The One You Feed - Rabbi Rami Shapiro

Episode Date: August 12, 2015

[powerpress] This week we talk to Rabbi Rami Shapiro about perennial wisdomRabbi Rami Shapiro is an award-winning author, poet, essayist, and educator whose poems have been anthologized in over a dozen volumes, and whose prayers are used in prayer books around the world. Rami received rabbinical ordination from the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion and holds both Ph.d. and D.D. degrees. He has created a synagogue, worked as a management consultant for Fortune 500 companies, and got initiated into the Ramakrishna Order of Vedanta.In addition to writing over 30 books, Rami writes a regular column for Spirituality and Health magazine called “Roadside Assistance for the Spiritual Traveler” He also host his own podcast Essential Conversations with Rabbi Rama.Our Sponsor this Week is Spirituality and Health Magazine. Click here for your free trial issue and special offer.  In This Interview Rabbi Rami and I Discuss...The One You Feed parable.How the good wolf can teach the bad wolfWhy Rabbi Rami is a JewHow wisdom comes out of dialogueThe importance of thinking critically & paradoxicallyThe four components of perennial wisdomThe idea of spiritual maturityThe role of Believing in Something vs. Experiencing Something For more show notes visit our websiteSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I have lots of thoughts during the day that would land me in jail if I acted on them. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like

why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Our guest this week is Rabbi Rami, a freelance theologian who makes his living writing and speaking. He has earned rabbinic ordination from Hebrew Union College and a PhD from Union Graduate School. He has created a synagogue, worked as a management consultant for Fortune 500 companies, and as if he hasn't been busy enough has also published about 30 books. Rabbi Rami writes a regular column in Spirituality and Health Magazine, who we are proud to have as this episode's sponsor.

And before we get to the interview, I want to mention that in the past several weeks, we've been talking a lot about the One You Feed coaching program. If you've been wondering whether or not the program is good for you, this may help. This is what Jessa, one of Eric's former coaching clients, said when asked who would benefit from signing up to be part of the program with Eric. Anyone who has sort of something that feels insurmountable, but yet they have this like little pocket of hope inside that they want to achieve. He's amazing for that. It's real. Like it's it's coaching for Jessa. It's not just coaching, if that makes any sense. Like it wasn't generic at all. coaching, if that makes any sense. Like, it wasn't generic at all. He can use his immense knowledge of, you know, action, thoughts, and feelings and sort of craft a really particular program. To learn more about the program, you can now visit the website. Just go to

oneufeed.net slash coaching. And now here's the interview with Rabbi Rami. Hi, Rabbi Rami. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Eric. It is a pleasure to be on. Yeah, I'm happy to have you on. You've done a lot of different things. You've written a lot of books. You write a column for Spirituality and Health Magazine, who's been our sponsor this month, which we're very excited about. And you also have written a lot of different things that I'm interested in. Perennial Wisdom, 12-step programs, I'm a recovering addict. And I noticed that, you know, one of the books you wrote was with Richard Rohr, who I just very

recently have really started getting into some of his writing. So this is a good conversation time for me. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Let me just clarify something. So I didn't write the book with Richard Rohr. He wrote the foreword to the book. I don't want to attach him to anything I said in case he doesn't agree with it. So you can only blame me for what I've written. But he did write the forward. And I also, since Spirituality and Health is your sponsor this time, I write the regular column, Roadside Assistance for the Spiritual Traveler. regular column, Roadside Assistance for the Spiritual Traveler, I also run their weekly interview podcast that if people are interested in, they can go to spiritualityhealth.com and subscribe not only to the magazine, but to the weekly show.

Excellent. And we'll have links on our show notes page to Spirituality and Health magazine, to Rabbi Rama's radio show, his blog, some of his books. So let's start the show like we always do with the parable. There's a grandfather who says to his son, you know, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love and the other is a bad wolf which represents things like greed and hatred and fear and the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second and he looks up at his grandfather and he says well grandfather which one wins and the grandfather says the one you feed so i'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to

you in your life and in the work that you do okay Okay, so let me start with full disclosure. I'm an OA, Overeaters Anonymous, so much for the anonymous part, and I overeat. I feed them both. I feed them both, whether I intend to or not, I feed them both. But the parable of the two wolves strikes a perfect parallel with the Jewish teaching that every person is born with two inclinations, one for good and one for evil. And the way the rabbis describe it, if you don't feed, they don't use the feed metaphor, but if you don't feed the evil wolf, if you like, if you don't feed the evil inclination, you would never fall in love. You'd never be in a relationship. You wouldn't have children. You wouldn't be involved in the community. You wouldn't run a business. And their thinking is that that aspect of our personality is the one that operates in the world and has to be informed by the good wolf or the good inclination, but it has to be fed. You can't starve that.

