Excerpt from two delightful Rami Shapiro interviews:
“A holy rascal is someone who thinks religion is much too important to leave in the hands of the professionals. You know, there is such wisdom, brilliance & genius, in religious stories, myths, practices, contemplative practices. And what happens when you put them into an institution, is they become very dry, very cold, and self-focused – not self as in some contemplative way of the capital s 'Self,' but self-focused in the sense of the purpose of Christianity, even though they’ll say it’s salvation, it’s really to make you a better Christian, according to the denomination (((boosting one's tribal ego or strengthening one's 'partisanship'))). The purpose of Judaism is to make you a better Jew, according to the denomination, etc.
So a holy rascal is curious about the deeper meaning of religion, not at all interested in the self-focused nature of religious institutions, and is convinced that these myths & symbols & rituals are gateways to something that cannot be articulated in any other way. And so a rascal is someone who breaks the rules and tries to get to the heart of something.
I am really quite dogmatic. I believe that, whatever we’re going to call it – God, Kali or whatever – is a nondual Reality. I don’t believe that there’s a God separate from Nature, who created the world, who judges us, and all that. I’m not a dualist. I’m a nondualist. And so I’m interested in the nondual aspects of Hinduism and Vedanta, in Taoism and Zen, Christianity, Islam, wherever – they all have this nondual perspective among their mystics. I’m interested in that. I will play in all those arenas, because I think they’re all leading us to the same ineffable experience. When you’re talking about that nondual reality, the labels become irrelevant. And I mean, every religious tradition has this mystic element. And because the mystics understand that - God or whatever they’re going to call it - can be experienced directly, in, with, & as you. And that’s not what the conventional religious teachers tell you. And I’m interested in that experience.
The number of people who register on those Pew Religious Polls who say they don’t have a religion - ‘I’m spiritual, but not religious’ – I call them the ‘spiritually independent’ – people who are interested in spirituality but they’re not going to tie themselves to one tradition in particular – yes, I think that’s a growing segment of the human population, certainly in the United States.
Just to put in a good word for Catholicism, there’s a lot of rich mystical stuff in the Catholic tradition, that you may not be aware of. But the problem is there’s not a lot of marketing for it.
I first met Father Thomas Keating in 1984 - he died a few years ago. I met with him, at least once a year for those decades, studied with him, learned from him, and practiced meditation with him. He is, along with Father Basil Pennington, the founder of the Centering Prayer movement. That’s a Benedictine practice that he sort of modernized for the benefit of contemporary Catholics, but now, it’s in a lot of different movements. But he was a beautiful holy rascal, and a deep contemplative. And I don’t know if I ever heard him say this specifically, I mean, he lived a monastic life, and so I don’t know if he ever said this, outright. But yeah, I think he would agree that Christianity, Catholicism is hiding its brilliance under a bushel.
... so does Judaism. So there is a 1000, probably 2000 year-old Jewish mystical tradition, that includes various types of meditation. ... Jewish meditation practice ... is talked about in the Bible, it’s taught by mystical rabbis, but it’s a universal practice. ... ultimately, it will separate you from your addiction to ... narrow mind, and open you up to the other dimension of consciousness that you have, which is ... spacious mind. So I spend time every morning in ... focused mantra practice. So I just repeat (a mantra) ... there are lots of different names you can use.
Mantra meditation practice is a rich Jewish practice, but nobody talks about it in Jewish context. So it’s there, but unless you’re looking for it, or unless you’re lucky enough to have a teacher who’s steeped in it, and willing to teach it, you’re never going to know. We could go on for an hour just on the different kinds of meditation practices, but mantra is one.
But you also have something similar to what’s called nada yoga in the Hindu tradition, listening for it, sound yoga. And so in Judaism, you’re listening for what’s called ... ‘the still small voice’ in the King James version, or ‘the fragile voice of silence.’ And whether you’re talking Hinduism, or you’re talking Judaism, there’s this teaching that the Universe has 'a hum.' It's a musical thing that’s happening, and you can tune into it. It’s not magic. Just be quiet and listen. And I practice that every day also. Hindus say the sound is ‘ohm’, we don’t have an actual sound for it. We just call it this ‘fragile voice of silence.’ But you can hear it, and you know it’s not coming from your head, and it’s not exactly coming from any place outside your head. There’s just this sound, and you can take refuge in that.
