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Articles
by Rabbi Zalman Shacter-Shalomi
Roundtable
Talk with the Dalai Lama
Vancouver BC, on April 20, 2004
By Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
At
the Conference celebrating the visit of His Holiness the Dalai
Lama to Vancouver BC. Reb Zalman was one of the guest visionaries
along with Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, former Czech
Republic President Vaclav Havel, Professor Shirin Ebadi, Dr.
Jo-ann Archibald, and moderator Bishop Michael Ingham.
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Source
of Time and Space
Avinu Malkaynu!
From infinity draw down to us The great renewal
And attune us to Your intent,
So that Wisdom, Your daughter
Flow into our awareness,
To awaken us to see ahead,
So we help instead of harm.
May all the devices we make and use,
Be sparing and protecting of Your creation.
Help us to set right what we have debased,
To heal what we have made ill,
To care for and to restore what we have injured.
Bless our Earth, our home
And show us all
How to care for her,
So that we might live Your promise
Given, to our forebears
"To live heavenly days
Right here on this Earth."
May all the beings,
You have fashioned,
Become aware that it is You
Who has given them being.
May we realize that You shaped our lives
And may each one, who breathes
Join with others who breathe,
In the delight of shared knowing
Of the great breath.
Assist us in learning
How to partner,
With family, neighbors,
And friends.
Aid us in dissolving old enmities.
May we come to honor,
Even in those whom we fear,
Your image and form,
Your light Dwelling in their hearts.
May we soon see the day, when
Your House will be indeed,
The House of prayer
For all peoples,
Named and celebrated
In every tongue and speech.
On that day You will be one
And one with all cosmic Life.
Amen!
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The
problems we face at this time don't seem to yield to the solutions
our traditions and lineages have provided in the past. Each
one of our traditions had built in a high degree of surface
tension and saw itself as sharply separate from others. Often
universalistic statements were made which in subtle and not
so subtle ways were what people call inclusivistic; that is
to say "if you come under our umbrella as a lesser adjunct,
as a minor satellite, we will legitimate you" Still the
attitude was basically triumphalistic; when the Mashiach -
Christ - Mahdi - avatar - Maitreia – comes we will be
proven right and you will end up to be on a lesser plane than
we.
Then
came Auschwitz- Hiroshima-Nagasaki - the moon walk - the internet
- and now we can no longer afford any reality map that does
not base itself on an organismic view of life on this planet.
Our traditional theologians, in order to defend themselves
against existential terror and high anxiety the spiritual
vacuum in which they have to preach –have by and large,
been co-opted by those haves, who have the deep pockets, to
hold on to the status quo- or by the have-nots who want to
return to implausible security of the old time religion.
More
and more have deep thinking eco-theologians come to the conclusion
that each religion is like a vital organ of the planet and
that we for the planet’s sake need, each one of us, aim
to stay alive and devout in the most healthy way we can manage.
Hence for all my universalism I need to be the best and healthiest
Jew I can be and urge my co-religionists to become the best
and healthiest Jews they can be in order to contribute to
the healing of the planet. While I have gained much help from
our tradition which provided me with the sacred tools and
means to higher consciousness many of them seem not to be
immediately applicable to our current situation.
However,
there is a revelation coming down to us from helpers above
our ken as well as the result of a chthonic* push from below
from our mother the Earth. This leads me not so much to offer
answers as to raise questions. Therefore my contribution will
be to raise questions and they are all intertwined.
As
each generation comes it needs answers for the problems which
the old answers have created. Example nuclear fuel, pesticides
and herbicides, -soon we will have to deal with questions
which genetic engineering is creating in bio-engineered plants
and who knows how soon? Even with human genetic stock. The
urge we experience to grow in awareness is often blocked and
opposed by forces that want to cut us off from that urge and
addict us to mind deadening distractions. Yet at a meetings
like this one we want to amplify that urge that has the push
of our earth's need of healing as well as the pull of the
vision of organismic health that wants to birth itself in
us. Here, we want to wake up ourselves and wake others up
to even more awakedness. We have been habituated to find the
easiest and most immediate answers so that we not stay in
the anxiety of holding on to the question. The answers, easily
available, don't work to stave off the impending disaster
of our accelerating global dying. So what are some of the
questions?
First:
What ideas of cosmology do we have to have in order to approach
the healing of the planet. Apparently the reality map we have
at this time is not correct. Our sense of the direction to
which the possible harmonious life matrix points demands that
we change that map. Creativity does not reside in the way
we are imprisoned to repeat precedent. It is in daring - to
be outrageous, to play with the least probable possibilities,
the ones more weird and spiritual where we may find answers.
