When Lady Augusta Gregory compiled a description from local informants of the daimons they called the Sidhe in County Galway, Ireland, she provided us with a list of characteristics pretty much common to all daimons. The Sidhe are shape-shifters. They can appear large or small; as birds, beasts, or blasts of wind; as lights which fly through the air. Their country is Tir-na-nOg, the Country of the Young, which is located under the ground or under the sea, or perhaps in islands out in the west; or it may not be far from any of us. Fighting is heard among them, and music that is more beautiful than any of this world; if they are seen, they are often dancing or playing. The Sidhe will help a man with his work or even tell him where to find treasure; they will teach certain wise men and women where to find lost livestock, and how to cure the sick. They call many over to their world through the evil eye, or by a touch, a blow, a sudden terror. Those who receive such a stroke will waste away from this world, as their strength is lent to the Sidhe. Young men are taken to help with their games and their wars; young mothers are taken to suckle their newborn children; girls that they may themselves become mothers there. The dead are often seen among them. The Sidhe have been, like the angels, from before the making of the world.

It is not to our credit, I think, that we now call Tir-na-nOg, the unconscious, and the daimons, such things as “archetypes” – although C.G. Jung recognized that archetypes “manifest themselves as daimones, as personal agencies, and are not ‘figments of the imagination’ as rationalism would have us believe.”

In China, daimons called kwei-shins variously inhabit hills and rocks, preside over land, live among the ancestors, and are omnipresent, usually visible, sometimes not, being both material and immaterial. In Arabia, Jinns are composed of subtle fire, able to take on whatever shape they please. For the Romans, daimons were everywhere, genii loci, from the fauni of the woods to the Lares and Penates of farms and houses. Trolls and hulder-folk inhabit Scandinavia; elves were widespread throughout western Europe – a tall handsome race like the Sidhe, who were called in Wales Tylwyth Teg, “the fair folk.” Every county in England had a different name for them, from the pixies of Cornwall to the farisees of Norfolk. Whether or not the Sidhe are the same as the “Little People,” we cannot be sure. We know only that, as a fairy once remarked to a Sligo man; “I am bigger than I appear to you now. We can make the old young, the big small, the small big.”

The comicalness of the Little People helps us to laugh them out of court (although we would be ill-advised to laugh at them to their face). For example, the Little People are eighteen inches tall, perfectly proportioned, with hair that grows down to their heels. Some wear gold caps; others go bareheaded. Their footsteps and voices wake people at night, but if you get up you find nothing – although food might be missing… This is how two Cherokee women described the Yunw Tsunsdi who live a hidden life parallel to the Cherokee people of North Carolina. The Little People who helped the Inuit shaman described by the Danish explorer, Knud Rasmussen, were called aua – little women no larger than an arm’s length, with pointed caps, short bearskin trousers, and high boots, which held upward turned feet so that they seemed to walk on their heels. The Little People of Ghana, West Africa, are called Asamanukpai. They are slightly bigger than a monkey, colored black, white, or red, and their feet are turned back to front. If you visit their haunts it is advisable to make offerings of rum; for if they are annoyed they stone the offender and lead him into the depths of the forest, and lose him there. However, like the aua who are also the agents of the shaman’s greatest enlightenment, the Asamanukpai may teach you all they know, squeezing into your eyes and ears and mouth the juice of a plant which enables you thereafter to hear everyone’s thoughts and to foresee all events. Thus the ridiculous daimons are also the source of the most sublime truth.

I want to emphasize the chief attributes of daimons because these are also crucial attributes, often neglected, of the ground of reality itself. Firstly, they are ambiguous, even contradictory, for instance both material and immaterial (anthropologists who tend to call them “spirits” are misleading). They are both benevolent and malign, always tricky – at best mischievous, at worst life-threatening. Secondly, they are elusive, fast-moving, appearing and disappearing in the twinkling of an eye. Thirdly, they are shape-shifters, like Proteus nearly impossible to pin down. Whenever, therefore, we think we have a fix on reality, we will find when we look again that the image, concept, or formulation we proudly hold up is an empty mask whose living daimon has already slipped away. The nature of daimons tells us besides that reality is better represented by concrete, personified images than abstract and impersonal concepts. If we want to catch them, we cannot use plodding logic or precise rationality; we have to use our own quickest, most highly colored, shape-shifting faculty: imagination. Fourthly, daimons are always marginal creatures who favor liminal zones or times for their appearances – bridges, crossroads, seashores, no less than the turning of the day at midnight or of the old year at Halloween. They are always, too, marginalized by “official” culture, whether of science or of the Churches.

A fifth characteristic of daimons is emphasized by Plato in The Symposium, where Socrates tells us that we can have no contact with the gods or God except through the daimons who “interpret and convey the wishes of men to the gods and the will of gods to men.” “Only through the daimons,” he says, “is there conversation between men and gods, whether in the waking state or during sleep.” Here we understand the essentially intermediary nature of daimons, mediating between the material and the nonmaterial, the personal and impersonal, between this world and the Otherworld. Those who are expert in daimonic intercourse used to be called cunning men or wise women, medicine men, and witch doctors, but are now generally called shamans. Such individuals often marry a daimon who, like a poet’s muse, is the supernatural source of insight and power.

All of us are traditionally enjoined to leave food out for the daimons. They do not literally eat the food, but are said to feed off its essence. Metaphors of nourishing and marriage, then, express the reciprocal relationship between us and the Otherworld – and psychotherapists might do well to bear them in mind. For we feed the daimons in order to prevent them from becoming unruly, or worse; and we maintain a close, even erotic relationship with them so that they are not compelled to relate to us by force. Notoriously, daimons take our children, replacing them with sickly children – changelings – of their own. They take young mothers to nurse their young, and young men to help them in their battles. It is as if, as the Irish poet W.B. Yeats remarked, “we need their wisdom as they need our strength.” If we do not feed them – that is, heed them – they grow increasingly importunate. Ignored in their natural habitats, they return from outside Nature, as extraterrestrials who not only steal young mothers but their fetuses as well. The lack of reciprocity in this interesting folklore was later amended when it became widely believed that the “aliens” were in cahoots with the government, who sanctioned their abductions in exchange for their “wisdom” – an advanced alien technology.

Thus the daimons are still alive and well, although just as outcast from official culture as they ever were. The reason why they have been forced to shape-shift into extraterrestrials – to cut their cloth to suit the times – is that they suffered badly in their traditional forms at the hands of Christendom. No daimon was allowed to mediate between mankind and God, as Plato had allowed, because Jesus Christ was now the one and only Mediator. When St. Paul spoke of daimonia, he meant devils. All daimons were demonized. At best they were assimilated to Christianity: the old daimons of hills, rivers, rocks, and trees were christianized into the saints and the Virgin Mary, who supplanted many a nymph of stream and holy well. But both processes of demonizing and christianizing imply a polarizing of the daimons’ contradictory nature. Like all monotheistic religions, Christianity is intolerant of daimonic ambiguity. Daimons cannot, for example, be allowed to be both benevolent and malign – they must be polarized into either angels or devils.

Although the Otherworld in which the daimons are said to live is, of course, nonspatial (just as it is timeless), it always represents itself in spatial metaphors – it is beside this world, or beneath it, or above it, or concealed within it (and “not very far from any of us”). Multi-spatiality stands for nonspatiality. Yet the Otherworld takes precedence over, and is more real than, this world – as we suspect when we are seized by a dream or ravished by a vision, before “common sense” re-asserts itself. The Otherworld is probably where we come from, if Plato is to be credited, and certainly where we go when we die. It is usually the reverse of this world, like a mirror image. Daimonic men and women can enter it or communicate with it at will, just as the heroes of old traveled there to learn the arts of culture or to steal the secret of fire or agriculture.

One of the innovations of the modern Western world has been to turn the Otherworld into an abstraction. It has been formulated in three main ways: as the Greek psyche tou kosmou, or Soul of the World; as the imagination; and as the collective unconscious. The last two models of the Otherworld have the added eccentricity of being located within us. Historically, all three models have been outcast by Western orthodoxy – Christian theology no less than modern rationalism. But wherever they have as it were broken the surface and emerged from their “esoteric,” even “occult” underworld, they have been accompanied by the most extraordinary efflorescence of creative life. In Renaissance Florence, and again, among the German and English Romantics three hundred years later, imagination was exalted not only as the most important human faculty, but as the very ground of reality. “The Primary Imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception,” proclaimed Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “and is a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM….”

The only concern of the Primary Imagination, wrote another poet, W.H. Auden, is with sacred beings and events. They cannot be anticipated, he says – they must be encountered. Our response to them is a passion of awe. It may be terror or panic, wonder or joy, but it must be awe-full. Auden’s sacred beings and events are our daimons, archetypal images which Imagination generates. They are chiefly personifications but Imagination can, like the “glamour” the fairies cast over objects, enchant anything so that what we had formerly overlooked is suddenly seen as ensouled, a presence, as if it were a powerful living person.

Thus Romantic Imagination is pretty much the opposite of what it has come to mean – something unreal and invented, what Coleridge called “fancy.” “The nature of Imagination is very little known,” lamented the visionary artist and poet William Blake, “& the Eternal nature and permanence of its ever Existent Images is considered as less permanent than the things of Vegetative and Generative Nature.” Indeed. Imagination is independent and autonomous; it precedes and underpins mere perception; and it spontaneously produces those images – gods, daimons, and heroes – who interact in the mysterious unauthored narratives we call myths.

The prototype of this myth-making imagination was the Soul of the World posited by the Neoplatonists who, like Plato, understood that daimons are intermediate between mortals and gods. And they developed this insight, recognizing a whole daimonic realm, partly physical, partly spiritual, which mediates between our sensory material world and the spiritual or “intelligible” world of Forms – Plato’s abstract gods that provide the ideal models for everything that exists. This world-soul where the daimons come from was sometimes imagined hierarchically, with the intelligible world above and our world below – but all three emanating from an unknowable source simply called the One. At other times it was pictured as a single dynamic realm with two aspects: one intelligible (spiritual) and one sensory (material). And this is how the Western esoteric tradition has generally imagined it. All Neoplatonists, Hermetic philosophers, alchemists and Kabbalists have asserted that the cosmos is animated by a collective soul which manifests itself now spiritually, now physically, now – daimonically, both at once; but which above all holds all phenomena together. It is a macrocosm, containing all images, daimons, individual souls, including the human soul. But because it is daimonically contradictory, it can also be seen as a microcosm – an individual soul containing a profound collective level, in which we are connected to each other and, indeed, to all living things.

In Plato’s Timaeus, where the Soul of the World is first described, it is infused throughout the cosmos by the Demiurge, Plato’s creator-god, who thus makes a living ensouled universe. (The Soul of the World remains the root metaphor for all conceptions of the world as organism, including modern ecological ideas). In other words, as well as being transcendent, one level above our world, the world-soul is also immanent, just as traditional cultures imagine it. Not that they always have a concept for the world-soul – they do not abstract from the world but rather see the world in the first instance as animate, instinct with soul. “All things,” according to the ancients, from Thales to Plutarch, “are full of gods.”

Those who have emptied Nature of soul and reduced it to dead matter obeying mechanical laws, pejoratively call the traditional world-view animism – a term which effectively writes off what it claims to describe. To “animistic” cultures there is no such thing as animism. There is only Nature presenting itself in all its immediacy as daimon-ridden. Every sacred object and place had its genius or Jinn, its numen or naiad, as the case may be. The Romantics imagined Nature in this way. For them, Imagination was co-extensive with Creation, just like the Soul of the World. Every natural object was ambivalent, both spiritual and physical, as if dryad and tree were the inside and outside of the same thing. “To the eyes of a man of Imagination,” wrote Blake, “Nature is Imagination itself.”

When Jung discovered a collective unconscious beneath the personal unconscious – Freud’s subconscious – full of the repressed contents of our personal histories, he was consciously reviving the idea of the Soul of the World. The “archetypes” which dwell in the collective unconscious are as difficult to grasp as the gods to which Jung often compared them. Like their antecedents – Plato’s Forms and Kant’s a priori categories – they are abstract entities that nevertheless constitute the substrate of reality. The archetypes are, says Jung, unknowable in themselves; but, paradoxically, they can be known because they manifest themselves in images. The Neoplatonists put it another way: the gods who are in themselves “formless and unfigured” appear as daimons, many of whom are different images of the same god. Since Creation myths always place the gods prior to mankind, it seems just as likely that the gods imagine us as we imagine them. And this is what Jung claimed for the archetypes: “All we know is that we seem unable to imagine without them…. If we invent them, then we invent them according to the patterns they lay down.”

The archetypes do not only appear as single images; they also appear as those structures and patterns which form the recurring motifs of every mythology, such as the death and rebirth of the hero, the quest for hidden treasure, the journey to the Underworld, and the abduction of a mortal by a god. When he wanted to describe the dynamics of the psyche, Freud drew instinctively on myths for he understood that they are the true stories of the soul. However, while he confined himself to very few, such as the myth of Oedipus and of Electra, Jung went further and realized that all the myths are alive in the collective unconscious. What he did not perhaps realize so clearly is that no interpretation of myth really throws light on that myth. For instance, we may interpret the hero’s slaying of the dragon as the ego’s struggle to break free from the overpowering unconscious, but this tells us nothing new – it is merely a rather dreary variant of the original, more colorful archetypal story. Like the daimons who inhabit them, myths shape-shift to provide new versions of themselves for every generation; and I will shortly be suggesting that the modern myths we call “scientific fact” are new variations on old tales.

It was while he was investigating alchemy that Jung came to realize that imagination was “perhaps the most important key to the understanding of the opus.” He began to see it as something powerful and concrete, “a concentrated extract of the life forces, both physical and psychic” – in other words, “an intermediate realm between mind and matter, i.e. a psychic realm of subtle bodies.” Imagination was identical to the vital principle of alchemy, Mercurius, who was at once a substance and a god; the beginning, middle and end of all things; both Prime Matter and Philosophers’ Stone; common as dung yet the highest principle imaginable. To find his equivalent we would have to look outside Western culture altogether – to the Tao (or Dao) perhaps, or to the Hindu god Shiva, who dances the cosmos into existence, or to the Lord Krishna who is Lord of the Universe, yet not above causing domestic disorder and teasing milkmaids like a fairy.

While the Otherworld is both within us and outside us – both microcosm and macrocosm – depending on our point of view, psychology has located it exclusively within. Once again, it was Jung who, through his own experience of a shamanic descent into the underworld of myth, pioneered the idea that “there may well be a psyche ‘outside-the-body,’ a region so utterly different from my psychic sphere that one has to get out of oneself… to get there.” He re-imagined the unconscious as an “alien country outside the ego,” an Otherworld of gods, ancestors, and daimons just as traditional cultures describe. If it is within us, it is also as if, were we to travel deeply enough within, the unconscious turns inside out. “At bottom,” said Jung, “psyche is simply ‘the world.’”

How did the unconscious come to be situated inside us? The short answer lies with the new kind of consciousness – our own modern Western consciousness, in fact – which emerged at the beginning of the 17th century. Its novelty lay in two extraordinary claims for which Descartes was the spokesman. Firstly, it asserted that it was entirely separate from the world, which henceforth was to be regarded as exclusively outside us – it was the subject in relation to which everything else was an object. Secondly, it claimed to be the whole of the psyche, effectively denying the existence of the unconscious. Instead of the old interaction of microcosm and macrocosm, of human psyche and world, where each mirrored the other’s oceanic richness with marvelous congruence, we are left with an inner world diminished to mere consciousness, and cut off from a stark and soulless outer world.

The new consciousness was centered around a subject, an ego as we now call it, which was so bright, so focused, so narrow, that it threw the rest of the psyche into deep shadow. All the twilight intercourse between consciousness and the unconscious ceased. From the ego’s point of view, the unconscious did not exist. From its own point of view, of course, the unconscious existed more profoundly, more darkly, sealed off as it was from direct expression through consciousness. Its stifled cries were not heard for three hundred years, when they came to light in the depth psychologists’ consulting-rooms. Indeed, psychology was founded specifically to disinter this buried part of the psyche; or we could say that the suppressed unconscious grew so importunate that we were compelled to invent psychology in order to contain it. Being immortal, the daimons cannot be done away with but will always return to subvert the very ideologies that deny them, tormenting the over-ascetic in their cells or labs, maddening the over-rational with their irrationality. Scoured from Nature in the 19th century, they reappeared in our drawing-rooms as spirits of the séance; banned from the planet they return from on high as menacing extraterrestrials; denied by urban sophisticates, they cry out with alien voices from the psychoanalyst’s couch.

From the daimonic outlook, the situation could be simply put like this: banished from the outer world, soul and its daimons were forced to take refuge in the only place left to them – the human psyche. But this inner world had in turn been straitened to a brilliant but inhospitable consciousness, compelling them to hide in the darkness behind. The unconscious was filled with the outcast daimons – except that they did not so much fill it as form it. The modern unconscious was created by the new ego-consciousness’s separation of itself from the rest of the psyche and from the world at large. Although I have described this separation as two different movements, they are really one because, as Jung noticed, psyche is the world. To cut oneself off from psyche, soul, the unconscious, is also to become estranged from Nature.

The very strength of the modern Western ego is also its greatest shortcoming, namely its literalism. You are led to believe a lie, Blake wrote in a poem, “when you see not thro’ the eye.” To see with the eye alone is to see the world as if in single vision, as two-dimensional only, as literal. To see the world through the eye is to cultivate what Blake called “double vision,” which perceives in greater depth, beyond the literal to the metaphorical. He asked himself the question: “When the sun rises, do you not see a round disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea?” “O no, no,” he replies, “I see an innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty.’” Single vision sees the sun only as the ordinary Guinea-sun; double vision sees it also as a heavenly host. We need double vision to see the daimons – to see that they are real, but not literally so. Unfortunately we have become so literal-minded that the only reality we recognize is literal reality which, by definition, rules out daimons.

Reality is far from being intrinsically literal. It is literalized by the peculiar perspective of our modern consciousness. It is peculiar because it is the only perspective which insists that it is not a perspective at all but a true vision of the actual world. It has in fact lost perspective because “perspective” means “seeing through,” and it fails to see through itself. So forceful is the literalism of our world-view that it is almost impossible for us to grasp that it is exactly that – a view – and not the world. The world we inhabit, then, is seen through a particular perspective, framed by imagination – in short, by a myth. There is always another world according to other perspectives, other myths. The collective unconscious, imagination, and the Soul of the World are all models of this Otherworld, all analogous to each other, all metaphors for a daimonic reality – which is itself another metaphor. The ultimate reality to which these models refer is unknown. It is a mystery.

The first task for us moderns is to learn to see through our literalism in order to restore Romantic double vision. For example, if I may recapitulate for a moment: the daimons inhabit another, often subterranean, world which fleetingly interacts with ours. They are both material and immaterial, both there and not-there – often small, always elusive shape-shifters whose world is characterized by distortions of time and space and, above all, by an intrinsic uncertainty. The point is that the words “subatomic particles” could be substituted for the word “daimons” without any loss of accuracy. This is not a coincidence – the subatomic realm, like the unconscious, is where the daimons took refuge once they were banished from their natural habitats. We understand such particles as electrons literally – we even use them in our war against materialism. But electrons might be specifically designed to re-introduce us to the reality of daimons. They cannot, that is, be taken any more literally than the little people (or any less).

If the realm of subatomic particles is a literalized image of the immanent Otherworld, the transcendent Otherworld is literalized by our picture of the cosmos, whose fantastic denizens – Black Holes, Quasars, Dark Matter – resemble the ogres of fairy tales or else the elements of some ancient Gnostic myth. Within a black hole, for instance, there lurks a singularity about which nothing can be known because all the laws of physics break down at this point. Nor can it ever be observed directly because nothing can escape from it, not even light. Since time slows to nothing at the speed of light, anything crossing the “event horizon” of a black hole will (from the viewpoint of an observer outside) take an infinite amount of time to reach the center. And so on. It is easy to see that whatever else a black hole is, it is a knot of mythic resonances, an Otherworld where as usual everything is reversed and where time is distorted. Like an archetype or god, its influence is all the more powerful for being invisible and unknowable. As a daimon in a soulless universe, a black hole can only manifest itself as a devouring Charybdis that whirls everything in its vicinity into oblivion. It is incomparably smaller than a star but its power is commensurately greater. It shape-shifts – black holes as tiny as atomic nuclei have been proposed. It is a materialistic image of the Unknown God who dwells in the unfathomable abyss and a negative image of the One beloved of the Neoplatonists.

The rational ego cannot finally cut itself off from soul, but its denial of soul’s myriad images leaves an empty void which in turn is mirrored in the universe at large.

The dark abyss of space punctuated by tiny lights, like the Gnostic’s soul-sparks, is the image of the modern soul – or soullessness. The cosmologists try to fill the void with their gods, which are Big Numbers. But the millions of light years and squillions of stars fail to recapture a soul which is impervious to quantity and can only be replenished by quality. Thus, no matter how cosmologists multiply the numbers of galaxies, they still find themselves about ninety per cent short of the matter they need to account for the equilibrium of the universe. They have to postulate the existence of a vast amount of invisible “dark matter.” Most of this has to consist of exotic kinds of “virtual particles,” unlike any actually detected by nuclear physicists. These particles are extremely transitory and elusive yet all around us without our knowing it…. We can see them for what they are by now, I hope. Modern cosmology tells us as much about the modern unconscious as about the universe. For whatever we repress gathers force in the unconscious and throws a shadow over the world; and “dark matter” is precisely the shadow of the imaginative fullness we have denied to our cosmos.

Once we begin to see through literalisms, we begin to see them everywhere. For example, take Darwin’s theory of evolution. It predicts a vast number of fossils to link one genus to another (e.g. fishes to reptiles, birds to mammals) and even more fossils to link one species to another (e.g. the earliest mammal, possibly a small rodent, to humans). In fact, not a single intermediate fossil has been found, except possibly one (viz: archaeopteryx – which may well be a forgery). Why do evolutionists go on believing in evolution? Because it is a powerful Creation myth which demands belief.

