main, two main phases. The first phase was more of a devotional
phase that was marked by a deep practice of prayer. It wasn't like formulaic prayer, like
just reciting you know, the Hebrew sort of liturgy, which is the way I was trained to
pray as a child. It was more personal prayer. So really spontaneously relating verbally,
through body language, with the divine. And I would talk to God as a formal practice.
And this is actually found as a form as a practice in the Hasidic tradition. And it
wasn't that I was really following a particular thing. It was more of a of a of an up of an
upwelling of inspiration that came just through my own, you know, connection to and desire
for the divine. >>Rick Archer: You mentioned that you would
sometimes stay up all night in bed communing with God.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah. Yeah, I was, I was, I was wacko. I was like nuts for God. I was,
you know, love obsessed, you could say. Like, you know, someone, like, meets someone, and
they fall in love with them. And they just like, can't stop thinking about them. And
they want to be with them all the time. And they want to talk to them on the phone all
the time. It was like that. >>Rick Archer: That's great. You know, Patanjali,
in the Yoga Sutras says that the yogis who have vehement intensity, are the ones that
that realize most quickly. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah. And at the time, I didn't. You know, in retrospect, I can look back and say, yes,
that's actually true. That's absolutely true. That think that my path, in a sense, opened
up because of that initial devotional, enthusiasm, passion, heartfelt kind of desire, like I
didn't have any model really, of where this was supposed to go. Like, I didn't know a
real map that was laid out that I was trying to walk down. This was like a real heartfelt
kind of self-inspired movement. Like I just, I just wanted to know God.
>>Rick Archer: Like, would you say you were a pretty happy guy? Or were you suffering
and so your yearning for God was born of that suffering?
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Um, I was certainly, I certainly had all kinds of suffery kind of knots, you
know, what would the word be like, knotted up. But I wasn't unhappy. And I feel like
the primary I would say there were two, there were two threads to this movement. One was
not connected to relief of suffering. It was really just for its own sake, like really
just wanting to to be intimate with with the God that I had internalized right? As being,
you know, at that point, I didn't know what God was I I had all kinds of ideas about it.
>>Rick Archer: You just knew something was there and you wanted to know it.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: I knew that I believed that there was something that was there. And that
was enough to, like, get me, you know, and I had enough experience, I had enough of a
sense of you could say, like a kind of benevolent spirit that's animating all of reality. As
a child, I had already known that, not directly, but is like a sense of it, you could say,
that there was enough of that sense that I trusted that there was indeed, such a, such
a reality, behind the veils of perception. And so that there was a there was a movement
toward that, to know that spirit that was more of the for its own sake. And then there
was another thread that was more along the lines of wow, you know, life, life is hard
and there's a lot of I, I suffer. And it would be really wonderful if this benevolent spirit,
like healed all my pain. So there was also that kind of yearning, I think, for freedom
from suffering. So there were there was both, I would say there was both there at the same
time. And both of those threads were kind of intertwined in a way in this prayer practice.
So I was going deep into prayer and, and I also started doing various kinds of meditations
at that time. It was, it was at the same time, I'd say, my early 20s, that I was getting
turned on to these mystical texts and playing with different meditation practices that I
was discovering, in these texts. So I think the meditation was also deepening the prayer
and the prayer was sort of inspiring the meditation and the two were going hand in hand. But primarily,
it was a devotional inspired path at that point. And as I was deepening into that, what
I started to experience was I started to feel myself drop into a real sense of intimacy
with at first it started with intimacy with God, like that s what it felt like, and communion
with God. And I started to. Let's see, if I can describe. It was if it was a presence
of sweet, innocent, pure, loving goodness and goodness in like the richest kind of textured
way that started to grow inside of me. Like, I started as I deepened my intimacy with what
I was calling the divine at the time, and as I really started unloading my, my wounds
into this God field, you know, into this devotional field with God, really expressing whatever
it was, that was in my heart, and even in my body, because this was a very embodied
sort of practice of prayer, it wasn't just saying words, it was like, moving with the
spirit of what I was experiencing. So if I was experiencing pain, my body, you know,
I would let my body kind of express that - its prayer to God, I would go into those postures,
if it was experiencing anger, frustration, then I would, you know, yell at God and like,
you know, like, you know, bang things and like, kind of acted out in a way. It wasn't
something I didn't know about therapy or anything. At the time, right? I was like this orthodox
kid, just having out this whole thing with the divine. And so as as this whole process
was unfolding, it was like, my, the burdens of my soul were releasing, and more and more
of a kind of inner presence started to emerge. This presence of sweet intimacy.
>>Rick Archer: Nice. Don't let this question sidetrack you, but you know how you see the
Orthodox Jews at the Wailing Wall praying, and they're doing this thing where they're
nodding their head like this back and forth. And I wonder if that's some kind of like,
retrofit, you know, of what you were doing spontaneously. It's like, maybe they read
someplace originally, that people went to movements when they're undergoing profound
transformation and so then they, they did movements in order to put the cart before
the horse sort of, but I don t know. What is that all about?
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yes, good question. They call that shuckling you know.
>>Rick Archer: Okay? >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: That's the term and it's,
it's those, you know, as you describe its body movements that go along with prayer.
It's an interesting question. I, you know, in some sense, you know, there's also this
theory about the the asanas in Hatha Yoga, >>Rick Archer: Yeah. Whether they're spontaneous
or they were retrofitted. Yeah. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, exactly.
>>Rick Archer: And then when people have Kundalini awakening, sometimes their body naturally
contorts. And, you know, or they go through spontaneous mudras and things like that.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, exactly. And I and I've had those experiences which I can, which
I can get to when we talk about that. So I actually do believe that the the the yoga
the asanas in hatha yoga are reflections of, or you could say retrofit, you know, like
you say, from these Kundalini awakenings. >>Rick Archer: Yeah. And at the same time
they help to, I mean, they may happen spontaneously through a Kundalini awakening, but also by
doing them, they help to facilitate awakening, because they kind of loosen up and help to
free, you know, deep conditioning in the body. It's kind of like you can pull any one leg
of a table and all the other legs will come along. You know?
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And I think the shuckling, which is to shake really,
that s what it means, you know, it s a shaking is also in some sense. You know, what we don't
know for sure, of course, but I think is a good, solid hypothesis. That movement, you
know, reflects in, like, the spontaneous movements that have that can happen during prayer, because
I, I've experienced that. So >>Rick Archer: It's kind of a mimicking of
them. Because probably those guys don't really have to do that based on their subjective
experience. But people did that. And so somehow it became a thing.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, and it can bring people, just like yoga, right? You just like the
>>Rick Archer: Yeah, maybe, maybe it elicits something.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: It brings them into an a more embodied kind of connection to the prayer,
which can bring in a whole other kind of experience. >>Rick Archer: Okay, well, that was a bit
of a tangent, but let's get back to what you're saying.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, so this presence started to just kind of grow and you know, blossom,
in a sense, inside me, and as it as it grew, it became clear that I, you know, the way
I started to relate to it was this is the Divine Presence. That's, like, birthing in
me, it's like, growing in me, and it because it had this quality of it was such purity,
like it is, and had such a richness and depth to it, it was not like anything I had ever
experienced before, in ordinary human kind of mode of experience. It was like a kind
of magical substance, a magical elixir of divinity, of Divine Presence. And this was
kind of starting to fill me up, you know, through this process. And as it grew and started
to nourish me from the inside out it actually began to initiate a whole other process of
deepening, I would say, that, that brought in and there was a lot to this whole phase,
but it brought in and it sort of inspired a whole other phase of the journey that was
more of a phase not devotion, but of some kind of annihilation.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah, I noted down some quotes from your book, you said There was a very
intense black fire that consumed my entire body, soul and and burned me away, there was
literally nobody and nothing left at all. For a long time, I could not find any sense
of self whatsoever. Yet everything carried on as usual around me. I felt super alive.
Life unfolded in a spontaneous way. There was intense aliveness, but there was not anybody
there that was alive. There is more but I'll let you say some more.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, exactly. And before that a whole, before that incident that I
described in the book, there was, you know, there's a lot that happened before that that
kind of was a deepening into deeper and deeper states of silence. And it was also during
this time that there was a lot of these spontaneous purification kinds of processes that were
occurring, that would be akin to, of course, at the time, I had no language for this, but
it would be akin to some of these descriptions of Kundalini processes, where you're just
kind of your body is clearing out all content. All, you know, you could say impressions from
our historical life, our historically conditioned life. And so there was a whole kind of process
of this that was going on for several weeks, a very, very intense kind of purification.
You know >>Rick Archer: But somehow you realized that
something good was happening, you didn't think you're having seizures or something like that.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: You know, it's kind of a miracle that I stuck with it because it was
so yeah, I trusted in a deep way that this was guided by this, by the Divine. It grew
out of this deepening intimacy with God, right? So there was I had this deep trust that what
was unfolding, even though it was super, super difficult, and really even painful on a physical
level. But I knew in a deep way, that there was a deep that there was a real kind of intelligence,
there was a divine intelligence to this process that was, like, way beyond me, and that, like,
I could either just surrender to this thing. Or try and resist it or try and fight it.
