Tami Simon: You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today my guest is Rabbi Rami Shapiro. Rami is an award-winning author of over two dozen nonfiction books. His poems and short stories have been anthologized in over a dozen volumes, and his prayers are used in prayer books around the world. Rami received rabbinical ordination from the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion and holds a PhD in religion from Union Graduate School. A congregational rabbi for 20 years, Rabbi Rami is currently adjunct professor of religious studies at Middle Tennessee State University, where he also directs The Writer’s Loft, MTSU’s creative writing program, and is co-director of One River Wisdom School, a training program in the Perennial Philosophy. With Sounds True, Rami has published the new audio series, How to Be a Holy Rascal, and is working on a forthcoming book called Holy Rascals: Advice for Spiritual Revolutionaries.
In this episode of Insights at the Edge, Rami and I spoke about what makes somebody a holy rascal, and two of the hallmarks of holy rascality: endless curiosity and boundless compassion. We talked about his background as a rabbi, and why he left congregational leadership, and what it might mean to practice what he calls “nondual Judaism.” We talked about his mystical experiences of encountering God as a mother figure, and the importance of these encounters for burning away tendencies to claim and hold on, and how this introduced Rami to a state he calls “freefall.” Finally, we talked about the importance of ecstatic experience and the role of holy rascals in our time. Here’s my conversation with Rabbi Rami Shapiro.
Rami, normally I refer to you as Rabbi Rami, but I wonder if maybe I should start calling you Rascal Rami. What do you think?
Rami Shapiro: No, too formal. Definitely too formal. [Laughs.] [It] puts too much pressure. Rabbi—you can earn a degree in that, but rascal, that’s a lifetime achievement award. So no, I haven’t earned it yet.
TS: OK. Well, I won’t refer to you then in that way. Rabbi Rami, tell me a little bit about what it means to be a holy rascal. What makes someone a holy rascal—this esteemed term?
RS: In my mind, a holy rascal is somebody who loves religion too much to leave it in the hands of professionals. I think that’s really—I just made that up, but I think that’s a good definition. Someone who loves religion too much to leave it in the hands of professionals.
Professionals take it so seriously that they miss the point. For me, the point of religion—religion is a way that human beings make meaning out of the raw, existential facts of our existence. The facts—our experience changes, so the meaning changes. Religion should be fluid. But when you put it in the hands of professionals, it becomes deadly—it’s fixed, it’s shallow, or even hollow. It just becomes a series of things you say or do and has no depth to it. Obviously, I’m saying this with a broad brush, but still. [A] holy rascal is someone who wants to put the spark back into religion, or wants to really make religion something that is transformative, rather than simply imitative.
TS: So here at the beginning of our conversation, you became Rabbi Rami, which, to be called a rabbi means that you took on a certain professional role, if you will, within the Jewish religion. At the same time, you’re Rabbi Rami without a formal congregation, if you will, at this point in your rabbinical life. What I’d love to know right here at the outset is how you became a rabbi, and then how you became, if you will, a renegade rabbi, which is how I think of you.
RS: I really appreciate the “renegade” part! I became a rabbi because of my Zen master, Joshu Sasaki Roshi. My plan throughout my junior/senior year of high school into college—my plan was to become an academic in Buddhist studies. Buddhism was my passion [and] practice as well as theory, and I really thought I’d get a PhD in Buddhist studies and teach that somewhere.
I was working with—I was very lucky and I was invited to become a full-time student at Smith College, even though [it was] Smith College for women. There were, if I was not mistaken, at that time—and this was in ’72, ’73—there were eight men on campus. We couldn’t live on campus, you couldn’t even eat on campus, you could hardly pee on campus—that was the most difficult thing. But I was invited to study full-time at Smith in the religion department specifically under Professor Unno, Taitetsu Unno. He introduced me to Sasaki Roshi, who would actually come out to Spencer Abbey to work with Father Thomas Keating and the monks at the abbey, but after he was done with them, he would come to Smith College and run a retreat at Smith.
On one of these, he was talking to me privately and he knew I was—I don’t how how he knew, maybe Tai Unno told him—but he knew I was planning on going to graduate school for Buddhism. He thought that was a terrible idea, and he backed me, literally, into a corner, his face in my face, and he said, “Nope. Don’t go to graduate school. If you really want to learn Buddhism you move to the monastery with him—Mount Baldy—and study Japanese and really practice Zen. That’s how you do it.” And that was definitely not me. I knew I couldn’t pull that off. So it sort of just exploded out of me, and I said, “No, Roshi, I can’t do that; I’m going to become a rabbi!” Well, it was news to me! [Laughs.] I was planning to be a PhD in Buddhism. “No, I’m going to be a rabbi!” And he just smiled and said, “Oh, good! Be a rabbi! Be a Zen rabbi!” And I said, “OK, I’ll be a Zen rabbi, thanks.” And that’s as much as I visited the monastery, but I didn’t want to live there.
So that’s how the idea started. When I went into Jewish Studies more seriously, I found that there was a whole dimension there that really did speak to me. It wasn’t the conventional, it wasn’t the stuff that I learned growing up in an Orthodox synagogue or any of my actual lived Jewish experience. But it was the mystical and how some of the modern rabbis that I was studying with took some of these mystical ideas of nonduality and cast them in a more contemporary form that could work in a synagogue, theoretically. None of them had synagogues to test it out, but that’s what I was going to do. I was going to take this nondual Judaism, transform it into a language that 20th and then 21st-century Jews could grasp, and then make my synagogue a think tank for exploring that kind of Jewish thinking and practice. And I did that for 20 years, but eventually I had to leave. That was enough.