Otherwise, you'd be a saint or a monk in cloister community somewhere. And even then, you'd need some of that bad wolf energy. So for us and for me personally, it isn't feeding one and starving the other. It's having the good wolf teach the bad wolf how to behave and then use the bad wolf's energy to do some good in the world. That's a really interesting perspective. And we've come across that often, where it's this idea of, it's not about starving one. You know, it's about where you put your focus, but I really liked that idea of one of them trying to teach the other. One of the things that you said recently, I'll read it. You said, I am a Jew because Judaism values argument and doubt over revelation and belief. And then you also said, I'm a Jew because Judaism doesn't tell me what to think,

but teaches me how to think. Could you expound on that a little bit? Yeah, I think that the core of Judaism is this ancient and ongoing argument about what is just and what is kind, as well as theological issues, though that's not necessarily the Jewish focus. Jew and the texts that we inherit, and between the Jew and the rabbis who have commented on these texts before us, and the Jew and everyone who's commenting on them now, including your neighbor. But, you know, in Judaism, we say two Jews, three opinions. You even argue with yourself. So, our understanding is there is no final understanding. There is no final text. There is no final revelation. It's always in process of – wisdom always comes out in the process of dialogue. So, yeah, we argue constantly.

And as soon – in a traditional Jewish educational setting, as soon as you think you've got the answer, the work of the rabbi is to – which is they break up that notion and say, wait, here's some other nuances you may have missed. Wrestle with those. So our educational system at its best is not about filling your head with facts that you could Google, but we're actually training you to be able to think critically and I would say paradoxically. So critically as in, you know, being able to challenge ideas and paradoxically meaning that you can hold more than one idea in your head at the same time, even if those ideas are mutually exclusive. So just to see if I can make this a little clearer, we have a saying of our entire pedagogy, our entire approach to education is wrapped up in this one saying from a couple thousand years ago, Elu ve'elu divrei Elohim chaim. Elu ve'elu is your opinion and their opinion,

no matter how mutually exclusive, are both divrei Elohim Chaim, the words of the living God, provided that both the opinion holders are trying to ferret out the truth and not simply throw propaganda and try to control your thinking. And, you know, as long as everyone is being authentic rather than deceptive, then radically different opinions are considered, are both considered, are all considered the words of the living God. And your job as a student, if you like, is to hold as many of those in your head at the same time so you can argue every side of an argument because there's truth is so multifaceted. Yeah, it reminds me of a story I heard recently, and I know you've spent a fair amount of time in studying Zen Buddhism. And one of the ideas is that there's some monastery I heard

has at the gate, it has two stone lions that represent paradox and confusion, and they're considered the guardians of truth. Yeah, right. Though they may be the brother the guardians of truth. Yeah, right. Though they may be the brother and sister of truth, you know, because truth is probably deeply paradoxical. Yeah. So you wrote the book Perennial Wisdom for the Spiritually Independent. You're very much known for and advocate a lot of interfaith type work. What is perennial wisdom? What does that mean? And what

are some of maybe the key things that stand out as you look across these different traditions? So perennial wisdom is the notion that there is a core set of, I don't know if you want to say spiritual ideas or philosophical ideas, but even psychological ideas, there's a core set of ideas that people rediscover over and over again. That's why it's perennial. That lie at the heart of all mystical traditions. So when I say mystical, though, I don't want to restrict that to religious. Mystical could be also scientific and psychological. But by mystical, they cut to the truth itself without labeling it according to one system or another. And the heart of the perennial wisdom, the wisdom that is perennial, is basically four things. First one is everything is a manifestation of

one thing. So you can call the one thing God or nature or universe or great spirit or energy, whatever it is. You know, the Buddhist notion of pratityat samudpata, that everything arises together, or the Hindu notion of everything is a manifestation of Brahman. So, everything is a manifestation of the one thing. That's the first point. Second point is people have the capacity to intuitively know this. I mean, we're part of it. We can know it. It's not something that you believe in. It's something you actually experience. The third thing is that we also have the capacity not to know it. And the fourth thing is the purpose of your life is to work through the capacity not to know it and achieve the knowledge of it as it.