And I just had enough trust that I allowed it like it I allowed it to happen. And it's
a little bit nuts, because there were things that were happening that were just not I hadn't,
they did not fit in the like the worldview that I that I had, you know, been coming from
at all >>Rick Archer: Like what just for kicks? Give
us an example. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Well, like you mentioned,
like going into body contortions and yeah, yeah, some of them that were would be impossible
to do. Like, I wouldn't have been able to do those. Like if I had tried, right?
>>Rick Archer: Right. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: There were there were a
lot of kind of paranormal experiences, perceptions, like different kinds of paranormal, psychic
and clairvoyant and astral kinds of experiences that were part of this. There was a spontaneous
what I would now, you know because I have a context for the Hindu tradition, you know,
spontaneous kind of pranayamic pranayama breathing practices, very intense. There was just altered
perceptions of various kinds that, you know, I had no explanation for. Like those kind
of, like a whole constellation of bizarre kinds of experiences.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah. It's interesting that you went through all this without a teacher
just to sort of reassure you that, you know, it was okay.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: No, I know, it's kind of, okay. I was I was I was really out on a limb
like, I knew I was on an edge, that you know, maybe I was going crazy, and maybe I really
didn't know exactly what was happening. Other than I knew that I had, that my intention
was was very sincere. And that I felt this presence there with me. And that presence
was my teacher. That was my guide. That was, that was my reference point for, for some
kind of an inner stability and connection that I trusted deeply enough. In some sense,
I felt like everything that was happening, like I knew, on some level was part of this
benevolent process of opening, even though my whole rational like conditioned, right
self was kind of going bonkers. >>Rick Archer: Did you feel that the presence
had a sentience to it such that, you know, almost as if a guardian angel kind of thing,
or maybe that I'm just using that as a convenient term, but that there was that you were sort
of being looked looked over, looked after by a compassionate or well-meaning guide of
some kind? >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: It did not feel like a sentient
being in that, like an entity, it didn't feel like that. It felt like it was
>>Rick Archer: That the vastness had a sentience to it.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yes. Yes. The vastness had a sentience to it. Yes.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah, I like that, I mean, cause sometimes vastness or absolute or whatever
is portrayed as kind of, like a rock, you know, dumb, just being, you know, without
any sort of intelligence in inherent in it. But, you know, what you were describing, and
what I think many people experience is that it's, there may be some level of it, that
s that way, but there's profound intelligence permeating and orchestrating everything.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yes, yes. And that is, I have there is not, I cannot find any part
of me that, that has any doubt about the intelligence, the, you could say, the divine intelligence
that's guiding and that is animating our human experience.
>>Rick Archer: Nice. I like that. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: It is as real, it's more
real, to me, from my vantage point, than, than anything in the sort of usual sort of
conventional human realm. So, yeah. >>Rick Archer: You want to continue, or you
want me to ask a question or read a bit more from your book?
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: I'll just say that, I'll say this about that experience that you described,
that that that experience was, in a sense, a culmination if you will, of this, of this
phase of these pure these spontaneous purification, what I call purification kinds of events,
that you know one could position as a kind of Kundalini type process. And it culminated
in this kind of burnout, you could say, I felt like, a burnout. And it really changed
my perception in a radical way. It's what initiated for the first time I would say really
initiated a nondual type of experience, which, you know, the former kind of experience of
the divine presence was really one of union. It felt like communion and union with God,
like I was becoming more and more unified with this presence. This presence was in me,
I was in it, it was like, where I ended and this presence began started becoming blurred,
and it was like this presence of divine sweetness and purity and love. But with this burnout
experience, it was like everything with erased. And not only was the conventional sense of
self erased like any sense of being a person, you know, with a history or thought thoughts,
all of that was just total, but also, this sense of, of, of a, of a self in union with
God was also erased so it was like everything was annihilated, including God. Right, including
this sort of presence, that I had come become like, in some sense wed to. So there was this
like not, and all that was left was just a sense of just clear, just perception, you
could say, there was just awareness, but there was no location to the awareness. So it wasn't
like I was perceiving reality, it was like, just reality was perceiving, was aware of
itself. And there was no demarcations or divisions in perception, which was a, that was a, that
was, I mean, if I, you know, up until that point, things were wacky, but this was like,
I had no, like, there wasn't even any way to process this. Because there was no one
to process it, it was just like it was. So I would say that began, you know, the second
phase, what I call the annihilation phase, which was the annihilation of self. And, yeah,
and there was certainly nothing in the Jewish tradition that I had known at that point that
could explain this, that could explain this occurrence. And I had not studied Buddhist
or Hindu texts at that point. So it was like, for a while, I thought, maybe I died. Like,
that's what happened after you die. You know, like, that was a serious consideration.
>>Rick Archer: Interesting. Of course, you've now discovered that there are things in the
Buddhist and Hindu traditions that describe this. Yeah, there are.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: That was very, very helpful for me, actually, at that time, you know,
after this happened, and I started to look for explanations. And I came across these,
you know, Buddhist and Hindu teachings, they were super, super helpful in terms of understanding
more of what was happening. >>Rick Archer: Yeah. Now, it seems that, you
know, the next step was that, you know, you just said, Have have I died? There's absolutely
no one here. There's just, you know, reality perceiving itself. But then you said What
I realized, was that while there was no self in any conventional sense, there was still
a location from which perception was occurring, there was also a reflective mechanism that
was operating. That is, there was something that was able to reflect on the experience
of not having a self. It was possible to discern a very subtle presence of it being self, at
the very center of things. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yes, yeah. So at first,
when it first occurred, there was nothing, there was nothing, there's no location, there
was no presence self, there was, it was just like, total absence. And then, as that, as
I kind of, kind of settled into that, you know, for lack of a better word, or like,
it was a sense of, okay, accepting it, in some sense. Then I started to explore more
of this phenomenon. And, and it was, in that there's actually more subtlety to this whole
thing, I don't know how much we want to get into it..
>>Rick Archer: Get into it, go ahead. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: So, the you mentioned, I
ll mention it, because you mentioned the this the passage were I m talking about the Black
Fire. So, the Black Fire is actually important, because before there was just the vastness
of, you know, nondual sort of space, there was a sense of deepening into a black void,
you could say, and this was what I mentioned, the journey of silence earlier, I called the
journey of silence in the book, which was a deepening into deeper and deeper states
of inner silence. And that deeper states of inner silence really had a quality of dropping
into a black hole that was just getting more and more silent and more and more kind of
deep. And and this fire was of this black hole quality that had like that. It was like
the presence of deep absence, but as a as a force as a fire. And that is what like I
actually felt it viscerally through my body, like actually like burned through my body
and burned through my consciousness, burned through my mind, my heart. And then there
was just like a sense of just like going into just black unconscious space, like vast, deep
black nothing, right? And it was from that black nothing.
>>Rick Archer: Was this in an inner meditative condition, or was it actually while you're
eating breakfast, and it was happening all the time, that kind of thing
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: This happened during a meditation. >>Rick Archer: Okay, right?
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, it was a Kabbalistic >>Rick Archer: I was wondering if whether
you're still able to function while this was going on?
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Well there, there was the, the at the height of the experience, I was
meditating, and you know, so I was, I had my eyes closed, and I was, you know, I didn't,
I felt like I was like, I had kind of gone gone blank, you know, kaput there was the
sense, I had gone kaput, and then I came to at some point. And then when I came to, and
I opened my eyes, everything was that non-dual. You see, so there was actually there was before,
before the perception of just pure, you could say awareness, there was this black annihilation.
There was the black annihilation fire, a sense of just being completely annihilated in black
space. Going kaput, as you say, I like that, and then after kaput, open my eyes, and then,
and then there was a sense of just kind of, like 360 awareness, without a location.
>>Rick Archer: Mm hmm. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: And it was like that for
some time. But perception was very, very vivid, and permeable. So like I could see through
things, you know, like that was sort of the way it's hard to describe it. Everything looked
kind of transparent. So there was this sense that you could actually see through things,
and that things, objects don't exist the way we conventionally perceive them to exist.
So like, it was like this kind of magical reality where nothing is actually solid. And
there's not really a location of perception, in the usual sense. It's just you are that
everything that is transparent, like it was clear that that is just so there was that
phase. And then the next phase was was what you're describing now. So this, this kind
of beginning to contemplate from this place of what is this who you know, who is the one
that's perceiving this? Who is having this experience of non-dual perception? That was
then when this sort of, point of light started to appear, you know, at the center of everything.
And what I realized was that this point of light that appears at the center of everything
which, which I recognized as this is me, this is actually my soul spark. This is the original
point of my consciousness. This is me in it's most in its primordial state of, of existence,
not existence in the usual sense, but in its eternal existence.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah. Is that what you're referring to a starlight in your book?