The place where species really change into another is not in Nature but in myth. Species of gods and daimons are always appearing to humans in animal form. The interchangeability of humans and animals is a metaphor for the reciprocal relationship between this world and the Otherworld. All “missing links” are literal versions of the mediating daimons; the idea of species mutating, a literalization of daimonic shape-changing. Many traditional cultures from West Africa to Australia believe that the ancestors from which they are descended are god-like animals. Yet they would be incredulous at our literal belief in this, and our attempts to prove that we are descended from a common ancestor of apes and ourselves. The evolutionary chain is a literalization of mythic genealogy.

Besides, the theory of evolution is not as new a myth as we usually think. Structural anthropology has shown how myths that look very different on the surface are in fact variants of the same myth. For example, Creation myths are traditionally devolutionary. They describe how we are descended from gods or god-like ancestors, and our present state is fallen, a regression from the perfection of the past. We are inferior to our forebears. Our task is to recreate the conditions of Eden or Arcadia, the state of past harmony.

Only our Western Creation myth is evolutionary. It describes how we have ascended from animals and our present state is advanced, a progress from the imperfection of the past. We are superior to our forebears. Our task is to create the conditions of the New Jerusalem or Utopia, the state of future harmony.

We notice that these two myths are not so very different. They are symmetrical but inverted. So, while the evolutionary myth claims that it is not a myth at all, but history – and superseding all other myths – we see that it is really a variant of the devolutionary myth, an eccentric variant that wants to take itself literally.

The modern ego’s literalizing drive means that its scientific myths have to be acted out; the Otherworld has to be turned into this world. The supernatural and magical powers of the heroes and shamans who travel through the Otherworld are mechanically approximated by our technology. Guns and bullets supply the ability to do occult harm at a distance; telephony and radio supply the ability to communicate telepathically over long distances (the telescope is a kind of second sight, a way of seeing what is happening far away); X-rays and surgery literalize the shaman’s ability to “see inside” his patients and to extract (by hand or by sucking!) the cause of the disease; aircraft and rockets literalize magical flight. The search for electricity was originally the quest for the “light of Nature,” a mystical counterpart to the ordinary light of fire or sun which could shine suddenly in the darkest night, surrounding every visit of a god or goddess, such as the Virgin Mary, or indeed every visitation from an angel or UFO. The closer science came to harnessing it, the more its elusive volatile nature, as the alchemists say, became fixed. Its mystical properties were distilled away, leaving only the dross of ordinary light. Illumination was literalized into mere light, whose profane brightness and glare were inimical to the dim sacred light in which true enlightenment occurs.

Television’s strange power to addict us stems from its literalization of Imagination itself: we gaze enchanted at the “little people” in the artificial Otherworld on the screen. Because television feeds us images which are not, as Plato would say, representations of Eternal Forms (or, as we might say, Art), we remain – our souls remain – unnourished. We crave more images, and more, in the vain hope of that repletion which only relations with an authentic Otherworld can give. Indeed, whenever technology is divorced from true imagination it always proliferates manically, and we always want more – more machines, more images, and now more “information,” as if this quantitative “more” could fill the void; as if “information” were knowledge. Hence, however useful a tool a world-wide web of information is, it will never become the world-soul it is unconsciously imitating because it is a web spun out of our own entrails. Computer technology constantly drives towards the literalizing of daimonic reality. Its “chips” are little souls to animate everything from “smart” toasters to bombs; its cyberspace is a fantasy Otherworld; “virtual reality” a counterfeit daimonic reality. We are fooled by the cleverness of computers into thinking that we can create an Otherworld and manipulate it. But the Otherworld is not our creation – if anything, it creates us. Nor can we manipulate it – we can only be transformed by it.

The transformation central to all cultures and essential to our own is death, not of the body, but of the ego. Because the ego of its nature clings violently to life – that is, to the reality it thinks is the only reality – it can only be uprooted by external violence. This is what is meant by the traditional performance of initiation rites. The pattern of initiation is laid down by the gods or ancestors, and embodied most fully in the initiations of the tribe’s shamans, who, in trance or ecstasy, travel into the Otherworld to be dismembered by daimons, raised up again and given supernatural knowledge and power. It is of course not the literal body which is dismembered but the literalistic perspective of the ego (which is so often carried by the body).

The rites of passage accorded young people at puberty are commonly a replication of shamanic initiation, but in concrete form, with the daimons being played by the elders of the tribe. The initiates are abducted at dead of night and systematically terrorised: they are left without food and water for days in a pit, sometimes buried in the darkness of a symbolic grave; they are beaten, pierced, given scars or tattoos, and, above all, painfully circumcised. Finally, after this near-death experience, they are vouchsafed a blinding revelation: all the most secret myths and lore of the tribe.

Puberty rites transform the child into an adult. If they are delayed, young people can sometimes reach their early twenties while still remaining children. No initiation, no adulthood. Ritual transformation – imaginative transformation – takes precedence over merely biological, only literal, change. It is little wonder, then, that Western adolescents – who are deprived of any official initiation rites – seek them out through home-made Dionysian cults of drugs, sex, drink, and wild dancing. They naturally long to get out of their heads and into the Otherworld. They positively need fear and pain and deprivation to know if they can stand it, know if they are men and women, know who they are. They want scars, tattoos, and piercings to show off. Some even commit crimes specifically to incur punishment – the initiation of prison – only to be given “counseling” instead.

Our humane liberal culture has a horror of that fear and pain which seems to be essential to initiation. Still, luckily, there is always enough suffering to go round. Bereavement, loss, sickness numb and gut and dismember us. We are usually encouraged to seek a cure for these experiences rather than to use them for transformation, for self-initiation. But it is often a mistake to medicalize suffering – and death – because they are primarily matters of the soul, not the body. If I were Supreme Ruler, I would institute Mystery Schools like those of the Greeks at Eleusis where young people would be initiated into a vision of the Soul of the World which would inform their whole lives.

Until that happens, it might be advisable to seek out whatever contact with the Otherworld we may, and especially to pay attention to daimons in whatever guise they appear; for “whoever denies the daimons,” wrote that great Neoplatonist Plutarch, “breaks the chain that unites the world to God.” We should try and restore the Soul of the World. This may not be impossible. Just as the individual soul was re-discovered through psychopathological symptoms, so might the ecological crisis be read as the collective soul crying out for attention. Everything in Nature that we could turn to if all else failed, has apparently turned against us: air, sunlight, rainfall – all are said to be polluted, carcinogenic, acid, harboring poison. Part of the pollution is the way that, even if literal pollution is not certain, we feel it to be so. Paranoia is a way of life as we sense attack from unseen agents all around us – barely detectable, shape-changing viruses, germs, invisible “rays” (such as microwaves) in the air and even poisons in food full of putative pesticides and chemicals. And so on.

This paranoid sense of the world conspiring against us is also, of course, a symptom of the world reviving. We have declared it so much dead machinery for so long that when it comes back to life, ensouled – animated – as of old, it comes back seemingly as death itself. The outcast daimons return as the vengeful Furies of lethal pathological symptoms.

If we want to enthrone the Soul of the World in her original glory, we will have to do more than introduce environmental remedies which, however well meaning, tend to stand at an equal and opposite pole – that is, to be as literalistic as the damage we do. We have to cultivate a new perspective, or seeing through; and a sense of metaphor, a seeing double. It may even take a bit a madness, a smidgen of ecstasy, if we are to shift our obdurate literalism and impeach the imperious ego. We can always make a start by developing a better aesthetic sense, an appreciation of beauty, which is the first attribute of soul. For the way we see the world can restore its soul, and the way the world is ensouled can restore our vision.

This article was previously published in Elixir Magazine, Issue 3 on Dreamlife, Autumn 2006.

What differentiates wisdom from other forms of knowledge?

Context for the conversation is first provided by Sousan Abadian and Christopher Bamford, who were co-presenters for Seven Pillars' Wisdom House Architectonics weekend in September 2009.

Sousan Abadian: Hi, everyone, it's such a pleasure to be on this call with you. Thanks for the opportunity to get the ball rolling as I think out loud with you on what differentiates wisdom from, say, knowledge or information or data. I just jotted down some thoughts before the call, and I'll begin by comparing wisdom with knowledge.

One simple metaphor I was playing with is that if knowledge or information is akin to light, then wisdom can be thought of as light applied with love. And while knowledge might access the mind, wisdom appears to be more holistic and accesses the mind, the heart, the body and spirit.

So with this grounding, I just had some basic definitions I'd like to suggest: having knowledge is having awareness or understanding of facts, truths, or information; but having wisdom can be thought of as the capacity to apply knowledge with discernment and using insight -- or another way of saying this might be applying knowledge as best as one can according to divine right action.

So already the words discernment, insight, divine or right action spring up around the notion of "wisdom" as distinct from, say, "knowledge." So let's just take a moment and focus on those words. Discernment and divine right action refer to several characteristics of wisdom that involve applying some moral or ethical code of conduct to discern right action, applying knowledge in accordance to some "right way."

There's another distinction to be made between human laws and sacred laws, between right action and divine right action. So with greater wisdom, perhaps one begins to discern between human and sacred laws, which certainly don't always correspond, and so acting from a place of greater wisdom is not always acting in accordance with the human-devised rules of the game.

Now, loosened from the mooring of human-devised rules and laws, wisdom is context-driven and intuition based. Wise action in one context is unwise under similar circumstances but at a different time, for example. While we might think of knowledge not as context-driven, but more absolute and clear-cut in nature, wisdom is more context-driven. So with few rules or absolutes to give shape to wisdom or guide wise action, how do you discern how to maneuver over such a context-dependent terrain?

Wisdom uses insights, or "inner sight," or "inner listening" -- accessing the divine mind, which in turn requires a quiet mind, as free as possible from judgment or fear. So I'll refine somewhat the definition I provided earlier and say, wisdom is the capacity to apply knowledge with discernment, and insight. So wisdom is the ever-growing capacity to apply knowing, not knowledge -- and what I mean by that is that wisdom is not necessarily knowledge-dependent, it's knowing-dependent.

This knowing comes from an inner dialogue, in other words it's not necessarily so that the more knowledge you have, the more wisdom you have -- they're not necessarily correlated. In some cases perhaps great knowledge, if it's accompanied by enhanced ego, can even interfere with greater wisdom. Which is why we notice that children, without much seeming knowledge, often have wisdom beyond their years. Or similarly, illiterates I've met on some of my journeys, with little access to knowledge, have more wisdom than many I've encountered at Harvard. So I'll end with a poem by William Wordsworth called "The Tables Turned":

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you'll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble? 

The sun above the mountain's head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow. 

Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There's more of wisdom in it. 

And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher. 

She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless—
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness. 

One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can. 

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--
We murder to dissect. 

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

Sousan Abadian: With that, I thank you, and give the floor to our dear Christopher.

Christopher Bamford: Well, this is a privilege to speak to you all like this. And it's kind of strange to do it on the telephone.

What I thought I'd do is say a few words out of the experience I had at our wisdom weekend, the Labor Day weekend at the Abode. I came to the Abode that weekend with a great deal of knowledge about wisdom and about our house without walls. For years I've studied wisdom literature, and I was proud to call myself a devotee of divine feminine wisdom.

I knew that wisdom was immanent in the divine and the stars and nature, in us. I knew that wisdom's path was one of active receptivity, of always being open to grace, of sacred hospitality, welcoming the stranger and so on. However, over our weekend, I learnt that this was only knowledge, but not wisdom herself, because wisdom itself is always in the moment, in the in-between, unpredictable, playful, always a mystery, and demanding not only receptivity and vulnerability, but always a kind of deep un-knowing. That's to say -- I learned that knowledge may be the fruit of insight, intuition, meditation; it may transform us, initiate us; I have certainly been changed by everything I knew about Sophia -- but it's not wisdom.

And wisdom isn't present or experienced until she's expressed, enacted, embodied in life and in the world, by the whole human being, the whole person, in every modality. For instance, it's one thing to have knowledge of God, but another altogether to live in God. It's one thing to be touched by God, but another to see all things in God, to live the reality that everything we encounter is a theophany, a divine play, a divine manifestation. In other words, it's one thing to have knowledge of wisdom, but it's another to live in wisdom, out of wisdom, which is always it seems to me, immanent in the moment. So I learned that wisdom goes beyond knowledge and intuitive understanding, and embraces and unites with all life in the moment that it appears, when it appears.

So I would say that from one point of view, wisdom is always immanent, it is embodied, it is lived, it is always relational, contextual, inter-subjective, practical, ethical, creative, and always in process, always on the way. And it became slowly apparent that the conversation, in a certain way, at least to a first approximation, was a perfect vessel or vehicle, a paradigm for the experience and the embodiment and the participatory embodiment of wisdom.

Now wisdom in this sense is similar to the ways we speak of the wisdom of nature, wisdom of the body; and from the wisdom point of view, creation herself is a great conversationalist. In other words, knowledge I can experience in the solitude of my self, but wisdom I experience in the web of relationships of which I am a part. And the experience of wisdom is the experience that the transcendent lives in and through this web of relationships in which the immanent is immanent. In other words I learned from this weekend that wisdom is the practice of wisdom, and that wisdom is not in us -- we are in her, and she becomes available to us in the multidimensional spaces that open up between and among us, and between and among all I am with, in any or every context. And I learned from that weekend that as one opens wholly, body soul and spirit, to these relational spaces, and gradually lets go of all knowledges, previous insights, past experiences, all certainties, wisdom in a strange way becomes present.

This was a wisdom by which, I felt, all those participating in the experience become wiser, better, and in a sense more loving people. So what I'm saying is that from our weekend, I learned that wisdom goes beyond yes and no, it lives in the coincidence of opposites, it always lives beyond any paradox or mystery, irresoluble. I learned that wisdom has much to do with love, and perhaps in fact it's the same thing. And with that I'll just leave it there.

Deepa Patel: Wow. Thank you, Christopher. So are any of you called to respond to what's been said?

Tamam Kahn: Christopher said we are all inside wisdom, I love that. And I think that one of the things that leads to wisdom might be the questions that we would ask being in there: "What is reality telling me? What is the lesson in this?" That wisdom comes through the process of self-inquiry.

Deepa Patel: If you were to apply that right now, in terms of what you've heard, what emerges?

Tamam Kahn: What I feel is the whole body of wisdom that we are inside, and I love that thought. That to me seemed really important, and how do we then respond, how do we connect with that, and I felt that it would be through inquiry.

Rabbi Shaya: This is Shaya, and the one thing I wanted to add is the way wisdom comes from our mistakes. The inquiry and also, yes, the intuition, the in-teaching, and a lot of the wonderful lofty things I heard, which I don't disagree with. But also that sense of one of the reasons why wisdom is connected with the aging process is, there's more time to learn from our mistakes.

Lee Irwin: I'd like to just add something, in terms of Christopher's view about love. I certainly agree with that, and my own perception of wisdom is as a nurturing presence. The practice of that nurturing presence is to be open and receptive to the thoughts and feelings and awareness of others, in such a way that some newness and insight comes through. It takes overcoming my own preconceptions about what might emerge in a particular situation -- like, who knows what might emerge in this particular situation? So being open is like calling forth or fostering that divine presence that brings inspiration and nurturance.

David Spangler: I realize that I don't think of wisdom as a form of knowledge; rather, wisdom, for me, is an engagement -- more like life itself. I think of knowledge as the form that is my first encounter with the life that is wisdom -- so I'm looking at my lamp, here in the living room, and I realize that I see its form and I can have knowledge about it, and the knowledge is how tall it is and how electricity works within it and so on, but none of that tells me about the life of the lamp, and its connection to my life and to everything else in the living room and beyond. But if I start with that shape, that knowledge, and I just say "take me deeper into you," then I do come into touch with that life. And I don't actually feel I know the lamp, I don't feel I have knowledge of the lamp, until I've touched that life. What I've had before that is just a kind of perception. I'm not sure if that makes sense, but I'm trying to think experientially about what is the difference between knowledge and wisdom, and I realize I don't think of wisdom as a species of knowledge at all, I think of it as an act of deep connection to life.

Janet Piedilato: David, I resonate with what you're saying. Coming from the sciences, I guess I look at knowledge as the accumulation of information in an attempt to understand life and everything that's around us. It's not anything that really is stable, that we can really count on -- it's our feeble attempt to understand that which is really beyond much of our understanding.

What I may have learned in the 1970s is today completely discarded for new ideas. When I think of wisdom, the very idea of inquiry doesn't enter into it -- I inquire and I question and I form hypotheses when I'm looking for knowledge, when I'm making my feeble attempt to understand something. But to share again with Christopher, inside wisdom I have this vision of sitting inside the body of the Buddha, and inside there are no questions. We don't need questions. It is a knowing, just a knowing, and I often tell students as I teach, "We have all these questions here, one of which is on top of many of our minds -- why is there pain and suffering and wars?," and my vision is, in the body of the Buddha, when you could ask any question, there is none to ask, because it is a place of wisdom, and those questions have no relevance anymore for they are to do with knowledge.

And again that knowledge is fleeting and my heroine, Barbara McClintock, who is the great scientist of the 1920s, I think said it best -- her idea was, leave everything that you think you know behind and just let yourself feel. So like David and everything that's been said before, knowledge is very limiting -- it's wonderful, I'm a perpetual student, and I enjoy learning new things—but wisdom is in the moment, it's an inner knowing, that the way you're acting and the way that you are moving within the being of the entire cosmos is right. There are no questions, it's just -- you see that person who needs help, you don't think "do I help them, do I move toward it" -- no, it's just a natural move. So for me the difference is -- the inquiry is about knowledge and the collection of facts which tomorrow are going to change, next year, next century, but wisdom is in the body of the Buddha, there's no question. It's just a knowing.

Lindy Hough: That was a good piece of information, Janet, and I did resonate with it. It does bring up the tussle of inquiry. I'm a creative artist, I'm a writer and basically look at this most of all through an artistic view, and I'll say a few things from that perspective.

Without inquiry, both knowledge and wisdom are less available to us, and less creative. I think the engaged Buddhist practitioner, for instance, or engaged Muslim practitioner, is always very actively participating in bringing -- and I think of this as a wonderful thing -- bringing questions and thoughts and feelings from real life to the problems of either science, knowledge or wisdom, traditional sciences as well as the occult and esoterica.

I've been involved in psychic groups here in Maine that Richard Grossinger has been running, and it's been quite amazing. It's powerful to try to think of what the relationship is between the inner voice that is working much as Christopher describes, very creatively, and participating with others in generating a collective wisdom; where does psychic awareness fit into that? Psychic awareness even challenges some of my Buddhist certainties.

Certainly in the mix that I find in writing poetry or my novel or writing about Maine in a non-fiction book -- all of this has to be worked on, much as it is in science. I do think of knowledge as pretty creative and exciting, and mutable -- it's always changing. I also bring what I thought about wisdom before we started, how it is informed by our traditions; I've always looked to indigenous traditions for wisdom, and that has to be a piece of it. Yes it can be in the now, and very relational and a present creative act for us now, but I've had huge comfort in the empirical wisdom of Sufism, or homeopathy or Native American shamanism, simply because it's stood the test of time. It, in that way, resembles science.

Yitzhak Buxbaum: If I could share a couple of thoughts. I went to the Torah to see about Wisdom building her house, setting up her seven pillars, I thought I might get some insight there. And I didn't. But in looking at the Hebrew, subsequently I saw that Wisdom is plural in this case: "Wisdoms has built her house."

First let me backtrack a step. I was disappointed that I went to an Ivy League college and didn't learn that there's such a thing as wisdom -- all I learned was knowledge. Nobody told me that there was such a thing as wisdom. I had to go through four years of college, and only after I graduated did I learn that there's such a thing as wisdom. As I see it, knowledge is objective, knowledge of the world. Wisdom is how to live. You don't study that in college.

There are a few kinds of wisdom. There's worldly wisdom, how to live successfully in a worldly way, and that's exemplified often in folktales. I'm a Maggid and a storyteller among other things, and I see how folktales exemplify worldly wisdom, not religious wisdom. So for religious wisdom, I go to Hasidic tales, or Sufi tales. Then there's godly wisdom, which is even higher than religious wisdom, because religious wisdom can be just the wisdom of a human, and godly wisdom is higher. But then, going to the Torah, Wisdom-Plural has built her house, may be even higher than godly wisdom, the wisdom of the seven pillars. So there are many wisdoms, there are different godly ways of looking at the world and how to live.

My last thought was that it says in the Torah that the fear of God is the beginning of Wisdom. Everybody's heard that. And one of my long-standing observations is, in NYC I would often see, on the subway, little old African-American women reading the Bible. My thought was that a little old black woman reading the Bible may not have had much schooling in college, but may have more wisdom than some fancy professor who doesn't know that there's good, that there's God. So for me, intelligence is character.

Deepa Patel: Thanks Yitzhak. There are of course some themes which are resonating from what people have been saying. I'm wondering about the people who haven't spoken, what you've been struck by.

Pir Shabda Kahn: I feel that the question assumes that there is a difference between wisdom and knowledge, and we have to go about defining these two terms to find our difference. But now it seems like we're asking ourselves the question "how do we move from observable knowledge, through experience, to direct knowing?" And it seems that knowledge probably comes from the word gan from Sanskrit, which also means direct knowing and, in our language we think of wisdom as Sophia.

And we can also go to the second turning of the wheel of Lord Buddha's teaching, the Prajana Paramit Ridaya Sutra, sometimes miscalled the Heart Sutra, as it's really translated the "Heart of Perfect Wisdom." Prajana should be understood, like some people have spoken about, wisdom as a direct knowing. And in order for Prajana to arise, the sutra asks us to recognize both interdependence and the insubstantiality of every thing -- that there is no thing. It doesn't mean that the relative and the absolute are inseparable, it doesn't deny the relative, it just says we've misunderstood it.

I feel that we have to overcome a false notion of a separate self, and let the whole have her way, which seems to be the purpose of this life. I think someone called this non-dual, someone called it experiential. And it seems like what would be valuable for us is to develop the methodology to move from how we describe the word knowledge as we understand it today, through experience, to actions which are purely beneficial and come from the essence coming through. It's like the outer world with knowledge draws us to her, just like the story of Nasrudin when he's looking for his keys under the light, and his friend comes to help and says, "Nasrudin, let me help you." They look for a while and he says, "Nasrudin, are you sure you lost your keys here?" And he says, "No, I lost them over there, but there's more light here." So that seems to be what that worldly knowledge does to us, it distracts us from overcoming the thought of self which is blocking wisdom herself from having her way.