TS: Let’s not skip over that part. I want to at some point circle back around about nondual Judaism and what that might actually look like and sound like in a tradition that most people think of as a theistic tradition—so we’ll get back to that. But talk to me about 20 years [of] congregational life and the decision to leave, and why it didn’t have enough holy rascality—I’m presuming that’s why you had to leave, but unpack that for me.
RS: Well, I started the synagogue myself. When you graduate in the Reform Movement, there’s a placement process, and I think you’re supposed to start out as an assistant and you work yourself up to an associate, or maybe it’s the other way around, I don’t know. It’s sort of controlled by the unions. Eventually, you get your own synagogue. I am not a team player; I knew I couldn’t work for anybody. My approach to Judaism was so off the wall that no rabbi would stand for it, and I couldn’t pretend not to believe what I believed. So I needed to start my own synagogue.
And I did: I had some friends, and we just started it in Miami, Florida where they lived. I put an ad in the paper for—I don’t know what we said, but it was for an unconventional Rosh Hashanah New Years’ service, and about 80 people came, and 20 people stuck around long enough to form a synagogue. And it was a weird place; we didn’t have a cantor so we had whale song instead—recorded whale songs. It was really sort of—now I look back at it and I go, “Oh no, that was really silly.” But I didn’t know what else to do, so I did what I did. And it caught on a little bit.
And it was a think tank; I mean, I rewrote the liturgy several times, because like you said, the classical liturgy is incredibly dualistic. It’s all about God as a male superpower somewhere, and I didn’t believe that. I didn’t believe that since I was a kid. So you had to rewrite everything.
But I would challenge the notion that nonduality has no room for theism because I think—one of my teachers said, “Look, if God is everything, then God could also be experienced, anyway, as the other.” And I had experiences of God as mother, and it was clearly—I wasn’t talking to myself, or I wasn’t—it wasn’t simply a psychological projection of myself. Something was there, something was happening. I just don’t think it was the ultimate thing. So you could probably experience God as a personality of some sort as long as you didn’t take it as absolute.
But anyway, so I rewrote the liturgy and I was constantly tinkering with the holidays and their meaning, but eventually I wanted—everything was too wordy. I kept stripping the words down and I needed more silence in the service. And if it’s a community, a multigenerational community, you just can’t ask people to come in with their little kids and sit quietly, even for—I was going to say 20 minutes, even for 5 minutes. It’s too difficult. People didn’t join the synagogue in order to be silent; they joined for other reasons. So it was harder and harder for me to get what I wanted out of the synagogue. And people were very happy with what we had. So we experimented with actually opening up a mediation center on the property, but in the end, they said, “No we really like what we have, and we don’t want to change it.”
And I was moving in a different direction—not just more contemplative, but also beyond the boundaries of Judaism. I’m very—back then I guess we would have called it interfaith, and then interspiritual, but now I’m just much more interested in perennial wisdom: the wisdom that the mystics teach regardless of the tradition out of which they come. That’s where I was moving, and Judaism was one language among many, but I was becoming more and more multilingual and my sermons were becoming sort of a hybrid of teachings from so many different traditions. People said, “Well, why is this Jewish anymore?” And I said, “Oh, well that’s a good point. Why am I still here if I’m not doing classically or a more confined or focused Jewish thing?” So I had to leave. I just couldn’t serve them the way they needed to be served.
TS: Well, I think you’re pointing to something really important, which is as somebody deepens in a path, at a certain point I think, as one’s maturity increases and the deeper you go, you do find this multilingual access, if you will. Does that mean, then, that there’s no room to continue to lead and express in the mother tongue, if you will, that you’ve been taught, and to lead other people on that path? Or is this just what happened for you—it just wasn’t right for you anymore?
RS: Yes. It’s personal to me. I mean, I spent lots of time with, for example, Father Thomas Keating—he’s clearly Catholic, but I would also say he’s interspiritual, but he hasn’t dropped the cassock; he’s still alive and he’s still clearly Catholic. So no, I think you can go very, very deep in your own tradition and remain with that as your mother tongue but I couldn’t. I mean, being monolingual just didn’t work for me—we’re sort of pushing this language analogy, but speaking only the Jewish language didn’t work.
There are things you can say—I mean, my best definition of God comes from St. Paul in the book of Acts, where he defines God as “that in which we live and move and have our being.” That sounds like the Tao to me. Now I call St. Paul Rabbi Saul, so I can fudge it and say, look, he says he’s a Pharisee, he’s a Jewish guy in a Jewish place talking to Jewish people—not exclusively, but many—so his definition clearly reflects a Jewish bent, and that’s fine with me. That’s great, if you can find that kind of teaching in Judaism. But when I’m talking, whether it’s lecturing in the United States or India or wherever I go, I just can’t limit myself just to Jewish terminology—it just doesn’t work for me anymore. So it’s personal.
TS: Part of the reason I’m going down this lane, if you will, and I’m still going to call you Rabbi Rami, as I do, is that I think a lot of people are starting to have this experience of interspirituality, if you will, or that what’s alive for them is what they’re reading in the Tao Te Ching as well as their contemplative prayer practice, and yet, do I still belong to a synagogue? Does that make sense? “Is it OK for me to feel this deep draw to so many different traditions, and where does that land for me as a spiritual practitioner? I’m in a confused soup.” I wonder what you would say to those people who feel that sense of soupiness, and yet they want to raise their kids in a tradition—it’s a confusing landscape.
RS: Well, I mean, if they were actually someone sitting in front of me, the first thing I’d say is, “If you feel that way, why would you want to raise your children in a specific path?” In other words, if you’re identifying as Jewish but your practice is much broader and your thinking is much broader, why would you want to—if you have to overcome a lot of Jewish stuff like “chosen people,” and male gods, and the supernatural, why would you want to bring up kids in a system that they’re going to have to outgrow or they’re going to have to unlearn?