Does that make sense? It does. And so given that this is the idea of perennial wisdom, given that it crosses a lot of different traditions, and even outside of some traditions, I'm interested in, you talk about spiritual maturity. I'm interested in, you talk about spiritual maturity. It's a term you use often and you describe it as living life with ever deepening qualities of justice and find one tradition and go deep in it? Or can people discover the perennial wisdom and become spiritually mature by pulling things out of each of the different traditions? Yeah, that's a perennial question. And I'll tell you, in the interfaith world, the PC thing to say is that people should explore their own tradition and go deeply into it. And when you go deep enough into it, you will discover this perennial wisdom

that resides at the heart of all of them. I don't disagree with that. I just wonder if anyone's going to go deeply enough into any tradition to get to this perennial universalism. I don't think that's how it works. I think that the purpose of, you know, if you go deeply into Judaism, the purpose that's set for you is to be more Jewish, not to become a perennialist. The more you study Catholicism, the goal of the teacher is to make you more Catholic and not more universalist. So, yeah, you can do it that way if you really want to go deep, deep, deep into the mystical heart of any brand named religion. I think that is certainly a doable thing

if you want to put the time and energy into it. I don't think everyone wants to, and I don't think most people would. So what about the opposite of just the notion of picking and choosing? What about the opposite of just the notion of picking and choosing? So I would say this about that. Number one, you're not picking and choosing. I'm not giving you an alternative. The perennial wisdom is perennial because it comes up over and over again, but it's the truth. It's wisdom.

And so the four things I just mentioned, that's what you choose. It's a tradition in and of itself, but it's not something to be believed in as much as something to be experienced and lived. How you experience it, I mean, that's contemplative practice. And there, I think you need to look at the world's contemplative practice traditions, plural, and see maybe there's something in Buddhism that works for you. Maybe it's something in Sufism that works for you or Judaism or Catholicism or, you know, whatever, and follow that. Or maybe it's a scientific practice using biofeedback. There are lots of ways to move beyond the delusion of an isolated self into the reality of the integrated capital R reality. So I think it's about practice. And there, that's a matter of your personality. And then you can find the practices in any tradition or pulling from a number of traditions. So I think it can go either way.

Personally, I mean, I'm steeped in Judaism. I'm a rabbi, so it's my foundational practice. But I integrate a lot of other things into my daily spiritual practice. And the only part of Judaism that speaks to me is the part that either actually reflects or the part that I can turn into a mirror of the perennial wisdom that we just talked about. So in the end, however you do it, you all end up in the same place. It's a teaching in and of itself. Right. So I'm familiar with a lot of the Buddhist practices of meditation, of mindfulness, of various different meditations. I'm familiar with some of the Catholic contemplative practices, but I'm not very familiar at all with what are some of the contemplative practices

within Judaism. Are those something you could describe in a couple minutes to at least give me, you know, and the listeners a flavor of what those are and what those look like? Yeah, I think, well, first of all, let me say that practice is always rooted in the body. And since humans share a similar physiology, all practices are basically variations on a theme. Whether you're praying to Krishna or you're praying to Christ, the act of prayer is probably not different. What you say is different, but the you know physiology of is the same so basically contemplative practice works with breath whether we're talking about repeating a mantra or chanting names of God or walking or sitting and counting your breaths like you might do in a Zen

Center so the Jewish ones are just variations on that. So, for example, we have mantra practice in Judaism. There are a lot of different mantra that you can recite, but one that I do on a regular basis, I do a number of them. But every day I recite Ha-Rachaman, the compassionate one. It's one of the attributes of the divine, and it's a way of cultivating that quality in myself. There's one that I use every day, Ein Od Milvado. It's from the Book of Deuteronomy. It literally means there is nothing beside him, and the context is there's no other God but God, sort of la ilaha ilallah. But in the mystical tradition, it means there's nothing but God, ain od mil vado. There's nothing

outside of the divine. The same way the Sufis interpret the no, no, there's no God but Allah. There's nothing but Allah. There's nothing but God. There's nothing but this capital R reality. Everything is a part of that. So there's mantra practice. You can do that all the time. There's nothing but God. There's nothing but this capital R reality. Everything is a part of that. So, there's mantra practice. You can do that all the time. There's the practice of what's called heat bodhidut, where you isolate. It means to isolate. You separate yourself. You find solitude from the world. Rabbi Nachman in the 1718, early 1800s said, do it out in the meadow. Now, where I live, finding a meadow is not that easy. But, you know, go out into nature, get away from the noise of the world. And he suggests you do this at night, but get away from the noise of the world for an hour a day. And just have a

conversation with your higher self, your higher power, your God. So, and then there's prayer, then there's silent meditation, just sitting and it says in the book of Lamentations, for example, it says, sit in solitude and be silent. And Isaiah says, be calm, still, and fearless. You know, the whole be still and know kind of notion. So Judaism has sitting practice. It has walking meditation. It has mantra practice, prayer practice, as does every other tradition because, you know, people invented them and this is what works for us, you know, for humans.