Gayan Macher: In addition to listening to the various things that people are saying and being stimulated by a lot of them, part of what I'm experiencing right now is my relationship to this encounter and this technology of being a large group of people who are talking over a conference call. And I'm struck, in working with this setup, with some of what Christopher was saying about the encounter between people, and conversation -- and I'm seeing some of the difficulties, for me, with this technology, because it lends itself to a series of monologues, like we're each speaking, and then when we finish our thought the next person says what they have to say. And I'm working myself with the relevance of this question to us, which is -- can we find the alchemy of our coming together, our meeting? Can we hear something of the emerging meaning, and feel it among ourselves, beneath the concepts that we're conveying? It's when the exchange of ideas is like the exchange of the fluids of our hearts. So I've been aware of the process of trying to find my way into that kind of connection with you through this medium. I don't know if others have a similar experience, and I don't mean to cut off the content of what we're talking about, but I wanted to say something about the process.

Deepa Patel: Actually, I was going to speak just before you said that, and in part that was the question that was coming up for me, because of what Christopher said, like, "what's arising in this moment?" And yet, one of the things I was sort of relishing and one of the things that was sort of arising for me in this moment was actually the idea that I could take this hour to hear what's being said, and know that not only in this conversation, but when I go away from this conversation, that I'm still in it -- that there are things in it that keep resonating.

Gayan Macher: Are you saying, in other words, that in some ways this is kind of like the planting of seeds that ripple out over time?

Deepa Patel: It's partially a planting of seeds. But the other thing I'd say about the process is I spend a lot of time on the telephone in this way, and I'm really struck by how my relationships change even though I'm not seeing people and may never meet some of the people in person. Christopher talked about, as a result of one conversation, coming away feeling wiser. But he also talked about connection, and I'm aware of that even though there is this process of people speaking one at a time. And I think that in a way, that's what differentiates wisdom for me from other things -- it's an echoing of what others have said.

Lee Irwin: I'd like to add something to that. I do think that a respectful wisdom is really important, because it's part of the way that you can really assimilate what other people say, but one thing I can take away from this conversation for sure is the sense of community. And I feel that very strongly -- I feel a great resonance with everyone who has spoken. And for me, that's a pretty profound affirmation of what the Guiding Voices project is about -- to be in community. I can come away from this conversation feeling pretty strongly that, yes, there's a lot of other people working on these issues, and they have a lot of insights, and those insights really nurture me and offer me inspiration, and it's a wonderful affirmation for me. So I think the process is, maybe not perfect, but it's pretty good!

Deepa Patel: I just wanted to come back to Christopher and Sousan, who started us off in our conversation, to see if you wanted to add something here. Christopher, would you like to go first?

Christopher Bamford: I don't really have anything to add. I listened with great care and participated in all the contributions and I guess at the moment, what I'm feeling or what seems to be manifesting, is that this wisdom is always in process, it's always flowing. In a sense it's the Tao. From her own perspective, there are no mistakes. Because we learn from our mistakes, we learn from what we hear, but our mistakes are only steps to the next moment, our learning is inherent in the process and in a sense when we say mistake we sort of put a negative connotation around it. But I don't think from wisdom's point of view there is a negative or positive in that sense. As we've each responded to the call that these questions founded in us, I've been struck by the sense that, no matter how different and from different perspectives and using different languages and having different concerns, how the whole forms a kind of community, as Lee was saying, in which we're all participating.

Sousan Abadian: I don't have much to add to the wonderful offerings that have already been made. I'm just taking with me so much of the wisdom, and the image of sitting inside the body of the Buddha that is just so beautiful in my mind and my heart. Thank you.

Pir Zia Inayat-Khan: Yes. Thank you all for being part of this conversation, thank you all for being Guiding Voices for Seven Pillars. I look forward to the continuation of this conversation and many more such conversations. I would particularly like to thank Deepa for facilitating and organizing the call, and Christopher and Sousan for the beautiful openings that you offered.

I came to this conversation with some existing thoughts about what distinguishes wisdom, and these formed in my mind as four qualities or four aspects. Before I go into them I want to say that as I've been listening to all of you, I have felt that these aspects are filled in or elaborated or beautifully explicated in so much of what has been said, so I thought I would share with you these aspects as I see them and how I have heard them reaffirmed and illuminated in what you've shared.

The first aspect is that wisdom has a "heart quality" to it. A way that I further contemplated that is that wisdom is empathic, but it's calm and centered. It's not emotional in excess, and yet it's deeply empathic and boundary-less in its ability to commune. And I heard that when Christopher said perhaps wisdom is really love after all; that emphasizes the aspect of empathy.

Sousan spoke of wisdom as free of judgment and fear, and I understand that also in terms of this quality of empathy that is confident and goes beyond the anxious grasping experience of love into a serene, boundless, non-judgmental, hopeful domain of love. And Lee spoke of wisdom as a nurturing presence, and again that is a beautiful expression of the heart quality, the nurturing, empathic, beneficent quality of being. We have also talked about community as being relevant to wisdom, and certainly it seems to me that community has to do with the connections between hearts. So the heart aspect was important for me.

Another aspect that's important for me I initially noted down as "experience and presence." Wisdom is experiential, and presential. In the course of our conversation I started to distinguish these two, because some of the comments, it seemed to me, had to do with experience, but not necessarily presence in its pure form.

For example, when Rabbi Shaya said we learn wisdom by making mistakes and learning from them, to me that speaks to experience. And likewise when Maggid Yitzhak spoke of wisdom as how to live, and the development of character, those expressed to me life experience. But then one aspect of experience is presence, and I would differentiate presential knowledge from representational knowledge -- representational knowledge being mediated by concepts and presence being a direct mode of sheer connection, ultimately a connection that goes beyond the duality of subject and object, so that there isn't a knower and a known and the knowledge in between, but a simultaneity in the act of knowledge, the simplicity of direct communion.

And I think that relates to what Pir Shabda spoke of when he referred to the overcoming of selfhood, because in the moment of presence, self and other meld into pure sensing. And I also think this may be what David was speaking of when he distinguished between knowledge and life, and spoke of wisdom as a form of witnessing of life. That witnessing of life is what I understand as presence -- direct, sheer, luminous presence.

The third aspect that I had noted down is the sense of mystery, awareness of an infinitude that outstrips comprehension. And I felt this was reaffirmed when Christopher referred to wisdom as "deep un-knowing." I thought that was beautiful, because perhaps wisdom is not only the pinnacle of knowing, but also the pinnacle of ignorance -- the knowledge of what is beyond knowledge. The sense of awe in the presence of mystery seemed important to me.

Finally, the fourth aspect of wisdom I had noted was that it unites polarities. For me, a purely transcendent celestial knowledge would be incomplete, as would a purely terrestrial practical, egoic sort of knowledge. Wisdom has to do with the encounter between, and some sort of juxtaposition or synthesis of, very different cognitive modes, from disembodied spiritual transcendence right down to the embodied individual consciousness. The ability to somehow hold all of this, to unite and reconcile the unreconcilables, has something essential to do with wisdom. And I heard this in what Christopher said when he spoke of "beyond yes and no," and speaking of the coincidence of opposites.

So, as you can see I've been busily noting down comments throughout the hour, and the other thing that I noted down that didn't fit neatly within these four categories, but just arose as a kind of tension within the conversation -- and of course I view tension as a positive thing in a conversation like this because it brings out differing points of view where we can explore nuance that wouldn't otherwise be apparent. What I noticed is that there were different views on the question of inquiry. Tamam raised the subject of self-inquiry, looking within at various points in one's life experience to check in and pose a question to oneself, or at least that's how I understood Tamam, and this was reinforced by Lindy. And Janet brought in another viewpoint, which is that at a certain level, wisdom occupies the space that is beyond questions -- simple certainty, or the Buddha-mind. And so at the end of this discussion, I will take away that question, and I think it's something each of us could individually and collectively consider: "What is the role of inquiry in wisdom, and when do we reach the moment when letting go of our questions is going to be the best basis to experience something that we can truly identify as wisdom?"

The conversation then continued via email.

Janet Piedilato: Your final notes on the call, capturing wisdom through a feeling of calm, serenity, a heart certain quality, fully resonate with the Wisdom experience that I refer to as being in the body of the Buddha. There is no fear, no anxiety, and for me, no need of questions, for in that presence there is complete being—at peace, at one, beyond all opposites, beyond the I and the other. It is a mysterious sense of being, for there in the heart of the unknowing is everything.

Perhaps I can best explain by giving an example: Over twenty-five years ago my firstborn and only daughter Janette was stricken with leukemia. She was a small child, just ready to begin school. While doctors said she had a very aggressive cancer and gave her a mere few months to live, Janette lived for five years before passing at the age of ten. It was a horrible time for all of us, a time filled with anxiety, with fear, with sadness. We pulled together as a family and fought the disease the best we could. Yet Janette relapsed and things quickly spiraled downward.

In the end I administered chemotherapy to Janette at four AM several times each week. We both hated the process yet it saved us from going to the hospital for it. As the chemo took about 45 minutes to go into Janette's bloodstream, I needed to be ready to disconnect her IV line, so I needed to remain awake and alert at the end of the process. To accomplish this I would kneel on the cold wooden floor and say my Franciscan rosary, 15 decades.

Somewhere in the middle I would suddenly go someplace outside that room filled with dread, with fear, with sorrow. In the middle of the night, in cold January, I was in a space flooded with pure warmth, with radiant white light. I would be in a Presence which was beyond image and name. It was an undeniable Presence that I felt but did not see. Back then I called it a Beatific Vision. I would hear a voice telling me that Janette would die, that this was agreed upon. The voice would then ask if I remembered. I would always answer that I did and that it was all right. I understood. It was perfectly all right. I was in a space of love, of complete surrender to the Presence. I had no question that there was no mistake, that all was as it should be. It was mysterious as well as beyond all knowing, yet it filled me with complete certitude.

The serenity and the peace took me from that death bed to a space well beyond it where I was no longer bound by all the questions that haunted me as a mother of a dying child. In that space of Wisdom there was no need for questions. Back in the room, the cold dark death room, I would question how I, a mother, could give consent to a death sentence. Yet over and again the experience repeated. In the end, even in that room, even holding my precious child as she died in my arms, I knew, KNEW, that in spite of my pain and sorrow, it really was all right. That experience, what I called the Beatific Vision, what I would now call Wisdom, held me. It was all those things you spoke of—nurturing, peaceful, serene, sensing a Presence that filled one. Yet there was no Other, just mere pure communication, so pure there was no need for me to question it. It was a confrontation with the mysterious that wiped out questions, replacing all with a deep sense that every hair on every head is exactly as planned. All the pain, sorrow, anxiety, fear were gone. This for me is the experience of Wisdom.

Many times since then in my meditations, my shamanic waking visions, I find myself in the body of the Buddha and it is always the same. I go from waking reality with questions, with the burning inquiry, and yet once inside that golden light the questions no longer have meaning, for just being in the Presence wipes them all away.

When I think of inquiry in science, I differentiate between narrow and the wide focus inquiry. My heroine, Barbara McClintock had questions as to how genetics worked. But she did not go with specific questions narrowed by what she believed she knew. Rather she went with the humility that said she knew little and just wished to let the plants speak their truths. When I create a complementary formula for someone I spend hours upon hours with inquiries about every aspect of the disease as well as conventional chemo and my natural approach. I crisscross every which way, using all I think I know, questioning and working the puzzle the best I can from the knowledge I gather. Yet even the most well researched protocol never yields the same feeling of certitude evoked by an experience of Wisdom. For the waking study and waking knowledge always begets more questions! This is so unlike the Wisdom Presence where all questions are answered in such a manner that there are no questions, where is such certainty, such completeness, such surrender—even in the face of certain death with all its terrors, as illustrated by my experience with Janette.

Being in the Presence I call Wisdom is a specific experience. There are certainly other experiences of Wisdom in life. For example, the knowledge I gathered twenty, thirty years ago to earn my degrees is pretty worthless (amazing advances in cellular biology are dwarfing the old ideas), but a different form of wisdom gathered in the process is still with me. The patience, the discipline, the respect for my teachers, the gratitude for my opportunity to study and to learn, the delight in the entire process, this remains with me as the most important part of the training. Yet this form of wisdom, perhaps like learning from one's mistakes, falls in a different category than my visionary experience of being in the Presence.

Lee Irwin continues the conversation here, with a short piece on wisdom.

The topic of Wisdom is a deep and difficult subject because, as a limited human being, the scope and depth of Wisdom exceeds my grasp. I cannot start from a position of authority because Wisdom, whom I will personify as feminine, knowing she is so much more, cannot be contained by the authority of any personality or subjective state. For me, Wisdom is a Mystery inseparable from the sacred ground of Being from which we all come and in which we live and breathe and co-exist.

I am reminded of an image from the ancient Egyptian world, a larger-than-life-sized statue of the Goddess Isis, carved from black stone. She sits on a throne, veiled, with the Ankh (symbol of life) in one hand and flowers (symbols of luminous beauty) in the other. On the front of the base is carved the following saying: "I am everything that was, everything that is, that will be, and no mortal has yet dared to lift my veil." Isis as an image of the Goddess of Wisdom, of innumerable attributes inscribed in the Isis aretalogies, reflects the Mystery of the Veil that hangs between seeing and being seen, a translucent barrier that reminds us of our mortality and limitations. Wisdom, in the image of the veiled goddess, solicits our sense of awe and reverence before the unspeakable depth of divine origins. As it is written in The Wisdom of Solomon (7:10-26): “Her radiance is unceasing.” . . . “She penetrates and permeates all spirits, all things” for “She is the breath of the power of God, a spotless mirror of divine activity.”

The human circumstance, embodied in the circumscriptions of sensory, emotional, and intellectual perception, holds a revelatory potential. The depths of the sacred human are, I believe, inseparable from the divine ground in which Wisdom sustains our capacity for new insights, creative manifestations, and a lucid maturity of care and concern for the well being of others. In this sense, I perceive Wisdom as a nurturing presence, a veiled potential able to illumine any circumstance, relative condition, or situation. She is discovered in the moment of inspiration, in the outward flowing energies of love that manifest as a concern for the health and vitality of another, in the joy of discovery, and in the affirmation of what is truly sacred in life.

We grow into Wisdom, into a maturity of insight that challenges us to constantly refine and deepen our understanding and values. And each step is part of a dance, a partnership with all those we encounter, to find the appropriate response that will manifest the potential of Wisdom in each and every circumstance. Wisdom is not a content, nor a set of precepts or rules for behavior, nor is it a particular philosophy or coded symbolism of a spiritual practice. Wisdom is a process, a dynamic interaction that penetrates every person and being, every creature and created thing which seeks to solicit insight; it is unconfinable in static images, irreducible to fixed ideas.

It is my conviction that Wisdom in its depthless Mystery is emergent, revelatory, and infinitely capable of newness [in the context of the preservation and enhancement of life]. Whatever content we attribute to Wisdom, however viable and central to human life, such content reflects only the interface between our shared mortalities and the conditionality of the human situation. Our relative needs for greater maturity or insight depend on the development and refinement of the known in the face of the unknown. Beyond the content, or through the content, the Mystery of the depthless wonder of human possibility, of creative discovery, manifests the heart of Creation [- to make a world, beings, the web of life -] as living, dynamic, and evolving toward deeper insights and the embodiment of sacred potential.

Wisdom as an emergent ground, as a dynamic process of discovery and affirmation, is deeply rooted in the pathways of mystical tradition, in the branching Tree of human spiritual realizations and embodiments. The roots of this Tree sink deep into the sacred ground, drawing sustenance from every tradition that hallows life, nurtures human relations, and promotes communication and understanding between and across traditions. Every tradition embodies wisdom in the life of its community, in our human capacities to actually manifest wisdom in our interactions with others. And out of those interactions comes yet more revelatory insights because? Wisdom is not bound by human law or custom or tradition.

Wisdom, as an ever deepening current within the World Soul, I believe offers all humanity the opportunity to be fully participant in the forthcoming of new insights and revelations. These insights, arising through all the branches of human activity—artistic, musical, mathematical, scientific, political or economic—reflect the self-surpassing nature of our human potential. We are not defined by what was but stand, as individuals and as communities, on the threshold of what might become, what calls us beyond our limits into an expansive horizon of shared insights, new spiritual realizations, and the reaffirmation of the sacredness of creation.

As a global community, we bear a responsibility to foster the health and well-being of all humanity, and through Wisdom to find the ways that lead to peace and cooperation. The very ground of Wisdom manifests in the energies and creative interactions of those who can love and be loved, where love is the medium of Wisdom, and creative trust and cooperation are the weft upon which is woven the imagery of our greatest accomplishments. And every act of selfish concern, every violent reaction and self-serving decision, unravels that imagery and leaves only the disjointed remnants, the disturbing incongruity of uncaring beings in pursuit of their own pleasures, needs and appetites.

Chivalry, in a spiritual sense, is caring for others, protecting the weak and less empowered, and serving a cause greater than one’s own needs and aspirations. Wisdom requires chivalry, a surrender of pride in knowing, deep humility, a willingness to not know, not see, not comprehend. Then the loving heart can be informed, in service and devotion, by what next is needed, inspired by insight, for the healing of our many wounds and scars, for the recovery of our dignity in light of our renewed potential for transformation.

We do not need teachers of Wisdom; what we need is a shared context within which the processes of inspiration can be fostered for the good of all, not the few. We must all seek to be wise, however simple that wisdom might be. In the deep Mystery of Wisdom, we are asked, led, persuaded to be more, to prepare our hearts for a lifting of the Veil that we might receive inspiration, guidance, direction that demands our utmost creative abilities to actualize. Wisdom does not give us “answers”—She teaches us through the gifts of our own potential, reveals a resolution based on the integrity by which we live, by the honesty and truthfulness between our thoughts, words, deeds and promises.

The importance of integrity is crucial—every seeker of Wisdom takes on the burden of living in accordance with his or her most profound insights. It is not only the teachings, but the practices, and even more, the embodiment that manifests the values and commitments of the individual, that reveals the deep congruency between thought, feeling, will and creative actions. As Wisdom flows into our lives, every person becomes an embodiment of sacred potential, every individual a medium of possible insight. The clarity, depth and fullness of that insight arises through an inner coherency, a healthy-mindedness, a loving heart, and a flexible will that seeks to foster growth and development in both self and others.

We are all teachers of Wisdom through the acts and commitments of our lives. We must awaken our deep potential through the inner sacrifice of selfish intent and the surrender of unconcern for the well being of others. Wisdom asks us to recognize our limits, to acknowledge our lack of insight, and to affirm our desire to be uplifted through a gracious receptivity of the Infinite. Within nurturing Presence, our stance or attitudes toward our unknown potential is a crucial index of our capacity for growth. As I give myself to Wisdom, She gives Herself to me, the greater giving to the lesser for purposes of shared human development.

There is a mystical ground within Wisdom, an ocean of endless reach without a shore, a vast clarity whose light is a source of quickening life, a profound energy of creation. And we, as limited beings, stand in the midst of that Ocean, surrounded by the currents of transformation, breathing our life gift for the purposes of creation. And the self in that context goes beyond “identity” and becomes something else, it becomes a gate, a mirror, a window through which the light of transformation can reach the incarnate world, cast its rays on sorrow and suffering, and offer healing warmth.

Can we clean the glass? Can we remove the smoky darkness of inner preoccupations, the ashes of hurt and the dust of illusion cast by our poor choices and misdirection? Can we polish the mirror of the heart and make a place within our engaged and active lives for unexpected revelation? Can we hold open through love and care, an inner expectation, a purity of motive seeking new insights without preconception?

The awakening of self-awareness is the very basis of spiritual insight because the ground of our humanity is not different than the ground of Wisdom. What we desire for the well being of the world, without imposition or arrogance, without fear or qualification, is born through self like a lens polished to focus light, to spark the fire of inspiration. Wisdom’s light teaches us not to abandon self but to perfect the self as a medium of engagement within the world; Her light is a subtle vitality that heals excess and extremes and encourages the grafting of individual insights onto the Tree of Life.

Wisdom teaches engagement, dedication, loving kindness, and the joy and humor of our limitations. Whatever we know, there is more—immeasurably More—and the excitement of that fact is that there is no end to creative discovery and world transformation.

May Wisdom guide our steps, may we find the courage
to surrender and in our willingness to learn,
discover Her Endless Depths.
May we rejoice in the fellowship of Wisdom, in related
harmonies of soul and loving embrace,
affirming Her Luminous Presence.
May we overcome the illusions of self through courage
and thus discover the self-in-relation,
manifesting Her Joyful Grace.
And may we work in concert, in solidarity to discover
our differences, each unique, rare and precious,
as a witness to Her Unity and Diversity.
Amen, Now and Always.

Lee Irwin

Though it began some five centuries ago with the so-called discovery of the New World and the first circumnavigation of the globe, the reality of the Planetary Era has, in our own times, finally entered the sphere of collective consciousness as a result of the growing threat of climate change, ecological devastation, and the mass extinction of species.¹ If the world’s religious or spiritual traditions are to serve in the transition toward a life-sustaining society, they will need, as they come into greater dialogue with one another, to seek out those elements that affirm the sacredness of the earth and cosmos and point to the indissoluble, if still complex, unity of the cosmos, the human and the divine. They will also need to show their coherence with, or friendliness to, the profound insights of contemporary science. The philosophical worldview of evolutionary panentheism can help guide the spirit of this dialogue in the direction of the desired transition.