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yes, exactly. >>Rick Archer: There's a little passage, you
said Starlight is the first light. It is the original primordial light of creation. It
has that nondual quality to it - formless, dimensionless, timeless. And yet, when the
primordial point, the star, displays itself more distinctly, it carries an implicit sense
of I, there's a sense that I am this light, because it is the first light of the individual
soul. It is the seed of the soul, the soul spark.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So this this point of light, this starlight can
manifest as a as you just read, as either a distinct kind of star light shining in the
vastness of space, with a clear sense of eternality. Like that's, that's the mark of it is that
it doesn't feel like it was ever born or will ever die it feels there's a distinct sense
that this eternally abides. This is an eternally abiding light that is pre pre-existence, pre-creation,
and this is the primordial star. But then we can also experience this as just the light,
just the starlight without a star. And now what I realized was this state of just non-dual
vastness of being, right? What that I first sort of realized when I came out of this black
fire it's just starlight. Like everything is kind of shining scinatillating transparent
scintillation of pure awareness as reality, you know, without a particular location, without
a particular center, or the starlight can kind of crystallize into a particular form,
to a particular spark of light, which then gives a sense of there being a center for
the self. But it's not the ordinary self like that we usually think of a self, it s not
a thinking self, it's a being self. It's a self that is of being, it's being manifesting,
as a first spark of itself as a first spark of a something that we can call an individual
consciousness. So that's the discrimination between the starlight and the star. And they're,
they're both of the same nature, they're just different manifestations of it.
>>Rick Archer: You re doing a really good job of describing something that's really
hard to describe. You know, how the Genesis says, Let there be light, and there was light
and the, in the Vedic tradition, or at least some aspects of it, and perhaps some other
traditions, they, they understand that the subtlest realm of creation is light, it's
called the, you know, the, the celestial field. And there are beings which dwell there with
who have celestial bodies who live in celestial homes, and the whole thing is just fabricated
of light. And then things get more concrete and more manifest from there. But, you know,
many people do kind of experience that realm. Not many, but people do experience that realm.
And I could I have something else I want to ask you about light, but maybe you want to
comment on that before we go on. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, totally makes sense.
And it wasn't until, after all, that I had all these experiences, that I went back to
these Kabbalistic texts, and then understood that these what would my experiences were,
were also known and sort of described in these metaphysical terms in the kabbalistic system.
So just like, you know, in Hindu tradition, right, as you're sharing, there's an understanding
of the primordial sort of light of creation. >>Rick Archer: Hira?yagarbha, it's called
the golden egg of creation. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yes, that's beautiful. Yeah,
there's a in Kabbalah, and a lot of what I do in this book, really, most of the book
doesn't talk about my experiences, as you know, it's mostly
>>Rick Archer: I know we're just just squeezing that out of you.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: It's good, it's good, good exercise to, to, to speak to the experiential
source of actually, these teachings. Because the Kedumah teachings that I articulate in
the book are, they're really what they're just showing, they're, they're articulating
the, they're mapping out these experiences in a way that can be kind of utilized, can
be retrofitted perhaps, or on, you know, replicated or duplicated, through practice by people.
And what I've found is that in the Kabbalah tradition, and the Jewish tradition, there
is an understanding of these processes, it's just that the way the texts are written, unless
a person has some sense of the experience, it would be almost impossible to understand
what they're talking about. What happens is that people read these texts, and then it's
just mental, you know, like, it becomes like this intellectual exercise, which is the way
that that I had encountered it prior to these experiences. And almost all, if not all, of
the Kabbalistic kind of teachers that I had, you know, encountered were you know coming
at it from the outside in. Right? So they read the text, and then they try and like,
try and understand the experience from the text. My experience was inside out. Like I
had, you know, I had no idea like, I wasn't looking for any of this stuff to happen. I
had no map. I had no and none of this stuff would have made any sense from what I had
read, you know, and it was only later on I studied more deeply and, and I and I saw,
oh, wow, they're actually describing. They're describing these primordial processes that
I that I had become intimate with in my own experience, but had no framework, certainly
not in Judaism, for at that time. And yet, what I discovered is that the framework is
there. It just has to be understood properly. >>Rick Archer: Interesting. Well, I want to
ask you another question about light but the thought that just popped into my head when
you said that is that, you know, you could actually be instrumental in helping to bring
about a sort of renaissance or a rediscovery of the true meaning of, or the inner meaning
of all these things that, you know, I mean, you could write a commentary on certain scriptures,
you know, saying, here's what they said, and here's what, here's the experience, they're
actually referring to, you know, and then here's another thing, and here's that experience,
without, you know, tooting your own horn too much. But obviously, these guys wrote this
stuff down, because they consider these experiences significant and worth writing about. And it's
kind of a shame, if they're completely not understood or misinterpreted. There may be
a coming generation, which would find this extremely useful, because my feeling is that
more and more people are going to sort of be awakening experientially, and they already
are. And many people are doing their best to glean, you know, meaning from ancient scriptures.
But as we started this whole discussion an hour ago, those have very often been misinterpreted
or mistranslated, and, you know, become rather obscure, so. So either we need to write new
ones, or we need to sort of find out what the old ones were actually talking about.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, totally. And that's, you read my mind, because it's on my list
of projects is, you know, to work on a commentary on on the Torah that
>>Rick Archer: Oh, cool. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: that actually, you know,
explains it more experientially. >>Rick Archer: Yeah, that's great. So, while
while we're on the topic of light, you said something I found very interesting, you said,
When we enter this dimension of light, it can open up the channel of divine oils. It
is possible to actually experience an ethereal oil descending from the top of the head, down
the whole body. This seems similar to the teachings on amrita in the Vajrayana tradition,
some texts describe this deathless ambrosia in similar ways flowing down the body from
the crown of the head. There's also in the Vedic tradition, the the notion of soma, the
ninth mandala, of the Rigveda, is all about soma, and there's stuff about it in our Veda
and so on. And it's often thought to be some kind of plant that you can find in the Himalayas,
and you can grind it up and use it. But and maybe it is that also, but there's a whole
explanation of how the body produces it, when it becomes refined enough. So the most refined
products of digestion or the whole metabolic process end up fabricating or creating soma,
which then has a further refining influence on the whole nervous system, and, and perception.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, makes total sense. experientially, for me, what's happening in
the >>Rick Archer: When you experience it coming
from the top of the head, was it kind of like this, as if someone had poured oil on the
top of your head? And there was this sort of blissful cascade kind of coming down like
that? >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yes, exactly. Exactly. It
was like a sense of being anointed, of being anointed with oil. It was very, very visceral,
like, you actually feel as if there is a substance, that
>>Rick Archer: Yeah, it's like running down your face and down the side
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Running down your face. And then your whole body right? But down the
head and face it's very, very distinct like so it's an ethereal kind of presence, you
know, that can feel like oil. And, and you mentioned soma, and you know, the sort of
the inner metabolism and how of how this process occurs. In the Kabbalah tradition, this is,
this is correlated with the, with the Messianic condition like the Messiah, the Messianic
state, is correlated with the experience of, of anointing with oil because this this English
word messiah is actually a transliteration of the Hebrew word mashiach, which appears
in the Hebrew Bible, to refer to one who is anointed with oil. That's actually what the
word means Messiah is one who is anointed. Right? So in the Hebrew Bible, when it refers
to a mashiach it is referring to a king or maybe to a priest, as well, where, because
there was a coronation ceremony where they were anointed with oil, so they were the ones
who were anointed with oil. So in the Kabbalah tradition, the Messianic condition is part
of our nature, like each one of us, is, you know, a Messiah in drag, so to speak. And
we, we have this inner potential for being anointed by the inner oil, by the ethereal
divine oil. And it's part of connecting to this Starlight dimension, in my experience,
at least, at any rate, right? It could be other people have a different process in which
this plays out. In my experience, it was when I connected to that state, that this ethereal
oil, that I have that sense of that anointing, it's and it was part of the transformation
of perception and of consciousness, because the result of the of the, of the oil was,
commensurate with this opening up this radical kind of opening up of perception into like,
non-localized, kind of, you know, pure awareness. So I think that we need to also revision,
this whole concept of the Messiah and move away, in a sense, from looking to one person
as sort of embodying the Messiah potential, and in a sense, really reclaim our collective
potential for each of us to to know ourselves, in this deep way, to know ourselves in this
primordial way, as a living kind of, you know, King or Queen of the Divine.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah, didn't Jesus say something like, you know, all these great things that
I do, you shall do even greater things? You know, he kinda said, Hey, you got this too.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Exactly. Yeah. >>Rick Archer: Yeah, and regarding the loyalty,
isn't there something in the 23rd Psalm Thou anointest my head with oil? Isn t that one
of the lines? >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Mhmm.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah, I love that. But it's interesting, because it's perhaps another
one of these subjective experiences that gets externalized into ritual. So you know, people
describe this experience, like you just described, and then some people who maybe weren't having
the experience thought hey, let's, let's make this part of the tradition and pour oil on
people's heads. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, no, totally. That's
the way these things go. Yeah. It's like the asanas and the shuckling, right. And the anointing
like, you know, we, we, we ritualize these inner processes, in some sense, perhaps, and
as a way to, to domesticate them to, you know. >>Rick Archer: Or maybe there's a value in
them in that they're symbolic of a subjective experience, but perhaps people eventually
forget the symbolism and take them too literally. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Totally, yeah. I also find
that the rituals in general, ritual can have powerful especially if rituals are in some
sense, the closer connected they the closer they are to the original experience. Or you
could say, the closer they are in spirit. And in genesis, to those original experiences,
they have the potential to, to, in some sense, replicate the sense, you know, I think that's
what draws people to ritual so much is that they actually feel something happening. They
may not have all the language to articulate the subtleties of it, but it's like people
feel can feel these forces at play when they perform rituals.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah, and sometimes people want to just throw the whole thing out, you
know, because they feel it's superficial. But as Thoreau said, he said, you know, you've
built castles in the air, that's where they belong, now build foundations under them.