So the contemplative approaches across the religions, you can find a unifying theme across those also, really around the body, around the breath, around awareness and attention. Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. And that's why when you get contemplatives together from different traditions, they only grow closer. Because it isn't, the theologians, they've already gotten beyond their theology. They know that theology is simply a reflection of a culture's, a tribe's self-identification markers. It's, you know, when you say, I'm never surprised that a rabbi comes to the conclusion that the Jews are the chosen people. I would be shocked and far more impressed if a rabbi could show me in the Torah where it says the Hopis are the chosen people. You know, I'm never surprised when a Catholic theologian discovers that Christ is the second person of the Trinity rather than Krishna. So, those things, contemplatives get

beyond, I think, very quickly. And we realize that's just, it's just the marketing of the brand name religion. But contemplative practice takes you beyond that. And it's in that, I don't know what you call that, that world beyond those slogans, that we find ourselves on common ground. That's an interesting perspective that contemplatives are better able to talk to each other and get closer across traditions. It reminds me of, we had a guest on the show, who in a completely different context, but said something that has stuck with me ever since. And she said, if you take the time to go deep in, you know, it's about taking conversational risks with people. If you take the time to go deep, you can connect with a lot of people because underneath it all, we're really all the same. But if you stay up on the

surface, it can be very difficult to connect because everybody's got a different surface. And I just thought that was really profound. And that's kind of, I mean, that's pretty much exactly what you're saying here. If you go deeper into any of these traditions, you find that perennial wisdom. I absolutely agree with that. I wouldn't want to discount the surface differences. I think that's what makes things interesting. You know, if everyone looked like me, that would be very boring. Right. If everyone, you know, or thought like me, etc. So, I like the differences. But yeah, the contemplative practices take us to another place where we, I think, if you practice them diligently, you do. You come to this common ground, this common

wisdom, this perennial wisdom. One of the challenges you mentioned in the beginning, the notion of interfaith, like you said, I do a lot of interfaith work. And one of the problems with interfaith is its shallowness. You know, you can get representatives from different religions together and we're all on a panel. And this is just one kind of interfaith gathering. There are others that are much more effective. But you get this panel of people, you know, you have to have your resident Catholic and a Protestant and, you know, a Muslim and a Jew and a Hindu and a Buddhist or, you know, whatever, a Baha'i person. And you go down the line and each person tells you the key elements of her or his religion. And everyone nods like, oh, isn't that lovely,

and we all agree, and we're going to, you know, it's just a big kumbaya moment. When in fact, you know, if when a Jew, if I was doing it, you know, I would, I usually start out by saying, well, look, here's what Judaism says, and all the rest of you are wrong. It's not like Judaism is liberal and says, oh, everyone is right. That's a modern interfaith conceit. The truth is Catholicism thinks it's right. It doesn't think Hinduism is right. Judaism doesn't think Catholicism is right or Islam is right. is obsessed with just grinning our way through our differences rather than actually taking them on,

finding out what's interesting about them, because I think they are interesting and they're worth knowing on an intellectual level, but then going deeper and saying, okay, let's now stop talking. Let's see what happens when we spend the rest of the day in silence, and then we'll talk about where we, you know, each of us practicing our contemplative, the contemplative practices in our religion, and then see where that takes us. The problem is,

so many people are ignorant of the deep contemplative practices that exist in their traditions. I mean, I spent 10 years teaching comparative religion at university level. And I was, I don't know, not shocked every year because you get used to it, but disappointed every year that so many of my students, and I'm in the Bible Belt, so many of my students knew only the most superficial level of their own Protestant tradition. They didn't know anything about contemplative practice, even though it's in their Christianity. No one ever taught it to them. Right. And that's a real shame. I think people have been robbed of the depth of their tradition,

even as we're being sold the surface. Thank you. I think someone called you a holy rascal, and it sounds like there's an organization or a project around that. What is a holy rascal. Yeah, Sister Jose Habde, who was, she's deceased now, a Catholic nun and a Native American elder and medicine woman. Yeah, she was at one of my times. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the

Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk

gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us tonight.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening?

Really No Really. Oh, yeah, really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oxen jumped up in the back of the room and said, he's a holy rascal. And it stuck.

Holy rascal. And it stuck. Yeah, holy rascal is somebody who uses satire and humor and the audacity of, I don't want to say the audacity of hope, maybe just audacity, to point out the fact that the emperor has no clothes. fact that the emperor has no clothes. I mean, our mascot is Toto from the movie version of The Wizard of Oz when the little dog pulls the curtain away from the wizard and the wizard says, pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. Well, to me, religion is much of religion, especially the surface end, is simply a little man, and I mean man, a little man with a big megaphone making lots of noise and scaring people. And what a holy rascal does is say, look, this is, don't be afraid of this.