I was in Prague, and I was part of this wonderful interfaith group that I used to travel with pre-Covid. And we were at a European Union gathering, at this ancient monastery in Prague. And at one point, the leader asked me to teach (synchronization through music). So we 30-35 people huddled together into a clump, and I asked them to find their own heartbeat and just tap their own chest to their heartbeat, like a drum. And then we started to chant. Now because there was this great Indian mantra teacher in the group, I used a Hindu chant – ‘Om Namah Shivaya.’ And so I started with that. And within just moments, everybody’s heartbeat was in sync. And there was this real palpable sense of unity. It sounds silly, but it’s like Bob Marley – ‘one heart.’ It was just this one heart beating. And when we stopped the exercise, and went back to our chairs, the whole energy in the room had shifted, because there was a real union there. Because we were all in sync to the one heart.
There is something greater than us, this nondual reality of which we are a part. And you’re always connected to it. There’s no way not to be connected. But you can block it. And unblocking is what these practices are for.
I think we’re entering into a new dark age. I think this is the Kali Yuga (((“the age of Kali," or the age of darkness, misery, & vice, the final, most corrupt stage in a Hindu cosmological cycle of four ages (Yugas). Characterized by a decline in spiritual values & morality, increased conflict, & a focus on materialism, a period of significant degradation for humanity, according to Hindu scriptures))). It’s a global crucifixion of human civilization. Not very uplifting, but you have to go through the dark night in order to come out into the light, it’s a spiral. It’s not a devolution, and then we can’t get out of it. You go into the dark, and then you’re going to come out again in the light, and then it’s going to be dark again. So there’s this dynamic between the yang & the yin here as we go through cycles.
But I think they’re all connected: the war in Ukraine, which is the first large land war in Europe since WW2. It could trigger WW3 easily. Global climate collapse in many places, gun violence in the US. All of that is a sign of this great, dark night that we’re moving into. And it’s like an Etch-a-Sketch in the sense that it gives us an opportunity to shatter all the stuff that doesn’t work. You’re going to see, as horrible as the Ukraine war is, and as horrible as the mass exodus of people trying to get into the US from Latin America, South America, that all this is just a hint of what’s coming. When climate change hits more strongly, we’re going to have this massive climate migration. And if our response is to build another wall - either virtual or physical – if our response is to keep these people out, we’re looking for huge violence on a global stage.
We’ve got to find other ways to deal with the struggle of humans. We have to see them not as ‘other,’ but as fellow humans. Of course we have to go beyond that, and see the same with regard to all species that are all part of a single ecosystem. And if we don’t love our neighbor, who sometimes is a human and sometimes is an elephant, and sometimes is the salmon and sometimes is the rainforest, if we can’t love all of that as a part of ourselves - because it is, then we’re doomed as a civilization. Earth will continue, Nature will continue, but it won’t have us in it, or very few of us.
We’re going into this dark night, and the question is, what’s going to guide us through it? So right now, what’s guiding us through this by this wizard from the TV, is fear, anger, outrage, different ways of manifesting, but it’s all anger-based, it’s all fear-based.
At the same time ... there’s this incredible number of spiritually independent people. IF people like that can discover what I call Perennial Wisdom, there’s HOPE for humanity.
Perennial Wisdom is the title I made up for the title of a book, but the idea has been around forever. Perennial Wisdom is a fourfold truth at the Mystic heart of every religious tradition. And I think you’d see it in science now too. It’s very simple.
• The first of the four is everything is a manifesting of a single nondual reality.
• Number two, humans, and maybe others, but humans have the innate capacity to know ourselves as part of this larger reality. We can move or shift from narrow mind to spacious mind. (((self-centered, fear-based to allocentric, love-based)))
• Number three, when you make that shift, and you realize we’re all part of this single dynamic, then loving your neighbor, operating by the Golden Rule, or as it’s put in Genesis 12:3, ‘being a blessing to all the families of the Earth, human & otherwise,’ that becomes axiomatic. You know we’re all one body in a sense, I and we have to take care of the entirety. So loving one another becomes axiomatic once you experience the fact that we’re all part of the same thing.
• And then the fourth one is, awakening to this nondual reality and living by the Golden Rule, being a blessing – together comprise the highest human calling, that’s what we’re here to do.