You know, so we don't necessarily have to chuck all this, this rich tradition, but it
could be supplemented or substantiated by an experiential foundation.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Totally. >>Rick Archer: Yeah. Okay, so um, so we spent
the first hour and 15 minutes talking mostly about your experience. But we've we've obviously,
you know, gone off into various profound bits of knowledge. Is there anything more you want
to say in this sort of chapter of the conversation? And actually, here's a good segue point, perhaps
that might help us do that. And then we can get on to talking more about your book. A
question came in from Tom in Chicago, who asks, what is the color of light in this dimension?
Does it gradually change colors? Or is it a constant color? I ve heard the color golden
referred, referring to the celestial light. But what do you have to say to Tom?
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, so are you referring to the starlight?
>>Rick Archer: I believe he's we had that whole conversation about light and light and
starlight and everything. I think he's asking, is there a color to it?
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: I think this is a good segue because it, there's a whole, in the book I
talk about the colors actually, a bit. This Starlight itself is there is colorless there.
It's like color of starlight, like a it's a primordial and this is the thing about the
starlight is that there's, there's a, like I can I can legitimately use the word light
to kind of point to it. Even though there's no light to be seen. Like, it's not a visible
light in the usual sense. And even in the inner sense. It's like a it s as if you know
it s the light prior to it coming coming through the prism. It's like the colorless light that
is the essence of light. It's like it is >>Rick Archer: color, the light that goes
into a prism is actually all the colors combined, but they end up you know, being colorless
when they're all combined. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly
that's, that's that's really the perfect metaphor then. Because it's like, all the colors are
implicit in the starlight. So it has this sense of like, like potency.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: You know? Like, there's
a potency to it, even though there isn't a distinct color to it. There's that sense of
like, all of creation packed into this light, you know?
>>Rick Archer: Perfect. Yeah. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah. >>Rick Archer: Yeah, I mean, if it's this,
if it's the sort of primordial field from which creation arises, then obviously, all
the qualities and so called colors of creation, would have to be inherent within it. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: That's right, yeah, they're
implicit in it and then as we come into formation, and as we come into manifestation, as a particular
individual consciousness, right, so I talked about the point of light. But this point of
light births itself, you could say, through the human form, through the human being, into
a more full embodied expression of this light. And it's through that coming into form, into
incarnation, that this colorless, primordial light begins to discriminate itself, begins
to express itself into the distinct colors of the what we call, you know, what Kabbalah
would call the sephirot or the divine qualities, these which are the particular colors of lights
that discriminate out of the colorless primordial light. It's like the colors of the rainbow.
So, all of the realm of manifestation, the world of appearances, the the conventional
world that we typically experience is constituted by various combinations of these colors, of
these discriminated light forms, each of which has a particular quality that can be experientially
discerned through our, through our inner and outer experience, actually. And so these qualities
of light, these divine qualities or qualities of being or I call them the lights of being
in the book, do have distinct colors to them and there's many of them, right? There's there's
the there's the golden light, the red light, the white light, the black light, the you
know, the green light, and they're more like kind of hues or you know, they re subtle vibe,
frequencies of light, you can say, that can be experienced in our human organism in everyday
life. So in some sense, they are the they they serve as the typical portals to the primordial
light because they're usually much more accessible to our human experience. And each one of these
lights has its own teaching and you know, in the Kedumah sort of path, we work with
our experience in a way that brings forward and clarifies these particular lights. But
the primordial light itself is not a particular color in my experience. It's more of that
colorless light prior to it's coming through. >>Rick Archer: Yeah, it hasn't diversified.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah. >>Rick Archer: Yeah, there's a thing in physics
called sequential, spontaneous symmetry breaking, where there's a perfectly symmetrical field
at the foundation of everything. And then it, it sort of breaks into greater and greater
diversity. And, you know, various forces and matter fields come out and from there elements
come out, and just the whole thing just sort of gets more and more manifest and diverse.
But it sort of mirrors what you're talking about.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, that s beautiful. That makes sense.
>>Rick Archer: But anyway, the the basic concept I think we're talking about here is that there's,
you know, this fundamental field, and it actually could be, could be experienced to have the
quality of light, and that everything arises from that fundamental field. And becomes appears
to become kind of, you know, material creation. Now, you said that, when you had that profound
awakening, it was if material creation was immaterial, that as if you could see through
things, they seem to have no materiality, even though you could see their their distinctions.
Zvi Ish-Shalom Yes, that's right. From that, from the starlight
condition, it, one, one mode of the starlight condition is transparency, the transparency
of form. So there's more of a pure sense of formlessness that, you know, that presents
itself in this dimension of experience. There's, there's, there's even more subtle kinds of
variations of this. There's there's absence of formlessness also, I mean, there, and there's
like, you could say different gradations of formlessness itself that presents itself that
can present itself in that state. It's not like a static. It, there is, this is we're
getting a lot of subtlety here, which is good. But the, the, in my experience, that there's
both a baseline of form of a, of a non-changing formlessness. And it's also possible for there
to be a radical, intense kind of dynamism in that formlessness. And this can be confusing
to, you know, to understand it from a conventional kind of mind state. Because how can it be
both sort of dynamic and changing and also totally unchanging and formless at the same
time? And yet, experientially that's possible. So
>>Rick Archer: In reality that's possible. And in both in terms of certain ancient traditions,
like Tantra and also modern physics. It's, it's understood that there's this sort of
infinite dynamism and silence simultaneously coexisting, and that there's this kind of
relationship between the two. And we can we can talk more about it, but it's, it's definitely
both ancient and modern knowledge relates to that.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, totally. I mean, it's, it really is the essence of what you know.
I think, you know, the whole Shiva Shakti kind of unity and in Kabbalah it would be
YHVH and Elohim or YHVH and Adonai which are the feminine and the masculine principles
of pure unchanging being on the one hand, Shiva, you know, and then the dynamism of
creation on the other, Shakti. It's it's a mistake to understand those as two separate
phenomena in the ultimate sense, the real realization at least in my experience is that
they actually are totally coexistent and interpenetrated. They're not two, it's like two sides of the
same thing. And they simply, are facets of one unity.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah, you talk a lot about in your book about expansion and contraction.
And I think those could be regarded as simultaneous. And there's an interesting explanation, which
is that we could call it the self-interacting dynamics of consciousness, where consciousness
in its sort of primordial state, because it's conscious, there's nothing for it to be conscious
of other than itself. But it does that because it's nature's to be conscious. But in doing
that, it goes from one to three, the three being, you know, observer, observed and process
of observation. And yet, at the same time, it's one. And so this sort of infinite frequency,
gets set up between the one and the three. And that counts for this infinite dynamism
at the foundation of everything. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, that s beautiful.
Makes sense. >>Rick Archer: Another question came in. Let's
see what this is here. Oh, we'll get to this a little bit later. He's asking about reincarnation
and karma. But maybe we'll get we'll get to that. We could have started the interview
with this. But let's start let's now take a moment just to define some basic terms like,
you know, what is Torah? What is? What is it? What is the the mystical Judaism that
Madonna was studying? What is it called? >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Kabbalah.
>>Rick Archer: Right, what is Kabbalah? What is Kedumah. It'd be good, good to get familiar
with the terminology a little bit for those who aren't.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Torah is, is a word Hebrew word means teaching. And it, conventionally
normative you know, the normative use of that term refers to the Hebrew Bible or to the
oral traditions of Judaism. However, really, the term traditionally, the word Torah, really
refers to the totality of the teaching not to a specific text. So it could include the
Hebrew Bible, and sometimes people just use the word Torah for the Hebrew Bible, but it's
really used more similarly to the way the word dharma is used in Buddhism. Dharma refers
to the totality of the teaching of the path, of the way, which includes the oral teachings,
includes the practices, it includes, you know, the inner most essence, so too Torah is a
word that points to all the dimensionalities of the teaching.
>>Rick Archer: Okay, good. And then how about Kabbalah Kabbalah?
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Kabbalah is the Hebrew word that means receiving, to receive. And it's
a it's a term that's used to refer to the totality of the Jewish mystical tradition.
So there's a subtle distinction we can make, in that, you know, scholars in the field of
Jewish thought, who study Jewish mysticism, will position Kabbalah as a particular school
within the Jewish mystical tradition. However, the word Kabbalah in the traditional framework
is used to just refer to the totality of the Jewish mystical tradition, including all of
its various historical manifestations. >>Rick Archer: Okay, good. And then until
I met you, I d never heard the word Kedumah. So what is that?
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Well, you're not the only one. No one's ever heard of the word Kedumah.
Okay. Kedumah is not a word that appears in the tradition. Well, it does appear that tradition.