You know, this pulls the curtain back on that aspect of religion in order to free people from that to help engage them in the deeper contemplative side of things. There is a website, holyrascals.com. It's got a lot of video interviews with people I consider holy rascals. There's a book in the works and a six-hour CD class on how to be a holy rascal. All that, I think, is coming out, will eventually come out with Sounds True over the next couple of years. Excellent. I like, I like the term. Let's change directions a little bit and let's talk a little bit about recovery. You wrote a book on recovery, you know, about 12 step recovery and how that applies, not just to people who have addictions, although you've got

a line early on that says 12 step recovery is about freeing yourself from playing God. And since almost everyone is addicted to this game, you know, this applies to everyone. What do you mean by freeing ourselves from playing God? What is that addiction we have? Yeah, well, Bill W. says in the big book, the first thing you have to do is stop playing God. Stop imagining that you can be in control of your life. And that's the addiction, is that I'm in charge of, even if you just say, oh, just my little world, but I'm in charge of my little

world. The only way that you can maintain that illusion is by trying to control everybody else that comes into your orbit. So, the addiction is to control, controlling myself, controlling everyone else, so that whatever my delusion is, it plays out the way I think it should play out. And since that doesn't work, it's never possible, we do more and more crazy things to try to hold on to that illusion rather than give up the illusion. And I think that what 12-step does is it helps people see that addiction to control as an illness, as a dis-ease, and drop it, let go of it, turn it over to your higher power, you know, the way 12-step works. I am a fan of 12-step. I know lots of people think it doesn't work. They look at the statistics

to show that only a small percentage of people who are in program actually benefit or become free of their addictions. I don't know how accurate those statistics are, but I know that one of the things that plays into that is the fact that a lot of 12-step programs are mandatory or mandated by the court system. programs are mandatory or mandated by the court system. And the person going into it is just going into it because it's better to do that than go to jail as opposed to being ready to be in a program. So my bias, if you like, is I think that Bill Wilson was one of the great spiritual teachers of the 20th century and that 12-step as a universal practice, not just for alcoholics or anyone with a named addiction, but anyone who realizes that they need to overcome the addiction to control could benefit from 12-step practice. Yep.

I mean, 12-step programs saved my life. So I have a bias towards them, certainly in some regards. And in the book, you said that you also recognize the limitations of 12-step programs. What do you think some of those limitations are? You know, where does it stop or what areas does it fall short? Well, I think like any program, you can become addicted to the program. And so then it's just circular. You know, it's like any program, you can become addicted to the program. And so then it's just circular. It's like any religion.

The more Jewish I become, the more Jewish I become. And I never get out of the label system of Judaism. The same thing with 12-step. People make it into an orthodoxy in and of itself. And we could talk about other things if you're interested. For example, the whole notion of God of my understanding is very tricky. Oh, yeah. Because the God of my understanding is simply my ego coming up with some kind of self-serving theology.

I think that at the heart, I think that what Bill did, Bill W. did, is what all great gurus do. They put you in a double bind, which means you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't. And when you're stuck with that and you know there's no way out, you discover that the problem is in the game you're playing and you just stop playing the game. You can't win the game, so stop playing the game. You can't win the game of control. And 12-step can be another way to control things. Oh, I'm going to turn my problem over to my higher power, but my higher power is just my own imagination. And so that doesn't really work. Eventually, you have to deconstruct the whole system, and then you turn your will over to something you can't name, which is, I don't know, you want to say God, you want to say whatever you want to say, but something you can't name.

And when you're no longer in the game of control, then the need to control just stops. You know, a couple of thoughts there. I could probably go on this topic for a long time. Um, you know, I, I got sober originally and had almost 10 years sober and I struggled that whole time with God of my understanding or, um, I just wrestled with those concepts a lot. And I think I forced myself to believe certain things that didn't really work. Um, and then after 10 years, I went back out and I drank and I did that for a couple of years and I've been back sober for about eight years. And when I came back, I had to be really like for myself, I had to sort of honor the idea that I have no idea what that God or higher power is, but that if I stop clutching so tightly, like I'm going to turn things over, what do you turn it over to? And I realized it almost doesn't matter in my case because it's the clutching that makes me sick. You really got to what I was pointing at and maybe, and I guess it wasn't

as clear, but yeah, you have no idea what you're talking about. Right. So can you, can you turn it over to, I don't know. Right. That's the ultimate liberation. The opening line of the Tao Te Ching, you know, Lao Tzu's philosophical text is that any Tao, the Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. Right. So, any God you can imagine isn't it. Yeah. So, I give up. Right. You know, and when I give up that theological game, then yes, then it's lifted, it's turned over, it's, you know, it's over, whatever you want to say. The same thing with Job. You know, Job in the book, in the Bible, the book of Job, Job has this notion of what God is supposed to be. And in the end, God just blows all of his theology to pieces.

