Good Life Project - Rabbi Rami Shapiro | Spiritual, But Not Religious? What’s Really Going On.

Episode Date: September 22, 2022

You’ve heard the call, “I’m not religious, but I am spiritual.” What does that even mean? And, why are so many people running from organized religion, but flocking to some amorphous and ambiguous claim to spirituality that often extends not further than a sense that you yearn for something more? And, is that okay? Or, are we leaving something behind? And, if so, what? Is it a part of ourselves? A sense of wholeness and belonging? How do we reclaim a feeling of connectedness and expansiveness and ease, without also surrendering to the strictures of organized religion that, too often, integrate tribalism, separateness and disconnection from our lived, modern experience?These are the questions we dive into with my guest today, Rabbi Rami Shapiro. Rabbi Rami is an award-winning author of over three dozen books on religion and spirituality, including his latest, Judaism Without Tribalism. In our conversation today, we explore why so many people are leaving organized religion, the distinction between religion and spirituality, the evolution of God and religion, and much more.You can find Rabbi Rami at: WebsiteIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Rabbi Steve Leder about the role of faith and how to share our wisdom with future generations.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKEDVisit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount CodesGoing West: Whether you’re looking for a new true crime podcast that has minimal side-talk or one that focuses on the victim and their story, you have to check out Going West! Going West is a true crime podcast hosted by Portland, Oregon couple Daphne and Heath, and in each episode, they dive into various US-based disappearance and murder cases. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.ClickUp: Save time with the all-in-one productivity platform that brings teams, tasks, and tools together in one place. Sign up today at ClickUp.com & use code GOODLIFE to get 15% off ClickUp's massive Unlimited Plan for a year—meaning you can start reclaiming your time for under $5 a month. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In the 1800s, there was this Rabbi Nachman of Bratislav who said, you cannot love your neighbor until you've made peace with your own dark side. Because until you've done that, until you've owned your own shadow, you're going to project it on your neighbor and hate your neighbor because you're really hating yourself. And that's also part of what we're doing. Can I own my dark side? Not live from it, but at least honor it. So you've heard the call. I've even said it myself. I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual. What does that even mean? And why are so many people running from organized religion, but flocking to some amorphous and ambiguous claim to spirituality

that often extends not further than a sense of yearning for something more. And is that okay? Or are we leaving something behind? And if so, what? Is it a part of ourselves, a sense of wholeness and belonging? How do we reclaim a feeling of connectedness and expansiveness and ease without also surrendering to the strictures of an organized religion that sometimes integrate elements of tribalism, separateness, and disconnection from our lived modern experience? Can we bridge all of these gaps and bring them back together? These are the questions we dive into with my guest today, Rabbi Rami Shapiro. So Rabbi Rami is an award-winning author of over a dozen books on religion and spirituality,

including his newest, Judaism Without Tribalism, and Perennial Wisdom for the Spiritually Independent. He received his rabbinical ordination from the Hebrew Union College Jewish Institute of Religion and a PhD in religion from Union Graduate School. And now, as a congregational rabbi for over two decades, Rabbi Rami is also a professor of religious studies, a rabbinic chaplain with the U.S. Air Force, and the co-director of the One River Foundation. Plus, he's a contributing editor at Spirituality and Health Magazine, where he writes and hosts the magazine's bi-weekly podcast, Spirituality and Health with Rabbi Rami. And in our conversation today, we explore why so many people are leaving organized

religion. Now, I've asked this question of other leading religious scholars, and his lens is very different, provocative, and fascinating to me. We talk about the distinction between religion and spirituality, the evolution of God and religion, and so much more. Regardless of where you fall in your lens on faith, on religion, on spirituality, what tradition you may or may not have been brought up in. This is a deeply engaging, interesting, and open-minded conversation that invites everybody to really re-explore, stepping into some devotion that helps you feel more connected and alive.

So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. A conversation I had with Rabbi Steve later, not too long ago, and we were talking about this phenomenon that has been documented over the last decade or so of people running from faith, from organized religion. Apparently,

the fastest growing group of people are those who consider themselves the non-affiliated. And yet many of those people, when you ask them, are you spiritual? We'll say, yes, I'm very spiritual. I'm just not connected to faith. I'm curious what your take is on what's really happening there. Yeah. My basic assumption is you can't run away fast enough. There is something, I'm overstating it, but there's something intrinsically poisonous about what's happening in organized religion, every religion has its organizational side, where it's really a tribe trying to promote itself at the expense of other tribes. Its truth is the one truth, and everyone else is wrong, and all of that. And more and more people are outgrowing

that whole dynamic. I mean, it's very much a matter of marketing. You know, when you say the Jews are the chosen people, it's like Coca-Cola saying we're the real thing, you know, and all other colas are fake. So people get that. They see through it. Lots of people, anyway, see through it, and they want nothing to do with it. And yet the other part of religion is what the mystics teach. And I think when you look at the teachings of the mystics, you discover what I call perennial wisdom, the fourfold truth of the mystic heart of all religion. And there's no argument there.