Each of the elements in the term panentheism contains or implies the others. This is most obviously the case with pan, the Greek word for “all” or “the all.” As we see in the early controversies surrounding the term pantheism, “all” refers in the first place to the world or cosmos, including the human, as distinct from the creative divine, usually referred to as “God,” though in pantheism the two sides of the equation are identified with one another (deus sive natura, “God or Nature,” as Spinoza famously put it). The notion of panentheism seeks to maintain the distinction between the two, though it sees the world or cosmos as subsisting “within” (en) the creative divine. Instead of simply saying that everything (pan) is divine (theos), panentheism says that the divine is in (en), and ultimately includes, everything, which therefore is also in It. As Whitehead says, “It is as true to say that the world is immanent in God, as that God is immanent in the world” (1978, 348). In the Western theological and philosophical tradition, one finds notable variations of this idea in Plotinus (the “One”), Anselm (who defined God as that “than which nothing greater can be conceived”), and Hegel (with his understanding of the Absolute). Analogues from the East include the ideas of Brahman, the Tao or taiji, and the Buddha Mind. All of these terms, however—and perhaps especially “God” and “Absolute”—can be, and often are, (mis)read in a manner that seems to contradict panentheism’s affirmation of immanence.

Lokapurusha

To say that both pan and theos are evolutionary introduces a whole new level of complexity to the three terms and their interrelations. Hegel, for instance—though arguably the most formidable and influential of evolutionary thinkers—rejected the idea of a literal evolution of nature. Increasing complexity in the sequence of natural forms, according to Hegel, manifests the developmental logic of the Absolute Idea, or of the Absolute as Spirit, not of nature per se. Schelling, by contrast, did argue for a dynamical evolution of nature, though not in the sense of Darwin (or Gould, in our own times), both of whom do not recognize the overarching telos granted by Hegel and Schelling and later characterized by Teilhard as Omega, the movement or evolution toward which is governed by the law of “complexity-consciousness.”

From a philosophical, and specifically metaphysical, point of view, many questions arise. What is the relation between the personal and the impersonal in how we conceive of, and relate to, the All? In what particular ways do we conceptualize the relation of the One to the Many, of the Eternal to Time (and history), of Spirit to Nature? What is the status of the human in the scheme of things? Hegel, Aurobindo, Whitehead, Teilhard, Wilber and other grand theoreticians each have something unique to contribute here, not only to the metaphysical options, but to the question of epistemology or method in the consideration of these options. For instance, the writings of both Aurobindo and Teilhard include engagement with the personal Divine (as Ishwara or the Mother, or as Jesus, respectively) in a manner absent in the writings of Hegel or Whitehead, for whose understanding of God or the Absolute the notion of personality is nevertheless by no means irrelevant. All four also have distinct, and in some respects contradictory or conflictual, views of the nature and limits of knowledge (and the relations between its scientific, metaphysical, gnostic and revelatory sources) and of history. The cyclic dimension of Aurobindo’s view of history, for instance, is not supported by the other three. It is not clear, moreover, in what way Whitehead’s process metaphysics can account for the arrow of evolution, or the specific trajectory both it, and the course of history, have taken.

Integral theorist Ken Wilber, perhaps the most prominent contemporary representative of a speculative evolutionary panentheism, has opened up fruitful possibilities for encounter among, and integration of, key insights from Hegel, Aurobindo, Whitehead and Teilhard, among others, drawing also from across the full spectrum of religious or spiritual, philosophical and scientific traditions. Many, however, have criticized Wilber’s admittedly still evolving model, and method, both from the perspectives of the individual traditions Wilber claims to integrate, as well as from alternative (though arguably equally integral) meta-points of view (see Ferrer; Kelly 2009; Rothberg and Kelly).

Also relevant to an integral approach to evolutionary panentheism, though again in varying degrees of tension with Wilber, are the visionary figures of Steiner and Gebser, the radical empiricist tradition running from James and Myers through to Michael Murphy and Ralph Metzner, the continuing tradition of process thought, and the archetypal astrological worldview of Richard Tarnas. Given the limits of this article, I can only mention them here.

2. Mythos

Evolutionary panentheism would have a very limited allure were its manifestations confined to the kind of abstract conceptual discourse exemplified by the preceding paragraphs. By contrast, the primary mode of religious or spiritual expression—theistic or not—is symbolic and mythic. Even Hegel, for whom the Absolute is fully grasped as such only as Concept or Idea, recognized that art, religion and philosophy all share the same substance, that in fact it is only as reflection on (or refraction through) the myths and symbols of religion in particular that “absolute knowing” can arise in the first place. Most forms of theism, however—despite the common theological predicates beginning with “omni-” (as in omnipresent or omniscient)—tend to portray the divine as transcending the cosmos without necessarily including it, most typically through the god(s) residing in “heaven” (whether pictured as literally in the sky, or on the top of a mountain: Zeus, the original Yahweh; or as residing in some more subtle but equally distant realm). An early exception is the lokapurusha or cosmic anthropos of Jainism, depicted in the figure of a man (sometimes a woman) whose body includes the three great realms already familiar to shamanism: the upper or celestial, the middle, and the underworld.² This figure is echoed in the later Adam Kadmon of Lurianic Kabbalism, whose skeleton is formed by the sephiroth (or divine emanations) of the archetypal Tree of Life, and whose body also comprises a threefold division into upper, middle and lower realms (there is also a vertical pattern of three “pillars”).³ The Adam Kadmon, however, is generally conceived in Neoplatonic fashion as the archetypal cosmos in divine-human form that pre-exists the physical cosmos (this complicates, through its idealism, the panentheistic notion that it also includes the cosmos in its full actuality).

Adam Kadmon with Sefira, and "Adam Kadmon" by Hildegarde of Bingen

The archetypal character of Adam Kadmon or the primordial Human is echoed in the Kongoukai (Vajradhatu in Sanskrit) or Diamond World Mandala of Japanese Shingon Buddhism, with the figure of Dainichi Nyorai or the Cosmic Buddha at its top and center. In this tradition, however, the transcendental reality of the Diamond Mandala is always paired with its counterpart, the Taizoukai (Garbhadhatu in Sanskrit) or Womb Mandala of phenomenal reality, with the same Cosmic Buddha at its center.⁴ The non-dual, panentheistic, union of these two realms is symbolized by the portrayal of Dainichi Buddha holding the “Mudra of Six Elements,” where the five fingers of the right hand (corresponding to the five elements of the phenomenal world) clasp the extended index finger of the left hand (symbolizing the sixth element of universal Mind).⁵

Kongokai and Taizokai Mandalas, photos copyright Mark Schumacher

As an illustration of how, in the Western Christian tradition, the panentheistic intuition or idea has succeeded in finding a compelling expression, consider the vièrges ouvrantes (“opening Virgins”) of the high Middle Ages.

From the outside,⁶ ones sees Mary with the infant Jesus on her lap (in the older position of Isis as throne of Horus). The statue opens, however, in one example (though implied by all) revealing in a striking triptych the truth that not only the whole world (and not just the night sky, as with the Egyptian goddess Nut), but the Trinity itself and the central mystery of the death and resurrection of the Savior are contained within her all-encompassing womb.⁷

Vierge Ouvrante, Open and Closed

These statues (which were condemned by the Church in the 15th C) manage to communicate the two related senses of panentheism—that the divine is as much in the world as the world is in the divine, and this regardless of where one might sit with respect to theological caveats around her status as theotokos (“God-bearer”) or “Queen of Heaven.” Though the statues might be condemned, the great cathedrals remained, so many of which are named after the Virgin, and which perhaps inspired the original creators of the statues. The West façade of Notre Dame of Paris, for instance, as perhaps the most realized of them all, presents the same kind of triptych, with Christ in the central door below the famous rose window.⁸

Notre Dame Cathedral, images from Wikimedia Commons and IceNineJon and used under the Creative Commons license.

Compare now the vièrge ouvrante with another famous triptych, the Garden of Earthly Delights by Bosch. Most people are not as familiar with the image of the closed outer panels,⁹ which, in the comparison I am inviting, would correspond to the vièrge fermée or the closed Virgin seen from the outside. Judging from the inscriptions at the top of the panels, the image would seem to depict the cosmos on the third day of creation.

"Garden of Earthly Delights," Hieronymous Bosch, Closed, and page from ELEMENTA CHEMIAE by Johann Konrad Barchusen

The image is that of a womb-like sphere, and reminds one of an alchemical retort in the early phases of the work.¹⁰ In the upper left corner stands a diminutive image of God the Father, the cosmic “spermatozoic Logos” in the act of creation. Though nominally the source of the cosmic sphere, he is in fact dwarfed by it. Given the symbolic correspondence between the realm of matter and the goddess Mary-Sophia as cosmic Great Mother (mater), we can take Bosch’s inner triptych as an analogue of, and in this case also a counterpoint to, that of the vierge ouverte (“open Virgin”).

The archetypal core of the vierge ouverte is expressed in the mytheme of birth-death-rebirth through the presence in the divine womb of the central symbols of the cross and the triune Godhead.

Bosch’s three panels¹¹ are too complex to allow for a single reading, but for our purposes, this much can be said: in terms of developmental symbolism, the garden scene of the left panel corresponds to the phase of gestation, birth and early infancy (to both pre-labor perinatal and post-partum symbiosis with the maternal divine). The central panel, whose earthly delights have come to represent the whole work, corresponds to life, but in the sense of a death-in-life, since the identification with the world of the senses is seen, in the final panel, to lead to a kind of hell realm, whether this be understood in terms of apocalyptic suffering, the leftward path following the last judgment, or to a more existential assessment of the secret but inevitable pain (as in the Buddhist notion of dukkha) accompanying every earthly delight.

"Garden of Earthly Delights," Hieronymous Bosch, Open

Clearly, Bosch’s work evokes a more conflicted relation to the cosmic “all” than does the vierge ouvrante. Despite the shared deep structure, Bosch’s work might be seen as negating, or perhaps as playing on the moment of negation within, the incarnational spirit of the Virgin.

To further amplify this structure, one could consider the Iroquois cosmology as expressed in the myth of the Woman who Fell from the Sky. She is the celestial-divine source (through her more or less parthenogenitically conceived daughter and granddaughter) of the two luminaries (sun and moon), the stars, and the twin male hero gods Sapling and Flint. As in the Egyptian cosmology, the earth in the Iroquois myth is identified with the divine masculine (Geb for the Egyptians, Turtle Island for the Iroquois).¹² In resonance with the Bosch triptych, the movement here is from harmony (the time before the Woman’s Fall from Heaven) to discord (the warring twins, whose Biblical analogues are Abel and Cain). In the Iroquois myth, the evil brother Flint is overcome and harmony eventually restored through the establishment of the men’s rites of initiation.¹³ The corresponding victory over evil is not represented in the Bosch triptych, which ends (in the third panel) with the phase of discord. The possibility of victory is implied, however, through the original placement of the work as an altar-piece and through its liturgical and sacramental context (which, as in the later part of the Iroquois myth, is one of male-dominated or androcentric initiation).

As a final and more recent example of the same archetypal theme, I would mention Sri Aurobindo’s Savitri, a twentieth century evolutionary panentheistic epic. A mythic summa of Aurobindo’s philosophy of integral nondualism, Savitri tells of the world-redeeming love of Savitri, an incarnation of the Great (Meta-) Cosmic Mother, for the mortal Satyavan. Through her yoga, death is simultaneously embraced and overcome and we are carried over the threshold to a new heaven and a new earth. As with the image of the vierge ouvrante, the drama of redemption is portrayed as happening within the (subtle) body of Savitri. This drama, which is a symbol of the evolving cosmos as a whole, culminates with the descent of the Supermind and the full opening of all her chakras. In contrast to the Bosch triptych, an infinite bliss is revealed behind every apparent pain. Of the symbols and myths mentioned so far, Aurobindo’s is the only one that is explicitly evolutionary. Despite the Vedic theme, however, it is clear that Aurobindo draws from, as he contributes creatively to, the notion of evolution as it emerged in the modern West. A significant aspect of this creative contribution is the manner in which he carries forward the (neo-) Hegelian vision of his early contemporaries, for whom (as for Teilhard, and in contrast to the still dominant paradigm), evolution is understood panentheistically.¹⁴

Copyright Adams and Primack, used with permission

3. Cosmos and Gaia

The role of providing an overarching account of the origin, nature and goal of the cosmos has largely been taken over by the natural sciences. Although the dominant modern scientific paradigm has militated against a panentheistic evolutionism, there is a growing counter-trend with certain proponents of the “new story” of the universe (Berry, Swimme, Primack and Abrams) and in the movement toward what could be called a more integral ecology (Wilber, Hargens and Zimmerman, Harding, Morin, and Kelly). Though grounded in contemporary evolutionary cosmology (including relativistic and quantum physics) and Gaian science, this new story is also indebted to the visions of Teilhard and Whitehead, without necessarily adopting all of their spiritual or metaphysical commitments. One could argue that the tendency here is toward a pantheisitic, rather than a panentheistic, evolutionism. The scientists, it is true, do not generally preoccupy themselves with this distinction. For someone like Swimme, the cosmos in any case is seen as numinous through and through and, with its paradoxical and singular origin (the primal flaring forth, as Swimme calls it), its omnicentrism, and its creative advance, manifests the potencies of the traditional (and especially esoterically inflected) creative divine.¹⁵

Copyright Adams and Primack, used with permission

Joel Primack, whose work predicted the existence of dark matter, and his wife and collaborator, Nancy Abrams, have drawn parallels between the new story and Kabbalah (though not to the symbol of Adam Kadmon). In their view, our current understanding of cosmogenesis, from the Singularity to the expanding cosmos, corresponds to the movement from the first through to the third of the sephiroth.¹⁶ In their more recent and popular book, View from the Center of the Universe, Primack and Abrams propose four illustrative symbols.¹⁷ The first, cosmic spheres of time, depicts our vantage point in the here and now as the center of concentric spheres reaching out in space and backwards in time to the edge of the observable universe.

Copyright Adams and Primack, used with permission

One is to understand, however, that the center, as in Cusa’s definition of God or the Absolute, is everywhere, and the outer sphere or circumference, nowhere.

The second and third symbols they present are both pyramids, the first and smallest of visible matter and the second of cosmic density (shown above). The main point here is that the whole of the manifest universe is, as Bohm liked to say, a kind of froth on the sea of invisible (dark) matter and energy.

The last symbol is that of the cosmic ouroboros. The overlapping area where the snake bites its tail represents the approach toward a Grand Unified Theory of the microphysical (quantum mechanics, at 10^-30 centimeters) with the large-scale structure of the universe (relativity, at 10³⁰). Opposite the tail/mouth is the mid-range scale of the human, which, along with this particular moment in our evolutionary unfolding, constitutes the view from the center of the universe.

The scale of the human that defines the perspective of the universe as a whole is that of the middle or center. One is reminded of the middle realm of the Jain lokapurusha, inhabited by humans (and the only realm from which it is possible to achieve liberation), as well as or the Norse Midgard or Middle Earth, with the World Tree at its center (corresponding to the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, which, as we have seen, forms the spine of Adam Kadmon), encircled by the Midgard Serpent. ¹⁸

Yggdrasil painted by Oluf Olufsen Bagge, taken from Wikimedia Commons and used under the Creative Commons license, and Sephira Tree with Snake

Embracing a version of the anthropic cosmological principle that includes recognition not only of our critical placement in the cosmic ouroboros, but also the critical uniqueness of our evolutionary moment, Primack and Abrams assert that “we humans are significant and central to the universe in unexpected and important ways.”

We are discovering this fact at a moment in history when so much is at stake. It is our hope that this new picture of the universe will help convey the preciousness of the cosmic experiment on planet Earth. An understanding of our universe and our extraordinary place in it may reveal solutions to the problems that confront us personally and globally.

Primack and Abrams are right to point to the preciousness, and precariousness, of the Earth, which many have come to call by her ancient Greek name, Gaia. Lovelock, the creator of Gaia theory, only goes so far as to say that the Earth is like an organism. Its organization can, he maintains, be fully accounted for in the context of an essentially materialistic systems theory. His disciple, Stephan Harding, by contrast, is compelled to consider Gaia not only as animate and sentient, but in some sense divine (in that the life which Gaia has brought forth is intrinsically sacred and numinously charged, at least for those who have eyes to see). The direction that Harding and other “strong” Gaia theorists are taking is in line with the great tradition of Naturphilosophie initiated by Schelling, Hegel and Fechner, all of whom spoke explicitly of the Earth as organism and as permeated by the anima mundi. With respect to the notion of evolutionary panentheism, while the animate Earth may not be coextensive with the divine “all,” it is nevertheless the sacred Midgard (or “Middle Earth”) of Germanic myth within which our evolutionary drama is destined to unfold.

4. Conclusion

The emergence of Gaia theory has coincided with the planetary crisis we now face, notably with the now linked specters of global climate change and the mass extinction of species. There is, of course, the prospect of unparalleled human suffering as well, the severity of which will depend in large measure on how successful we are at dealing with the threat to the biosphere. We find ourselves, therefore, in a planetary life and death situation reminiscent of the archetypal import of the central panels of the triptychs considered previously. In terms of the evolutionary arc implied by their deep structure—the same structure adopted by Hegel, Aurobindo, Teilhard and Jung—the earth community as a whole is poised on the initiatory threshold between death and (possible) rebirth. If our future is not to realize the apocalyptic vision of Bosch’s third panel, we must heed the assessment of the world’s leading ecologists and environmental scientists. To do so, however, will require fundamental shifts in our material, economic, social, and political modes of being in the world. If we succeed, we will be ushering in the next evolutionary phase of the Planetary Era, one guided not by the myopic and destructive ways of industrial growth society, but by a nascent planetary wisdom culture.¹⁹ Going beyond the notion of mere sustainability, this culture will embody such ideals as global solidarity and, for the leading-edge at least, a re-enchanted vision of the cosmos that seeks to actualize our full evolutionary potential. The worldview of evolutionary panentheism, and a new planetary ethic that might flow from it, is a precious seed of this potential. With the right tending, and not a little luck, we just might see this seed sprout and blossom.

The next of the Iron Rules is: My conscientious self, do not reproach others, making them firm in their faults. There is a very beautiful and enlightening passage from Pir-o-Murshid Inayat Khan on this subject in the Volume entitled “Sufi Teachings” under the chapter heading “Overlooking”:

“There is a tendency which manifests itself and grows in a person who is advancing spiritually, and that tendency is overlooking. At times this tendency might appear as negligence, but in reality negligence is not necessarily overlooking, negligence most often is not looking. Overlooking may be called in other words rising beyond things: one has to rise in order to overlook; the one who stands beneath life could not overlook, even if s/he wanted to. Overlooking is a manner of graciousness; it is looking, and at the same time not looking; it is seeing and not taking notice of what is seen; it is being hurt or harmed or disturbed by something and yet not minding it. It is an attribute of nobleness of nature; it is a sign of souls who are attuned to a higher key.

Overlooking is the first lesson of forgiveness. This tendency springs from love and sympathy. It is the tendency to sympathize which brings the desire to overlook … until one comes to a stage of realization where the whole of life becomes one sublime vision of the immanence of God.”

An amusing story is told in Turkey about a gathering of Sufis. At this gathering someone asked three shaykhs—the heads of three orders—a question: “What do you do when you see a vice in someone.” The first shaykh answered, “I admonish the person.” The second shaykh answered, “I try to cover it up so that no one will see it.” Finally the third shaykh, the most enlightened, answered, “Vice? What vice?”

Inayat Khan tells a story about a lion cub that got lost on the savannah. Separated from his pride, he gradually forgot his origins and fell in with a herd of sheep. Living among the sheep, he began to bleat like a sheep and eat grass and so on. Though he grew into the form of a powerful lion, in his mind he was a sheep. One day he was confronted by a pride of lions. He tried to flee with the other sheep, but he was surrounded. He shook with fear, but the lions did not attack. Instead they expressed their puzzlement: “You are a lion. Why are you acting like a sheep?” But however they might try to convince him, the lion would not believe them. Finally, in frustration, they chased him to the shore of a little pond. There the lion gazed at his reflection and saw that he was a lion. Suddenly his whole world changed.

That is a story about the human condition. We are born as lions, but somehow we fall in with sheep. What does it mean to fall in with sheep? We become impressed with limitation. We are seen as sheep and sooner or later we come to accept the validity of that assessment. We internalize the world’s judgment and simply take it for granted. It’s not that any particular person intended to deceive us. Those who have planted this impression in us have themselves been infected by the impression from others. It is a kind of psychic disease that is transmitted down the generations, through cultures, through families—a spiritual ailment that makes one feel less than one’s true worth. It is a gloom that circulates through the world endlessly, and all of us are susceptible to it, all of us have in some ways been touched by it.

But that is not the only force in the world. If it were, the world would crumble under the weight of its own torpor. There is another force, the force of illumination, the creative power of the awareness of beauty. Each one of us is a battleground in which these two forces clash. So far as we are locked in the grip of the illusory judgments that have been thrust on us, so far are we incapable of seeing beauty in ourselves, and accordingly incapable of seeing it in others. We then become complicit in the perpetuation of the dark gaze of misjudgment. It is a vicious cycle that has to be broken decisively, and that is what this Iron Rule is calling us to do. Do not reproach others, making them firm in their faults.

The first “other” is our own self. We treat our self as an other when we stand in self-judgment. It is one thing to learn from a mistake and move on. It is another thing to fall into the habit of continuous self-blame. When this happens, the more we accuse ourselves of a vice, the more deeply imprinted the vice becomes. It is reaffirmed with every guilty feeling, and we become helpless. This Iron Rule calls us to break the cycle. Beginning with oneself, cease reproaching the sheep that is one’s illusory nature and learn to see the lion that is one’s true self.

The same principle applies to other “others.” In our interactions with people, we often miss the radiant beauty of a soul and see only its shadows. Though we live in a paradise, our vision is so focused on limitation that we preoccupy ourselves with grievances and neglect the glory of each passing moment. We take exception to imperfection, failing to see that it is from imperfection that perfection evolves—and that what enables it to evolve is unconditional love.

On reflection, one might find that seeing defects is part of a pattern. That which one dislikes in another is present in oneself. In fact, one may be acutely critical of a characteristic in another precisely because one cannot yet accept it or transform it in oneself.

Consider, for example, aggression. If aggression repeatedly arises within oneself, but you repress it, then you tend to feel resentful of someone who has not mastered this same impulse. But if rather than repressing your aggression you have transformed it—if you have clarified and resolved the distortion in the energetic current manifesting as aggression—then you will never resent someone who is unable to do so. Instead, you will strive to support others in liberating themselves as you have been liberated.

We all know from direct life experience that moods of depression and futility are frequently the result of an atmosphere charged with harsh, cynical judgments. Conversely, in the company of understanding and supportive family, friends and colleagues, one tends to thrive.