And while most English translations end the book with Job repenting in dust and ash, like he's groveling on the ground. The Hebrew is much more nuanced, and it really says that I find comfort in being dust and ash, in being mortal, in being in a state of I don't know. And that state of I don't know is what all the contemplatives end up with. You go through that dark night of the soul when your ideologies and isms and all that is being stripped away from you, and you end up in this I don't know place. It's Jesus on the cross when he says, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Because the God he had in mind isn't panning out. And so, he has to let that go. And there's that moment of, I don't want that to happen. But, you know, the universe is so constructed that if you allow it, it's,

your ideas are stripped from you and you end up in this don't know place. I mean, there's a, I can't remember the name of the Zen master, but the book is called Only Don't Know. And there's a, so, you know, it's a pretty common Zen idea there's a Zen saying that says seek not after truth cease only to hold opinions and it's the same thing being that I don't know yep and that's very liberating Joseph Campbell has that quote I won't get it exactly right but that basically God is a metaphor you know God is always just a metaphor for things that go beyond any possible intellectual understanding. Right, right, because it's the Tao that can't be named, yeah. Thank you. Back to the interview.

Another thing with 12-step programs that I personally have wrestled with is, because I agree with you about the addiction of control and all that, and yet, like anything in life, right, it seems like there are extremes. And one of the things I wrestled with was in the recovery programs, it's just said, I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like, why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk

gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend.

Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really.

Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app,

on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over and over, acceptance is the answer to all your problems. Acceptance is the answer. Acceptance is the answer. And in my particular case, what I found it was easy to do was to take that and allow sort of a nature of mind to sort of avoid, or a nature of mine to just blow things off and, and, and, and not care. And I was able to take that and sort of wrap that in the cloak of acceptance. And for myself, I had to get more into, you know, I had to look more at the serenity prayer about, you know, there are things I need to have the courage to change. And I think that's the,

one of the key pieces of wisdom in life is how do you know what you can't control and what you can and is there any guidelines that you have or ways you think through that yeah i think that's all i do so i i have all kinds of thoughts on it yeah so so when i think of the acceptance notion i think of it in terms of, there won't be anything to change unless I accept what is. So it's the radical acceptance of reality. And reality is I'm not in control. Or reality is I've got these two wolves battling it out in my head. One says, eat this.

And the other one says, don't eat that. And as I'm standing in front of the open refrigerator watching these two wolves tear each other's throats out before I can decide whether to eat it or not eat it, if I can, and this is, I'm sort of making this metaphoric, but this is literal for me. Yeah, no, I get it. If I can accept the fact that I'm standing in front of the open refrigerator

looking for something to eat that I, it's not that I want a carrot. I mean, I want junk food. So looking for junk food, if I can accept that and not judge it, just say, oh, here's the reality. Here's my reality at the moment. I'm standing here again. I find that I can walk away from it without having either wolf win. It's just having accepted that truth about me, I'm no longer trying to change it and I'm no longer controlled by it. So that's one thing. And then the other thing is, how do you know what you can and cannot change? That's really tough. I mean, I don't want to say that I have any idea how to

answer that. I mean, part of me says you are in control of nothing so you can't change anything but that makes no sense because you obviously make changes all the time so so we have to really go into i don't mean intellectually i mean really sit in silence and look to see what i have where i can make changes and where i can't but the notion of change is what buckminster fuller called trim tabbing. So I don't know if you're familiar with the word trim tab or listeners are, but in the old days, Buckminster Fuller is 5,000 years old. And when he was in the Merchant Marine,

he was on ships that they didn't have the hydraulics that contemporary ships have or that airplanes have. So in order to turn the rudder, you just couldn't turn the rudder on these big ships because the pressure of the sea is too great. No one's strong enough to do that. So you have these little baby rudders, as he explained it to me once, little baby rudders called trim tabs. And they're tiny.

You can turn those and they shift the pressure of the water against the big rudder and make enough of those little trim tab changes, then you can turn the big rudder. So he said, I think this is a quote from him, live your life as a trim tab or my life as a trim tab, something like that. But the idea is, okay, I don't have to make the big changes. Yeah. That's not in my control. But where's the trim tab I can turn? That's brilliant. And he is brilliant. And I can give you examples, though you may not want them, but I can give you examples of little trim tab changes

that I have made in my life with people that have changed their relationships drastically. Yeah, well, I mean, that's a very common theme on this show and a very common theme in the work that I do with people on behavior change is starting small. I'm always amazed, I would say I'm amazed by what a series of small steps taking consistently amounts to. Yeah, right.

So I'd love to hear a couple of the ones that have been effective for you, your trim tabs. Well, I'll tell you, I'll give you one because it's the easiest to articulate and the easiest for people to grasp who don't know me, but would know the situation. So my dad and I, my dad passed away in March, last March. My dad and I had a very troubled relationship, a very distant relationship. I wasn't the boy he wanted. You know, he wanted a jock and he got a nerd. So, most of our lives together were with my mother mediating. So, you know, when I moved away, went to college and all that, I would call home. I'm a good Jewish boy. I would call home every week. But I would, my dad would always answer the phone because dads who were born in the 30s are in charge of the phone and the car and whatever else.