There's no one-upmanship there. There's no, we're the chosen, or we're the saved, or we're the true believer, we're the awake. I mean, all that stuff disappears. So I think that people are running away from that. When they take refuge in the word spiritual, though, I don't know if that has any meaning whatsoever. You know, someone says, I'm spiritual but not religious. First of all, I don't like defining oneself in a negative by what you're not. But if you say, I'm spiritual, so what does that mean? To me, spirituality is a practice. It's not a feeling. It's not a buzzword. Spirituality is a set of practices, and you can find them in every religious tradition, that are designed to overcome the ego's sense of alienation and separation and

all the fear and madness that comes with that to the realization, overcoming that separation and awakening to the realization that you and everything else in the universe is a manifesting of, and then fill in the blank, you know, God, the mother, Allah, Brahman, Dharmakaya, you know, Tao, nature, whatever you want to call it, whatever that thing is for you, whatever your language around that non-dual reality is for you, you're a part of it. I mean, that's just as is everything else. Spirituality is the practice of awakening to your true nature as an expression of this infinite non-dual divine reality. So if people are saying I'm spiritual in that I'm either pursuing or I have tasted that realization, then I get spiritual. But if it's just like, I'm spiritual in that I'm either pursuing or I have tasted that realization, then I get

spiritual. But if it's just like, I'm not religious, I'm spiritual. Don't think I'm nothing. I'm spiritual. Then I don't know if spirituality is really the salve that we need at the moment. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting to make the distinction between this spirituality as a quote state versus as a practice or a path or a set of things that you do. Lisa Miller, who does a lot of research actually on how spirituality actually affects the brain, describes, I guess her terminology is spiritual experience.

And similar to you, it's about sort of like awakening to a larger sense of I'm a part of something bigger than me. And it's a set of practices that allow you to relate to that experience that you basically say yes to on a regular basis. And if you come out of a Christian background, then you can practice Brother Lawrence's presence of God or the repetition of the Jesus prayer from the Orthodox Christian tradition.

If you're coming out of Hinduism, you can experience the same thing through nama japa or mantra japa, repeating a sacred name or sacred phrase you can experience the same thing through nama japa or mantra japa, repeating a sacred name or sacred phrase. Judaism has the same thing, as does Islam, Buddhism. Every tradition has its methodology for the spiritual awakening. But most people, this is very judgmental, but I guess I'm in that mood. But most people, when they say they're spiritual but not religious, aren't doing a practice either, or it's sort of half-hearted. Real spirituality, to say I'm spiritual, should be the equivalent of saying I'm devoted to this non-dual reality, awakening to this in, with, and as, this non-dual reality.

It's not a hobby. Religion can be a hobby, but spirituality should not be a hobby. It's a complete dedication of your life to awakening. And if you're doing anything less, maybe we should find a better word. Yeah. Let's talk about that word awakening. From what to what? Yeah, so I think you awaken from the delusion of separateness. Alan Watts used to talk about, we look at ourselves and we think that we end at our dermis. This is me. What I see in the mirror is me. And that's false. I mean, there is no me without the entire universe.

When you look at the amazing photographs that are coming to Earth from the Webb Space Telescope, I've had people say to me, I feel so small when I'm looking at those photographs. And I say, I'm feeling so big. That's me. It's a giant mirror image of my truer nature. So awakening from that narrow mind, in Judaism it's called mochin de katnut, narrow mind to mochin de gadlut, spacious mind, awakening from the sense that I am this separate, alienated being to realizing I'm part of the entire universe and beyond. So that's what you're awakening from, that narrowness to that spaciousness. So when you talk about non-dualism, is that essentially what we're talking about here?

Yeah, I think so. Non-dualism is tricky because we're so used to dualistic thinking and we use our language in dualistic ways. So if I pit non-duality against duality, I'm in duality. So language ultimately breaks down and you have to just be quiet. But my understanding is if everything is part of this one thing, the narrow mind, mochim dekatnut, is part of it also. So it's not like something is wrong that I'm, you know, my narrow mind is wrong. It's just my narrow mind is narrow and there's a bigger reality out there. So it's not that you shift from one state to another

and leave the first behind as if you could jettison it. It's realizing that my egoic state and my whatever you want to call spacious mind state, they're all part of an even greater reality called an X, whatever you want to call it. But it's non-dual. There's nothing outside of it. It's all that is. It's funny, as you were sharing that, I had this kind of a funny, surprising image appear to me, which is, I think it was Zorba with that famous quote, the full catastrophe. Yeah, right. Yeah, it's like all of it. Just yes. It's just yes. Who wrote that? It's a great book, Full Catastrophe Living.

Jon Kabat-Zinn. Yeah, Jon Kabat-Zinn. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is really interesting. And I think we get so hung up on language and trying to make distinctions and make clear often what is actually really difficult to use language to make clear, let alone whether the concepts themselves actually are even remotely binary to start with. But we just,

we have this need like to actually identify and make, you know, like if this is black and white, like we're like preternaturally feel violated by the notion of quote, having to live our lives in the gray rather than feeling invited to the sense of possibility that that brings us. Yeah. I mean, we like the binary for whatever reason. Albert Einstein in the 1950s, maybe 51, 52, he had a letter published in the New York Times. And in the letter, he spoke about what he called the optical delusion of consciousness. And when he went on to explain it, the delusion was that you and I are not simply unique, but separate. You and I can be unique expressions of this singular, non-dual reality, but we're not separate from it, and therefore we're not separate from one another. And he called it an optical delusion because he said it's based on our biology. The way our eyes

are situated in our head, I see myself over here and you're over there. And that is fundamentally a misreading of reality, that we're not separate. We're all part of the same happening. So again, it's tricky, but because of our biology, because of our psychology, because the way we're trained to be in one silo or another and to be afraid of those in different silos. Jews afraid of Muslims and Jews afraid of Christians and Christians afraid of Muslims and Buddhists and all the rest of it. So we're conditioned to be in these silos, but that's all training. Someone had to teach us. My wife and my sister were both preschool teachers for their decades. That was their career.

