Author: admin

Who are you, really? Not who do you say you are, or who others say you are or should be, but who are you, really: who is the you who says and hears what others are saying? I am a white male Jewish American, but the me that knows this isn’t any of these things. I am currently sitting on a wooden Adirondack chair overlooking the Cumberland Plateau, but the me that knows this isn’t sitting anywhere. The me that knows cannot be known; it has no attributes; it has no substance; it isn’t a thing but a knowing. But what is it if there is nothing to know? What is it—who am I—if there is no content to know?  Can the knowing that knows everything be forever unknown?

Welcome to the Kali Yuga, the Apocalypse, the End Times, the collapse of order into the creative sea of chaos. Global warming and climate change and the rise of ISIS and jingoistic nationalism and mindless consumerism and Gilded Age capitalism and all the other bogeymen that haunt our dreams both waking and asleep didn’t cause the collapse, they are simply how the collapse is happening. The cause is simply reality. We need times of collapse the way we need earthquakes and tsunamis: without the shifting of the earth’s plates that cause earthquakes and tsunamis, the earth couldn’t function; without periods of collapse there is no new growth. We need Good Friday if we are to have Easter Sunday. That’s why Good Friday is good: Jesus has to die if Christ is to be born. So the question isn’t “How do we stop the collapse?” but rather “How do we ride it out compassionately, wisely, and lovingly?”

Knowing my identity as a Jew, American, white, male, liberal, etc. is simply a social construct with no metaphysical grounding, why schlep around these identity markers at all? Knowing that “self” is a fiction, and “me, myself, and I” are variations of this fiction, why bother to dress up the “self” with a specific identity at all? I think the answer is this: I can’t help it. Just as there is no such thing as “ice cream” separate from specific flavors of ice cream, there is no me, no self, with identity markers. The key isn’t to free yourself from everything that is yourself, it is to know that everything that is yourself is a fiction. This way you can play as and with your “self” rather than be played by it.

Since the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States I continually run into frightened, angry liberals (like me). If I refrain from jumping on the bandwagon and simply observe their (my) anger, I find it shallow and cheap. They (and I) are having a temper tantrum. How dare America invalidate our worldview, our values, our knowledge of how things are and how they can be made better? And if I look deeper still I find that there is an even cheaper grace in this cheap anger. We care so much for person and planet, and now that we are the only ones who care we can take great comfort in the fact that we are the caring ones. Both our anger and our grace are cheap, meaning that while they can’t change anything, they can make us feel superior. And, after all, if we are honest, that is what counts most of all.

I often awake in the middle of the night and find myself chanting silently: sometimes my Hebrew mantra, the 13 Attributes of Godliness, sometimes my Sanskrit mantra I promised Swami Swahananda never to reveal. The chanting seems to have preceded my waking, so who was chanting? And the I that observed my “self” chanting seems to be a creation of my awakening from sleep and is a different “I” from the chanting “I”. And now there is an “I” that is aware of both of these I’s and the I that is aware of both of these I’s. So now there are three I’s, plus the I that is aware of these three, and now the fifth that is aware of the other four, and now the sixth that… You get the idea? But who is the “you” that gets it?

Thoughts happen. You catch them as they happen and assume you are thinking them. You aren’t. You are “reading” them, claiming ownership of them (my thoughts), and then defending them often to the death (your’s if need be, but preferably someone else’s). Thoughts create the illusion of a thinker. Even as I write these words I’m not thinking them; they are simply arising and I type them out on the screen. Afterwards I can read them and decide whether or not to agree with them, but even this happens without my conscious control. If I am careful in my observation of what is happening, I realize that I am a nameless, faceless, narrative–free Cypher, a no–thing, that observes all things as outside itself. But if I look more deeply (and who is this I that is looking I cannot say) I discover I am not other but all. Just as the ocean is all its waves without being reduced to any of them, so I am all that is happening without be limited to any one happening or the sum of all happenings. Yet all of this is mere thought. The challenge is to get beyond thought. At least I think that at the moment.

Religiosity is the innate human yearning for meaning in the present. Religion is the institution(s) we create to preserve and often impose meanings we invented in the past. Spirituality is the innate human capacity to shatter religion as a first step to freeing religiosity to make new meanings.  Religiosity is healthy when it is driven by compassionate curiosity: the desire to know freed from the desire to control. Religiosity is unhealthy when it substitutes fixed images for fluid imagining; when it stops asking questions and settles for momentary answers. Religion is healthy when it preserves our answers for the moment without prohibiting the asking of new questions in the next moment. Religion is unhealthy when it fixates on an answer and outlaws all further questioning. Spirituality is healthy when it invites us into terrifying ecstasy that shatters the known and leaves us naked in the midst of the Unknown. Spirituality is unhealthy when it substitutes happiness for ecstasy, and shallow proverbs for the deep probing that is religiosity.

Asking Does God exist? is asking the wrong question. As Paul Tillich taught us: God doesn’t exist, God is existence. This is why the ineffable Hebrew name of God YHVH is a variation of the Hebrew verb to be; God isn’t a being, or even the Supreme Being, but be–ing itself. And this is why when you read YHVH backward you get HaVaYaH “existing.” Don’t ask Does God exist? Ask What is this exiting that I am?

The ascendant God of the moment (and this moment is millennia–old) is the God I/Me/Mine who is a reflection of our most xenophobic and jingoistic (and for many misogynistic and homophobic) tendencies projected into the cosmos through writings and rituals we call sacred. This is the God who leads from tribal to tribalism, from honoring differences to condemning the different. This is the God who dominates our headlines because this is the God who dominates our heads, and often demands we sacrifice them. This God exists in our imaginations, and no amount of rational, scientific argument can convince us that this God isn’t the true God. The only way to defeat this God is to imagine a better one. And the only way to imagine a better one is to be better than the one we’ve got.

I am a zayde because my son and daughter-in-law had a baby. I expected that I would be his zayde, and his zayde alone, but I was wrong. Once I became a zayde I discovered I was the world’s zayde. I discovered I wanted to play with everyone and everything: humans, animals, trees, the seen and the unseen. I rediscovered my love of blocks, and picture books, and making funny noises. I rediscovered my nose and mouth and eyes, and was reminded again and again how annoying it is to have someone—even the cutest someone—stick his fingers in any of them. People ask me how they should refer to me: Rabbi, Rabbi Rami, Rebbe, Reb Rami… my preference is Zayde. Just call me zayde.