Can you remember a moment in your life when someone had faith in you? Just recall the tremendous blessing of that experience. That person’s simple act of faith in you, when you could not have faith in yourself, enabled you to see yourself in a new light and to become more fully the person you truly are. Can you do the same for others? Can you discern the latent beauty hidden in the disarray of another person’s life struggle?

When one perceives people in their true light, as illuminated souls, one sees in them a beauty that they may not be ready to see. You will find yourself in the position of the lions who confronted the lion who thought he was a sheep. Try as you might, you will not be able to convince them in words. They will need to see for themselves. But your seeing glance may become the mirror in which they will begin to see.

This commentary was originally presented during a session of Suluk Academy and is printed with permission from the Sufi Order International.

A summary of the public dialogue can be found here. A video clip from toward the end of the evening, of Rabbi Kellman speaking about his son in Israel, can be found here. Photos from the event can be found here.

Rabia: Thank you so much for that attunement. It helped bring us into this special place where we want to explore some of the wisdom of a very ancient religious tradition. My name is Rabia Povich and I have the pleasure of serving on the board of trustees of Seven Pillars, and I'm going to do very little talking tonight. I had the extreme pleasure of spending the day with these wonderful gentlemen, and witnessing, largely, a very lively and meaningful discussion. We invite you to do something similar now, and later on in the evening we'll offer the microphone around for some questions, if you should have them. First, Pir Zia will give a little bit of a frame of where this Judaism dialogue fits into Seven Pillars.

Pir Zia: Thank you all for coming. I'm very happy to see all of you here tonight. Thank you, Rabia, for introducing the evening, and to you, Rabbi David, for that beautiful chant which took me back to a year ago, to your attunement with us on that day, which was such a unifying moment.

We are brought together here by Seven Pillars House of Wisdom, which is a forum for interspiritual collaboration and cultural creativity. It was established just a year ago, and it has subsequently grown and hosted a number of seminars and conferences and dialogues, as well as offered online articles and, essentially what we are undertaking is to build a conversation. That conversation is one that is inclusive, but it is not random and haphazard -- it is oriented by guiding voices, by individuals who come from diverse traditions -- spiritual as well as scientific, artistic, and cultural disciplines -- who come together to facilitate a conversation that allows us to deepen our connection with some of the most basic questions of contemporary human existence, and to approach these questions bringing to bear the sum of all available knowledge.

So this endeavor has had as its organizing frame, four primary areas. The first is Cosmology, which has to do with locating our place in space, drawing on ancient indigenous cosmological law, but also drawing on the very latest evidence of contemporary astrophysics. It has to do with the intersection of science and spirituality, the relation of person and planet.

And then there is Prophetology -- Revelation, which has to do with reckoning with, coming to terms with, the legacies of the great prophetic figures who are the fountainheads of the universal spiritual traditions of the world. And coming more and more to understand these prophets as a single planetary lineage.

Thirdly, Mysticism, which is to say, the personal inner experience of a deepening encounter with the divine, the totality of that which is vaster than the boundaries of one's personal self.

And fourthly, Chivalry, which is the way of purposeful action, heroic idealism, ethical engagement, to transform the world. These are our four subject areas, and within the subject of revelation, we have sought to convene deep practitioners of the world's faiths in dialogue. Our approach has been to begin by bringing together practitioners of a single faith, working towards eventually bringing together multiple faiths, but feeling that we should begin by undergoing a deep engagement with open-ended exploration of each of the three major Western religious traditions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- the religions that have exercised the most significant influence on the formation of what we call "Western civilization."

Of course, when we speak about Western religions, there's more to it than these faiths -- there's the indigenous traditions, and now we live in a cosmopolitan, pluralistic world where every religion of the world is present amongst us, and our sincere intention is to include all without exclusion, without boundaries. But we are just beginning, and our approach has been to work first with the religions of the Book, the Judeo-Christian-Islamic heritage.

We had a Revelation dialogue last year bringing together practitioners of the Christian faith, an all-day dialogue between ourselves, and then an evening like this. And now following the same model, here we are tonight. Having had this day-long discussion of Judaism, we're excited to be in your midst and carrying our conversation forward with all of you, and looking forward to your participation and questions. So without further ado, thank you for coming, let's begin.

Rabia: One thing I would also just like to begin with is a recognition that we have a little lack of gender balance here. We are just going to recognize that. We are not going pretend it isn't happening. We're going to tell you that it was not our intention, nor do we feel that it's reflective of the Jewish community. Quite honestly, there are many wonderful women Jewish scholars and practitioners, and it is a combination of an unforeseen set of circumstances and other commitments where all of the Jewish women that we invited could not attend. That being said, we recognize that Judaism has both a masculine and feminine aspect to it and I am quite assured that these men will be able to shed light on the feminine aspects of Judaism as well as the masculine.

I'm going to ask each one of them to spend two minutes speaking to you about who they are, because one of the things we felt we have learned with Seven Pillars is that people like to know who's speaking to them. So you got a little bit about their bios, I'm going to start here with this wonderful Rabbi, Yaakov Kellman, on my right. He lives in Albany. I'm going to let him tell you about himself.  He has been to the Abode before, twenty-five years ago, as well, leading various practices.

Rabbi Yaakov: Thank you. I'm still trying to figure out who I am. I can identify myself as Yaakov Kellman. Some would want to put me in this box of being Orthodox, but I like to escape, so I come to the Abode. Those who were here during the summer know that I have a tendency to be a little bit funny on this level, but really I'm sitting beside four wonderful, special teachers and so to some degree, since I'm trying to find out who I am, I'm a student. I'm meeting everyone along the way, along my path, and looking to see how much I can learn from them and from you, and share a little bit.

Back to the box: I live in Albany, I run a non-profit organization called Jewish Educational Resources of New York, which we call JERNY, connecting Israel and the greater Capital District Region, on all different levels, involved with some very interesting things that way.

I'm for 22 years a prison chaplain for the State of New York, maximum security, and do a little food work on the side. Hobbies -- when I interview someone else I'm like "what are your hobbies?," it really tells me what's going on. My spring-summer-fall work is outdoors, believe it or not, in Albany with a nice-sized organic garden, and my winter retreat is filled with skis, snowshoes, and in Hebrew the word is "???" which is books, holy books -- I take a month off and do that. I'm glad to be here tonight.

Rabia: Thank you, and we'll hear more. Next, Rabbi David Ingber, who is also not a stranger to the Abode. He's been here a couple of times. He comes to us here from New York City, and a special thing about him is that he is a new father, so thank you for coming and having your child share you with us tonight.

Rabbi David: I definitely got the night off. I'm really glad to be here. I've been here before and it's always a pleasure. It's worth a trip. And it's hard to believe a place this special is so close to New York, and it doesn't seem that far away. I live in New York City, and I am newly married and I have a new baby, in the year since I was last here. I work in a place that I started, out of the box in New York City, called "Romemu", and it's been around now for three years. We offer services, from Friday night and Saturday morning services to Zikrs along with other interfaith work that we do, and we have a good time doing G-d's work in New York City. I think that's about it.  Oh, hobbies... I'm addicted to ice hockey, I play late nights after I finish teaching, I go down and play and then come back in and give a kiss to my wife and baby.

Rabia: And Rabbi Rami Shapiro, I believe this is your first time with us. Though he has shared presentations with Pir Zia before, and he comes to us from central Tennessee.

Rabbi Rami: Yes, I am a virgin here at the Abode. Which is always nice, I suppose. I live in a small town east of Nashville, where I don't do G-d's work, I do Johnny Cash's work. I had a synagogue for 20 years in Miami, Florida, and I retired from that, and took a year to work at a meditation center in LA, and then I moved to Tennessee. Basically I write books, and that's what I do.

I work part time at the University where I'm Adjunct Professor of Religious Studies, but most of the time I'm sitting at a keyboard, trying to think through my ideas, and find ways to get you to buy them. I have no time for hobbies -- who has hobbies? I have too much email. So no, I can't think of a hobby.

My spiritual practice, maybe, is my hobby. I walk. I rarely go to synagogue -- no, to be more honest, I NEVER go to synagogue unless I'm paid to go, and for 20 years I was paid to go but when that stopped I suddenly lost interest! So my spiritual practice is primarily walking and chanting, and I wonder if that's not my hobby also. Maybe I have a little hobby there going.

Rabia: We now move on, setting up Maggid Yitzhak Buxbaum, who has been with us before, a couple of times at the Abode, and comes to us from Brooklyn, New York.

Maggid Yitzhak: Are all Rabbis comedians? It's a great pleasure to be here. Even in this room -- I was here last night, and I felt the clarity of the spiritual atmosphere in this room, and felt that we had to give thanks, not only to G-d when we enter a holy room like this, but to all the souls that preceded us and cleared out the air to make it such a vibrating holy environment for a discussion like this. Rabia said we should speak just a short bit about what Judaism means to us now -- none of the previous panelists answered the question [joke].

Rabia: I do appreciate that that you can follow directions. We'll go right ahead with that.

Maggid Yitzhak: I became involved in Judaism in my mid-20s, forty years ago, and I've been made happy by Judaism. I believe that all the religions are true, all the religions are good, and for me, I know personally that my religion is good for me. It makes me happy. I know the meaning of my life, though I don't claim to know the meaning of your life, so I'm grateful to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Rabia: Just to frame, if this works, the piece of the question that we're now each going to address. We are all living in a fragile time. I think we all know this. We are living in a time of environmental crisis, a time where religions and people are killing each other over beliefs, in a time when too many have too little and a few have excess, and yet an interesting perspective I had in preparing for this was to think that this religious tradition Judaism has lasted for almost four thousand years, through many difficult times. Perhaps this one is unique, perhaps it isn't. Perhaps this is another one of the very tough times that humanity is moving itself through.

So with that as a bit of a frame, we want to say that we are not hopeless. In fact we are very hopeful. That there are things, for instance with Seven Pillars, that we want to explore that will help give us the tools, the vision, the knowledge, and the experience to work through these challenging times in our lives.

One of the things we think can give us insight and information are the revelations from religious traditions, and here we have the opportunity to ask, and have each of these panelists respond to, and then have a dialogue about, what they feel Judaism has to offer to the non-Jewish world at this time. So this is what we've asked them to talk about and we will let this just be free-flowing. Yitzhak, would you like to start?

Maggid Yitzhak: When I was thinking about this question, when it was first sent to me, the first thought that occurred was that Judaism has already provided to the non-Jewish world great gifts. Monotheism, not that Jews created it, but the monotheism that provides the consolation and meaning of life to masses of Christians and Muslims, was delivered or got to them via the Jewish people's faith. So that's pretty well known.

What's less well known is that Judaism is the source of religious humanism. Anciently, religion was not necessarily connected to ethics or morality. We take it for granted now, because it's so embedded in the Abrahamic religions. But this centrality of loving your neighbor as yourself, as the center of the worship of God, is something that the Jewish people gave. We didn't invent it, that's obvious, but we were God's channel to the non-Jews. The question is, “Do we have anything still to offer?”

Many Jews find the concept of the chosen people difficult. And I tell them, historically it's a fact: the Jews were chosen to spread monotheism to these hundreds of millions of people. The question is, “Are the Jews chosen for anything today?”

One of the thoughts that I've had about this is that the Jews are a rare example of this ancient thing where each individual people or nation had their own God. A people, a nationality, and a religion in one. It's ancient, in a sense primitive. The Jews are one of the -- I don't know if there's another people who exist, with this. But one of the things this gives Judaism is that the Jews have taken their peoplehood and offered it up to God. That we're not supposed to be after our aggrandizement as a nation, for power or money, but at Sinai we gave our people up to God. And we can teach that to the nations. In other words, it may be today that the Poles or the Mexicans are individually much more religious than the Jews, but as a people, the Jewish people has given up its ego to God, is connected to God in a way no other nation is. We haven't succeeded in that fully, it doesn't mean the Jewish people have done a totally wonderful job of that, but we have made a beginning, in a sense, and that's something we can teach the nations -- how do you take your nationhood, and being Americans or Mexicans or Portuguese, whatever your nationality is -- how do we take that nationality, that cultural unit of great power, and sanctify it by making your food connected to God, your clothes connected to God, your dances connected to God -- to connect every aspect of nationhood to God. That's one area where the Jewish people can perhaps offer something to the world.

Rabbi Rami: I'm impressed. Thank you, I feel very honored to be in that group. What I would say that the Jews have to offer, not just at this time but one of the things that Jews have offered for almost the entirety of our existence, is a radical iconoclasm. You may not hear it so much from all of us, but I think it's really at the heart of Judaism.

One of the stories we tell about Abraham, who is the founder of the tradition, is that he destroyed the idols of his father. It's like Muhammad cleaning out the Kabba. Abraham destroys the idols of his father. I think being a Jew means destroying the idols of the previous generation. When we look at our understanding of the Holy of Holies, the most sacred part of the most sacred temple in the Holy City of Jerusalem, there was nothing in it -- it was empty. Our G-d is, in a sense, a placeholder.

You can't pronounce G-d's name, you can't make an image of G-d, you can't imagine G-d. All of the talk we have about G-d is a kind of idolatry -- ultimately G-d is ineffable, and it leads us to this kind of iconoclasm that really calls us to smash the idols of theology and of -isms in general. And that's why I think you see certain kinds of Jews, because Judaism becomes an -ism, and we have our idols, but there are certain kinds of Jews who just thrive on this idol-smashing. And I think that's what we give to the world.

And that's why Freud had to be Jewish, because he smashed the idols of Victorian society; that's why Marx had to be Jewish. Now these weren't religious Jews -- because maybe religious Jews in their day couldn't do this anymore. They were the iconoclastic Jews of the iconoclastic people. I think iconoclasm, idol-smashing, being able to live in a world without surety, without security, one that's fundamentally -- at least it seems, I'm not certain. It is very chaotic, to live with radical doubt and argument.

I don't know if anyone went to see Amos Oz when he was in Manhattan, but he gave a talk on Judaism: the Civilization of Argument and Doubt. That's part of -- that's the Judaism that attracts me, the aspect of my people. And I think that's desperately needed now, to stand up and say that all the emperors, whether religious or political, none of them have any clothes. And I think part of the Jewish job is to say that. The struggle, of course, is to look ourselves in the mirror and see our own nakedness. We're not so comfortable doing that, necessarily, but I think that's the gift that Jews bring the planet, one that I think is desperately needed.

Rabbi David: I have a bit of an issue with the wording, it's grating against me as I'm listening. I'm struggling with saying "what Jews give" or even "what Judaism gives.” What does that mean exactly?

So when I hear that -- certainly when I was growing up as a kid, whenever I would hear inherent characteristics given to Jews, or "Jews are this, Jews are that" I would always -- I grew up in a very Orthodox home, so they'd say "Jews are so spiritual" and I'd see people that looked anything but spiritual, doing anything but spiritual things, and that bothers me to no end, and I'm sure it bothers everyone on the panel.

So for me, just to focus a little more on what Judaism has given as a culture and a religion -- the practices, the values -- how those things are instilled. I wouldn't say "the Jews give it," but rather the Jewish path has always either -- I don't even know the process of dissemination or transmission, is it a morphogenetic field? Is it by means of inculcation? How those things work I have no idea, but one thing is for sure, the Judaism I experienced growing up put a heavy emphasis on a number of things that are already common in other religions. 

So, stakah -- charity, the power of charity. That you can affect someone's life with generosity and giving. That's in every religion, but Judaism has it very strongly -- an ethos of giving in charity.

An ethos of learning, obviously, of study, and being a people of the Book. It's a very strong -- maybe too strong, depending on your parents -- sense of accomplishment in study.

Shabbat -- obviously shabbat is one of the great gifts to civilization. Thich Nhat Hanh, in one of his books, actually recommends having a day of shabbat. I know many friends who keep shabbat in some way shape or form. We could go on and on and on.

And I think that if I had to highlight one thing, or get right down to the crux of the matter, I'd say that this notion of b'tselem elohim. It means being created as a divine fractal. B'tselem literally means image, and it's an amazing thing. As a point of contrast with my esteemed colleague, impressive, to my right, the iconoclasm of Judaism is only matched by its deep, entrenched belief that human beings are the very image of G-d, and that should run very counter-intuitively to this notion of being iconoclastic. Aren't all images to be erased?

So Heschel said, very famously, that the reason why it is prohibited for a Jew to make an image of G-d, is not because nothing can be in the image of G-d, but that there would be too many images of G-d, and they would fall short. They would not be able to reproduce sufficiently the image of G-d, so I'm working on this.

Immanent, descending and you're going upwards, transcending and away from form, and I'm embodying form. But in embodied form, the Jewish proclamation that every human being has the stamp of the divine on their face, in an era in which that was certainly not self-evident at any level, and as has been at the core of humanism, the thrust of western civilization, and culminating, some would say, in and the great Western philosophical tradition he represents, in the human being's face, in that image of G-d, the very ethical obligation is grounded in that moment, and I would say, that along with arguing with G-d -- which I think you were getting at there -- that Judaism has given the sense that you have holy chutzpah -- that if G-d pisses you off, "go ahead!" go right at it, throw down the mantle and get right up in God's face, Moses and Abraham and the like, all the way down to the in Hasidic lore. So those two moments, of being made in the image of God and by virtue of that being able to confront God and struggle with God -- I think those are two things that I grew up with, certainly.

Rabbi Yaakov: It's humbling to sit here tonight, being the fourth one and not being asked to impress the other three! What can you do? The other thing is, we've spent the whole day together since eleven o'clock this morning. As I was preparing in my head what to respond, much of what was said by my colleagues was what I was going to say. Does that get me out of responding? It could be heresy on some levels, and I'm not prone to be a heretic, but I sit here humbly tonight before you, on some levels representing 3500 years of continued tradition.

We call it "Judaism." It doesn't say that in the Bible. Judaism, this is what you call us. That's okay, I accept. And it could be that what we have to offer the non-Jewish world transcends Judaism. It could be that what we have to offer the non-Jewish world is that sense of unity, seen through my 3500-year old glasses, which are not always that clear. That we can come together, and that we should come together, as people of faith, as people of spirit, and be able to share with each other, and to be able to give to each other and teach each other and learn with each other, that which is beyond and above all the -isms. Not to confuse you, but this, also, is from where I'm sitting what I see Judaism has to offer the world.

Rabia: The people of Israel are god-wrestlers, and David, I think you went there -- the ability to argue with, wrestle with, the concept of G-d. What humanity sees happening around us when we don't like something that's happening. Since I framed this from the perspective of some of the challenges that we're facing, now, in the environment, in world conflict, in disease and hunger. At a time when we've had much progress as well, as people, as nations, I wonder where you feel that "G-d-wrestling" might fit in there, in the context of some of the challenges we're facing today -- the relevancy -- do you wrestle with G-d, and how, while maintaining the sacred?

Rabbi David: I just want to teach you something. The word in Hebrew for "thank you" is "toda." "Toda raba" is "thank you very much." The truth is that the word "Jew" comes from the word "Yehuda," to be a Judean, someone who is from Judah. Judah gets his name in the Bible as the fourth son of Leah, because after three failed attempts to get her husband, Jacob, to love her, first with Reuben, she says "now he'll see that I brought him a son and he'll love me." He doesn't love her. Then Simon -- "he'll hear that I brought him a son" – he doesn't love her. Levi -- "now this time he'll love me" – still doesn't love her. The fourth son, Judah, she doesn't care anymore if Jacob loves her, this time I will thank God -- the word "Yudah" means to thank God -- "I will have gratitude for its own sake."

So "Jewish" means, every time I hear someone say "are you Jewish" I hear in it "are you grateful? Do you know how to thank? Where's your gratitude practice? Are you gratefully alive?" And when you ask me if I'm wrestling, it's an interesting thing, because the word "Yehuda" or "to thank" also means "to give up, to relinquish, to let go."

So you have a paradox -- you're called "Israel," the one who struggles -- the word "Israelite" means "one who struggles with God," and you're also called a Jew, someone who surrenders and lets go. And in that dance, that dialectic between struggling and letting go, those are the two perspectives in the tango.

So, specifically there are things we need to struggle with in the tradition. First of all, as Rami said this morning, very beautifully, the first movement is always to own responsibility. So when we have a conversation about Judaism and the environment, let's say, if that were on our agenda, the first thing we would have to acknowledge is that Judaism hasn't always had a very healthy relationship with the environment, number one, and not only that, we have contributed in ways that we could own as part of our agenda, ways that have subjugated, and that have lent themselves towards misinterpretation and unfair power relationship with the environment, and with women, and all these things. So that would be the first step, to acknowledge that we made a mistake, to make amends.

But then from within the tradition, we can look for ways that the tradition can speak to current crises, and illuminate them, and speak to giving direction. "Torah" really means direction, the word Torah means “show me the way”. So there are ways that Torah can show the way on various issues, like torture, like not to make use of the environment in a way that's inappropriate, not to waste.

All of these values can come to bear on a whole slew of issues that are at the core of what's facing us, but in order for that to happen we need to be real with the tradition, and I think vis-a-vis the non-Jewish world, it would be to acknowledge that we are perceived, or want ourselves to be perceived as those who have this pure tradition of 3500 years without any blemishes, and those who have left Judaism and who come to my synagogue, cry and say "I never knew -- just telling me that we weren't perfect was a healing, just to hear that, that we could've done it better." That would be the first place to wrestle. The first place is to give in.

Maggid Yitzhak: Rabia had asked us the question, "What does Judaism have to teach the world?" And one of my thoughts regarding that was that, when I study other religions, I don't pay any attention to their deficiencies unless they absolutely pop out in my face. Because when I'm studying other religions, which I do regularly, I'm interested in what I can learn from them.

If I see something in Hinduism or Sufism or Buddhism that is beautiful, I'd like to see if I can incorporate it into Judaism. So I'm looking at their virtues, not at their deficiencies. So I don't know what the other religions are missing. Non-Jews need to tell me, or us, what they see in us, from their knowledge, that attracts them, that seems curious, that seems interesting, that they don't have in their traditions.

So it's not as if I, my colleagues, or the Jewish people are going to teach others, because the others have to want to learn. And in fact, in America, we live in this great era, where all the religions are learning from each other, right? It's awesome. Along with the women's movement, that's the great thing happening in our era, of historical significance.