And they taught four-year-olds. And four-year-olds don't know about this siloed thing. They have to be taught, no, you're a Christian. Don't forget that. And they're not. So don't think they're the same as you. They don't get the differences. Someone has to teach them to them.

And I mean, religion does a good job at that, though it's a terrible thing to teach. It'd be so much better to say, look, everyone is unique. And there are all these different ways to discover the oneness of things or the non-duality of things. Let's celebrate the Christian way of doing it. And let's celebrate the Muslim way of doing it. Let's not panic that there are Christians and Muslims and Jews and Hindus and Taoists and atheists and all the rest of it. I mean, no one complains about the diversity of roses, but we complain about the diversity of people. And it's very scary to me.

So that, I mean, the thing that I want to know, and that I think a lot of us have really been trying to explore for in a lot of ways is why, you know, why. Why is this trained into us at the earliest age in nearly every domain of life, whether it's faith, politics, wealth, any other identifier or category? Because if something sustains in humanity for generation after generation after generation, and in fact becomes reinforced within culture, you've got to assume that it's serving some role, not necessarily a constructive humanizing role, but it's serving a purpose. My curiosity is why, if when you really deconstruct this, it just appears so destructive, both individually and collectively, why does it keep sustaining? Why do we keep repeating the pattern of ingraining this sense of separateness

and sometimes classes and better than and less than? I mean, I don't have the answer to these things, but I have thoughts about it. It may be on one level that we want to belong and we can only belong to, we can only befriend a certain number of people. I forget what the number is. It's like 150 people. 150 people. So you want to find your 150 and that's your tribe and then you feel comfortable with them. And maybe you want to defend them against other groups of 150. I mean, that may be part of it. But I really think it's more evil than that. anyone in particular, but that people can make a lot of, they can garnish a lot of power and a lot of wealth and a lot of control by convincing people that are in a certain silo that those

wealthy, powerful, controlling people run. They don't want to lose their position. They want to keep their power. And the best way to do that is to scare the crap out of the people that are in their silo, keeping them away from everyone else. There was a church I went to near where I live. I used to teach at the university, Middle Tennessee State University, and I was teaching religion. And my students would often recommend I go with them to church on Sunday, different churches, because there were new churches popping up. And I went to this one church, and it was student-oriented,

undergraduate-oriented, a lot of video, great band, great music. The kids were encouraged to make their own videos, and they would play them before the service began. And I could see this absolutely speaks to them. And then the pastor came out, and he started preaching. And it was horrifying. He told these kids that they cannot have friends who are part of this church. And if their parents don't support the church, they have to cut themselves off from their parents. And he just went on and on isolating the kids from their larger community at the university, but their families there, just isolating them, which makes them afraid. and then being able to come out and say, but you're okay because you're with me and I'll take care of you. And we hear that politically. There's a lot of men and women, and it's not

exclusively men, but I would say it's mostly men. There are a lot of con men out there in every religion trying to gain control over other people, and you do it through fear. So the reason it gets perpetuated is because you can hand on the power structure, you can hand on the control, and therefore you hand on the means of control, which is instilling fear. I mean, it's part of the patriarchy. It's the madness of humanity, and it doesn't go away. It's very hard to break. And then you get people who do try to break it, Jesus, let's say, for one, and they get crucified. But he's not the only one. You could look at the Sufi Mansur al-Halaj, who came out and had this mystical experience and announced to the community, al-haq, I am truth, which is like saying I and the Father are one. It's the

same idea. And they killed him. So there are these people who have these breakthroughs, but they don't fit into society because society is run by these other people who don't want that message out there. But it still gets out there. I mean, there are people right now on every tradition and none around the globe who are preaching this perennial wisdom. I didn't define it before I just mentioned it. Let me just take a second. It's very quick.

There are four points to perennial wisdom. The first one is everything is an expression of the one thing. Call it Krishna, call it Christ, call it whatever you want to call it. But everything is an extension or an expression of this non-dual reality. Number two, human beings have the capacity, innate capacity, to awaken in, with, and as that greater reality. We've been talking about those two things so far. The third point of the four is that when you have this awakening, you also find yourself inwardly moved toward compassion. What the Hebrew Bible or the Bible calls in Genesis 12, verse 3, being a blessing to all the families of the earth,

following the golden rule, that kind of thing. Just coming from you. It's not a God outside saying, you must do this. It's just, I get it. We are all brothers and sisters, whether we're talking humans, plants, animals, insects. We're all part of this incredible family. And I can only treat you with justice and kindness and respect and dignity. And then the fourth point is awakening to your true nature as an expression of the divine and acting in a godly manner.

Together, comprise your highest calling as a human being. And there are people all around the planet doing it in different languages and articulating it in ways that reflect the traditions out of which they come, even science traditions, so it doesn't have to be religion, but reflecting the traditions out of which they come. And their message is vital if humanity is going to thrive. I mean, we're in this horrible, dark night of human civilization, and it's going to get worse. And I think our only way out is to embrace this perennial wisdom in one form or another. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here.

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Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him them y'all need a pilot flight risk when i hear the the you know the four pillars i'm nodding along saying yes yes yes yes it just makes intuitive sense this is the way to be like this is the way that we come together this is the way that we come together. This is the way that we see each other's humanity. And yet part of that is also, and tell me if this lands as true to you, is accepting a worldview that also says, I cannot control a lot of my existence that says that there's a certain amount of uncertainty within which I live. And as the stakes rise, that becomes a brutalizing experience for so many of us because we are utterly unequipped to be able to breathe in that reality, especially if it goes on for more than a hot minute.