If I were counseling someone, I would say—this is my definition of the perennial wisdom tradition. It’s got four points. Number one, it’s that nonduality—that everything is simply a manifesting of the single reality. You can call it Allah, you can call it Mother, you can call it God, you can call it Nature or Tao, or whatever you want to call it, but there’s just one reality, of which everything is a part, an expression. Number two, human beings have the innate capacity to know that reality. So whether you do it through meditation or chanting or gardening or walking or swimming, or whatever, prayer, we’re built to know this. The third one is when you do know it, it carries an ethic of universal compassion and justice. The fourth point is, I think this is the highest thing that human beings can strive for—this awakening and living out the ethics that comes with it.
So if someone would say, “How do I raise my children?” I would say raise them in the perennial wisdom tradition, and then if you’re Jewish, find Jewish expressions of perennial wisdom, rather than start with Jewish conventional notions and then have them, I don’t know, have to outgrow them and find perennial wisdom later. I don’t know if that makes sense.
TS: No, it does. Whether it’s someone who was raised Jewish and is now looking [at] what they want to pass on to their children, or someone who came from an Episcopal background, or whatever background, I think when it comes to raising children—this is what I hear from people that I know who now have young children: “I want them to be part of a community. I have my own meditative path, but I want my kids to feel connected and that there’s a ritual that we go to every week.” I hear what you’re saying is find a religious institution that really represents this perennial viewpoint, but that’s not that easy, Rabbi Rami. In a lot of cities, you’re not going to find such organized opportunities, and then if you’re not providing an organized opportunity, your family doesn’t have the chance to connect with other families in this way. I think it’s a real conundrum for people.
RS: Well, I think it’s a conundrum at the moment because this is somewhat new, but I imagine that if people put out feelers through social media, looking for some kind of community, or to create some kind of community that meets in [their] house or something like that, I think that they might be able to connect with like-minded people.
I mean, what troubles me—I go to synagogues, I speak in lots of synagogues, and the rabbis are well-educated and well-meaning and compassionate and concerned with social justice, and all the things that synagogues are supposed to do. But they’re locked into a story that I find really troublesome. I found it troublesome last century, and I still find it troublesome. And that is the whole notion that Jews are God’s chosen people, we have the one true revelation, God dabbles in real estate, Israel is it—it carries with it so much baggage that we should let go.
The same thing if you’re a Christian, and you belong to a church that teaches original sin—are you kidding me? Do I really need that story in my life? I mean, I preach or do seminars at a lot of churches and people are still suffering from original sin. They can’t—they don’t have enough faith in Christ to have him heal it, so what do they do? I say, “Well, convert to Islam, convert to Judaism—we’ve never heard of it!”
So these stories that we impose upon people—to go back to where we started, that’s the work of the holy rascal, is to take the stories that are doing so much damage, these religious stories that are doing so much damage, and say, “They’re just stories; people make them up for political reasons, sociological reasons, to elevate an elite and keep them in power. There’s all kinds of secular reasons why these stories are there, but they’re not true. They’re stories; they can be reinterpreted or they can be dropped.” But if they’re hurtful and unhealthy, they’ve got to be either fixed or let go.
I’m really questioning the whole notion of—if you don’t fit in the community that you’re going to join, you’re really going to be on the fringe, do you want to belong to that community? But I understand the need for community.
TS: I get that side of it—you understand the need for community—and here we are, we’re in this transitional phase. Are you suggesting to people, “I’m going to now have holy rascal gatherings”—I know you’re not calling them “holy rascal gatherings,” people could call it whatever they wanted—”And I’m going to reach out on social media and do this in my house, and before you know it, I’m going to be playing whale songs. I don’t know how to structure a gathering like this. I don’t know how to structure a gathering. I’m busy all week long—now I’ve got five families in my house on the weekend. What are we going to do together? I’m not trained in this.” How do people become empowered in this gap phase?
RS: That’s a great question. Partly, I do have something called Holy Rascal Revival, where I would come and teach you how to do that. But there are probably places you can go, like a Unitarian church—they call them Unitarian fellowship[s]. Maybe there are very, very liberal churches and synagogues in your neighborhood that would work.
But there is this whole house-church movement where people who don’t feel comfortable at church are just getting together. They pray something, they read something, and then they just have conversations. It might just—the chavurah movement, the Jewish fellowship movement in the 60s and 70s—I think what people were hungry for was conversation, and then the ritual grew out of that. And they created—the people who started it, or some of them, wrote this three-volume [book] called The Jewish Catalog; It was the Jewish version of the Whole Earth Catalog. It said, “This is how you do it—anybody can do it.” Here’s how you can weave your own prayer shawl, your own tallith, here’s how you bake a challah.
So it may be that that’s the way it goes, but I absolutely recognize that we’re in this transitional moment and it’s difficult. I mean, my kids—I have a one-year-old grandson—and they’re struggling with how to raise him because they want him to have an identity, but they don’t want the identity to be, well I guess, exclusivist or somehow—when you have an identity, as soon as you’re in a group, there’s the out-group, and they’re trying to avoid all that. But it may not be avoidable—they may have to be—I don’t know how you do it, but it’s something that people are wrestling with.
I mean, I have the luxury of being 65 years old. I could care less. I don’t need a community.
TS: Yes. Yes. OK, I want to go back to these four principles, if you will, that you talked about on a perennial wisdom path—the first being nonduality. I think when a lot of people hear that term, it’s a little abstract and confusing. So can you explain what you mean by it?