So I have what I call my perspective religion -- I've been involved in Judaism for 40 years, and I've been studying Hinduism for that equal amount of time. So I call it my perspective religion, because it gives me perspective on being a better Jew. Not a practitioner. And then I read so many books on Hinduism that I had to switch to Sufism. No books left to read.

So that's a wonderful thing that goes on in America, but people, non-Jews, more rarely investigate Judaism for two reasons. One, people from a Christian background often think that "We know Judaism, because we read the Old Testament." But Judaism has developed for thousands of years since then. So many things have happened and changed the religion since then, so that's not really the case that a person who's familiar with the Old Testament knows what Judaism is. Most Jews would hardly recognize their religion in what's portrayed, if they actually knew what's in the Old Testament.

The second reason is that non-Jews feel that Jews are pushing them off a little bit. The Jews are a bit insular. And there's a bit of truth to that -- there are segments of the Jewish community that are insular, and push us off as well as non-Jews. But it's not generally true. The mainstream of the Jewish community, and certainly the spiritual end, would love to have people come and not learn to be Jews, but learn about how Judaism, if it's attractive to them, can enhance their practice of Christianity or Islam or whatever their religion is.

Rabbi Yaakov: The thing about wrestling with God is that it never stops. And the minute I think it stops, I've fallen into a trance, a deep sleep. And someone needs to come along and wake me up. It's very easy to be satisfied with the status quo. I don't have regular plates available, so we'll pull out some paper... then comes the plastic, then comes the gasoline, and so on and so forth. We are just one day away from eight days of living in eight days of the most environmentally unbelievable holidays of the calendar, which is the Sukkot holiday. Do you know what it means to live in a sukkah?

First of all, it's unbridled joy. Second of all, I'm living in a hut. Oh, you have huts here -- I was walking today and I saw huts here! I'm glad they have better roofs than the sukkah. But for the eight days that we live in the sukkah, we're living under the canopy of G-d's creation. And by the way, the s'chach, the roof of the sukkah, is the feminine presence of God manifest down, almost to our heads. What's it made out of? A sukkah's not a sukkah without the s'chach.

I once had to tell the Albany police that, when I had a sukkah that was built illegally. They came along and said, "you can leave the sukkah but the s'chach's gotta go." I said "a sukkah's not a sukkah without the s'chach," he didn't understand. He had a red face and a big nose, but it's okay. The s'chach is the leftovers -- that which would be discarded from the threshing floor and the vineyard. So we take that which seems to have no other use, maybe it'd make good compost, and we put it on our sukkah and there we live in unbridled joy for seven days.

And Zalman and others have really taken the Sukkot holiday and used it as a means to bring out the environmental issues -- what Judaism has to offer in terms of environmentalism -- but also to remind all of us that we are stewards for the world. And we wrestle with each other about how to do this, what to do. But the idea of wrestling with God, the Talmud says that sleep is 1/60th of death. The greatest sin is to not be awake like that. David will call me up now, because we've become friends, and remind me that I have to get up in the morning.

Rabbi David: I'll be up in the morning.

Rabbi Yaakov: What's your son's name? Bear? Bear will wake you up and then that's how it works, because the teachers teach the parents.

Rabbi Rami: I want to pick up on the sukkah theme. I don't know if this is true -- I don't know if any of it's true -- but this is what I was taught: that in the Messianic times, the only holiday we have left is Sukkot. You were told Purim? I was told Sukkot. See, there, now we have to -- there's a story for both? I'm going to go with the Sukkot one. But even if it's the only one left, I don't believe the Messiah's coming, so we're going to have to deal with all these other holidays too.

But I like the idea because, not so much about the environmentalism and other stuff with Sukkot -- you have to live in the sukkah. It's this absolutely fragile environment, and it says to me -- "this is your life." Absolutely no security in the sukkah. The rain comes and you get wet, the wind comes and you get blown around. And yet you have this unbridled joy. To me, it's the gift that Judaism has given me. And that is the capacity to live without security, in the midst of life's wildness, and yet find in that craziness, unbridled joy. That, to me, is quintessentially -- wait, does that mean "only Jewish"? No, it's quintessentially Jewish, not uniquely Jewish.

But it reminds me of a Zen story that you probably know that really gets at the same thing, about the guy who's walking through the forest, and he falls into a tiger pit? And the tiger pit has the bamboo on the bottom that are sharpened. The tiger is supposed to fall into the pit and be skewered, but instead the guy falls into the pit and he grabs onto a vine before hitting the bamboo, so he lives.

And then he's going to climb out, but just as he starts to climb out, the tiger shows up. Since the covering of the pit is now exposed the tiger doesn't fall in, he looks in and he sees his lunch climbing out of the pit, right? So he's going to eat that guy. So the guy says, "I'm not going to climb out, I'll just hold on here, the tiger will get bored and he'll go away."

And then while he's hanging there, a mole comes out of the side of the pit, and starts to gnaw away at the vine. And so now he knows that if he goes up he'll be eaten, if he waits the vine will break and he'll be skewered on the bamboo. He's dead either way. Absolutely what Sartre was saying -- No Exit. Nothing you can do. You're doomed.

And then he notices growing out of the vine this strawberry. He plucks it, eats it, and says "this is the most delicious strawberry I've ever eaten." And that to me is how you live your life. You're dead either way! Can you appreciate the strawberry? And that is what sukkahs teach me. You're living in this structure that reminds you of your mortality.

And then what do you study during Sukkot? Ecclesiastes, right? I have two favorite books in the Bible, Ecclesiastes and Job, so now you know. These are the most healthy books in the Bible. They offer you nothing but reality. No promises! So Ecclesiastes -- everything you think you're going to get out of life, all the places you place your treasure, whether it's in finances or kids or power or politics or the court system or wisdom itself, ultimately proves to be unreliable. Ecclesiastes' own teaching was, “you find it in friendship”. A three-stranded cord is stronger than two and stronger than one. It's with friends. It's building community. And so you invite your friends into being with you in the sukkah. That to me is the greatest gift that I've gotten from Judaism, and I think it's a gift that has to be given to the world.

Judaism is too big to be "an -ism." There's no such thing as Judaism; there's Jews with opinions. And sometimes the opinions coalesce, and when the Jews are dead their opinions get manipulated by the Jews who are alive, and we say "that's what they said" and they're not around to say "no, I didn't." But there's no one Judaism, and that's why there's four of us (referring to panel), and there could be four thousand of us, because that's just the way Judaism works.

So there's these different strands, and the strand that speaks to me now, at this point in my life, is this strand of Ecclesiastes and Job, where you're sitting in the chaos, in the horror of life, and yet you find the joy of friendship, and you find God -- because God appears to Job. I won't tell the whole long story about it but you find friendship, God, love, a strawberry -- unbridled joy -- in the midst of the madness. I couldn't ask for a better gift at this time in my life. Or yours (referring to Rabbi David), with the little baby keeping you up all night, joy in the midst of the madness!

Rabbi David: Unbridled is right.

Rabbi Rami: Undiapered wildness!

Rabbi David: Have we said anything particular, or is it all universal?

Rabia: I think we have said something particular, and Pir Zia and I got to listen, actually, to some wonderful aspects of the particularity of Judaism today. Pir Zia, I wondered if you wanted to mention the term "midrash" which was used quite a bit, but it's a methodology of exploring teachings that might be a unique, a particular flavor of Judaism.

Pir Zia: I thought one of the very interesting parts of our conversation today was the discussion of how you come to terms with a verse or chapter of revelation, of scripture, that is problematic. And Rabbi Rami challenged us, really, in that conversation, by expressing dissatisfaction with what is in many religions, in the mystical dimension, a response to that situation which is to attempt an allegorical explanation that takes it outside of history and reshuffles the terms of reference.

And what Rabbi Rami was confronting us with is that, at some level, that is not ultimately going to be satisfying. There are implications of the historical experience of peoples, as reflected in the scriptures, as reflected in the tradition, that has been conflictual, that has been non-egalitarian, that has given rise to violence. How do we address these elements?

And Rabbi Rami challenged us not to take the easy way out, not merely to explain these things away by some kind of mystical bypass, but really to come to terms somehow with the shadow, with that which is dark or dangerous within one's heritage. And that's when the subject of midrash came up.

A fascinating dialogue ensued, and I hope we can bring some of the spirit of that dialogue into a conversation this evening.  Perhaps here and now, the way that I might frame this, if I might give an answer from a very different perspective outside the Jewish tradition, not belonging to it, but regarding the question of what Judaism offers the world -- it seems to me that the sense of history itself is very much a product of the Jewish imagination.

Prior societies held a view of nature and of time which was cyclical, which essentially revolved through the seasons. In Judaism one has the sense that there is a nation with a story that has its episodes, its characters, its ups and downs, triumphs and failures; one has the sense of a people moving through time, growing through time, changing, their relationship with god shifting, the whole sense of history. And with that history comes a great load, a great burden from the past. That past carries with it many blessings, but it also brings into the present all of the trauma of the past, of wounds, of conflicts. And so a major subject for us has been, “What do we do with this heritage?” I think it's a question for the Jewish faith, I think it's a question for the whole world. And Judaism brings it into focus for us, because this is a people with a history that it owns, that it grapples with, and continuously seeks to come to terms with, with different modes of understanding.

And you mentioned Freud's Judaism, and that's something that he himself called attention to, saying that psychoanalysis is a Jewish science, in the sense that recognizing that the transmission of impressions down the generations from parents to children has to do with this sense of historical continuity, the presence of the past. So how do we then illuminate the past in the present, and what can midrash do for us in this?

Rabbi David: Let's be clear that psychoanalysis IS midrash. The very structure of psychoanalytic practice, the praxis itself, is grounded in a sense of narrative--what you're saying. And that narrative -- in, what book was it, the Jew in the Lotus, right? Rodger Kamenetz wrote this book -- many of you know this book -- there were a group of Jews, a delegation that went to Dharamsala to meet with the Dalai Lama, and the Dalai Lama asked the Jews for their secret of survival in the exile for over 2000 years. There's a moment of tension between one rabbi and another rabbi. One of the rabbis wanted to give over the secret, which was, he thought, the seder, the Passover evening seder, which probably more Jews go to the seder than the High Holy Holidays. And it's not for the matzoh ball soup -- there's something about the seder that historically grounds us in a narrative, and I think that's true.

And so midrash is a hermeneutic of -- it's basically assuming that there is something coherent called a narrative, and that, depending on your level of consciousness or your perspective, you are seeing the same story from a different angle and that same story will bear fruit. And so that's what a psychoanalyst does -- you sit down and tell your analyst your story, in theory, and then you interpret the story. You had your own interpretation of the story about how your parents were with you, and X Y and Z, and then your analyst says, "Listen, you might want to add this little piece to the story. You might want to fill it in this way, or you might want to turn the story this way. Or let us do a different hermeneutic on this story."

So psychoanalysis is the very process of midrash, which is to take a verse, and as the rabbis say, hit it with a hammer, and it splits into seventy pieces. That's the idea -- it's really early deconstructionism. It has the roots of Derrida's system of deconstruction. You take a verse, and you read it in every which way imaginable, including the whitespace between the letters and under the letters and behind the letters, and you flip it around, and you put a vowel where it wasn't, and you play with it, and it becomes almost -- it's a game, it's almost lila for Jews or yoga for Jews, is twisting a verse into many different asanas. "Let's see if the front of the verse can touch the toes of the back of the verse." And we'll bend it this way and that way, and back and forth, back and forth. Yoga is a really wonderful analogy to the way your mind begins to work when you first play with verses.

You say, "There's no WAY that you're going to tell me that THAT'S what that verse means." And then a month later, thinking, "Oh, that's what that verse means." And it's this kind of pliancy with your mind and playing with text which is at the root of midrash. Midrash means "to seek something." The assumption is that something has been lost. So midrash is the process of finding that which has been lost within the text and asking it to come out, come out from wherever it is. That's midrash.

Rabbi Rami: I teach at Middle Tennessee State University, in the heart of the Bible Belt, and when I teach Bible to my 20-year old undergrads who've been steeped in Bible in Sunday School, and we talk about the midrashic approach to Bible, or when I do workshops for clergy, which I do regularly, on the midrashic approach -- they're blown away that you can do that. And the rationale is so clear: if it's the word of God, how can you reduce the word of God to a single meaning, it makes no sense! It has an infinite number of meanings, as God is infinite. And it creates a certain mindset, a certain pedagogy, that shapes -- I'd love to say the "Jewish" mind, but I think it takes more than being born Jewish, you have to be raised and steeped in this midrashic mind and practice to let it happen -- but I want you to explain the pedagogy, the Elu v'Elu.

Maggid Yitzhak: One of the things about midrash that's so remarkable -- I teach midrash, occasionally, and I still don't understand certain aspects of its essence. One of the things about midrash is, is that you have a story in, say, the Torah, and it's interpreted by creating another story -- a meta-story, or a story to fill a gap. For instance, it says in the Torah that Abraham and Isaac were walking together to the attempted sacrifice of Isaac. So the rabbis will create conversations that Abraham was having with Isaac. It's a form of interpretation. It's a scenario, we might call it. And the rabbis create multitudes of scenarios, and they're all considered -- not right, but possible.  And the mindset that allows them to do this is -- I still don't have a complete grasp of it. It's so remarkable.

I remember when I became religious, my fervor was to know the one truth, about life and about existence. And the idea that you can have multiple truths is mind-blowing. There's a very famous Jewish saying -- the two famous schools, this is right after Jesus, an older contemporary of Jesus was Hillel, the greatest rabbi of our tradition, in ancient times, and his opponent Shammai -- sort of left-wing and right-wing, religiously not politically. And there was House of Hillel and House of Shammai, the two schools.

So it says in the Talmud that they would argue about many issues, these would say "yes," and those would say "no," absolutely divergent opinions. And the school of Hillel, when they taught the subject, they would teach their opinion and their opponent's opinion. And in fact, precede with their opponent's opinion. The school of Shammai would only teach their own opinion. And a heavenly voice was heard saying, "Jewish law, the ruling,is always like the House of Hillel, because they were humble, and because they respected the other opinion." And the voice said, "Elu V'elu Divrei Elohim Chayim" -- "These and those are the words of the Living God," although the ruling is always like Hillel. "These and those are the words of the living God," meaning you have totally divergent opinions, and God says, they're both the words of God. Mind-blowing.

Now the Kabbalah interprets this by saying that it's according to a person's soul-root. For instance, one ruling is stern, and the opposing ruling is gentle. So if your root requires sternness, your truth is "no." If your soul is rooted in compassion, and that's what you need, your truth is "yes." So the only trick that remains to be done, and I'm sure it'll be done by the people in this panel, is applying this model not only to Judaism, but to all the world's religions. "These and those" -- they may be divergent, opposite -- they're both the words of the living God.

Rabbi David: I just want to piggyback on that, since -- let's come back to Freud again. I just want to say how that principle, and the principle we were discussing in Freud, they're all from the same root, in a sense.  Adam Phillips is a British psychoanalyst who wrote a wonderful book, and in it he said the essence of democracy is that you allow as many voices as possible to proliferate within a container that then sees each voice as contributing to the biodiversity, in a sense, of the whole. The more voices the better. We don't want anybody's voice to be drowned out, so to speak, obviously within certain limits. As opposed to a dictatorship, or an autocracy, or some other sort of regime of hegemony, we want many voices to proliferate.

And this is sort of like the internal psychoanalytic position as well. We want as many of your inner voices to kind of come up out of the woodwork. You don't have to have your voices making little committees on the side, in secret, making sure that nothing gets through. The superego says, "no, none of that id in here".  Says the psychoanalyst, "No, no, let's let all of the voices come up and let them be heard, and you can hold it. You don't have to act, you're a mature adult. You can hold those libidinal impulses that you couldn't have as a five year old -- they can all live within you, in one society.” This voice and that voice can also be in the same container -- this religion and that religion, this truth and that truth. And they don't have to be mutually exclusive.

In terms of what Judaism has to offer in the 20th and 21st century, there are very serious political implications for midrash. Because there is midrash that is of the kind that you, Yitzhak, are speaking to, midrash aggadah it's called, where you have multiple scenarios within a given narrative. Once you fill in the lacuna within a story and so on and so forth. Then there are what's called midrash halacha, there are exegetical moments within the corpus of Jewish law. Like -- it's less akin to a literary culture of multiple perspectives in interpretation, and more like a Supreme Court where there are certain legal decisions within the Torah, within Jewish normative life, that we need to include multiple perspectives on a given law, say for example, within Jewish normative life, a woman can't divorce her husband. Every divorce within Jewish normative life has to be initiated by the man, not by the woman. A woman cannot initiate her own divorce. So a woman whose husband is recalcitrant, who refuses to give his wife a divorce, that woman can be chained for years without getting a divorce.

Maggid Yitzhak: Make clear it's not literally, David.

Rabbi David: No it is literally!

Maggid Yitzhak: You said chained.

Rabbi David: Oh, I don't mean literally chained! In other words --

Maggid Yitzhak: We're not going there.

Rabbi Rami: Dr Freud, calling Dr. Freud...

Rabbi David: So there is a need to increase imagination within many realms of the Jewish experience. For example, Judaism has used for the last 2000 years this kind of imagination -- these imaginal leaps -- in order to eliminate morally and ethically problematic texts and laws, and to further a more moral conscience. Now in our generation it'll be homosexuality, right? Two years ago, the conservative movement finally had the exegetical courage to say that homosexuality can be read THIS way, the same way we've been playfully reading texts for 2000 years, but it took a Rabbinic will, and as someone said, if there's a Rabbinic will, there's always a Rabbinic way. Which means, using imagination to progress God's more ethical and moral understanding of the world.

Rabia: Alright, you're all looking at me. I think at this point I'm going to look at our audience and ask if there are any questions. We did sort of discuss this and what we'd like to invite are questions and if you have someone to direct them to, that would be lovely, and if you don't, whoever feels inspired might reply in any case. So the mic is going to come over to you to get the questions.

Question:  My current teacher, Dhyani Ywahoo, indigenous and Buddhist, sent me an email suggesting I come tonight. She has urged me, before I do anything else, to go back to my Jewish roots. So a question I have is the following: It seems to me that the nation of Israel is the people of the exodus, then and now. "I am the Lord your God who freed you from slavery, out of the land of Egypt." Military, cultural, economic superpower -- something higher. And I think we are people who come with a certain degree of dignity and a certain degree of humility. No way to be Pharaoh and be Biblical. No way to be oppressed and to be the people whose God was on the side of the oppressed. I think the parashot (weekly Torah portions) we read, speak very clearly: today you leave. You know you will have left when you come to the land God has promised you, present, past future, all in one. We remember by repeating. So the question is: the prophets of the Hebrew scripture speak to social justice. It seems that even with the elegance of people like Aryeh Kaplan dwelling in the chariot-vision, the Jews have a particular flavor of the mysticism and that is the absolute rootedness in God's concern for the suffering. So I'm interested whether that rings any bells, or just... totally crazy?

Rabbi Yaakov: To me it's so clear what it means to be a light unto the nations. To me it's so clear what I have to do. When I wake up in the morning, from this week's parsha, when I'm lost in the garden, having eaten from the tree of knowledge, many things that speak about, and I try to hide from God, and God is asking me the question everyday, "where are you?" I'm offering my answer. So I never met another human being that wasn't created in God's image. I never met a speck of dust that didn't have some element of light, some lesson for me to learn, some way for me to deepen my approach to Judaism, my approach to all the -isms, my approach to the world, my approach to holiness. It's just a question of how aware I can be. And that's the challenge, because coming at us in our day-to-day are all sorts of those challenges.

How do you be spiritual when someone is standing at you, yelling at you for this, that, or the next thing? Where are you? You know, it's very easy to be spiritual in a spiritual environment. Take me out of that environment -- wow. Now, you would think that 3500 years of tradition would yield spiritual environments. I'm sorry to say, it's not always true. So how am I then spiritual in those environments that say they're spiritual, and on some levels want to be there, but, y'know, they sit in the sukkah and don't see the same thing. They take the which we take also during Sukkot, which means *sweeping noises*, really fast, you know?

When you have four species, four different types, when you have all different levels coming together it's the unity of the world, and you're sending the energy out and drawing the energy in. I can't be so fast. But how am I going to relate to the others in my environment? Put on every morning. Make it quick, clock's ticking! So, you know, that's the challenge. That's what our life's work is. And if we think we can run away from it, we've stopped wrestling with G-d. If we think we can stop wrestling -- well, we can stop wrestling with G-d, go to the movies and McDonald's or wherever we want to go, but somehow or other it comes back to us, and hopefully it will come back in a good way. And for someone who drove five hours to get here tonight, from the western side of Lebanon, New Hampshire, I'm hoping that even a small amount of what I offered here, and others will offer, will be there for you as a blessing.

Rabbi Rami: I need to say something, because if we're not going to deal with this... I HATE to be the person to deal with this. I loved what you said, I love the idea that Jews and Judaism are all about the suffering and alleviating the suffering, and one of the things we tend to do in spiritual talk, especially in the United States, is to individualize it. And when we do that, we excuse corporate evils. And I don't think you can talk about Judaism as a light unto the nations without talking about our Achilles heel: the Palestinians.

I'm not an expert in this. I'm not going to go into anything specific. I just think it's like in the United States where our Achilles heel is slavery and the genocide against the Native Americans. Every empire, however big or small, every civilization has its Achilles heel. And we have to own ours. And it's very hard for us. We don't like to see ourselves as the cause of suffering. We like to see ourselves as the victims of suffering. We like to imagine that we are still the canary in the mine, and I wonder if that's true. I wonder if it's not, in fact, women, who are in this day and age the canary in the mine. And you don't look to see how other civilizations treat Jews to see how moral they are, you look to see how they treat women.

But I think to us, like to the Chinese, how do you treat the Tibetans? To Jews, it has to be, how do you treat the Palestinians? Now we are always saying -- and I'm going to stop after this, because I get very upset -- where are those Imams? Where are those Muslims who stand up and decry all the violence of Islam? Well, they're there. I don't want to hear them, because it means that I'm elevating their moral status.