He'd always answer the phone, hear my voice, say, is everything okay? And if I said yes, he'd say, okay, here's your mother. If I said no, then he would basically go into a tirade. What's wrong with you? Why isn't everything okay? So we didn't have a lot of long heart-to-heart talks. Then my mother, and this is quite a while ago, my mother, years ago, my mother went deaf almost completely. Phone is very difficult for her.

So I had to start talking to my dad. And these were very difficult conversations, not because we were talking about anything difficult, just because we couldn't talk. And I was practicing, and I still do, but I was practicing at the time meta meditation, M-E-T-T-A, loving kindness meditation from the Buddhist tradition, where you just recognize that everyone is, you know, we're all bozos on this bus and you're praying for one another to have peace and harmony and et cetera. And so, I have a way that I do it based on the Jewish approach to it. And I was praying to or for my dad saying in my imagination, may you be free from fear, may you be free from compulsion, may you be blessed with love, may you be blessed with peace. That's my Jewish version of metta practice. And the longer I did it, I realized my dad was afraid.

He grew up in a time through the depression and then World War II. And he was a very frightened guy, very strong, very capable, very courageous, but the world was a very dangerous place. And you had to survive. And survive, he defined as basically, you had to have a certain income.

And, you know, because that was the thing is money because depression, baby. Right. So the more I realized that he was a frightened guy, the more I realized that his anger, because he was a very angry guy, was driven by fear based on his own experience. So the more I could feel his trap and the more I could recognize my own traps, the more compassion I had on both of us. And then to make a long story short, so one conversation, I ended it with, I love you, which we didn't say to one another. And he responded with this, and it was spontaneous on my part, so it wasn't a stage thing. It just came out. And then he responded and sounded to me just as authentic and as

spontaneous with, I love you too. And you could almost, you know, this I'm making up, but you could hear the tumblers click and the relationship reconstitute itself on a different level. And the trim tab was, I guess, two things. I mean, the practice was meta, but the trim tab was just saying, I love you at the right time, right? After a lot of practice, so I could say it with authenticity. And he must, in his own way, have been ready as well. So that's a tiny thing to say in a conversation. And yet it changed the whole relationship. And for years, we've had a very close relationship. And when he died, he died while I was there. And we were very close up to and

including his last breaths. I'm interested in how that relationship continued to transform. So you have this moment of sort of mutual acknowledgement between you two about love for each other. My experience has been that people that I found it traditionally difficult to talk to, that doesn't just vanish. So how did that part of it evolve over time? How did you and your father get better at communicating, given that you didn't have a lot of history doing it? Yeah, so I'm not sure exactly how to answer that, because I don't know better at communicating.

Our problem was we were always talking to that image of the other and never to the other. And with that, you know, trim tab shift thing going on, it was immediate and it was permanent. And then I just started talking to my dad and then I just became curious. Before I was defensive, then I got compassionate, and then I became curious. So who is this guy? What was his life like? How did he get to be the guy he is? And I think, you know, I think, I have to imagine this, I think he had the same curiosity about me. And I didn't take any course in how to have a difficult conversation. It wasn't anything like that. It was just talking to him as opposed to talking to my image of him, which was always very hurtful and negative. emotion. One is sort of an indulgence in the emotion, which is we wallow in it, we feel sad, we get depressed, we don't do what we need to do, we drink like crazy, whatever it is.

And then the other is sort of more of a repression, which I would say you sort of alluded to it a little bit with, you can use 12-step programs as a way of doing this, you know, sort of the spiritual bypass or the, you know, everything's okay. So there's clearly two sort of extremes to this. And it seems obvious that the answer is somewhere in the middle. How do you think about that idea of finding the right balance between indulging and repressing our emotions? Okay. So I have no idea. I don't know about balance. I can tell you what I think about emotions. I think that emotions are beyond my control. Feelings, I don't control my feelings. By the time I know what I'm feeling, I'm already feeling it.