RS: Well, what I mean by it is that—well, what I said. Everything—you and I, the chair I’m sitting in, the floor my feet are resting on—everything that exists is an expression of a singular reality. I am connected to everything. I mean, it’s the Buddhist notion of interdependence. So that’s how I understand it; there’s nothing separate. There’s nothing that is really alien to me; even if I don’t like it, it’s still a part of that larger reality in which I exist.
So that’s how I understand it; it’s still abstract. I mean, it has to be something that’s experienced more than talked about. Because as soon as you talk about it, it becomes an object that already is somewhat dualistic. So it has to be something you experience, and that takes contemplative practice of one sort or another.
Then in that experience, all sense—this is what happened to me—through those practices, or triggered by those practices, I don’t know how you want to put it exactly, but I experienced the dropping away of Rami. And when Rami came back, there was this sense of universality—I just knew that there was nothing else but This, with a capital T, and maybe you don’t even need the capital T. There was nothing else but this reality, and it was me and I was it, without taking any kind of ownership of it—not that egoic sense of, “Oh, I am God,” but it was clear that God was me.
I don’t know what else you can say about that other than—well, I don’t know what else you can say about that. I should really stop, because everything I’m saying, it’s still going to be abstract.
TS: That’s OK. I think it’s helpful and it shows how you use this term “nonduality.” You also referenced the idea of nondual Judaism, and from my own experience going to temple as a young practicing Reform Jew, we prayed to God—there was me praying to God. There wasn’t a lot of experiences of this kind of unitive consciousness that you’re describing. So when I hear something like “nondual Judaism,” I’m like, “Question mark? What is that? I’d love to understand that more.” And you spent a lot of time articulating that for your congregation, so help our listeners who are interested in that.
RS: Nondual Judaism takes the trope of Judaism like the oneness of God, or the notion that God is one, and lifts it out of the numerical into the nondual. So for example, I don’t know, mid-1700s, the founder of Chabad Judaism, Lubavitch Judaism, Shneur Zalman of Liadi, said that when you say the Shema—the traditional English is horrible, but “Hear, O Israel, the Lord”—which is a terrible translation—but “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.” He said if you’re saying this to remind yourself that God is One and not three, like the trinity, then you really only have to say it a couple times when you’re a kid and you get the idea. Why do we have to say it multiple times a day? His answer to his own question was because we’re not talking about a numerical quality; we’re talking about nonduality, oneness itself, where you’re saying, “Don’t forget, God is everything. God is the One, and there isn’t anything else.” And you have to continually remind yourself of that.
So in our liturgy, or when we would come to the recitation of the Shema, I would always use that as what we call a Kavanah, to set the intention of a prayer, to try to get the congregate not to affirm that God is numerically one, but to remember or awaken or realize that God is the only thing that actually exists.
There are lots of texts that—I mean, that was from the 18th century. But you can find Bible texts and Deuteronomy—let me get my chapter and verse right, I think it’s chapter 4 Deuteronomy, verse 39, says, “Know this day and take it to heart that God is in the heavens above and the Earth below, and there is nothing else.” Ain od—there is nothing else. Traditionally, conventionally, the rabbi will say, “Well, that means there’s no other God.” But the mystical or the nondual reading of it is, there’s nothing else, there’s just that—and you’re part of it. We’re all waves on the infinite ocean.
So there’s a lot—I mean, I could go through other texts, rack my little memory here. But let me give you another. This is from a guy called Moshe Cordovero, in the 1600s. [He was a] Kabbalist, a Jewish mystic. This is how I remember it: “God is found in all things, and all things are found in God. Everything is in God. God is in everything and beyond everything, and there’s nothing other than God.” I mean, that’s nonduality to me.
So that’s what you want in a nondual Judaism—you want to be able to realize that. So that means your holidays have to be interpreted through that lens, the rituals of—for me, kosher; I grew up with kosher, and it’s sort of drilled into me, and while I play with it by being a vegetarian, I never break it. I don’t eat pork—well, I don’t eat meat, so it’s easier. But I don’t eat unkosher things, broadly defined: I don’t need the kosher stamp on the product, I think that’s just about money and politics, but I just don’t eat things that aren’t kosher. It’s sort of the way I was raised, and I can’t imagine eating that stuff. So I’ve been conditioned by my parents to do that.
But the reason I do it isn’t because God said don’t do it; I don’t think God has a dietary plan for our lives. I don’t think God has a plan for our lives at all, but I don’t think God sets a diet. I do it because my understanding of kashrut, of kosher, is about—since I have to consume food and other things, it’s about consuming in a way that honors the fact that we’re all part of this infinite reality, so consume as little as possible, consume as justly as possible, compassionately as possible, and that’s how I would define kosher.
So I would re-cast—when I had a synagogue, but still in my own life—I re-cast the holidays and the rituals and the traditions through that nondual lens. If my Jewish practice isn’t from—I don’t know if the word is “promoting,” or is it continually reminding me—of the nonduality in which we live and move and have our being, then I’m not doing it right. It needs to be reworked. Does that make sense?
TS: It does. It does. I want to circle back a moment and tease something out, because you briefly mentioned, in terms of nonduality, this oneness also including the experience of something that seems outside of yourself. You mentioned God appearing in a mother form, and I know that you have had experiences here, when you were a rabbi, with your congregation, of having visions, personal visitations if you will, from the Virgin Mary. What I’d like to know first of all—let’s just take it slow—what actually happened?
RS: Are we recording this? [Laughs.]
TS: We’re recording this, Rabbi Rami. Tell me first of all what actually happened. You’re a renegade rabbi; you’re on your holy rascal path. You can speak the truth here.