Actually, I'll explain where it appears. But it's it's a word that is not, you know, I
mean, I made it up in a sense that I should say, I've adopted it. >>Rick Archer: Right. You found that someplace,
and you thought it was a good word to use? >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah. You know, that's,
I say it appeared to me in meditation, as a as a term that represents that points to
this teaching that that I began to teach, right? So Kedumah itself is a word that means
primordial and it appears in an ancient Hebrew text that talks about this principle of there
being a Torah Kedumah, a primordial Torah, that existed before the creation of the world.
And so the so the teaching goes that the Holy One, you know, gazes into this Torah or consults
this Torah, and then creates the world. So it's talking about some kind of a primordial
blueprint of creation. So >>Rick Archer: That's kind of what the Veda
is thought to be also in that tradition is kind of this blueprint of creation, which
contains all the laws of nature and then which can be kind of Xeroxed whenever a new creation
needs to arise. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, exactly. That's, that
fits. So. So this word, sort of points to this primordial reality prior to creation.
And when, after I had, you know, had all these experiences and went through a decade of integration,
right? Of all of it, and this teaching, this path and teaching and understanding of Torah.
Now, Torah, in the larger sense of Torah, not Torah as like, some religious teaching,
right? >>Rick Archer: The centrality of knowledge.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, the Dharma right, this dharmic teaching or this torah teaching,
started to present itself through me. And I started to teach it. And the first time
I taught it was five years ago, when I gave this first series of 11 teachings, which form
the basis for this book that, you know, shared - The Kedumah Experience.
>>Rick Archer: When you say it presented itself through you, did you sort of feel like kind
of an inner prompting that you just had to expound this stuff and that you, you know,
you almost felt like you weren't the originator of it. It was just sort of you were the channel
for it, maybe? >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, that's right.
>>Rick Archer: Okay. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, it was like that.
And so, the, this first series of talks that formed you know, that basically are the transcripts
for this book, was the first time that I had taught this teaching that I call that I call
the Kedumah teachings. I call them the Kedumah teachings, because when this teaching sort
of revealed itself to me, that was the the name that it had. Like that it presented itself
as the teachings of the of the Torah Kedumah, the primordial Torah, the Torah before the
creation of the world. So, I use this term Kedumah. So the reason why you've never heard
of it nobody's ever heard it is because it's a very obscure word. It's not a word that's
used in the tradition at all. I'm kind of reviving it and claiming it as a, as an esoteric
principle that I feel is important to reconnect to in our time, which is really about reconnecting
to the primordial spirit. Not just of this tradition, not just a Judaism, right because
Kedumah is not about Judaism, it's not about any particular religion or any particular
tribe or anything like that. Kedumah is, is really a trans-religious approach that is
about supporting humanity, supporting the planet to reconnect to its primordial source,
to its primordial nature. Because it's through connection, reconnection, remembering of ourselves
in this in our eternal nature that - first of all, it brings a tremendous amount of like
freedom from suffering and all that, there's a side benefit. But also, it's through that
connection that we have the possibility of, you could say reformatting our human collective
experience on this planet going forward. >>Rick Archer: Hmm. Nice. Take, take as much
time as you want now to kind of summarize what you're offering here. I won't interrupt
you unless I feel at some point that needs that might need clarification. But, you know,
I want you to have a chance to really expound what it is that you're offering. You've told
us in a nutshell, but I'm sure it can use some elaboration.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, I've shared the essence of it, which is really about reconnecting
to ourselves. That's why remembering ourselves, >>Rick Archer: Yeah, so a person gets to be
a serious student of this, what are they going to be studying? What are they going to be
practicing? You know? >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah.
>>Rick Archer: What would they learn if they read this book, that kind of thing.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: So, there's a number of fundamental points in terms of what, what
this Kedumah path is about. Because there's many, many teachings out there as we know,
many paths, many approaches, many practices, some ancient, some more contemporary, Kedumah
is both ancient and new. That is to say, its roots itself, links itself to an ancient lineage.
I experience it as an inner lineage, a lineage that is not through flesh and blood, through
time and space. Exactly. But it's kind of a an inner wisdom stream that reveals itself
in human, in human form and through human community at various times and places. So
many traditions have expressions of Kedumah, you could say, within them and have kind of
articulated a pathway to our primordial nature, to our innermost essence. In our time, this
is why I say it's both ancient and new. Our time has particular challenges to it. We in
terms of what we're working with, both just in the outer world and also in the invisible
forces at play. And so Kedumah, the Kedumah path articulates a very simple kind of five
step or five journey I call them the five journeys in the book. Five dimensions of our
experience, that at any point in time, we can, we can use as a map of our experience,
both of the territory we're in, but also as a way to deepen and understand ourselves more
fully all the way back to our primordial source and even say even more subtle dimensions of
freedom that I articulate in the book than what we've discussed so far.
>>Rick Archer: So are these five journeys, like alternate routes, or do we take all five?
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Well, they the five journeys are more five dimensions of freedom, that
are not they can be experienced linear in a linear fashion >>Rick Archer: Sequentially?
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Sequentially, yes. Or not, they can be non-linearly experienced, but
they're really just dimensions of our experience at any moment in time, that are possible for
us to connect to. And most people are dominantly familiar with the first journey, what I call
the journey of contraction. Contraction is the normative state of identifying with being
a separate self. And having all kinds of, you know, contractions in our system, in response
to our everyday experience, right? Reactions of various kinds, disturbances, mostly due
to identifying with the the narrative or surface layer of our experience, our thinking mind,
and its historical conditioning. So this dimension of our experience, what I call the journey
of contraction, is akin to, I use this metaphor in the book. It's like the narrative layer
of a scroll, if you take a, you know, a sacred scroll. And you read the text. I use like
the Torah as an example, right, the Hebrew Bible, many people they read the Hebrew Bible,
and they, they, they read it on a level of stories. Like these are stories about people
in history. That's the narrative level, that's the level of contraction, actually, that's
not the real sort of understanding of the meaning of the text nor of reality, so usually
we our experience of our life, day to day is one that is imprisoned and in identification
with the stories that are historically derived, you know. So that's, that's the usual experience.
Most spiritual traditions have some kind of, of a technology or path out of contraction.
So most spiritual awakening paths are about how to become free from contraction. So in
Kedumah, we talk about the journey of expansion, which is the second journey. And the journey
of expansion is the is when we are able to work with our experience of contraction, and
work with it skillfully. And so we do that through various kinds of practices, that are
embodied practices of working with the material of our contraction, as opposed to bypassing
it and sort of ejecting into some non-dual state, we really work to stay present with
and understand the nature of our contraction, and what we discover when we do that, is that
inside, at the heart of every experience, is the the primordial light of freedom, of
expansion. And so we just have simple practices that we learn and that we work with, to to
help us connect to the spirit of expansion that is available to us through any experience
in our daily life. So, so in that sense, contraction and expansion are go hand in hand. And in
fact, you can't have one without the other. Right? The contraction only makes sense in
relationship to expansion, and vice versa. So it's a mistake to think the, the goal is
to just sort of get rid of contraction and experience expansion all the time. Right?
Because that's, that just leads us into a different kind of suffering. It's a more subtle
kind of suffering, but it's a suffering nonetheless. Because we're setting up a sort of split in
our experience, and we become just attached to expansion, expansive contraction.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah, also the world works in boundaries and specificities and so on.
I mean, you know, try landing a Boeing 747 in a snowstorm without being very focused
and contracted on specific details that you need to, to attend to.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: And you bring up a very good point, which is a fundamental principle
that we work with in Kedumah, which is the relationship between contraction and concentration.
in Kabbalah, there's this term tsimtsum, which means it means to concentrate, or, or to contract,
as well, actually. And it's actually through contraction, of energy, of presence, of awareness,
that it can become super, super concentrated. And through the super hyper focus of our awareness,
and our presence, what we start to experience is actually more and more spaciousness at
the heart of that concentration, which is how concentration meditation practices work,
actually. >>Rick Archer: Say that airline pilot could
be experiencing an inner vastness and an inner freedom, while at the same time focusing very
precisely and sharply on the task at hand. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, exactly. And so with
our contracted experience in life, oftentimes, we're because we're lost in the narratives
and the storylines with it, and the identities, you know, the self-dramas, related to the
experience of contraction, we, we have forgotten how to use the experience of contraction as
a doorway into the inclusion of the spaciousness and freedom of expansion. And so, we really
work to capitalize on all of our everyday experiences, as as doorways and portals to
more of the fullness, a full spectrum of who and what we are, so we're really approaching
it not as, as a as a include as ancluj, what's the word? Inclusive. Thank you. Inclusive
approach to our experience where we're not trying to get rid of our contraction or somehow
fix it or alter it or change it, we're really learning how to more fully embrace the totality
of our experience, including our contractions, as expressions of the totality of reality
are equally valid as our experiences of expansion. And this inclusion inclusivity brings in more
of the potential for the third journey, which is the journey of wholeness. The journey of
wholeness is really the integration of the journeys of expansion and contraction into
a more full embodied >>Rick Archer: totality
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: totality of our human experience, that is able to hold all the dimensionality
of our everyday life, and also embraces more of the, the full horizontal dimensionality
of our journey, which includes the relational, and the functional dimensions of our experience.
So without wholeness, we have this problem that we see in spiritual communities today.