We've certainly seen the last couple of years how it's affected us. A lot of us turn to that. I think you kind of refer to them as the spokespeople who would say, these are the rules if you want to be able to breathe again. In part, because just as human beings, we're ill-equipped to live into the assumptions of stepping into the day every morning, not knowing. So we want the rules and we're willing to give a certain amount of freedom and surrender a certain amount of belief in the name of you tell me what to do and if I do it, life will be certain. I don't like it, but I agree with you, right? That people are afraid of not having rules. They're afraid of not following somebody. They always want, and it's usually a big father figure, whether it's God or the guru, they always want someone to tell them what to do. But when you

listen to what they tell you what to do, it's so narrow and it almost always includes, and let's hate these people, right? I want you to love this group, but I want you to hate that group. Don't mingle with them and maybe arm yourself against them. And they're the enemy. But yeah, people are not equipped for the kind of freedom that's necessary for humanity to really flourish. I don't want to make this too simplistic, but American democracy is fading. I mean, it's only been a truer democracy since 1964 with the Civil Rights Act. But that's crumbling. Part of it is because people aren't made for democracy, right? People aren't made for freedom. That's a lot of work. We'd much rather just go about our day and being told what to do and rake in whatever money we're

given for doing it and not worry too much about the larger picture or even about the people who are suffering around us. We just, we blot it out. So, yeah, that is a problem. I don't know if there's a solution, but maybe the idea or the hope is that you don't need everybody to do this. You just need, you know, the hundredth monkey kind of idea that that's a metaphor, not a reality. But you need to hit a tipping point. You need a certain number of people on the planet to be awake and to act from that awakening in a way that promotes justice and equality and compassion and all that.

And maybe we can reach that. But no, most people are never going to get it. Most people are going to stick with their silos. But if the culture, if the broader culture no longer respects the notion of power and control, the silos will soften. I said this, within every tradition, there are these great mystics and their practices. It saddens me when I go, for example, I go to a lot of churches, I give talks, and I love Catholicism. And I studied with Father Thomas Keating since 1984 until his death. I loved the man.

I loved his tradition. I was never a Catholic. I'm not a Christian. But I learned so much about Christian mystics. And when I go to a church, even a Catholic church, and they've never heard of Julian of Norwich or Hildegard of Bingen or Meister Eckhart or any of these amazing Christian mystics. It's like, who robbed them of their religion? And it's the priests, it's the hierarchy, it's the controlling people. And they do that because mystics

are hard to control, right? When you realize it's all God, it's very hard to bring those people into a little box and say, yeah, but this is the real, you know, we've got the real thing here. You say, that's just, your God is too small. It just doesn't work that way. But that requires an effort on the part of people that most people, and this is not a criticism, it's just an observation. Most people are too busy trying to put food on the table than to become forest-dwelling monks and try to have some kind of awakening. Yeah. I mean, the mystics in nearly any tradition that I'm aware of, at least, are largely, if not entirely, unconcerned about the preservation of the institution. That's how I read it, too.

I don't know if that's true, but that's my experience also. And certainly, I haven't read every mystic, but the few that I've been exposed to, the teachings are remarkably similar across every tradition. Not only are they not unconcerned with the institution, they don't acknowledge or even function around the notion that there is an institution to preserve. Yeah, no, I get what you're saying. I can't remember the guy's name, just went out of my head, but he's one of the great Gnostic gospel scholars. Maybe he'll come to me, maybe he won't. But I went to one of his lectures and someone asked him why, for example, the Gospel of Thomas, which was written around the same time as John, why the Gospel of Thomas

is not included in the canonical gospospels. And his response was amazing. He said, look at the Gospel of Thomas, and you'll discover you can't build an institution on it. Jesus starts the Gospel by saying, anyone who figures out what the hell I'm saying will not die, right? You go into that big mind that is eternal. And then it just becomes a series of koan, you know, Jesus' koan study that you try to crack on your own. But there's no Peter that's a rock. There's no church. There's no priesthood.

There's no apostles. It's just you wrestling with the teachings of Jesus. Anyone can do that, and you don't need a church. So the editor, you know, the people who compiled the gospel said, well, we you don't need a church. So the editor, the people who compiled the gospel said, well, we're trying to build a church here. We don't want a text that's going to take people out. We want texts that bring people in. So they didn't include Gospel of Thomas. And that's probably true with lots of books that could be part of a sacred canon in different traditions.

If you can't use them to your advantage as the controlling power, you really don't want those books around. Sort of certain going back to the early part of the conversation, the question I posed to you, part of what's happening with this fleeing of organized religion is people not understanding what they want, but starting to realize what they don't want. And part of what they don't want is this sense that we're talking about of other people telling us how to perceive, like that the institution matters most and also how to, that there's an in crowd, that there are people that we are with and for and people that we

are not with and against. And it's reaching that almost like critical mass that you described earlier that says like, enough people are normalizing the experience of walking away from that so that others are saying, oh, so this is walk away a bull. But again, your point earlier, I think it's just so important,

which is that what are you walking to? Because just saying that I'm spiritual yet not religious doesn't actually mean that. Right. I'd like to talk about what you're walking to, but let me just add something else about why people are leaving. I think they're bored. And so one of the responses to boring on the part of the organization is to make it more hip and cool, right? So you do a lot of praise music and you do sort of pop music light. It's all about Jesus music. Or you do a lot of synagogues. All the great cantorial work has been replaced with camp songs that you sang maybe when you went to summer camp when you were a kid. They try to make it relevant.

