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March/April 2006 Spirituality
Balancing Educating the Mind with Educating the Heart

Remarks by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the great wisdom teacher of the Jewish Renewal movement, in the context of a Roundtable Discussion with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu and others in Vancouver, Canada.

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 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 we will legitimate you. Still the attitude was basically triumphalistic; when the Mashiach or Christ or Mahdi or avatar or Maitreia comes we will be proven right and your will be on a lesser plane than we.

Then came Auschwitz and Hiroshima-Nagasaki, the moon walk, the internet and we can no longer afford any reality map that does not base itself on an organismic view of life on this planet. More and more deep thinking theologians have come to the conclusion that each religion is like a vital organ of the planet and that we need each one of us to stay alive in a healthy way. Hence for all my universalism I need to be the best and healthiest Jew I can be in order to contribute to the healing of the planet.

While I have much help from our tradition in the sacred means to higher consciousness they seem to be not immediately applicable to our current situation. There is a revelation coming down to us from above as well as a chthonic push from our mother the Earth from below. This leads me not so much to answers as to questions. Therefore my contribution will be in Questions and they are all intertwined.

Each generation comes and needs answers for the problems 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? 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 a meetings like this one we meet and 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 others and wake ourselves up to even more awakedness.

We have been trained to find the easiest and most immediate answers so that we not stay in the anxiety of staying in the question. The easily available answer doesn't work to stave off the impending disaster of our global dying so what are some of the questions?

1. 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 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. These possibility forms dance before the mind's eye and from that vision there emerges an unexpected form with its creative and therefore new way to understand reality.

   We need to learn this process of questioning in order to discover, and this is urgent, to co-create with the planetary mind the cosmology we have to have in order to approach the healing of the planet.

2. 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 in the most harmonious biological health of her environment.

   In order to co-create this cosmology we can no longer rely on a single mind. The complexity of what we have to mind in the world and in life is too great 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 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 in this area quite underdeveloped. We have very low ideas of how groups 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 of 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?

3. What are the upaya [skillful means] to lift cultural trance and establish the awareness of that 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 worked well when associated with flesh rejecting monastic asceticism. If your spiritual practice suggestions to me exceed 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening I will not do them and the old tradition demands more 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 the optimal transformational power. These actions take place in other regions than that 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 lamented the twilight of the gods, so it seems now the twilight of the life affirming archetypes. How can we access them? How can we empower them? How can they empower us?

   What do we, as spiritual people, have as means to access the waiting helpers from higher planes? We have come to realize that we are not on the top of the chain of being. What do we need to do on the subtle plane to heal following matrix understanding of the life process.

4. What adjustment in psychology, anthropology, philosophy politics, theology, spiritual technologies, finances, the arts, communications and most of all, the ethics do we need in order to heal the planet?

So the big question remains. Our current state of the disciplines of Transpersonal Psychology and Transpersonal Sociology is too primitive to handle our crisis. Our theologies, in order to defend themselves against the terror and high anxiety 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 a return to the old time religion.

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 I raised.

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

Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (known as Reb Zalman), is the spiritual leader of the Jewish Renewal movement, and an internationally recognized teacher of the heart who draws from many disciplines and cultures. He holds the World Wisdom Seat at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, where he lives and teaches. His latest book, Jewish with Feeling, is Reb Zalman's uniquely warm and welcoming approach to awakening the soul. He is the founder of the Spiritual Eldering Institute, which teach elders how to expand their lives and consciousnesses to meet their extended life span.