It may not be what I want to feel, but I'm already feeling it. I think that the approach to thoughts and feelings ought to be, and this may sound a little distant or whatever, but my approach to thoughts and feelings ought to be, and this may sound a little distant or whatever, but my approach to thoughts and feelings is observe them. I'm a follower of Ramana Maharshi in this, that I think there is an eye behind the egoic eye that I identify with, and that eye is always active. It's always observing, but I tend to ignore it and focus in on the feelings or the thoughts I'm having and identify with those. When I step

back and ask, like he would, you know, I'm paraphrasing him and say, okay, who's feeling this? You know, where, trace the emotion back or who's having this thought? I realized there's a, a dimension of myself that isn't feeling that, that is just watching that feeling arise from the psychophysiology of my being in a certain situation. So I don't try to control the feelings. I don't try to repress them and I don't try to indulge them. I just want to watch them. And sometimes I think people say, well, that makes you very cold. But I don't think that's what happens. I think what happens is once you know that you're not attached to or controlled by your thoughts or feelings, you're free to let them go wherever they want to go without letting them necessarily express themselves. So I have lots of thoughts during the day that would land me in jail if I acted on them, right? So I don't repress them and I don't get

mad about myself for thinking them because I didn't actually think them. I just noticed they were being thought. So it's like, oh, look, there's that stupid thought again. How interesting is that? Or there's that feeling of anger or sadness or whatever it is. Just being aware, mindful, if that's sort of the current term, but being mindful of these things and realizing simply by being mindful that the mindful me is not caught up in either the thoughts or the feelings that I'm watching. And that's what I try to do. Don't say I'm always good at it, but that's what I try to do. and that's what I try to do. Don't say I'm always good at it,

but that's what I try to do. And then I find my life is much more emotionally rich because now I don't have to shut down those feelings, even if they're inappropriate, because I don't act on them because I get to observe them and don't think that they're a license to do anything, thoughts or feelings for that matter. Yeah, that's a big thing we had.

I don't know if you're familiar with David Reynolds. Oh, my teacher, my friend, yeah. Yeah, that's a that's a big thing we had. I don't know if you're familiar with David Reynolds. He Oh, my teacher, my friend. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he has a he has yeah, he constructive living. It was a brilliant book. It was a great interview. And the thing he said that really hit me was that when you have control of your behavior, you don't have to be afraid of your emotions anymore. And as a recovering addict, that kind of blew me away, right? Because when I didn't have control of my behavior, a negative emotion was, you know, life-threatening. And now that that's not the case, it's easier to, it's still not easy, but I'm better able to do kind of what you did and give the, you know, give the emotion a little space, not treat it as an emergency, um, and let it breathe a little bit. Yeah, I think that, I mean, I've studied with him.

I think he's a fantastic guy and urge anyone to either listen to both, listen to your interview with him and read some of his books. One of the ways people tend to misunderstand that is to bully yourself. And that's not what any of us are talking about. It really is having compassion on yourself. Oh, there's that feeling. Oh, there's that thought. And just distancing yourself from it enough

so that it doesn't control your behavior. I know lots of people, and I'm sure you do too, who feel they are not in control of their behavior. Look, if I was in control of my behavior, I wouldn't be an overeater. Right, right. So don't tell me to do that. And I don't tell people to do that. I tell them to watch their thoughts and feelings and then notice the watcher and see if the watcher is looking for something to eat or the watcher is really interested in that next drink or

if that watcher has really transcended the whole thing, rest in that. I'll give you, if we got time, I'll tell you a really great story that I heard from a psychiatrist. He was, I'm guessing, late 60s when I heard this. He was in his late 60s when I heard this story. It was at one of my One River Wisdom School workshops. And we were talking about this very thing. And he said, when he was an intern at a hospital, they always gave the interns the most damaged patients because they figured they couldn't do any harm. And he worked with this 16-year-old, severely depressed boy. And he had also, the doctor had had some kind of training outside of his profession. He's probably Buddhist, but I don't know what exactly.

But anyway, he sat down with the kid and he said, okay, so tell me about your depression. And this boy has been in the hospital forever. He's seen dozens of doctors and he knows the lingo and he gives a beautiful, pitch-perfect description of what it's like when he's feeling depressed. description of what it's like when he's feeling depressed. And then the intern, the guy who's telling me the story, says to the kid, he says, okay, the you that was telling me about your depression, was that you depressed? And the kid stops in his tracks and he looks to see, and he says, no, I was just describing somebody else and he says okay great i want to work with that you not the depressed guy wow yeah and and they actually made progress and it's the same thing i don't i don't want to work with the overeater me i want to work with the me that's

healthy and you know you find a beautiful system for doing this with big mind practice from Genpo Roshi, where you just realize there's aspects of ourselves that are completely healthy, completely awake, completely wise. But we ignore those and we go with the others. Tap into the part of you that isn't an addict, that isn't, you know, stuck and mired in all the madness of your life. And you can look at the madness and say, oh, yeah, how interesting is that? And move on. That's a great way to describe it. Well, we are kind of beyond our time here. So, we're going to go ahead and wrap up, but I could probably do this for another two hours. But thanks so much for being on the show. This has been a really enjoyable conversation. Thank you, Eric.

It was a lot of fun for me, too. All right. Take care. You, too. Bye. Bye. To learn more about Rabbi Rami and this podcast, go to oneufeed.net slash Rami.