If you're trying to make your religion relevant, you're losing. Spirituality is always relevant because it's awakening to your true nature. What people are walking to is the unknown. I mean, I could fill it in and say, oh, you're walking to a sense of oneness and to the non-dual, but that's sort of cheap because the more honest thing to say is you're walking into the unknown and the unknowable because whatever we're talking about is really beyond language. I love the story in Genesis 12, verses 1 to 3, where God calls to Abraham and Sarah and says, you know, get out of your country, get out of your culture, get out of your parents'

house, and go to a place I will show you. And then God never shows them. It's like, just go. And the way the Bible has it starts with your country, and then your kinfolk, and then your parents' house. And the rabbis say, that's backwards. If I'm taking a journey, the first thing I do is leave my parents, and then I leave my neighborhood, and then I leave my country. Why is it the other way around? And their response is because the Bible puts it in terms of difficulty. It's easiest to leave my nationality. If I have to, I can become a Canadian, right? If it gets that bad, you can become a Canadian, you can move somewhere else. It's a little more difficult, but still easier than the third to leave your culture.

And then the hardest one to leave is your parents' house, the mindset that your parents gave you. That requires some serious therapy, psychotherapy. So the point is this journey in chapter 12, 1 to 3 in Genesis, is both an outer journey and an inward journey. But the end of the journey isn't really a place. The end of the journey is a state of being, or use Ken Wilber, you're in Boulder, so we'll use Ken Wilber, a trait, which is the trait of being a blessing to all the people of the earth, so the way you live. And that's what you're moving toward, is being a vehicle for justice, for compassion, for godliness, but rooted not in some socioeconomic political philosophy, but rooted in your experience of the divine as everything. That's the direction. But how it plays out in your life, you don't know. That's what makes it interesting. I mean,

if you knew, why bother living? If you knew how it was going to turn out. I mean, it's like going to the movie and watching the same movie over and over again, eventually going, you knew, why bother living if you knew how it was going to turn out? I mean, it's like going to the movie and watching the same movie over and over again, eventually going, you know, I think I'll stay home because I know how it turns out. I don't really need to sit through this again. So we don't know how it turns out. And that's what makes it interesting. But the bigger direction, you know, if we're looking at a, make a distinction between map and compass, we don't have a map. It's not like I know, turn right here, turn left there, I'm going to end up in point X, but it's a compass. The compass says I'm moving toward awakening to non-duality. I'm moving toward greater justice and greater compassion and capacity to treat people with more and more dignity, not just people, all beings. And you

move in that direction and you don't know what's going to happen, let alone tomorrow, in the next few minutes. And living with that not knowing is part of the genius of spirituality because it allows for all the angst that comes from not knowing and says, but it's part of the process. This is the way reality is. Religion removes any not knowing, right? It'll say, oh, we can't really define God, but God is X, and this is what God wants. And so there's really no doubt. If you believe in a specific religion, there's no question about not knowing. You know the God you believe in, the God you're taught to believe in, and you know what your leaders tell you that God wants. So there's no hesitation.

There's no wonder. There's no surprise. There's no anxiety around not knowing because they told you in advance. It's a map. It's not a compass. Spirituality is a compass. And again, that either attracts people or says, oh, no, no, give me a map. I don't want that. Yeah. I mean, it's like we trade wonder for certainty.

And without really ever questioning what we're losing in that bargain. Yeah. We just know that we feel a little bit more comfortable, a little bit more at ease, but we never really ask with this concept of God? How are we defining it or redefining it? And this is part of what you've been exploring in your reimagining of Judaism, but also the concept of God itself as something different than what is often handed down in more traditional forms of organized religion. Yeah. I mean, the God of organized religion, regardless of the name of that God, is a projection of the people in charge of the organized religion, right? And what that God wants is always what the people in charge want. And it's always to the benefit of whatever the in-group is. So, you know, theology is an

interesting thing. I'm curious about theology, but theologians have a strange job. They start out with the answer. It's like Jeopardy. It's like the game show Jeopardy. They have the answer. The answer is Krishna. The answer is Christ. The answer is Jewish people. The answer is whatever. They start out with the answer, and then they come up with questions for which their answer fits. That's why the Jews are never going to discover, rabbis will never discover, that the chosen people are the Hopi tribe, right? It's going to be the Hebrew people. They're never going to say, no, sorry, we were wrong. It was the Hopi. The Catholic theologian or any Christian Trinitarian theologian is never going to discover that the Trinity is, you know, Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva,

you know, maybe with the exception of Bede Griffiths, you know, the Catholic monk who lived in India. But they're just going to find their own thing. They have the answer, and they're going to have a question that will fit that answer. So, we've got to get away from that. I mean, I also define God because I'm writing books and I don't like using words where you don't know what I mean when I use them. So I explain when I use the word God, I'm talking about reality with a capital R or the source and substance of reality because God could be even greater than what you and I know is reality. But that's about all I can say about it. God isn't Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, etc. God is reality.