Especially in spiritual communities, or spiritual paths that tend to emphasize expansion without
really understanding or processing or digesting the content of our contracted experience.
So we have this phenomena where it's possible for us to do certain practices and kind of
stay in this sort of, you know, in this somewhat, you know, removed state of non-dual experience
>>Rick Archer: somewhat disembodied >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: somewhat, disembodied. And
then, you know, relationships are kind of a disaster, like, people or behaviors are
kind of out of whack or out of alignment. >>Rick Archer: Yeah, you're not making a living
and, you know, you re just not dealing with the world.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, exactly. So that's, that's, like, expand, that's just like total
expansion without the inclusion of contract, without the harmonization and integration
and digestion, metabolizing of, of the content of our experience, and of our personal history
and all that. It's a wholeness really represents. You know, there's this phrase in the Talmud
says, the real full human being as tokho ke-varo is the Aramaic word phrase, which means the
inside is like the outside. And the inside is like the outside. And so on the journey
of wholeness, we're really working with integrating the inside and the outside, so that our external
life or the outer world becomes a true reflection of, an expression of our inner realization.
Tokho ke-varo, and that's, that's the realization of wholeness in our experience, which is a
different kind of realization. It s actually more mature, more full, more real, more human
and human at the same time Divine. It s like the meeting >>Rick Archer: Yes. On earth as it is in heaven.
What that means to me is that the, you know, the inner divine quality has been sort of
suffused into the outer world through our interaction with the outer world and our living
realistically with the outer world such the outer world becomes, is is elevated in all
of its, in all of its functions, all of its forms.
Zvi Ish-Shalom Exactly. Yes, yeah.
>>Rick Archer: So that was three of the journeys. Zvi Ish-Shalom
Yeah, so that s the journey of wholeness. Then we have the journey of vastness, which
deals more with the primordial light than I described already. So the journey of vastness
is it's a different kind of expansion. So, in the journey of expansion, we're still experiencing
expansion relative to contraction. So there's more of that sense of, we feel free from the
contraction, but we still experience ourselves as, as a kind of individual self, that's feeling
expanded and we can have that sense of expansion through the body, more spaciousness. But in
the journey of vastness, it's a it's a radically different kind of expansion because it's really,
the erasure of, of all self, of all sense of, of self altogether. So it's not it's no
longer expansion relative to contraction. It's more moving into that more primordial
state of eternal vastness of being, which you could say, ushers in a different set of
realizations and understandings about the nature of who we are, and of reality. And
so the journey of vastness represents that, that dimension of the journey. And there's
there's various phases, there's various subtleties to the journey vastness, there's, as I mentioned,
there's like the black, no kind of space, of kaput, you know, the void. And there's
the starlight, there's the star, there's, and then there's also there's also a more
radical kind of emptiness that can appear in the journey of vastness. That's, that's
not just the emptiness of self. But it's like the emptiness of, of all and this is again,
where words fail, fail us, because it's even to say emptiness is not a good term. It's
saying too much. It's, it's more brings in more of a state or a mode of experience, in
which the categories of empty and full no longer apply, that there's no longer an inside
or an outside, there's no longer a fullness or vastness, there s no longer presence or
absence, it's like there's just a complete and utter you know, deep, you could say, divestment
of all charge in experience. This is this is moves into the the fifth journey, the journey
of freedom, which is in a sense, brings in a different kind of realization, which is
the realization of a certain kind of radical equanimity, or, you know, the Zen tradition
talks about the one taste state, where there is no longer a value preference for, you know,
states of realization or states of contraction, it's, it's like a more radical kind of, mode
of freedom, from all concept, from all concept even from the concept of freedom. And this
journey of freedom is marked in a sense by the dissolution of all hierarchy, dissolution
of all value preference, not the dissolution of all preference. It's just preferences become
simple. Just like life becomes radically simple in the journey of freedom. The journey of
freedom, it marks, also also the culm, the the end of the journey, the end of the spiritual
journey, not that the journey doesn't continue to unfold with learning and understanding
and life experience and all of that. It's like the end of the journey in the sense that
the, the, the, there's such such a complete and radical contentment with the, what is
right in front of our face, even the most mundane kind of thing, that there's no longer
the impulse to seek anything other than exactly where we are in any given moment regardless
of how ordinary and mundane it is, and so it's like the, the radicalization of the mundane
and the ordinary as the ultimate. There is no longer a kind of ultimate that we seek.
Because the ultimate is where whatever appears in our experience. That's the that's what
I mean by the divestment of all psychic energy in the experience and the equalization of
all value to experience in terms of preference that there's like a an arriving at a radical
kind of simplicity where everything is collapsed into whatever the immediate sense perception
is before us. And so that brings a certain, a different kind of freedom than the freedom
of vastness and the freedom of wholeness and the freedom of expansion, even the freedom
of contraction. That's why I say, the five journeys are a really all different dimensions
of freedom. The journey of freedom is a particular kind of freedom, it's the freedom to be with
whatever experience we have, without, it's like the erasure of the impulse to be anywhere
else. It's so there's a, and that brings in a whole other kind of, now each of these journeys
I m like summing them up quickly, each of these journeys is a whole teaching and has,
you know, a whole set of sort of subtleties and understanding to it. But what I'm saying
so far is kind of, like, how is this landing? Or making sense?
>>Rick Archer: Oh, it makes sense. As you traverse each journey, and then move on to
the next one, do you sort of abandon the previous one? Or do you kind of incorporate it and
then add the next one to it? >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Well, they're not, even
though I m presenting them in a kind of, >>Rick Archer: they're simultaneous, >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: What? Yeah, then these are
really all always already present. Yes. And at any moment, we can be in any one. It's
really like, just a way of situating where we are.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah, so maybe according to the circumstances, you would one or the other
would predominate. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah. Now we do have a formal
curriculum where we teach them progressively, right? But that's more for pedagogical reasons,
you know, as a way, it's a more efficient way of learning. And, and there is for many
people a natural progression. However, we're always, we're always cycling, and circling,
and spiraling back and forward through all the journeys at any moment in time. So we
can be studying things that pertain to the journey of freedom, or to the journey of vastness
but we're always practicing, you know, skills that relate to the journey of wholeness, which
has to do with, you know, aligned and skillful relating and functioning. We're always working
with issues around contraction, because every day brings new kind of react reactions that
we have to understand about ourselves. And so there's, you know, regardless of, and this
is why, at the very beginning of this, you know, conversation, when we talked about sharing,
you know, personal experiences because of the perspective of the journey of freedom
that we hold in Kedumah, and that I personally hold, there really isn't a value preference
for having an experience of contraction, visa vie an experience of radical awakening. They
each are real and true expressions of reality, that, that that are, are, >>Rick Archer: They have their value, they
have their relevance. Yeah, >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah.
>>Rick Archer: But I think what people find is that, you know, contraction is no longer
binding, as it once was, that, you know, in the midst of what may appear to be a contraction,
there's an inner freedom, which makes the contraction a whole lot more tolerable, if
not enjoyable. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: That's exactly right. Yeah.
So without the journeys of expansion. And the other, you know, the other journeys, it
will be very, very difficult, if not impossible, to really work with contracted experience.
So, you know, we we need to have the perspective of the other journeys in a sense in order
to most efficiently work with, to understand the nature of contractions, to see contraction,
as a, as a manifestation of spirit. >>Rick Archer: Yeah. When you say, we're studying
this, and you're teaching this and so on, do you mean students at Naropa University
are studying it and teaching it or is it can it be studied in some other context?
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: No, at the Kedumah school that I run.
>>Rick Archer: Okay. Independent of Naropa. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yes, that's right.
>>Rick Archer: I see. Is that an online thing or is it in Boulder?
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: We have we have online programs. We have in person retreat programs. We've
been meeting in Boulder. It's still we're still in our early years. We have workshops
we have a we have a retreat program called the Soulship where we we have, it s like a
multiyear curriculum of teachings, that, you know, we have people that have gone through
the whole thing. And, you know, we have people who are now training to support others in
this path. So it's, Kedumah is both a, it s like a principle of reality, you know, this
primordial principle that, and then it's also a formal kind of teaching and path that whoever,
if someone resonates with it there are opportunities to actually experience it, you know, so if
you go to the website, kedumah.org, they have all those programs there, you can check out
and see. >>Rick Archer: Okay, great. I'll be linking
to all that. So some questions came in that I want to take time to ask and have you answer.
And we'll jump around a little bit, because the questions are on different things, but
that's okay. You're ready for that? >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, sure.
>>Rick Archer: Okay, so firstly, there's a couple of questions about light that we were
talking about. Dan from London asks, Does this description of light relate to the regular
light we experience? It seems that when the light of the sun illuminates the world, the
light itself is mostly colorless, and it's not detectable or perceivable, in and of itself,
but generally only by the illumination of objects, we can find the source, the sun,
and we can notice the light rays through clouds. So I guess we're talking about this description
of light, maybe let me try to summarize this question, the light that you were talking
about, which is sort of like subtle field of relative creation, celestial light, does
that in any way relate to the more obvious light that we see with our eyes, which is
actually just a tiny fraction of the electric, spectrum of the electromagnetic field?
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Well, in some in some Kabbalistic texts, they actually use the metaphor of the
sun and the rays of light to the point to it. So I think it's helpful as a metaphor.