RS: Yes, well, being retired also helps.
TS: Yes.
RS: I mean, what actually happened was—
TS: Yes. Just the phenomenology—I want to just first start there. What happened?
RS: Yes. So here’s where it started: I’m sitting at my kitchen table in Miami, Florida, having breakfast before I go to synagogue. And I’m looking at the Miami Herald, and there’s this gorgeous oil painting of the Virgin Mary above the fold on the Herald. And I can’t take my eyes off it: it’s just—it’s modern, it’s watercolor—I think, it looked like watercolor—it was just absolutely, I couldn’t breathe it was so gorgeous. And then I said, “What museum is this at? What gallery is this at? I gotta know.” So I flipped the paper over, so under the fold, the article, and it turns out, it’s an oilslick on the glass windowpane of a bank—I think it’s [in] Clearwater, Florida, could be Stillwater, I don’t remember—but it’s a small town in Florida. And tens of thousands of people are making pilgrimage to see the Virgin Mary in this glass.
So I wasn’t one of them—I saw it in the newspaper, though, and that was enough for me. I realize how the mind works—the brain is designed, through evolution, to look at patterns. It keeps us from being gobbled up by saber-toothed tigers. So I understand the science of why what I saw isn’t what I saw, but it was what I saw. And it was so clearly that—and even knowing that it was on a window, an oilslick on a bank, I still could see nothing else.
That was the first sighting—it sounds silly, but there you go—the first sighting of the Virgin. And then, she just would appear, and in different places. I mean, at one point, I was walking—I do a lot of walking—and I just said, “Come on, this is ridiculous. If you’re real, show yourself now.” And I looked over at some place, and bam, I saw her again. So phenomenologically—you brought the word up—phenomenologically, that’s what was happening to me. Intellectually, I was going, “This is crap. I don’t believe anything that’s happening, but it’s happening. I don’t think it’s really the Virgin; it’s not Our Lady of South Miami [Tami laughs]—I’m not going to bring some message to the world because of having this experience.
But it just kept happening, and eventually, it wasn’t just Mary. Now it becomes Kali, it becomes Saraswati, it becomes more figures that don’t actually have a divine feminine—formless aspects of the Divine Feminine, like Hochma, Wisdom in the Bible, or Shekhinah, the presence of the Divine. So I would just sense her all over, and I didn’t like it; it wasn’t like I was like, “Oh, how cool is this?” It was, “How annoying is this?” Like you said, I can’t tell anybody. I’m a rabbi; we don’t have visions like this, and if we’re going to have them, we should have them of Golda Meir, and not the Virgin Mary [Tami laughs again].
So I went to a couple of people. I went to sister Jose Hobday—we were teaching together and I don’t know if you’re familiar with her or our listeners are, but she is deceased now, but she was a Franciscan nun and a Native American. I think she was Lakota Sioux, but [you] can’t hold me to that. But a Native American medicine woman, and I went to her with this, and she just laughed at me and said, “No, no. Once this happens, you have to talk about this. You have to teach about this.” I went to Andrew Harvey, who is my dear friend and teacher, and a tremendous devotee of the Divine Mother in all her forms. And I said, “How do you get this to stop?” [Tami laughs.] And he said, “You don’t understand. It doesn’t stop, it just gets more and more and more.” And his understanding was more from a—at least the way I heard it—from a Kali perspective, that this was, the Divine Feminine was a fire that was going to burn away all the B.S. that I was clinging to. And that becomes my actual experience.
But if you want to hear one more thing that I absolutely experienced, but I don’t believe a word of it [laughs]—I’m too academic, I’m too much of a philosopher to take this literally, and yet it absolutely happened. I was at the Casa de Maria, which is a wonderful retreat center in Santa Barbara, California, and it’s a Mary-centered place, and there are statues of Mary around. I invited the community that was studying with me—I think we were studying one of my books on the Divine Feminine—and I said, “If you wake up in the middle of the night”—and I’m of an age where I do, not for any spiritual reason but because my bladder insists, but if you wake up in the middle of the night and you want to do this, I suggested, “Go to the bathroom if you have to do that, and then get dressed or wrap yourself up in a blanket, and go out and wander around and find a statue of Mary that calls to you, and maybe do the Ave Maria, the Hail Mary there.” So if I asked them to do it, I certainly would do it, so I woke up in the middle of the night, and I went to the bathroom, and then I put some clothes on and wrapped myself up in a blanket, and there is one statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe that I always gravitate toward when I’m at La Casa de Maria. And I sat there—there’s a bench, and I sat there and I meditated there. I “Hail Mary, full of grace”—and I’m in a Catholic place doing a Catholic thing, “when in Rome” kind of idea.
Then I had this experience of—out of the blue, I wasn’t asking for guidance, I wasn’t asking for anything, and I hear this voice from—not exactly from the statue, and certainly the concrete mouth wasn’t moving, but I heard this voice that was clearly Mary’s voice, and she said, “Do you know why I’m called the Perpetual Virgin?” I have to think back what—I don’t even, what’s that phrase mean? I think the idea was that even though she had Jesus and then she had maybe other children—people argue about that, maybe older siblings than Jesus—that she was still a virgin. And I said, “No, I haven’t got a clue.” And she said, “It’s because I am the mother of all the living”—which is what Adam calls Eve in the book of Genesis. He calls Eve “The mother of all the living.” She says, “I am the mother of all the living, and my love for each being that I birth is so all-consuming that it’s as if that were the only being I ever birthed.” Did I say that clearly? Her love is so absolute for each of us, so absolute that it’s as if we’re the only one that she ever birthed. So I was really—that was moving, but that was it.