I love St. Paul's definition in the book of Acts of God, where Paul says, God is that in whom we live and move and have our being. That's like saying God is Tao. Comfortable with that. I can live with that. But again, Tao isn't Taoist or any other. You can't put an adjective on these things. So you have to live with the fundamental unknowing. But you can have definitions that are more dangerous and definitions that are less dangerous. The more dangerous definitions are those who reduce God to some patriarchal, parochial, anthropomorphized being who loves some and damns others. I mean, that's a very dangerous idea. And you can have a more constructive idea of God, which I think mine is, that God is reality itself. God is what's good. God is what's bad. I mean, I was just at a church and I was talking

about non-duality. That was the theme of the weekend. And yet at our worship services, they were just thanking God for goodness. And I got up to talk afterwards and I said, you know, we have to thank God for evil. If you imagine God is good, then you end up having to invent Satan to carry all the evil. And then you project Satan on the people you don't like and say, those are the Satanists of our time and those are the evil people and we have to get rid of them. It's just, when you fail to have a non-dual deity, you end up with a lot of madness, and that's where we are. If you look at, just real quick, I'm in there, you look at the book of Lamentations where it says, nothing good or bad happens unless God wills it. You look at Job chapter 2, verse 10, where Job says we have to accept the good

and the bad from God. And Isaiah 45, 7, where Isaiah hears God say, I create light, I create darkness, I fashion good, I fashion evil, I, God, do all these things. Those are some of the most honest statements in the Hebrew Bible, and they are true. Everything is a manifesting of this one reality. Not just what one reality, not just what you like, not just what you call good, but everything. Just the other day, we had a potential mass shooting. I think he only killed two people at the Safeway somewhere. I apologize to the people involved, and I can't remember the town at the moment. But this 20-year-old guy with an assault-style weapon went

in with Molotov cocktails in his car trunk and all this other stuff. And he was going to kill as many people as possible, but he was slowed down by a man, a 60-year-old employee of the store. And then the police came and the guy shot himself. But that guy is no less a manifesting of the divine than the guy who tried to stop him. Saints and sinners, it's all the same happening. And then you have to say, well, why is that? Why is God also evil? And the answer from a non-dual perspective is God has to be all possibility. So, it's not that God chooses someone to be evil. It's that evil has to manifest. And, you know, so many people are going to get cancer.

God doesn't decide whom, who is going to get it. Just so many people are going to get it. And that's just the way the universe is structured. So to thank God just for the good and not to be grateful for the whole thing, that is a very limited perspective that I think is misleading. making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X,

available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun, you know, in the context of if you view God not just as the sort of embodied manifestation of a particular set of instructions, but as basically says, okay, so if we see it that way, that biological construct you were talking about earlier between me and you and everybody else, that kind of dissolves. It has to dissolve to a certain extent, even though our eyes let us see another being as other.

But there's this other idea of if we grow and evolve as individuals, does then that invite us to consider the possibility that God, that this consciousness grows and evolves and learns and morphs over time as well? Because that alone is probably some level of heresy in different traditions. Yeah. I mean, that's process theology. God is also evolving. I mean, I don't have an answer to that, but you can make a case if you and I and all other beings are manifestings of God and we evolve, then God evolves. So you could make that case. Or you could say, look, we're talking about some ultimate consciousness toward which we're all like the omega point, TR de Chardin, omega point, we're all moving toward it.

Does the omega point evolve? I mean, I don't know. On the one hand, those are such rarefied questions, which I love talking about, but they're not necessarily relevant to the, what do I do today? Do I do my mantra today? Do I? But you could also say, I'm just thinking along with you, I have in my head positive thoughts and negative thoughts. I mean, I have feelings that I honor and try to live by

and feelings that I really want to just, okay, they're there, but I don't want to embody them. And maybe that's what this is too, that God includes all these things, that all these things are in the divine. We're part of the divine. We have all these things. In Judaism, it's called yetzer hato, the inclination for goodness, and yetzer hara, the inclination for evil. You've got them both. The question is, I forget the phrase about you have two wolves, and the question is, which wolf do you feed? So which side of yourself do you feed? And the Jewish ideal is to take what we would call the negative side and to put it in service to the positive side. You don't want to say, you can't cut a part of you off.

I mean, if anyone's listening and they're in a 12-step program, I'm in 12-step. And you never say, I'm a recovered anything. You know, I'm recovering. But more than that, I honor my addiction. I mean, it's part of me. It's shaped me for good or evil. I mean, you could say it's a horrible thing, and yet it got me into 12-step, and that's been a very good thing.

So I want to honor my addiction, my cravings, my madness, my dark side, my shadow side. I just don't want to live from that. I just want to recognize it. There's in the Bible, in the book of Leviticus, 1918, I think, if I got my chapter verse right, where it says, you'll love your neighbor as yourself. The Hebrew is, ve'ahavta, and you shall love. L're'echa, your neighbor. K'mocha, as yourself. It doesn't say, you'll love your neighbor as you love yourself. That's Oprah. That's not Torah. But it says you have to love your neighbor as

a part of yourself to recognize you and your neighbor are part of this greater reality. In the 1800s, there was this Rabbi Nachman of Bratislav who said, because the Hebrew Bible is written without vowels, it's just a convention, how you breathe the words, how you vowelize them. He said, you know, you could read the sentence differently. You could say, ve'ahavta nishalav, instead of l'rei echa, your neighbor, you could say l'ra echa, your dark side, your shadow, your evil, kamocha, as a part of yourself. And he goes on to say, you cannot love your neighbor until you've made peace with your own dark side. Because until you've done that, until you've owned your own shadow, you're going to project it on your neighbor and hate your neighbor because you're really hating yourself. So it's a way before Jung, but it's very Jungian insight. And that's also part of what we're doing. Can I own my dark side? Not live from it, but at least honor it. It's such a powerful starting place.