And to some extent, perhaps it's also a literal metaphor, in the sense that, you know, the
physical world, including the sun, and the ray and, and the light that emanates from
the sun, and all the processes at play that reveal the light to us. They are, in some
sense, an expression of like all things in the physical realm and in the human realm
are, are expressions and emanations of this primordial light. So they still carry the
vibrations and the frequencies of this primordial light. And so yeah, so the invisible light
of the sun that we usually don't see with our ordinary eye, I think is both an apt metaphor
and also, in some sense, perhaps a literal metaphor, it really is an expression of that
light itself. In terms of the vibrations of it.
>>Rick Archer: Another question on light from Tom again, in Chicago. Does each color of
light have a specific a special healing power or capability?
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yes, each color of light has a specific function in both the inner
both in the inner life, and in the outer world. So, for example, the light of compassion is
very healing in terms of our own inner wounds, you know. It can feel like we're being bathed
in a loving in the light of loving kindness, that is incredibly healing to experience.
And the light, the function of the lights is to serve as a bridge between the primordial
preexistent, you know, preexistence reality, and the realm of forms, the realm of manifestation.
And so every light has both in is serves as a bridge from the inner to outer and such,
it serves as an inner light of healing, but it also functions as a as a way for us to
communicate that loving kindness and that compassion to others in the world. >>Rick Archer: That s interesting, the notion
of a bridge, there's a saying in Sanskrit, I forget the Sanskrit but it's the lamp at
the door, as if there's a lamp or a light at the interface between the, let's say, the
inside and the outside or the unmanifest and the manifest. So that's kind of cool.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, that is cool. And I'll add to that there's a verse in the book
of Proverbs. Ki Ner Hashem Nishmat Adam Chofes Kol Chedrei Vaten. That's the Hebrew. For,
it means, for the light of being is the soul of the human.
>>Rick Archer: Yes. Nice. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: And so the the human soul
or the human consciousness is a light. It's and this is the light of being it is the interface
from primordial light of being to the man to the all the manifest forms of light that
make up the world of appearances. And we as human beings, in some sense, are that lamp
at the door, right? We we are that interface. And the human being is uniquely situated in
this sense that we have access to the primordial. We are vehicles of the primordial light, purity
of the primordial light. >>Rick Archer: Very good. Okay, continue.
You finish >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: into the realm of form.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we could say that all animals and beings of any sort,
from amoebas to humans or whatever, have, you know, are conduits for the light of being,
but the human, as you just said, is uniquely qualified to straddle the whole realm of create
the whole range of creation in his awareness, you know, to, to appreciate the, the whole
thing from the unmanifest through all realms of manifestation to the most contracted.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, and that's, you know, we all know, I don't know, I don't know for
sure if we're the only creatures that have that capacity, but
>>Rick Archer: Yeah, I mean, maybe whales and dolphins or something like that. But
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: yeah, but certainly the traditional texts, at least in Kabbalah position
the human being as uniquely situated in that way.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: And it does seem that we
have that we, you know, you know, but who, you know, knows.
>>Rick Archer: Yeah, and I would say that my I would conjecture that, given the vastness
of the universe and the probability of life on trillions of planets that we re probably
rather stunted little slugs by comparison, to what's possible.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: That s for sure. >>Rick Archer: Here's another question for
this is the one that came in earlier from Pierre Livingston in Quincy, California. Do
reincarnation and karma play a role in your system?
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, so there, there is a rich tradition of reincarnation in Kabbalah.
And there is a an equivalent to karma. It's not exactly the same, actually. But there
there is um >>Rick Archer: As you sow, so shall you reap.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, yeah. And there's in Hebrew, it's middah ke-neged middah, there's
a phrase in the oral tradition. You know, measure. There's a measure for every other
measure. Yeah. So there's a kind of, there's this concept that everything we do has some
kind of consequence in the fabric of reality, right? There's a ripple effect of every action
and even every word that we utter. So and one could even say
>>Rick Archer: every thought >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Every thought, yeah. So
yeah, so. So yes, we have an understanding of that. And that's why the journey of wholeness
is so important. The journey of wholeness which deals with integrating our speech and
our action, with our realization. Because it's not enough to just realize the truth
of reality or some, you know, state of vastness, but without really manifesting that through
our speech, behavior, and incarnate form of consciousness, then we can be still causing
quite a bit of harm to each other and to the planet and to ourselves. And then also in
reincarnation, I want to make a distinction between Kabbalah and Kedumah. You know, Kabbalah
is the traditional teachings of the esoteric dimension of Judaism that have a rich tradition
of reincarnation, and actually I have a new book that's coming out that deals with esoteric
that translates some of the some of the mystical Kabbalistic meditation practices that that
work with reincarnation. In the 16th century, there was a Kabbalistic a series of Kabbalistic
teachers and texts that have a kind of elaborate system of meditation for how to expedite the
journey of rebirth so that we don't have to come back. So you can, like do these meditation
practices as you're going to sleep at night and this helps, you know, the journey of reincarnation.
So there is a rich tradition of reincarnation. In Kedumah itself, Kedumah, as I, as I shared,
is an ancient but new teaching. It's, it's a contemporary kind of revelation, or expression
that doesn't work with those ancient practices in their traditional format, but really is
is more of a secular. It's contextualized more in a secular framework. So we're not
saying like religious or ritualistic practices from Judaism, like the Kabbalists would do.
So in Kedumah, we don't use reincarnation as the central organizing principle. And also
in the journey of freedom, the journey, the understanding of reincarnation shifts quite
a bit. Because it's no longer past lives but concurrent lives, because one of the realizations
in the journey of freedom is is you could say, the collapsing dimensionality of time
and space. And with the collapsing of the element of the property of distance in time
and space all we have is the kind of radical now. And so we can experience ourselves in
parallel lives in parallel universes and parallel realities. But there's no longer the sense
that they transpired in the past. There's the distinct sense from when we're in the
journey of freedom mode, that these are all lives and realities that are occurring concurrently
now. >>Rick Archer: Yeah, I ve heard other people
say that toom that that the, you know, our human mind and nervous system is kind of a
an interface, which which imbues a sense of linearity or sequentialness to things which
are actually simultaneous in in reality. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, exactly.
>>Rick Archer: Okay, there s a few questions that came in from Jose Luis Solaire in Santa
Fe, New Mexico, and Jose is associated with something called futureprimitive.org, which
is a podcast that looks like it's really cool. I don't know if I've ever listened to it,
but I want to check it out. But anyway, we'll ask some of his questions. Now, the first
one, you may have already answered so don't need to go on at length. But if there's any
little bit more you want to say feel free to say it, and that that is that in in your
book, you state that the Kedumah is a tantric Jewish path somehow related to Eastern lineages.
You want to elaborate on that? >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah. First of all, Hi,
Jose. >>Rick Archer: Do you know Jose?
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Thanks for your question. Sure. Yeah, I do know Jose.
>>Rick Archer: Okay, good. I ve never met him.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Actually, we did a podcast together
>>Rick Archer: Okay, cool. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: on futureprimative. It's
really, which is really fun. So your listeners could check that out. The, the tantric, what
I mean by tantra, when I talk about tantra, most people are familiar with, with tantra
as it relates to either the Hindu tradition or the Buddhist tradition, tantra right? Vajrayana
in Buddhism or the usually Kashmir Shaivism, or non-dual Shaiva tantra in Hinduism. I don't
mean to suggest that Kedumah is in some sense, a derivative or an expression of those tantric
lineages. I'm using the term tantra in its general, in it's much more broad sense.
>>Rick Archer: It shares some understandings and experiences with those traditions without
necessarily having been derived from right? >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
>>Rick Archer: Like a lot of you know, the primordial, what was that Houston Smith. Perennial
wisdom. I mean, certain certain streams of wisdom just show up all over the world. They're
close similarity to one another. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
So, the, in the sense that I'm using tantra I'm using it in a sense that any path or approach
you could say, that draws from and utilizes the, the energies of our life, life energy,
energies of the body, of life all the way to pleasure and sex and all of that can be
utilized as, as material for awakening. You can transmute all experience into fuel for
the awakening of consciousness and the opening of perception. And in that sense Kedumah is
a tantric lineage. It's not Jewish in the sense that it's not, you know, kind of, you
know, claiming any kind of allegiance with a particular religion. However, it does draw
from the tantric teachings within Judaism. And there are, that's not as well known. But,
for example, in the, in the Hasidic lineage Hasidism was a particular expression of the
Jewish mystical wisdom stream that appeared, you know, in the 18th century but developed
in different directions, especially in its early sort of generations. There was an there
was an explicitly tantric set of practices and teachings within Hasidism, and they called
it Avodah She-bigashmiyut , which means practice or worship through corporality, through materiality.
And the whole premise of that was that we can use our physical experience our physical
life energy, including pleasure eating, drinking, sex, work - as the as the not just the, the
optional, but as the optimal vehicles for awakening. So Kedumah very much works with
that, that tantric approach to spiritual practice and this is embodied in the way we work with
contraction. We are not trying to turn away from our experience, but we turn toward all
of our, you know, all of our experience, regardless of its content, all content of our experience,
can be portals to the mystery. >>Rick Archer: Okay, good. Second question.