Where are the Jewish leaders who decry the treatment of the Palestinians? And we can have absolute legitimate differences about the fate of Israel and what should happen there, and I don't know if I even have a strong understanding to even say, but with this new Goldstone thing that just came out and we won't even look at it, and we're saying that he's a self-hating Jew, this guy who's an ardent Zionist and a member of the board of Hebrew University, he's a self-hating Jew!  And that's why he's holding us to account. He's only holding us to our own standard. I don't want to hold Jews to a higher standard. I want to hold Jews to OUR standard. And that should be our standard -- and we don't live it out. And that just kills me, it just hurts.

Maggid Yitzhak: Just formally, I disagree with Rami. I don't want to talk politics, either --

Rabbi David: I just disagree with one thing. I don't want to say a lot. I agree wholeheartedly with the last thing that you said. That should be our standard. And I agree that we don't own our Achilles heel -- some of us. And there are many, many, many -- myself included -- Rabbis and other leaders who -- like J Street, and and , there are so many organizations that say the truth, that are not afraid to say from the pulpit.

Rabbi Rami: Oh, I didn't mean to say that. If that was the impression I gave -- that's not what....

Rabbi David: Okay, I just hope to clear the air that there are many organizations that are calling for Jews to live up to --

Rabbi Rami: In Israel, as well as here.

Rabbi David: I agree.

Rabbi Rami: I mislead you, and that's not what I meant.

Rabbi Yaakov: I feel that I have to say something now. I operate an organization that tends to be on the right side of the political spectrum. I have friends in the settlements, my daughter works in the settlements, my son was in the army in Israel. I want to tell you, during the Gaza war, the TV stations came to me, four of them in Albany. They had just come from a demonstration put on by and they came to me. And I said to them, all four stations, that I am pro-Palestinian. I think they wanted to pack up and leave -- they were looking for a good fight, looking for me to say so.

One of the proudest moments I've had as a father -- my son called me up, ten o'clock at night, that would be three o'clock, four o'clock in the morning in Israel. He was in the Army, he was at a checkpoint, and he said to me, "Abba, what do I do? My soldier friends are treating the Palestinian people that are coming through the checkpoint like they're beneath human beings. But I know that's not right. But on the other hand, look where we are. We don't know who's walking through that checkpoint." And I said, "You have to be a little bit like I am at the prison." I work at a maximum-security prison. You don't get into our prison by jaywalking. I said, "you have to remember where you are, but you can never take the image of God away from any single human being. Never." And the two can work together -- that's the challenge. And there are people in Israel who come from my community, or the community I tend to align with, who see that very clearly.

And let's not talk about the Palestinian leadership that I feel has defeated their people, let's talk about the individuals and friends of mine, before Arafat, who were friends and worked with and were colleagues with and benefitted individuals in the Palestinian villages. I don't mean to bring it up in a negative way, because the truth is there's pain on both ends. Like I said when I was here during the summer, the blood of a child of a Palestinian, and the blood of a child of a Jew, is... blood. And everybody's wounded. Everybody's wounded.

And I would take the side of Rabbi Frohman and Eliyahu McLean and others, and Shahabuddin, and others who are now working towards religious dialogue -- dialogue with spiritual leaders -- Jews, Sufis, Muslims, Christians, whoever will come along. And look towards a solution that says, "Hey, let's get above the politics. Let's get above the hatred, the hurt, and the pain. Let's heal from the pain." I just read that there's an organization in Israel I was familiar with that has victims of terror, on both the Jewish side and the Palestinian side, dialoguing with each other. To me that's a beautiful thing. I just read -- and if I'm wrong, correct me and forgive me -- Leonard Cohen was just in Israel, and this was his choice of charities. And he did a concert in Israel and believe me, there were those who questioned this, because there will be those who question it, because when you're in so much pain you can't always see the light and pick up on the spirit. He did the concert, and was not permitted by the Palestinian leadership to do the same concert for the same charity in the Palestinian territories. Sad, sad, sad. I could go on about this, but I think there are other things that we need to work with.

Rabbi Rami: So let me just point out one thing. This is what Judaism can give the world.  Just, you. That talk. That presentation. This is wrestling with God. Not the high spiritual stuff, that's all sweetness and light. This... this is the dirt, the compost that can really bring out something fresh. Thank you. This is why I'm a Jew, because this is what we do, and that was very powerful.

Question: So I sort of have an answer inside my mind, but I'd like to ask you all -- it seems to me that the biggest thing that you share, that you're expressing in terms of the Jewish tradition you share, and also what you would give to the non-Jewish world, primarily is a very strong ethical relation. We talked about the Levinassian, face-to-face, the encounter with the other, the ecological, so a strong ethical, almost imperative, and a strong textual dimension -- the hermeneutical, and the midrashian deconstructive, and Freudian... so my question is, if the essence really seems to be the ethical and the textual, why do we need God? Why do we have God? What's the relation to the Jewish divine? Why do you need God?

Rabbi David: Since we just finished a whole talk about the territory... I was in the occupied territories, two years ago, with my wife, and we went as part of a group of women that go to the checkpoints to make sure that the soldiers are acting ethically, called watch.

We were leaving. It was a very powerful experience for me and for those who were there. I'll never forget the feeling I had walking through the parking lot there with my yarmulke on and then breaking that silence, that wall, and just talking with people, and witnessing, and being with them, and talking to soldiers, and as I was leaving there was a little van -- they don't let them drink, on one side of the maksom, the border -- and now the soldiers started allowing them to bring in drinks.  So a guy had a van and he had a little ad hoc shop and was selling soda and I walked over to him and said, “Can I get a Coke?”, and he looked at me and said in Hebrew, “Are you a semite? and I said, “No”, and he said, “But you are wearing a yalmulke.”  Hear that?

And I said, “But I am not a semite and I do not think that God wears a yalmuke either.” Our God isn’t Jewish, which is obvious, right? What I was trying to say is that tribalism is what got us into this.  And it is transcendence of the tribal God – the capacity to transcend the tribal God but still maintain divinity and not have it reduced to a totem, or to “My God is Jewish. Is your God Jewish?”  That kind of thing. “Hey, does your God come here often?” That kind of thing. So that is one side. The Jews hold onto a God that they can put on their dashboard or they can sing some songs to that God.

Or the other side of the Jews are those who have walked away from God completely. They have what I call Post Traumatic God Disorder.  PTGD. PTGD is a real syndrome and it afflicts more than you can imagine.  Definitely something maybe like 3 out of 4 Jews I have ever come across hate God because the God that they were taught was traumatic, that God beat them up, that God wanted them to do silly things. Who would worship that kind of God? So we have these two extremes.

And somewhere between these two extremes, or above these two extremes, or beyond is the sense of God as Tillich’s ground of all being. So Judaism has gone through its own evolution of God and I wouldn’t remove God from any conversation about Judaism. Judaism has given to the world its own flavor of God, like French has given the world French, and English has given English, and Swahili, Swahili.

We have our own flavor of God and it has grown up in much the same developmental sequence as other Gods around the world have grown up. So our God also went through the terrible twos, and then grew up into adolescence, and then our God was in high school, and then college, and then had long hair and was smoking pot, and all that, and hanging out, and that’s our God. Our God has gone through all of those stages.

Our God has shown up as a woman, our God has shown up as a lover, our God has shown up as a friend, our God has shown up as an angry God, our God has as an uncle, as an aunt, as a grandfather, as a grandmother, our God has shown up as the ineffable, unknowable source and ground of all being, the divine player. You name it.

We have just as much mysticism and esoteric wisdom as any other tradition and its rich, and its vocabulary is complex. And its sentences are well-structured. It is all beautiful stuff. Kabbalah is gorgeous. And Jewish philosophy is gorgeous. So its all there.

So I think any ethics that is not grounded in the divine ultimately worships itself and cannot justify itself. So any ethics that is its own means and its own end is a silly circle that will always end up aggrandizing human beings at the expense of other human beings.  And so a sense of divinely inherent intrinsic value rooted in spirit and such that transcends all other values, transcends ecology and environment, all those things are all part of a system but are not the system. So if you ask me, this is a long soapboxy thing, but the ground of being is the soap box. It is the ground of being. So all those things are just little important moments but not the ground.

Yet a common criticism of Hatha Yoga is that it is not really a spiritual practice unto itself, that it is solely a body/health regimen and therefore the serious aspirant on a spiritual path need not bother with it. It is an arguable point of view, but consider this: the Yoga tradition teaches us that our bodies manifest our samskaras (inherent tendencies) carried into this life from our previous lives, and these samskaras predetermine much of our behavior, both helpful and detrimental. By consciously manipulating the body with breathing practices and postures in Hatha Yoga, we can straighten the crooked course of our samskaras, altering the course of our life.

Equally significant is that we hold our past emotional experiences, energetically, in our bodies. So many of us become unexplainably stuck on our path, not from lack of effort, but because of the chains of the past known as anger, grief, and fear. These buried emotions, like splinters in the heart, can be crippling to our spiritual practice. It is as simple as this: when people are in pain, they become self-centered and myopic. When people heal, they become more empathetic, self-less, and sympathetic to the pain and welfare of others.

Through the practice of Yoga, in particular the breathing practices, we can liberate these buried emotions and experience a rapid and meaningful transformation. So our God Intent, fueled with breath and powered by our will, ultimately realigns an emotionally misaligned body.

When I stumbled upon Yoga in my own life nearly two decades ago, I knew well what spiritual practice was, and I knew what exercise was—but I had never seen a system that combined the two except for martial arts. But martial arts usually involve a fighting mindset, while my aim was peace within and unity with all. After a month of practicing Yoga three times a week, I finally connected the dots and understood Hatha Yoga as an integral part of spiritual, and even mystical practice. At its simplest, Hatha Yoga supports the body of the seeker on his or her spiritual quest. It enables and empowers our other practices: breathing, meditation, ritual, and daily life itself. Why damage your back and knees in meditation when this can be deterred with the addition of a short regime of yoga to support your body before meditation? Why suffer from internal disorders and years of chronic pain when through conscious work this can be avoided? Why prematurely shorten your life and transformational practice through neglect of the body? The vehicle we travel in must be kept in order, or travel on the road of internal transformation becomes difficult, then painful, then impossible.

Integrating and balancing is one of the seminal purposes of Hatha Yoga. This requires us to develop strength where we are weak and flexibility or openness where we are congested—in body, mind, and emotions. As long as we are imbalanced, our lives and our spiritual path will be hindered. It could be said that Hatha Yoga is the foundation of the temple. This is because Yoga takes one’s spiritual life and embodies it, heals it, and removes stress and pain. After a time, the drugs one may have depended on to battle depression, sleeplessness and ulcers are no longer needed. Yoga works, regardless of your belief system. Try it three times a week for one month and see for yourself. Health comes as a side effect from a grander intent—the intent to breathe in God, and to ultimately embody God.

My conscientious self, do not claim that which belongs to another.¹

I have two small children and I take great delight in watching them grow and change. In children one can see the simplest impulses of the human personality before it has been socially conditioned. For example, when two children are playing together with an assortment of toys, a toy will often lie utterly neglected until one child happens to takes it up, at which point the other child will develop a sudden interest in it, and demand it as his own. As long as it lay on the floor there was no special attraction, but when another grasps it, it acquires urgent importance.

In reality, adults are not so different from children in this respect, although we might hide it. We are drawn to possess what others possess. In extreme cases, acquisitiveness drives people to deceit and violence. More often, it simply involves spending a great deal of time and energy accumulating and discarding possessions, hunting for the object that will bring happiness, yet never quite finding it. The whole economy is based on our acting this way. If we stopped, the economy would collapse and would have to be reinvented.

From a Sufi point of view, every motivation is ultimately grounded in a divine impulse. Even in our concupiscence there is hope for redemption. The pursuit of an object leads to the attainment of the object, which in turn leads to rising above it. If one were not to strive to obtain that which one desires, if one were to prematurely renounce it while inwardly still hankering for it, one’s renunciation would be hollow and hypocritical and liable to be broken at any moment. But one who has attained the object and risen above it, that one can be said to be free. Even the path of acquisition must have its end, as all things have their end, in realization. William Blake expressed this when he said that the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

Yet it must be said that it is one thing for an individual to follow the path of excess to the palace of wisdom, and another for the whole of society to do so. The enrichment of one nation or species very often spells the impoverishment of another, and with a human population of over six and a half billion, the Earth’s resources are already stretched precariously thin. Mahatma Gandhi was once asked if India could be expected to attain the standard of living of Britain. He answered that it took Britain half the world to feed itself—“if India became like Britain, how many worlds would it need?”

Collectively, the path of realization through excessive consumption is simply not tenable. Yet many of us go through a stage of preoccupation with objects. As one becomes a connoisseur, one’s tastes develop and there is no limit to what one wants. When one has obtained this thing, something else seems more desirable, and it goes on and on. But after some time one realizes that this is all dunya (wordliness) and that the thing itself is not what provides the satisfaction. The thing is just a trigger for an inner experience, and the experience itself is the source of the pleasure. What does possession really mean after all? In truth, possession is nothing more than legal proximity to an object. Is there any kind of invisible force that links a person and an object? There is no such force, except in the mind.

When one realizes this one moves to the next stage—from dunya to akhira (otherwordliness). Instead of seeking possession of objects, one seeks satisfaction in beautiful and joyful states of being. One sets out on the spiritual path, and perhaps one attends seminars and workshops and retreats and reads a lot of books. In this way one discovers a marketplace of beautiful spiritual ideas. Eventually one might begin to notice that the same impulses that impelled one in the marketplace of things drive one through the marketplace of spiritual ideas: the same acquisitive desire, the same attempt to obtain satisfaction through possession of something that is expected to be stable and pleasurable. Moreover—in the spiritual world as in the physical world—one is often tempted to seize that which belongs to another because it has more attraction than what one possesses oneself.

As one pursues one’s spiritual path, one sees that there are other people who are apparently endowed with a quality of realization that is extremely attractive. One wishes that one had what the other person has, and feels the need to test out every new methodology or discipline in order to latch onto something that will maximize one’s satisfaction. One craves to possess that which belongs to another, the apparently perfect spiritual state of those who surround one, and one feels oneself to be trapped in a lesser state. So one becomes, on the one hand, idolatrous of the others, and on the other, most unkind to oneself, feeling profoundly one’s unworthiness and incapacity. Ironically it is likely that the one upon whom we project our ideal of perfect spiritual accomplishment likewise feels his or her limitation and wishes for the state of a more perfectly realized being, and so on ad infinitum, everyone turning and looking at another—that is, until we return to the principle of this Iron Rule: Do not claim that which belongs to another.

The rule tells us, only claim that which belongs to you, that which arises from your own experience. That is what you can claim, accept and be content with—your own state of being. Understand its changeableness. Understand that your state is not the essence, but it is a quality of essence that is shifting. In the acceptance of one’s state one is better able to sense how it is poised on the ground of pure essence.

So take the truth of your experience as that which belongs to you, the special vantage point that has been disclosed to God by God exclusively through you. Your angle of vision is necessarily unique to you, and something is thereby added to life that could not be added in any other way. Nothing is superfluous. All is providential. Our critical judgments of our experience as good or bad, negative or positive are ultimately very relative. There is simply the life experience that we have been given for the enrichment of the divine self-disclosure. It is in embracing that experience that we enjoy the fulfillment that is our birthright.

This commentary was originally presented during a session of Suluk Academy and is printed with permission from the Sufi Order International.

Finally we are waking up to our ecological imbalance, to the realities of global warming and its catastrophic consequences. It is also beginning to dawn upon us that these environmental changes are accelerating, that time is running out more quickly than we may realize. To quote a recent article in the New York Times by Paul Krugman:

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe—a rise in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable—can no longer be considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome if we continue along our present course.¹

And we are beginning to respond, with concerns about greenhouse gases and plans to reduce carbon emissions. We are proposing global protocols that can delude us into thinking we are taking responsible action even as we continue our demand for materialistic progress. But underlying our global predicament is an even deeper delusion, the notion that we can avoid environmental catastrophe without considering its root cause, without the change in consciousness that is needed to effect real change.

angels fountain by alicepopkorn, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.

Behind our present ecological self-destruction, caused by industrial pollution, by the chemicals, toxins and particularly carbon that our civilization emits, lies our desire for material progress, the demon of consumerism and greed that walks with heavy boots over the sacred soil of our world. At the root of our predicament is a deep disregard for the environment, and for the consequences of our actions until it is too late. This is the product of a consciousness that is cut off from the natural world and its interconnectedness. It comes from an attitude that we are separate from the world around us and can do with it as we want—an attitude that is unthinkable to indigenous people who respect and revere the physical world, and whose cultures protect the balance between humanity and nature. Our western consciousness evolved through the birth of scientific reasoning to treat the physical world as a mere object, something mechanical whose laws we could learn and thus master. We developed the gifts of science, but also began to create the materialistic wasteland that we now inhabit. We banned the symbolic world as something superstitious, and the understanding of the relationship between the worlds that linked together all of creation, the concept of the “Great Chain of Being,” was forgotten. Rather than part of an interdependent whole, each part nourishing and supporting the other, we became lords of a soulless earth, which we sought to dominate and subjugate for our own ends.

Underlying this outlook is a deep partriarchal conditioning. As our collective consciousness shifted from a matriarchal understanding of the world as a living sacred being, the divine became a transcendent God, living in heaven. The sacred streams and groves became just the stuff of myth, the nature spirits that inhabited them forgotten. Patriarchal consciousness excluded the divine from the natural world, whose darkness man then had to conquer. We were left alone in the world with a God we could only experience after death. Living in a world without the presence of the divine, we had only our own laws to follow, our own desires to nourish us. The results of this consciousness can be seen in our ecological devastation and the soulless world of our materialistic dreams.

The question we now need to ask is whether we can redeem our present ecological situation without addressing the consciousness that created it. Can there be any real change without a shift in consciousness? What would this shift mean and how would it address the very real concerns of global warming? We cannot afford to be idealistic dreamers. There must be real solutions to our very real predicament.

In our patriarchal hubris we have forgotten something that has been central to every other civilization: the primacy and power of the divine. We may have banished God to the heaven of our imagination, but that does not mean that this supreme power is not present. Every other civilization developed and understood ways to work with this power, to channel Its energy. Shamans were trained to understand the way Its spirit worked, priests and priestesses learned to listen to Its voice, Its prophecies and warnings. Sacred geometry was developed to channel Its energy through sacred buildings. But now we have become blind and deaf to Its hidden ways. We may praise and pray to a God in heaven, but we do not understand how to welcome the divine into our lives. How can we heal and transform the world without the living presence of its Creator?

Monotheism pointed us away from the many gods and goddesses of the ancient world towards a single transcendent God. If the living presence of God is to return to our consciousness it will be not as a step back to the old ways, but as a divine Oneness that embraces all of creation. Mystics have always experienced the oneness of being, the many facets of creation reflecting the single Essence. We are beginning to be aware of the ecological unity of life and its interconnectedness; economically and technologically we are being drawn into an era of global oneness. We now need to understand divine oneness: how the different qualities of the divine form a living presence in the inner and outer worlds, and how these qualities work together as one.

On a very simple level we do not have the power or technology to “fix” our ecological crisis on our own. The problems we have created are too severe. And yet here is the very root of our misunderstanding. We cannot do this on our own. We need to embrace the divine not as some transcendent being, but as a living presence that contains the visible and invisible worlds, all of the spirit and angelic beings that our ancestors understood. The oneness of God includes many different levels of existence.

We know for our individual self  that real healing only takes place when we our inner and outer selves are aligned, when we are nourished by our own soul and the archetypal forces within us. What is true for the individual is true for the whole. It is from the energies within and behind creation that the healing of creation will take place, because these are the beings that support, nourish and help creation to develop and evolve. How can we heal creation without the help of the devas and other spiritual forces that are within creation? They are waiting to be asked to participate, for their wisdom and power to be used. We need to once again work together with the divine oneness that is within and around us.

But how can we learn how to work together with the inner worlds when our culture has dismissed them to such a degree that we have forgotten their existence? We may talk about angels, and even pray for their intercession, but do we really understand their power, or that they are just one level of invisible beings? The invisible worlds are present all around us even though we cannot see or touch them, just like the wavelengths of light beyond the small portion of the spectrum we can see. First we have to step out of our dream of separation, the insularity with which we have imprisoned ourselves, and acknowledge that we are a part of a multidimensional living spiritual being we call the world. The world is much more than just the physical world we perceive through the senses, just as we are much more than just our own physical bodies. Only as a part of a living whole can we help to heal the whole. Just as we need to work together with the outer ecosystem, we need to work together with the inner worlds. We need their support and help, their power and knowledge. The devas understand the patterns of climate change better than we do, because they are the forces behind the weather and the winds. Just as plant devas know the healing powers of plants (and taught the shamans and healers their knowledge), so are there more powerful devas that know and guide the patterns of evolution of the whole planet.

Once we regain our consciousness of the divine within creation, we will discover Her invisible presence in many different ways. And once we acknowledge how we are an interdependent part of this living whole, we will find that the divine can once again communicate with us. It is only humanity that has exiled itself from the divine, banished Her presence and thus become blind and deaf. When we lift this veil of separation we will rediscover the ways the divine within creation communicates with humanity, and how we can work together to save the planet. She will teach us what we need to know, guide us in the ways we need to go. We only need the humility to be open and listen, just as for our own healing we need to listen to our own soul and the deeper rhythms of our body.

But this shift in consciousness does mean that we will have to take responsibility for our actions and attitudes. We can no longer walk blindly, uncaring, on the face of the earth. Leaving behind the myth of our banishment means accepting our faults and the damage we have done in the inner and outer worlds. We are beginning to take responsibility for the ecosystem, though we have not yet fully realized that we will need to sacrifice our materialistic dream and to suffer the pain of withdrawal from this addiction. Taking responsibility for the damage we have done in the inner worlds, for example the sorrow we have caused the Great Mother by our abuse, is a step we have not yet taken. Nor do we realize how we have desecrated the symbolic worlds, whose sacred images are today being used as just another way to sell materialistic fantasies. Symbols and sacred images used to be a way to connect with the divine, to make the transition from the physical world to the mystery of the soul. Yet we now use these images for personal gain, without taking any responsibility for our actions, for the rape of the sacred. There will be a price to pay if we are to redeem the symbolic world of the creative imagination, just as we have to pay a price for our own faults and failings. Redemption requires real sacrifice. Only then can we regain the dignity that belongs to us, and help to heal the wrongs we have done.  Growing up requires responsibility and is a painful process.