So I went back to sleep, and the next morning, I shared—we went around, “Anyone want to talk about what happened?” So I shared that. And it was moving to me, but it was tear-inducing to several of the Catholics in the group that was with me for the weekend. And I asked them why—”What’s happening? Why the tears?” And I mean, it was hard for me to understand everything they were saying because they come from this rich Catholic background that I don’t have, but they said they’d wrestled with this idea of the Virgin Mary their entire lives; they did not understand it, and now, because of what she said, they understand it. And I thought, “Wow, how cool is that?” If I were in the religion-starting business, I would have said, “Well, she speaks to me all the time, and I’ll be back at six, and make a donation and I’ll tell you what else she said.”
TS: [Tami laughs.] OK. But I’m interested in one comment you made, sort of as an off-the-cuff comment. You said, “Her appearance in my life served to help burn away the B.S” I’d like to know how that happens—how that process has happened or is happening in your life. How is your B.S. being burned off?
RS: You know, I cling to things, both tangible material things—books, especially—but also relationships and ideas. What I experienced in this period—and I still have a connection with her, but we’re talking in the past—when it was the most intense, what I experienced was loss. Not loss, and certainly not release, but theft. You know, I would be clinging to an idea about God or clinging to some concept that I used to define myself in my religion and my spiritual understanding, and it would suddenly appear nonsensical to me. I went through a period of—the best phrase I know is “neti neti” from the Sanskrit—”Not this, not that.” It would be like she was saying, “No sweetheart, don’t you see, that’s not true. It’s just another idea that some guy made up. Drop that one.” And then I’d say, “Ok, but I’ve got this one—this one is cool, right?” “No. No. That doesn’t work.” And every time, she would somehow challenge me to look more deeply into the isms and ideologies that I was clinging to. I realized, “Oh my god, that’s another thing I’ve just got to just let go of.”
I don’t know if this is answering your question exactly—it’s not like she stepped into my life and said, “Give me that!” and pulled it out of my hand [Tami laughs], but somehow holding these things up to my experience of being in her presence left me with nothing to hold. And now, I worry that I’m clinging to the perennial wisdom. You know? So I’m still holding to something. What Andrew Harvey told me was, one of the analogies that he gave me was that encountering the Mother this way is—he calls it “The fierce love—fierce grace of his guru.” He uses “fierce grace;” my own extent of it is, I call it a searing love—it’s a love that burns away all these things that I’m clinging to and it sends like a freefall into the Divine.
We keep clinging to things because we’re afraid of falling, but there is no bottom; it’s just this endless fall into the intimate arms of the Divine Mother—that’s poetry, but this endless fall into the arms of the Divine Mother. You have to learn to live without ground, to live in the freefall. There’s no bottom to it. So everything I would cling to eventually goes away. Now, I like the idea, which of course makes me cling to that idea [laughs] so I have to even drop that. But it’s my spiritual practice—I don’t really think of it this way, but my spiritual practice at the moment is holding, each thing that I notice I’m holding, up to the Divine, the searing love of the Divine Mother, and letting her burn that one off, and then fall, and then it’s oh, I’m holding onto this one, let that one go.
I met with Father Thomas Keating a couple of months ago. I was teaching in Aspen, and his monastery, St. Benedict’s is in Snowmass, which is, I don’t know, 45 minutes away. We talked, and he said, “You should come out and see me,” and I hadn’t seen him for a couple of years. So I went out to see him—he’s getting very close to the end of his life, I think, and so we talked about that. I said, “Well, what are you doing to prepare for the end?”
And this is radio, so you can’t really envision it, but he makes this gesture of holding something in his hands, like he’s got water in the two palms of his hands, held together. And then he opens his arms and lets it fall. And he says, “That’s how I’ve lived my life. I hold Thomas in my hands, and then I let Thomas go, and every time I find myself holding onto Thomas, I let Thomas go.” And then I said, “Well, what happens at the end? Where do you go?” And he says, “No, at the end, there’s nothing left, so there’s no place to go.”
And that’s what I’m experiencing, and have been for a long time—that I’m holding onto Rami, defining Rami in one way or another, and then, through Ram Dass’s fierce grace or now my sense of searing love, having that taken away. But it’s no longer frightening; now it’s a blessing. One less thing to schlep around.
TS: Well, I’m certainly glad I asked about these appearances. That’s very, very helpful. Thank you.
RS: You’re welcome.
TS: Rabbi Rami, Sounds True is releasing a new audio series with you, it’s called How to Be a Holy Rascal: A Magical Mystery Tour to Liberate Your Deepest Wisdom, Access Radical Compassion, and Set Yourself Free.
[Rami laughs.]
TS: And there are a few different—I know, it’s no small promise!
RS: Right. No small promise.
TS: Yes. Deepest wisdom, radical compassion, and set yourself free. Sounds good to me. And in this series, there are a few different teachings that I want to highlight here in this conversation, and see if we can sneak this in before we conclude. One is that you talk about two of the hallmarks of a holy rascal: endless curiosity, and boundless compassion.
RS: Right. Those are key.
TS: Yes. Tell me a bit about each.
RS: So endless curiosity—a holy rascal approaches religion in a way that some people think is snarky, but that isn’t—if it really comes across snarky, then we’re doing something wrong. I’m so interested in why people believe what they believe. I mean, I taught at the university [in] Comparative Religion for 10 years. I’m always asking, I was always asking my students not just what you believe, but why that? Why do you believe that? If we go into religion saying, “What you believe is stupid,” or “It’s so different than what I believe it must be wrong,” then we get nowhere. But if our approach to people’s beliefs is not to be what, but why—”What does it do for you? Why are you attached to that?” And I don’t mean “attached” in a bad way, I mean, “Why do you love that idea? What does it say to you?” There’s no end to how interesting people become—to me, anyway.