I mean, that particular verse also is interesting to me. When I hear it, love your neighbor as you would love yourself. Part of me also thinks, but you're making an assumption there, which is that they want to be loved the way that you would love yourself. Right. But it doesn't say that, right? It doesn't say love your neighbor as you would love yourself. It just says love your neighbor as yourself. So, you know, but yeah, the neighbor

may not want to be loved at all, right? Or differently. Well, right. I mean, you don't even know. I mean, that's why the rabbinic definition of what it would mean to love just means to treat your neighbor with respect and don't rob them of dignity,

treat them justly, compassionately, as opposed to coming up with something more concrete, because you don't know what they want. That's the difference between the Jewish golden rule of Rabbi Hillel, don't do what is hateful to you, don't do to somebody else, versus Jesus's positive rendition comes a generation later, where Jesus says, do unto others what you would want them to do unto you. It seems to me that Hillel's is less open to error. If I'm going to do to you what I wish you would do to me, then I'm imposing what I like on you. Maybe you don't like it. But if I know that what I hate, I shouldn't do to you because chances are we both hate being lied

to. We both hate being, you know, whatever, exploited. So, you know, there's room for discussion with all these things, but yeah, it's a challenge. It is interesting. And, you know, you've referenced this notion of centering reality. We're trying to awaken to our true nature and also to the reality of like nature around us, you know, which begs the question, how do we get as clear? How do we see as clearly as possible? How do we remove the illusion, the delusion, like the, the veils that stop us from seeing, seeing our own true nature, but also seeing the true nature of those around us, the world around us.

When you think about a lot of Eastern traditions, Buddhism comes to mind, for example. So many of the day-to-day practices are about that very thing. These are the practices that you, yes, they both just help you move through each day in a more useful way. But fundamentally, what they're trying to do is strip away that which does not allow you to see more clearly the nature of reality, yours internally and also externally around you. That's a lot of work. And you see those practices build into Buddhism and other Eastern traditions in a way where, and again, I may be ignorant to the existence of those practices and more

Western-based traditions, but at least in my sort of like fairly rudimentary experience, I don't see that level of devotion or practical things to do to step into and see reality more clearly. What's your take on that? A couple of things. And one, we have to be very careful about how we define these things. So even saying the nature around us, there is no around. I mean, we're it. We are part of this natural reality. But that's why spirituality is so much work. And that's why I question when people say, I'm spiritual, but not religious. Are you spending that kind of effort trying to look beyond the veils, the things that alienate us from one

another? And there is a practice in Judaism. Well, there's this guy from the mid-20th century, Emmanuel Levinas, a French Jewish philosopher. He was in the French resistance against the Nazis, ended up in a concentration camp. He came out and he's got a lot of – his philosophy is very rich, way beyond me. But there's one thing that I think I understand and I find very helpful. It's called the philosophy of the face. And he says, and he's only talking about people, but I'm going to fix that in a second. He says, when you truly see the face of another human being, not the mask, it's a white person, it's a trans person, it's a cisgender person, it's a Jew, it's a Gentile.

But you don't see the mask, but you see the actual face. You're seeing the face of God and you're inwardly, I don't know if the word is compelled, but let's say you're inwardly moved toward doing that person no harm, to being a blessing, put it more positively. Martin Buber, who's a contemporary of Levinas, I think broadens it a little bit where he says that, you know, when I truly see another's face, whether it's the face of an animal, he talks about looking at a tree, another human being, I ultimately will see the face of God in all of these things. And there's a practice in Judaism from Psalm 16. Don't hold me to that. It's in the Psalms.

There's a line in the Psalms that says, which means I place the divine in front of me always. Whatever I see, I'm seeing God. And that can become a mantra practice so that when you're going through your day and you're wandering around and you see trees and you see animals and you see people, and if you just consciously say, and I'll just do it in English, you know, I place the divine before me. So I'm seeing God, you know, as this being that I'm approaching, dog, person, whatever it is, that you transform the way you interact with that person because you're seeing God. It's very similar to when Hindus greet each other with namaste.

You know, I bow to the divine. So it's very similar. It's just from a different tradition. But who teaches that? I didn't get that when I was growing up in an Orthodox synagogue. No one taught me anything like that. They told me, this is what you can eat. This is what you can't eat. This is how you dress. This is how you don't dress. This is how you pray. These are the words you use, all of that, which a lot of it has stuck with me because it's sort of ingrained. And I find value. I keep kosher, though not the way my parents did. But I take the value of kosher, which is rooted in two traditional teachings, not to cause harm to animals and not to waste anything. So I

see kosher today as the act of elevating all of my consumption, food and otherwise, to the highest ethical and moral environmental standard that I can muster. So I don't eat meat. But anyway, the point is this idea of the face, no one taught me that, but that would have been a great thing, I think, to teach a little kid. You know, maybe, I mean, I have a six and a half year old grandson. Maybe even he could grasp it. But certainly, if you're training for, you know, 12 years old, 11, 12 years old, you're training to become a bar or a bat mitzvah. Why isn't that part of the training?

Instead of this is what you read and this is all the tribal things to do. Here's something that comes out of the Jewish tradition. So it is tribal. It's part of our tribe's heritage. And yet it's got this universal value. Why don't we learn that? But that's not my experience anyway. Yeah. It reminds me a lot of loving kindness meditation, metta meditation. I remember talking to Sharon Salzberg a number of years back and we were back in New York City recording then. And she was telling me that on her way, she had walked over from her hotel to a studio and she's saying as she was walking down the street, she's just looking at each stranger as they pass, kind of looking at their face, looking them in their eyes and thinking to herself, like, may you be well. And the next person comes by, may you be happy. The next person comes by, may you live with ease. And it changes the quality of just the way that she feels, the way that she exists, her sense of connectedness, both to her own humanity and also to these absolute random