Being a tantric path means also the veneration of the feminine principle. Is there a practice
within the Kedumah teachings related to the Shekinah?
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yes, there are, the Shekinah is at the center of it. Shekinah is a Hebrew
word that means presence through so he's talking about the Divine Presence. And the, in the
Jewish mystical tradition, the presence teachings have to do with embodiment, with the realm
of creation, very similar to the way Shakti is used in the Hindu tantric tradition. You
know, it has to do with the the manifestation of the formlessness into form, into the realm
of creation. And so all of the material of the created realm, including the body, and
the physical forms of reality, are expressions of the Shekinah, of the Divine Presence. It's
the presencing of the formless nature of reality, into form, coming into, it's being coming,
becoming presence as form that is represented by this feminine principle. Now again, the
feminine and the masculine are principles. They're not meant as gender or sort of biological
distinct distinctions. Every human consciousness is, embodies both feminine and masculine principles.
We both have our formless nature and the realm of form. We both have, you know, the transcendent,
and the immanent, we both have the unmanifest and the manifest, the infinite and the finite,
the absence and the presence. All of these represent these kind of, the polarity of creation.
And so in Kedumah, we work a lot with the realm of presence, which is the feminine,
which is the Shekinah. We work with it through embodiment practices, through working with
presence in consciousness as it reveals itself through our embodied experience. And we work
with the physical forms of creation as portals to the absolute nature of reality, and ultimately
to the realization of the unification and the unity of the two, as I've discussed earlier
that they are two sides of the same truth. So we work with it mostly through presencing
embodiment practices and in our overall approach to transmuting our, the content of our experience.
>>Rick Archer: Good. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Hopefully that makes sense.
>>Rick Archer: It does. It gets a little abstract at times. But I one example I always think
of when I think of the sort of the, the divine in, in form in, you know, infused into all
the forms of creation is just that, you know, take a scientific analysis of anything and
consider what you're actually looking at. And one example I've often used is like they
say that if you took a gram of hydrogen and made all the atoms in it the size of unpopped
popcorn kernels, they would cover the continental United States nine miles deep. And then consider
that and consider how perfectly each one of those little atoms it's functioning within
itself and in relationship to all the other atoms in terms of the forces of attraction
and repulsion, and then consider that the whole universe is like that everywhere. And
you just get it's mind boggling to consider the, the vastness of intelligence which orchestrates
everything from the tiniest, to the largest a?ora??y?nmahato mahiy n they say in Sanskrit,
smaller than the smallest, bigger than the biggest. When I think that way, I just, you
know, kind of dazzled by the, the, the display of divinity that we're actually living in,
and looking at and interacting with all the time.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: It is totally magical and mysterious.
>>Rick Archer: Okay, here's his third question, you know, Thich Nhat Hanh was famous for saying
the next Buddha may be the Sangha. Do you have any commentary on that? Oh, his question,
the way he phrased this question is, is the next Messiah the awakened sangha to paraphrase
Thich Nhat? >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yes, so Thich Nhat Hanh
did phrase it as the Buddha. In our teaching, in the Kedumah teaching, we very much hold
a similar perspective. This I mentioned the soulship, soulship is sort of, sort of the
name of our, of our, of our school, of our program.
>>Rick Archer: Soulship, like starship? >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yes, soulship, and soulship
is a, has, there's many levels of meaning to that, right? On the one hand, it's like
fellowship, Soulship, right? We're a community, the soulship is our community. >>Rick Archer: Or a conveyance for souls.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Exactly. And it's also like a spaceship, like it's a vehicle for travel
through inner space, in our case, its inner space and outer space, because inner and outer,
at some point become one. So the soulship represents the collective body of presence,
that forms when we come together intentionally in community, to, you know, to explore truth,
to explore our experience, to understand the nature of reality, when we when human beings
come together, like we're doing here, this, you know, Rick, what you bring to the world
is a kind of manifestation of that, of this principle of the soulship, and it's bringing
in the intentional heart, for truth, into communion with each other, and then what forums
is like a certain kind of presence starts to starts to manifest in the relational field.
And in the collective field, as we gather, you know, it's like, you know, when we were
at SAND it was like, >>Rick Archer: yes, there s definitely a collective
consciousness there. I used to engage in group meditation practices, and sometimes with as
many as 8,000 people, and boy, you know, just a very powerful field gets generated by all
those people doing that together. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, exactly. And so it's
a very, very powerful thing. And it's, especially with the advent of technology, which, you
know, we get to do here, right, this is what we're practicing. We're practicing soulshipping,
through technology, because you have, instead of gathering together in a, in the same location,
we're scattered all over the world. But right now, like as I, as I speak, you know, through
this medium of technology. You know, we can actually all the listeners right now, and
not just all the listeners who are listening live, but all the listeners who will listen
and watch in future time. Through the perspective of the journey of freedom, like through that
realization, what we recognize is that all of those moments of connection in future past
present time can actually be unified in a singular point of non-dimensional interconnectivity.
Hmm, nice. And so the soulship has the potential and as we move into this new paradigm, you
know, the technology, the next the next paradigm of technology and inter, you know, it's like,
we're being called as a collective to step into more radically, I think, this more nondimensional
potential of our human nature, of our human consciousness. And it's through this kind
of soulship, you know, certainly coming together in person, is, remains a powerful vehicle
and, and we need to, you know, capitalize on that potential. But we also have the potential
to now include the nondimensional, and this soulship, as the next, you know, the next
Buddha or the next Messiah, if we want to, kind of use the language of the Hebrew tradition,
the next Buddha, the next Messiah, as the Sangha, makes much more sense, actually, to
me, cause my experience of this messianic light, of this point of light is, is intimately
connected, you could say, to the, to the constellation of stars of light, that constitute all of
humanity. In other words, there's like, the vast constellation of stars, is what forms
the starlight. The starlight is not just an individual is not just an emanation of, of
one particular light, it's actually the collective light of all the stars. And so as humanity,
as we wake, as humanity wakes up more, and it is happening, albeit, you know, slowly,
however, there's like, there seems to be a more of a of an uptick in terms of this, of
this process. As this starts to happen, we have this potential for the stars to meet
in unity in this non-dimensional space. And in some bizarre way, technology is actually
pointing us to that potential. And in that non-dimensional space where all the stars
actually come into one, we have the formation of the next Buddha, next Sangha, which is,
in fact, the Sangha, the next Buddha, or the next Messiah, which is in fact, the Sangha.
>>Rick Archer: Great answer, you have a gift for articulating really deep principles, which
I think is symptomatic of a great degree of depth that you've experienced and also a great
degree of integration that you've undergone, you know, of that depth. So it's really cool
talking to you. Zvi Ish-Shalom
I appreciate it so much. Thank you. >>Rick Archer: So I should wrap it up. I really
appreciated talking to Zvi and I'll be linking to his website, as always and his book and
so on. So you can check out his page on batgap.com. And hop from there to those things. In conclusion,
give us a quick overview of the ways in which people could engage with your teaching.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Yeah, so if you go to www.kedumah.org, K E D U M A H, all of our offerings are there.
And basically we have, we have different we have different modules that people can plug
into depending on you know, your situation and what what makes sense for you. We have
some online courses you could take. We have some intro workshops that are more like weekend
type workshop events that you can attend in person. And then we have a more comprehensive
program, that right now it's three years with several retreats, in person retreats a year
with me. And you know, we do a combination of meditation practices, teachings, we do
a lot of interpersonal type work and exercises that are really rich. You can check out on
the website we have some videos of teachings and audios that you can check out and you
know have a look at. But really the soulship which I mentioned is, you know, is the way
to get the really the curriculum of Kedumah teachings, which really walks, walks us step
by step through these different dimensions of the different journeys of freedom. And
it's totally experiential. This is not a kind of academic or intellectual exercise. This
is a journey of inner exploration, and discovery. And it's super fun and exciting. I personally,
you know, love, you know, sharing the process with others and, you know, seeing what's possible
for human beings. It's really quite amazing and really quite phenomenal. So the soulsoup
is our is our multiyear program of retreats. And that's, that's the best option for someone
who really wants to get deep into the teachings. >>Rick Archer: Great. Okay, well, thanks.
We'll be seeing you around I'm sure. >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Rick, thank you and blessings
for for all the amazing work that you do. Thank you for having me on. I look forward
to seeing you again. >>Rick Archer: Oh, yes, oh yes. You'll be
at SAND maybe or we'll see you someplace. I have a lot of relatives in Boulder. Maybe
I'll get out there sometime. I'll give you a call when I do.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Definitely we ll get some coffee on Pearl Street.
>>Rick Archer: Oh, I can't handle the caffeine. I'll have a decaf.
>>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Tea, herbal tea. >>Rick Archer: Okie dokie. So thanks a lot.
And thanks to those who have been listening or watching and I won't be doing any recording
any more interviews for the next month or so. But I'll be releasing ones that I've recorded
when I was out at SAND. So this will be interviews coming out every week. So we'll see you for
the next one. Thanks, >>Zvi Ish-Shalom: Bye everyone. Thanks for
listening. >>Rick Archer: Bye Zvi. Thank you.