At the same time, I believe that 99.999 percent of what we believe is bullshit. And I want to make that point also, but I want to do that in a way that’s compassionate. [Laughs.] That’s the challenge—curiosity is not difficult. Trying to be compassionate when you’re trying to say to people, “Look, let’s practice neti neti here and let that go. It isn’t that, it isn’t that.” That’s the real challenge.
But you have to have this boundless compassion in two ways. One, have compassion for the person who is trapped in an idea that really is not healthy. I mean, I know so many people who—I know we’re going to run out of time, but very briefly, I worked with a family who had a 16-year-old son. An Orthodox Jewish family, 16-year-old boy who suffered from very horrible disease—he was never going to make it to 17. And his family—not his parents, but his closest friends were his two cousins, and they and his uncle and aunt abandoned the boy, and wouldn’t allow their boys to play with him anymore, to even hang out with him anymore, because they told themselves a story that this kid had this horrible disease because God was punishing him for some evil he had done in a past life, and they didn’t want their boys tainted by the evil of this kid. That story—because that, to me, all it is is a story—that story ruined their friendship and their family, and left this boy totally isolated in the last months of his life.
So lots of what we believe is unhealthy in that way, and in many, many other ways, and I want to be able to point that out if possible, but I want to do it in a compassionate way. Not in a way that says, “Boy, are you stupid, that you believe that.” And that’s why primarily, the tools of holy rascals are humor, because otherwise, just standing up there and yelling at people doesn’t get you anywhere. But if you can gently, graciously, with lots of humor show the flip side of the belief, that sometimes is enough to have people drop it on the spot.
TS: Now, another theme that you bring up is speaking from your experience, not for your experience. Can you unpack that a little bit?
RS: Yes. This really comes from Father Thomas, and I appreciate the chance to honor him in this conversation this way. When I first started working with him in 1984 at the first Snowmass gathering—it went on for 30-some-odd years, this thing—there were originally 12 of us from different traditions, all of us contemplatives, and he said that when we talk, we can talk from our experience—what you were saying before, the phenomenological aspect of our religious lives—but you can’t talk for them. You can’t say, “We Jews believe” or “We Catholics believe.” You can’t talk as if the experience were an absolute; it’s simply your experience.
It’s not as radical as it might sound; it’s sort of using “I” language rather than whatever the other might be, I can’t think of what it is right now. But it’s just simply owning your experience and not making it an absolute.
TS: It would radically change the way people talked about a spiritual path if they did just what you’re describing. It’d be a big deal.
RS: I think it would be huge. I also think that most people would realize they don’t have an experience. They just go through the motions. I mean again, that’s very blanket condemnation, but when I go to churches and synagogues and other retreat centers and talk, most people, they’re not getting anything experiential out of their tradition.
I go to a lot of synagogues—I mean, one of the things I’m interested in is ecstatic experience, which I’ve had through kirtan, through Hasidic music—primarily music. And when I go to synagogue and they take Hasidic melodies or contemporary versions of Hasidic melodies, and they stop just before it starts to get hot, you can see that people are—it’s like you’re boiling water and the bubbles are starting to come up, but there’s not enough to actually have the water boil yet, and then you turn the water off.
So people are, I think, hungry for some kind of real experience, but the clergy are afraid of it. So they turn it off; they turn to page 14 now, as soon as they feel that something is happening.
TS: Why would the clergy be afraid of ecstatic experience?
RS: Because they think when you’re in the ecstatic moment, you don’t need clergy. You don’t need the story. You don’t need the ritual anymore. You don’t need—everything is gone at that moment; that there’s just this wild, ecstatic awakening to reality, and it’s not Jewish, it’s not Christian, it’s not Buddhist, it’s not secular. It’s nothing other than what it is, this unlabeled thing. And I think that scares clergy—they don’t want that. So they turn it down.
And then of course, there’s always a concern that, well maybe you can’t stop it. And that I understand. If you’re trying to run a service and there’s people there, maybe you’re gonna push somebody over the edge and they’re going to have some kind of, go into this kind of spiritual crisis. I get that that could be a concern. But that’s not what I think is actually happening. I think they’re turning it off because they just feel uncomfortable with it altogether.
TS: And are probably—or, one idea would be, afraid of losing control themselves, in the ecstatic experience.
RS: That would be true—yes. I mean, you’re giving them the benefit of the doubt that they could actually have the experience themselves. I think it’s difficult to lead and to have the experience, because the leader is still trying to keep control. But sure. Once you slip into that, then what happens? You don’t have any control.
And the entire—it seems to me, and once again, these are blanket statements, but religion is, in one sense, a way of controlling the ecstatic, controlling God, manipulating the thing so it doesn’t get out of hand. But I want to get out of hand, in a sense; I want to blow the whole thing up from the inside. Not from the outside, like I’m destroying it, but go into it so deeply that it explodes from the inside, from its own ecstatic power.
I mean, just imagine taking Communion—and taking it, in a sense, hyper-literally, but then this is going to lead us to poetry. But you’re taking the body and blood of God into your mouth. Our mouths are one of the most intimate things about us; when we’re little, everything goes in our mouths. That’s how we know the world. And then when we’re older, we restrict what goes into our mouths, and then when we fall in love, our mouth becomes a tool for erotic pleasure. And here, you’re taking in through your mouth the body and blood of God. Now, if that doesn’t lead you to some ecstatic, inner explosion, I don’t know what would. But it doesn’t. Because the ritual keeps it under wraps, or keeps a lid on it so that you can’t have that experience.