strangers just walking down the street in New York City. It's a tremendous practice, whether you call it shiviti from Judaism or metapractice in Buddhism. I was once, I run, I'm the host of the Spirituality and Health Magazine podcast. I had the good fortune to interview the Tibetan Buddhist, Matthew Ricard, the French Tibet Buddhist. And we were talking one time about his book on rescuing animals. I said, yeah, I get it. I get be kind to cows, be kind to dogs, cats, horses. But what about ants? I said, what about ants? Because I was having an ant problem in my bathroom. And he said, because what I was doing is I was solving my problem by killing the ants

with my finger. And he said, when you go to kill the ant, what does the ant do? And the ant, a lot of them seem to realize, whoa, this is the ant, and they make a run for it. And he says, these are sentient creatures. If you can see, he didn't say their face, but in Levinas terms, if I could see the face of the ant, if I can see the divinity manifesting as this ant, he says, you won't be able to kill them. It was true. That was the last, unless it was by accident because I tried to sweep them up and throw them out. So sometimes I accidentally kill them. But I no longer deliberately go after them.

I'm not good with mosquitoes. Mosquito is getting me. I slap it dead before I even think about it. But he was giving me the same teaching from his perspective, but it was the same universal teaching. See who the other is. Truly see who the other is or see who the other truly is. And you won't have the violence that we normally have because you won't have the fear. And I guess you could say that that practice is one of a number of different practices that return us to our true nature, which is, as you described earlier, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, compassion and service.

Yeah. I mean, that's how it's lived out. Somebody just wrote me from my column at Spirituality Health, how do you know that I'm spiritual? How does someone else know? And I said, you know, a couple of things. I said, one is the level of compassion you manifest. And I said, the other is how do you spend your money? I said, look at your checkbook.

You know, if it's all about buying yourself stuff, maybe you have some work to do and you can support other people or other causes that aren't self-serving. But it's not hard to figure out what it is. It's hard to figure out. It's hard to do. Not even you could figure it out, but how to do it or to actually do it. That's the challenge. That's the hard part. And it is hard. Yeah. A hundred percent. It's just thinking about how you spend your money. Also, it's immediately Rambam's ladder came to mind and I'm thinking, but one of the highest, I don't think it's the highest level, but the second highest level, it was anonymous giving. Yeah.

Highest level is giving somebody a job and then it goes giving anonymously where they don't know who you are and you don't know who they are. You know? So it's like, even if you're giving at the next to highest level, it's not because you want to be known for giving. Yeah. In my synagogue growing up, there was a standing joke during the High Holy Days. They would make a pitch for money, and people would have pre-donated.

They already committed to a certain amount. It's Orthodox Jewish, let's be anonymous. And they would get up and say, Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz have anonymously donated $5,000. You know, and all the adults are going, yeah, okay. But the kids are going, oh, the hypocrisy, you know. I remember that like in school donations, you know, like there would always be a page on like the thing after like all the parents gave and it would list every parent that had given. And so by default, like you're naming every parent that hadn't. Yeah, right. You know, but it was completely anonymous.

Like you don't have to do this, but we're going to shame you by negative. Right, right. Exactly. We are strange as people. We've talked about a lot of the ideas and certainly you've written much more deeply about them and especially your latest book. There's something that you shared, I think it was in one of the appendices in the book also that kind of raised my eyebrow that I thought was kind of interesting. This was in the advice for congregational rabbis and you invited them to be fire worthy.

Yeah, to be worthy of being fired, right? Yeah, I don't know if this is still true, but when I was coming up in the rabbinic world, it was an open secret that when rabbis were in their mid-50s, the congregation was already looking to see how they're going to get rid of them. This is not across the board, but this is a lot of people experience this. And the reason is, one, you're at the height of your salary. So, you know, you're spending a lot of money. Two, they think you're going to retire and you'll be emeritus and you're still going

to get paid for doing nothing. So they don't want that. So they find a way to get rid of you. And they usually say, well, you don't relate to the children. As if Judaism were just about relating, you know, it's just a preschool. So they find a way to get rid of you. My sense was, they're going to fire you. Now, you know, that chapter is supposed to be funny, but not false, but also very humorous.

So yeah, they're going to fire you. Be fireworthy. Say something bold. Say something radical. You know, one of the things I put in there was to add Jesus to the prayer list, to the Yort site list, the list of people who died on the Friday night or Saturday of whatever week it is. You know, so Good Friday, it always falls on Friday. And so why not add Jesus's name to the memorial list on Friday? Because he's the most famous Jew who ever lived,

and that's when he died. I mean, I would do that, but still it's tongue-in-cheek. But that could get you fired. But that's a good reason to get fired. So yeah, I think you have to make yourself fireworthy. Be willing to rattle the cage that they put you in. Yeah, you certainly take that with the humorous intent. And at the same time, many truth is said in jest, right? And at the same time, it's not just for rabbis. This is about when we all think about how we're going to live our lives. How do we step into it from a place of honesty and integrity and in service of and compassion? And be Jewish enough to be hated by those who hate Jews. Just don't be passive about it. And then they discover you're Jewish and suddenly they hate you. I mean, do something that honors your tradition so that if someone turns on you because you're a Jew, at least you're a Jew and not just someone whose parents are Jewish.

It's like happen to life rather than just let it happen to you. Yeah, right. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So in this container of good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? Life of compassion and justice toward others. That's the first thing that comes up. And then I would say a life of compassion for yourself too, because we're all bozos

on this bus as Firesign Theater taught us. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, say that you will also love the conversation us. Thank you. follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven second favor and share it maybe on social or by text or by email, even just with one person, just copy the link from the app you're using and tell those, you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen. Then even invite them to talk about what you've both

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