These possibility forms dance before the mind's eye and from
that vision there emerges an unexpected form with its creative
proposal and therefore new way to understand and map reality.
We need to learn this process of questing in order to discover
- and this is urgent - to co-create with the integral -planetary
mind -the cosmology we have to have in order to approach the
healing of the planet.
Secondly:
What is the basic health ethos arising from that new cosmology?
The cosmology of the industrial revolution gave us an ethos
to productivity at any cost. The cosmology of corporate capitalism
pushes an ethos to consumption at any cost. The cosmology
we seek to find should produce first and foremost an ethos
that honors harmonious biological health in the individual
and in the matrix of the most harmonious biological health
of the environment. In order to co-create this cosmology we
can no longer rely on a single mind. The complexity and with
it the responsibility of what we have to mind in the world
and life is too great to bear for only one person. The only
way to get it together is together. I plead for research that
would, discover what it takes to enable us to operate in webs
of consciousness in mind networks. At least for a small group
of prepared minds to seek to merge dreams and behold visions.
These people would serve as our psychonauts and contact minds
on other regions. We are quite underdeveloped in this area.
We have very low ideas of how groups really work. While there
is immense sophistication in the technological area of military
systems and lethal Weapons of Mass Destruction we are very
low in our understanding how we need to handle conflict resolution.
Much research needs to be done to help us to optimal social
and political harmony and this cannot wait. What do we need
to do in order that there be that cultural revolution that
is now urgently needed? I have often challenged educators
to plan the curricula for handling information with ecological
wisdom,For the formation of character,For education of the
heart,For raising the emotional IQ for teaching skills of
cooperation that would produce the Adepts, saints, Zaddikim,
rishis, Bodhisattvas and shamans which we will need at this
time.
Thirdly:
What are the upaya, the skillful means, needed to lift cultural
trance and launch the awareness of the emerging cosmology.
Current consensus mind leads us to ever greater crises. We
must do the miraculous work of altering millions of people's
awareness. We must go deeper and deeper in to regions where
we cannot use muscle effort , where only awareness can shift
awareness which is as one of my friends remarked changing
the tires while the car is moving - moving fast. We need so
to update the inner resources of our spiritual traditions
that once worked well but which were associated with flesh
rejecting monastic asceticism. If your suggestions for my
spiritual practice exceeds 20 minutes in the morning and 20
minutes in the evening I will not do them and the old traditions
demand more time than I can afford.
So
we need to look at what works of the old techniques and enhance
their yield by learning to attune our consciousness to optimal
transformational power. These actions take place in other
regions than the mind of the shopping mall. When I think of
the turbulent mind space we inhabit at this time I get close
to schizophrenia. I can't hear the choral - symphonic music
of a sacred common dream. Just as some people once lamented
the twilight of the gods so it seems that we now experience
the twilight of the life affirming archetypes! How can we
access them? How can we empower them? How can they empower
us?
We
have come to realize that we are not on the top of the chain
of being. What do we, as spiritual people, have as means to
access the waiting helpers from higher planes? What do we
need to do to address the matrix of the life process on the
subtle plane to gain understanding of the deep life process.
Only then can we embark on designing the needed education
of heart and spirit. Last:What adjustments in psychology,
anthropology, biology, physics, medicine philosophy, political
science, theology, spiritual technologies, economics, the
arts, communications and most of all, the ethics we need in
order to heal the planet.?
So
the big questions remain. The current state of the disciplines
of Transpersonal Psychology and Transpersonal Sociology is
too primitive to handle our crisis. You who are here, my colleagues
on the dais, as well as you in the audience I invite you to
help find the answers to the questions we raised. We need
to relearn the technology of blessings.
May
the people who organized this event,the people who contributed
with effort and finances may we who spoke and you how listened
be blessed energy, vigor, resourcefulness,joy, health and
well-being, harmony in your family and work life to actualize
our renewed hope. May the words of my mouth and the concerns
in our hearts be received and responded to by the One in whom
we find refuge and redemption. Amen.
*This
adjective means “from deep earth.” One dictionary
entry describes it as “...of or relating to
the underworld (I.e. chthonic deities). Reb Zalman notes that
“in this sense that there is energy from the lightheaven
as well as energy from the dark earth.”
Articles
by Rabbi Zalman Shacter-Shalomi
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