Now, I’ve been to Matthew Fox’s cosmic masses, and he spends hours before Communion priming you for the ecstasy of Communion. Actually, I saw it with you, at one of the Sounds True Awakenings. It was amazing. Of course, you can’t do that if you’ve got an hour and then you have to have a second service, and you have to get people in and out—the things that you have to do if you’re having a church, synagogue, mosque community. Ecstasy is crucial in our lives, but society doesn’t want us to have that experience, I think.
TS: Matthew Fox, I would say, is a good example of a holy rascal. Would you agree? He’s a good example people can appreciate.
RS: Oh yes! Absolutely. Matthew is a paradigmatic holy rascal.
TS: OK. I’m going to try to just get one more theme in that you mention in the Magical Mystery Tour, which is your audio series, How to Be a Holy Rascal. Which is, acting as a blessing in the world. How important that is. How do we do it, Rabbi Rami? It’s so important.
RS: Yes. Well, if I knew, I wouldn’t have written a—I would have done it instead of write about it, talk about it. The wording comes from the book of Genesis, chapter 12, verse 3. To me, these are stories, but the wisdom of the story is still there; the story is a vehicle. So in the story, God calls to Abraham and Sarah and says—literally in Hebrew it says “Lech lecha from your land and your country and your parents’ house to a place I will show you,”—and then it goes on for a couple verses—”and you will be a blessing to all the families of the Earth.” So the first part of that, Lech lecha, is usually translated as “go forth” in the English Bible. But “lech” means “to walk” and “lecha” means “into yourself.” It’s an inner journey, freeing yourself from the conditions of—and the Bible only mentions three—of nationality, ethnicity, and parental bias, but we would add gender, religion, and all the other narratives that define us.
So you make this inner journey, free yourself from those narratives, so that when you encounter another being—because this is all the families of the Earth, not all the human families—so when you encounter another being, you do so without conditions, without conditioning. Then what you experience when you see that other being, whether it’s a dog (because you and I love dogs) or a tree or a human being, when you see that being, you’re seeing the nondual in this unique manifestation. And the only thing you can do with regard to that other—well, first of all, you know it’s not really an “other,” but it’s another wave of the Divine, the singular Divine ocean. But what you can do with that encounter, the only thing you can do with that encounter is to act as a blessing, which would mean act in a way that uplifts, honors, defends, feeds the person or the being’s dignity, and does not in any way demean or demonize or diminish the other.
TS: OK Rabbi Rami, I just have one final question for you, which is the importance of holy rascals during this particular time in human history that we’re in, where attendance at religious institutions are down, where the world is obviously in such a state of turmoil, where the environment is under such attack, and the crisis we face in terms of species extinction, [and] global warming. What do you think is the role and importance of the holy rascal now?
RS: I would say a couple of things. This is huge, and we could have spent the whole hour on this. I would say a couple things. To the extent that unhealthy stories are ruining the planet—stories about, humans are on top, and we exploit, we can do whatever we want to the planet, it’s there for our use—stories like that. Stories that lend credence, and not just credence, that give an imprimatur to the destruction of species and the destruction of clean water and clean air, and all this stuff, that part of the holy rascal’s task is to challenge those stories and to say, “Look, the damper has no close. These are just made up for the benefit of whoever made them up,” and that we don’t have to tell those stories anymore. We don’t have to tell stories that otherize or demonize people or the planet. That’s part of it.
Part of it is also, I would say, that there are times of collapse. My sense is that we are in a Kali Yuga; I mean it more narrowly than the Hindu might use the term. I think we are in a time of collapse. I think that there are necessary times, dark night of the soul times, where we are moving to a higher level of consciousness, but to do so, you have to go into the darkness to experience, to cleanse yourself of all the things that are holding us back. In those moments, what we need is this boundless compassion for one another, and I think that humor plays an incredibly important role in those times because humor allows us to shine a light even in the dark. If we can laugh together—even just the biology of true laughter is a kind of kundalini yoga. When you’re really doing that hysterical belly laughing.
Sasaki Roshi once said to me, “Don’t bother with zazen meditation. Don’t bother with Zen meditation. Just get up every morning, sit on the edge of your bed, and start to laugh. Laugh until the laughter is real, and when the tears are rolling down your face, then just get up and go about your day.” There’s something about laughter that allows us to enter into these moments of collapse and darkness without losing our capacity to love.
So I think the rascal is really what’s needed now more than—I don’t want to say more than ever, but definitely, the rascal is needed now, because the rascal can free us from these unhealthy stories, can help us play with symbol and ritual and myth in new ways so we can tell new stories and devise new ways of living them out. The rascal is at the cutting edge of where spirituality is going, and isn’t so concerned with conserving what was, but is more concerned in playfully inventing what might be. So I think it’s very timely.
TS: Rabbi Rami, thank you so much for being such a holy rascal in training, on the path—the holy rascal path. And for helping me in my own holy rascal training.
RS: I appreciate that. Thank you for bringing this stuff out—the audio series, and then the book. I’m very, very grateful for that.
TS: Rabbi Rami Shapiro has released with Sounds True a new, 9-hour audio teaching series called How to Be a Holy Rascal: A Magical Mystery Tour to Liberate Your Deepest Wisdom, Access Radical Compassion, and Set Yourself Free. He is also publishing with Sounds True in the fall of 2017 a new book called Holy Rascals: Advice for Spiritual Revolutionaries. Thanks for the good laughs, Rabbi Rami, and also all the wisdom. I always love talking with you. Thank you so much.
RS: I love talking with you, Tami. Thank you.
TS: SoundsTrue.com: many voices, one journey. Thanks for listening.