And if we can see that business as usual is devastating society and the planet, Nature, if we can understand that, then we can go, ‘Well, what’s the alternative?’ And I think the alternative is the Mystic alternative – what I’m calling Perennial Wisdom.
Interviewer: “Wouldn’t life be a lot easier if everyone understood those four principles and meditated a little bit more?”
And IF the churches, synagogues, temples & ashrams, IF ALL religious institutions would say, ‘Let’s listen to our mystics. Here are the four things they say, then we would all be learning it, we’d learn it in different flavors, because there’s a Catholic way of saying it, and a Jewish way of saying it, but that just makes it more interesting. But we’d learn those four things, we’d live by those four things. And while the Dark Night is coming, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it, we can navigate through it, and come out the other end, more loving, more compassionate, more just.
... there are people like Yogananda, Ramana Maharshi, Nisargadatta Maharaj, all these great nondual teachers, and there are many in the Western tradition as well. If we break down the narrow consciousness by just even reading some of these people, and then picking up maybe Kriya Yoga from Paramahamsa Yogananda, or the practice of self-inquiry from Raman Maharshi - the practices are there, they’ve been there for millennia.
One of the amazing things about living in the 21st Century is that you can learn from all these amazing teachers in English (in our case). You don’t have to travel to far off places and learn other languages. There are many excellent spiritual books & podcasts. There are tremendous options for spiritual revolution. But you have to seek it out.”
Rami Shapiro - CHALLENGING BELIEFS: Are You a VICTIM of Spiritual Misguidance? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rZLlvXFQ7k
Religions are like Languages
“No language is true or false. Every language is an opportunity, a means for articulating experience. And I think religion is the same. Religion is a language in that it gives us a vocabulary of symbols, rituals, liturgies, actual words to articulate our experience of reality. But none of it is true in some absolute sense.
I approach religion the way Lao-tzu approaches the Tao in the opening line of the Tao Te Ching, where he says, ‘The Tao that can be named, is not the eternal Tao.’ So as long as we’re dealing with language broadly defined, we’re always one step away from whatever that ultimate reality is.
So when you’re talking about regular language – English, French, Japanese, Chinese, whatever the language happens to be, the more languages you know, the more subtle your understanding of reality is.
There’s a word for that place in your back that itches, but you can’t reach. There’s an actual name for that (notalgia paresthetica). Knowing that name, gives you a new insight into that itch.
So the
more languages you know, the more subtle, the richer your understanding
of reality becomes. And I think the same is true of religion. I find
religion endlessly fascinating, because I think it’s a human creation
and people are endlessly fascinating to me. So religion is endlessly
fascinating, but I don’t take any of it at face value. You know when a
religion says, ‘This is the truth’ – I don’t believe that. No truth can
be reduced to a specific language. No truth can be reduced to a specific religion. So I just put that aside. But still it’s fascinating to see how religions approach that reality and what they make out of it.
So the more I know, the more I know about reality, but I never mistake what I know about reality for reality itself.
Here’s my understanding of nonduality
– and then someone’s going to pick it apart. Everything that exists is a
manifesting of a single, dynamic happening. (There are no nouns in the
Universe. Everything is a verb or a gerund.) So there’s this Cosmic Happening that manifests as everything that you & I encounter, including you & I. And there’s just one of it.
My favorite is a Hindu analogy that there’s this infinite ocean, and the ocean has infinite numbers of waves, and the waves are simply the happening of the ocean. So you, I, Nature, the Universe, are all the wavings of the ocean, and the ocean is not two. There’s just one ocean.
But there’s a difference between nonduality and monism.
Monism
says well everything is the same: good & evil, there’s really no
distinction; men & women, cis & trans – it’s all the same.
That’s monism. But I don’t think that’s what nonduality is saying.
Nonduality
is saying, no there’s something you can label as good, and something
you can label as evil, and something you can label as trans, and
something you can label as cis, and something you can label as black,
and something you can label as white. There are actual differences, and the differences may matter, but they’re all expressions – unique, diverse expressions, of a single reality. The differences matter. And that’s different than being monistic."
Rabbi Rami Shapiro: Exploring Perennial Wisdom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csoitdudtX0
Three earlier posts containing Rami Shapiro excerpts & quotes: http://www.johnlovas.com/search?q=Rami+Shapiro&max-results=20&by-date=true
The Buddha’s last words were simple and profound:
"Be a lamp unto yourself. Be a light."