To reclaim our dignity and role as guardians of the planet will not be easy. But we can pray for the intercession of His mercy, knowing, according to an ancient promise, that “His mercy is greater than His justice.” There is a real reason that the ancients understood that He is a wrathful God, and made penance and sacrifice to placate Him. We may think that our science and civilization can protect us from this primal power, but the symbol of the dragon as the power of the earth is not without meaning. We have little understanding of the archetypal forces that underlie our surface lives, and of how they are all interconnected and can manifest the will of God. We can no longer afford to be ignorant or think that we can abuse the world as long as we want.

Spiritual ecology means reawakening our awareness of what is sacred in all of creation, and knowing that only if we work together with the divine in all of its manifestations can we hope to redeem what we have desecrated and destroyed through our greed and arrogance. It means to reclaim the wisdom of our ancestors who knew the sacred interconnections of life and the divine forces within it. Once again we have to relearn how to relate to the divine, how to bring an awareness of the many facets of divine oneness into our lives and prayers and meditations. We cannot afford to remain in this wasteland of separation, lost in our ego-driven arrogance. And we cannot afford to wait. We have already waited too long, ignoring the signs that are around us. Nor can we afford to think that science and technology will give us the answers we need to restore our ecological imbalance. Their ideology is born from the separation of spirit and matter, and this is what has caused the problems that are now bleeding the lifeblood of the planet. Matter is not dead, however we may treat it. It is part of a living organism like the cells in our own body. And this living organism is an embodiment of spirit. We have to bring together spirit and matter, heal the split that has wounded our world.

The world has been through many crises over the millennia, but this is the first global crisis that has been created by humanity. Whether we take responsibility for our predicament will determine our future and the future of the world. There is an ancient teaching that in times of imminent catastrophe we are given the opportunity of divine intercession; we can look towards God and pray for divine help. We are at such a moment and the soul of the world is crying out. Are we prepared to welcome back the divine and work together with the forces of creation? Are we able to claim this real empowerment? Or are we going to remain on the sidelines and watch as the politicians argue while the world continues on its present course?

We do not know what it might mean to once again work with the divine forces within creation. In the West we have long since lost touch with this heritage, even though it is buried deep in our psyche. Yet it is a simple shift of awareness to reclaim this consciousness, and in doing so we will step into the future that is being born at this moment of crisis. We will become alive in a new way as we help the world wake up from the dream that is destroying it. We will be active participants in the real ecological work that is needed.

The fourth rule is: My conscientious self, do not boast of your good deeds.

To begin, I would like to bring our attention to a passage on vanity from Murshid's¹ book, Creating the Person:

The whole manifestation is the expression of that spirit of the logos which is called, in Sufi terms, kibriyya. Through every being this spirit manifests in the form of vanity, pride or conceit. Had it not been for this spirit working in every being as the central theme of life, no good or bad would have existed in the world; nor would there have been great or small. All virtues and every evil are the offspring of this spirit. The art of personality is to cut the rough edges of this spirit of vanity which hurt and disturb those one meets in life. The person who talks of ‘I’, as many times as he talks about it, so much more he disturbs the mind of his listeners. Vanity expressed in rigidity is called pride, and when it is expressed nicely it is termed vanity. Often people are trained in politeness and they are taught a polished language and manner. Yet if there be this spirit of vanity pronounced, in spite of all good manners and beautiful language, it creeps up and sounds itself in a person’s thought, speech or action, calling aloud ‘I am, I am.’ If a person be speechless, her vanity will leap out from her expression, from her glance. It is something which is the hardest thing to suppress and to control. The struggle in the life of adepts is not so great with passions or emotions, which sooner or later, by more or less effort, can be controlled. But with vanity, it is always growing. If one cuts down its stem, then one lives no more. For it is the very self. It is the I, the ego, the soul or God within. It cannot be denied its existence. But only struggling with it beautifies it more and more, and makes more tolerable that which in its crude form is intolerable. Vanity may be likened to a magic plant. If one saw it in the garden growing as a thorny plant, and if one cut it off, it would grow in another place in the same garden as a tree of fruits. And when one cuts it away in another place in the same garden, it will spring up as a plant of fragrant roses. It exists just the same, but in a more beautiful form, and would give happiness to those who touch it. The art of personality, therefore, does not teach us to root out the seed of vanity, which cannot be rooted out as long as one lives. But its crude, outer garb may be destroyed, that after dying several deaths, it might manifest as the plant of desire.

How can these observations be applied to the rule, Do not boast of your good deeds? We might begin by noticing what kind of behavior in others disturbs our mind. One will probably find that there are certain people in one’s life whose manner is difficult and off-putting, and others whose manner puts one at ease. If one looks into this, in many cases the difference will be found to reside in the nature of the person’s ego. It is difficult to feel comfortable in the presence of those who are intoxicated with themselves, concerned only with their own interests, incessantly calling attention to their virtues, justifying themselves, and promoting their point of view. One’s own ego feels snubbed by the larger and more imposing ego that is before one. Conversely, the presence of one who is modest, understated and able to listen sympathetically is a soothing balm.

If we are to live by the Golden Rule we must consider ourselves in the same light. Reversing one’s gaze, one might notice that there are ways in which one’s own ego has a jarring effect upon others. We might find that we have a tendency, in the intoxication of the moment, to lose ourselves in our own interests to such an extent that we have little regard for the concerns of those around us. We are so caught up in our life that we forget that our personal drama is ours alone, that it is only we who are riveted by the angle of vision that is uniquely ours.

In another place in Creating the Person, Murshid tells the story of two passengers on a train. One was talking for hours and hours about the great exploits of his ancestors. Finally, his patience completely exhausted, the other passenger exclaimed, “Enough! I’m bored to hear of my own ancestors. Why should I care to hear of yours?” What a telling illustration of the principle that personal passions are not always shared!

Jesus (peace be upon him) said that we will be known by our fruits. We often feel the need to explain ourselves, to make our case, to call attention to our good intentions and the self-sacrifices that we have made. We feel that others really should understand us better than they do. We don’t feel properly appreciated. But the words of Christ call us to remember that it’s by our fruits that we will be known, not our words.

In fact our words may detract from our fruits. The good deeds that we are rightly proud of, by calling attention to them, by excessively speaking about them, those very deeds wither and become less worthy of appreciation in the eyes of others than if we had simply let the deeds speak for themselves. The teachings of the prophets and sages urge us to let our deeds speak for themselves. Even if it seems in the moment that one is not understood or appreciated, one must trust that all accounts are settled sooner or later. One need not struggle so hard to defend, explain, and justify oneself.

We might think that in speaking our own praise we are respecting ourselves. Yet however highly one might praise oneself, the truth is that the praise utterly pales in comparison to the praise that is actually due to the essence of oneself, the light of one’s soul. Ironically, in voicing the praise of which you think yourself worthy, you fall from the station that is your true position, because in praising yourself you are investing yourself in the self-image that you are projecting. The true greatness of your being is much greater than that image. The more that you try to invest in the image the more greatness you lose, because your true greatness is ineffable, it can never be expressed in words. Words only limit it. One’s real greatness is beyond all words and images. That greatness is unspeakably powerful and beautiful, unutterably awesome, and every time that we boast of ourselves, we rob from its infinitude to feed something very small.

This commentary was originally presented during a session of Suluk Academy and is printed with permission from the Sufi Order International.

Dreaming is activated whenever energy flows inward toward the spiritual and intellectual senses, rather than outward toward the worldly and perceptual senses. Dream images, like images reflected in a lake or a mirror, are both there and not there. If I look in a mirror I see that I am there, in the mirror, but then I realize that I am also not there, in the mirror, because I am here outside the mirror. And it is this doubling that is central to the imaginative act that occurs within dreaming. The interlacing of dreams and visions with their many associations and interpretations provides landscapes where we create and communicate meanings that transcend cultural differences.

Today, ethnographers like me are paying close attention to our own dream travel as we learn and experience the many cultural uses of dreaming. Learning another culture experientially does not result in the death of the subject, the death of culture into which the subject was born, or the death of the new culture the self is entering. Rather it adds affective resonances and a new mapping of the self’s state of affairs within its context of dreaming.

When I was living on the grounds of the School of American Research in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I suffered bronchitis for the first time. After two weeks of endless coughing, I spontaneously received a healing dream:

As I sat up, wrote down, and dated the dream (March 11, 2002), I immediately thought that the clothes and jewelry might represent my own cultural conditioning and attachments. Then I meditated on what I felt was one of the key symbols: the talisman known as a “dream catcher.” These woven circular nets strung with tiny gem stones and feathers, originated long ago among my grandmother’s Anishnaabe people. They were tied to the top of an infant’s cradleboard to allow only “good” dreams to flow through the opening at the center into the baby’s fontanel, and then seep into the infant’s dreaming consciousness. In recent years dream catchers have become symbols of Pan-Indian cultural identity. They are made in many forms and sizes: small silver earrings as in my dream, medium-sized fishing line and feather dangles for rear-view mirrors as in my car, and large irregularly shaped willow, deer sinew, feather, shell, and gemstone home decorations.

The combination of Pan-Indian dream catchers with a Zuni healing wand seemed to be metaphors for my hybrid cultural identity: First Nations Canadian and Irish-American ethnographer of Zuni Pueblo. While these interpretations centered on a set of symbols, I realized that the meaning of a dream ought to be understood by that which precedes it, sustains it, and allows it to give meaning. Because of my initial focus on isolated symbols my interpretation had thus far failed to uncover the grammar, or composite whole, of the dream with all of its rich contextual features. When I finally turned my attention to the social context I realized that the dream appeared exactly six months after three hijacked commercial jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon. This social and cultural disaster, which had occurred during the first week of my residency at the School of American Research, changed everything. I had been drinking my morning coffee when a fellow scholar at the school knocked on my study door to tell me that “we are gathering in the break room to watch the disaster.” I had no idea what she meant but followed her down below and saw on television the second plane slam into a tower and burst into flames.

All of us had difficulty doing any serious writing or research for several weeks since we were experiencing waking and sleeping nightmares. Alan Siegel and Ernest Hartmann, board members with me of the Association for the Study of Dreams (ASD), explained that everyone who saw the televised images of the crashing planes and people jumping from the burning towers had experienced psychological trauma which would last for some time. Siegel appeared on the “Today Show” providing the public reassurance about the role of nightmares in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). He created a website to which people from all over the world emailed their nightmares. While it was already known to dream researchers that nightmares emerge after disasters, since so many people were simultaneously experiencing PTSD from the same event, Hartman decided to initiate a survey. He placed his request for pre- and post-911 dreams and nightmares on the website of the Association for the Study of Dreams and received hundreds of postings.

Two months after 911 my nightmares subsided but then, all of a sudden, six months to the day after the disaster my strange healing dream appeared. Since it involved moments of dream awareness, or lucidity, and a powerful kinesthetic sensation of lightning shooting into my throat it might be described as an archetypal or titanic dream. As I further contemplated the dream I remembered an article in the local newspaper, The Santa Fe New Mexican, published soon after 911. It said that the governor of the state had purchased 10,000 dream catchers, made by indigenous craftsmen from all over the US and Canada, and gathered them in the capital building where a group of Pueblo, Navajo, and Apache healers blessed them. Then he had them flown in a private jet to New York City where they were handed out to the surviving family members. The purpose was to promote the positive dreaming necessary for healing nightmares, sleep deprivation, narcolepsy, and the other symptoms of PTSD. After reading about the governor’s actions I, like many others, went to the Santa Fe Farmer’s Market and purchased a dream catcher to place over my bed to protect me from nightmares.

Even after contemplating the dream images and the social context of my dreaming for several more days I remained uneasy and felt there was more to my lucid dream than I had managed to understand. So, I drove across the state to Zuni Pueblo and shared my dream, associations, and interpretations with Tola. She nodded, took my hand, and said “dreaming is good medicine all right. I’ll bet your grandmother healed you when you were a child with her good dreams. But this dream of yours is pocha (bad). It’s lucky you came and told it to me right away so that it could not yuk’iis mowa’u (complete itself) or continue dreaming itself inside of you.”

She was right about my grandmother healing me by means of dreaming, but why did Tola think my dream was “bad”? Was it because I told her my dream and at Zuni one only tells a recent dream if one feels it might be “bad”? Or did the dream’s “badness” have to do with the 911 context?

Two weeks later Tola’s son visited me in Santa Fe. After chatting about mutual friends he suddenly became serious and said: “Tsilu (aunty) dreaming about your deceased mother and my mother’s medicine society healing is attanni ‘dangerous, taboo.’ It’s good you told Mother about it so she could begin sending you good dreams for your dream catcher.”

In sharing my dream with Zuni elders I realized that I had changed it from an inner psychological possession into an outer intersubjective social process. And when I did so, I moved beyond being into becoming, and put into practice the Native American enactive theory of dreaming. According to this understanding of the dreaming process dreams that begin as personal highly-valued entities shift during dreamtelling providing a doorway into another dimension of reality. The anomalous image of my mother wearing a hot-pink pants suit and silver dream-catcher earrings opened into a paradoxical dreamscape in which I experienced conscious awareness of being in a dream state and of being sound asleep. This moment of lucidity came a second time during my dream when Tola’s energy shot down her feathered wand into my throat. At this crossover point between sleeping and waking there were complex visual, auditory, and tactile synesthesias as the lucid dream emerged from the dream landscape and I woke up.

This dream, even though it coincided with the end of my bronchitis and thus was “good,” was also “bad,” indicating that I needed healing. Tola and her son were advising me that I could heal myself by accepting my grandmother’s Anishnaabe dream-catcher healing tradition as equally valid as their Zuni medicine-society healing tradition. I realized that an ethnographer who too deeply penetrates another culture’s healing system is in danger of crossing over and “going native.” To avoid this we need to re-embrace our own culture’s traditions and integrate our ethnic identity with our ethnographic endeavor. If we accomplish this we will become bicultural.

Other field workers who have shared their dreams with their subjects have also learned that in doing so their dreams were no longer their own but merged into an intersubjective bicultural field of meanings. Stefania Pandolfo, an Italian-American ethnographer, learned that among the Sufis in Morocco, dreams are never one’s own. Instead, as the twelfth-century Andalusian mystical philosopher Ibn al-‘Arabî described in Bezels of Wisdom, dreams are messages from the barzakh. This is an intermediate imaginal realm between spiritual and bodily existence, the unconscious and consciousness, self and other, the living and the dead. Si Lhassan u Ahmed, a Moroccan Qur’anic scholar and dream interpreter, speaks of dreams as exits, otherworldly journeys, encounters, and knowledge passed between the soul of the dreamer and other living and dead souls. In this oneiric realm symbols are related to humans in order to make the spiritual comprehensible in signs.

As Stefania Pandolfo records in her wonderful ethnography of Berber culture, Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan Space of Memory, she entered into conversations with a group of intercessors in which her own voice became only one of many. While she occupied an authorial space, it consisted of an intercultural dialogue in the margins. She opens an important section, entitled “The Sphere of the Moon,” with one of her own dreams. In this dream, which she both does and does not own, she finds herself in a large house after a death she did not witness:

Since one of the characters looks and sounds just like her Italian aunt, while all the others are Berbers, and the setting is Morocco, we become aware of Pandolfo’s identity crisis as an Italian American dreaming in the US from within Moroccan imagery and epistemology. She notes that Arabic poems of loss, like her dream, draw on an imagery of space: a house in ruins and locales swept by the wind. Her tomb of a person whose name has been forgotten is also a central figure in the Berber practice of magic.

The second dream scene opens with her climbing the exterior stairs of a new house with an exposed staircase:

Even though she experienced this dream in New Haven, Connecticut, she realized that it was not strictly her own. Rather it was the dialogical effects of an encounter. Later, when she recounted the dream to her friends in Morocco she learned that they felt that it was a moral commentary on the recent disastrous events in the community. These traumatic events led to the emptying out of the old village and resettling in the new village, burned by the sun and blown by the wind, far from the gardens and forgotten graveyards. She had dreamed biculturally: simultaneously from inside and outside Berber culture.

We only know what another has dreamed indirectly through narratives, poems, songs, dances, dramas, amulets or other visual images. Since sensory experience is mediated by its translation into interpretable forms, dreams are culturally variable expressive representations. In many cultures dreaming and waking reality are overlapped experiences. Dreams provide an arena where human beings come into intimate contact with fused natural and spiritual worlds. This commonly occurs when one is fully within the landscape and social action of dreaming but on the edge of waking consciousness. All of a sudden one realizes that one is awakening to the outer world but still engaged within the images of the soul.

Many peoples use the cultivation of imaginal consciousness as a way to gain access to the past and autonomy for the future. In such cultures children are trained to be more self-reliant by developing a dream self. Such enhanced self awareness in turn produces powerful life-changing dreams combining travels between cultural worlds with explorations of the landscape of the soul.

Reprinted from Elixir: Consciousness, Conscience and Culture, No. 3, Autumn 2006.

Our planet is in grave danger. Pollution, war, and the plundering of natural resources afflict her. Warring cosmologies and the resultant policies produce inflammations, which are inimical to planetary health; and we, who are the cells of the global brain, are challenged to go deeply into the planet’s hidden operating files to untangle the messed up connections. What are these hidden operating files? They are the underlying rules of operation — like the hidden operating files that establish the way the computer starts up. Similarly, the Earth’s hidden operating files put in place all the functions necessary for it to operate healthily.

These files include all the functions of nourishment, resource management, and waste product elimination or reprocessing, and of healing various wounds that are incurred in the daily planetary operations. We now are at the point of producing great waste without having the means for timely elimination or reprocessing, and the wounds that are routinely inflicted on the Earth are not given adequate care and time for repair and healing. We therefore need to upgrade our planet’s operating files so they can handle the increased speed of change and the routine damage on a planetary scale.

While I was in deep meditation, it came to me that it is useless to try to solve the conflicts of the world on the plane in which they occur. We cannot use equal force to oppose the karma loosened on the world without bringing about an even greater cataclysm. If we try to solve physical problems at the same physical level as those problems, it is probable that the change we introduce will cause a destabilizing reaction at that physical level when the planetary body seeks to establish stasis under the new conditions.

Efforts to heal the planet on the exoteric level are therefore bound to fail. The usual methods are futile. We must find other means to effect change and healing, to impact the hidden operating files so as to accommodate today’s realities. In response to this challenge, I have been guided to work on a subtler plane in order to untangle some of the binds that afflict our world.

How did I come to this alternative of reaching to a meta-level so as to affect change that could safely and adequately respond to the necessary planetary healing? This inspiration to work on a subtle plane occurred when I was treated by a healer who used an energy healing method. By a guided imagery process, he would take me into realms I could not reach by my own will. In these realms we traced back the roots of some behavioral, emotional and mental tangles that had brought about my ailment; and then, by our exploring those roots and with conscious effort, we removed the tangles and I was healed.

This experience led me to consider that, by entering the matrix field of an organism on the micro scale, we can untangle conflicting impulses and bring about healing. Because of the healing I experienced after entering the matrix field, from whence the physical body is a continuously sustained outgrowth, and consciously re-imaging some of the conflicting tangles in that matrix, I now wonder: Can this same technique be applied at a macro scale to the entire planet? Can we enter the matrix field of the Earth and change the conflicting tangles so as to heal our planet?

There is scientific support for this approach. A biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, has identified inter-organism matrix fields that he calls morphogenic fields. Such a field is energized by beings living within it; and the field, in turn, provides order and harmony for those individuals. When a morphogenic field is healthy, robust, and energetic, the units living in it create a balanced ecology. However, if the field is sick or askew, the units within it struggle and fight against one another. We see this in the prevalent geo-planetary tense environment — the competitive, and hostile struggles among the various inhabitants on and in the body of the Earth.

I believe that the current morphogenic field of the planet is shattered and broken and that, in addition, the great dreams that energized nations, traditions, lineages and religions are weak and anemic. The discords have proven not to be solvable on the rational or political level, for these conflicts are energized by realities that operate on a much more subtle level.

It is my working hypothesis that, by entering the morphogenic field of our world, we might affect the clearing and harmonizing of that field. This will, I hope, result in a shift on the physically manifesting realm.

It seems to me that the planet’s morphogenic field is akin to what in many esoteric disciplines has been called the imaginal realm. Consider, for example, that between the intent to raise my arm and the action of raising it, there is the act of imagining the raising of my arm. We take this intermediary act for granted because it is so automatic. But imagination provides the vital interface between the intent and its achievement, between thought and physical reality. This interposing stage between the incarnation of thought in image and the presence of the image in being is the realm of the imagination. In the same way that imagination intermediates between our thoughts and actions, the imaginal realm also forms an intermediary plane of existence between the realm of pure spirit and the realm of physical manifestation.

The Sufis speak of the imaginal realm as ‘alam al-mithal. In Hebrew, it is called the olam hamashal. It is the realm of imagination, the realm of parable, the realm of dreams. It is the world of good and bad spirits, angels and demons, helpers and tricksters, the world the shamans seek to enter in order to align and harmonize -- that is, if they are working for the side of good. Those practicing black magic enter this world in order to use its powers to achieve other aims.

The imaginal world is in a different dimension from the one we usually are aware of inhabiting. Yet the imaginal world also has its own realities and operating principles, and these realities can be apprehended once we have developed subtlety in our imagination. This realm can be difficult to understand because our thinking is limited by the reality maps that favor and support reason and sensation while devaluing the reality maps that come from feeling and intuition.

So how do we begin to understand and access the imaginal realm? The answer may surprise you.

When my son was quite young and I would put him to bed and say the night prayers with him, he would, like so many other children, want to prolong the time we spent together. Often he would ask questions in order to open up new areas for conversation. One night he said to me, “Abba, what happens to people when they die? ” I asked him what he thought; and he replied, “We have two lives, the waking life and the dream life. When we die, the waking life dies but the dream life goes on.”

My young son’s reply shows a remarkable insight. Many people think dreams are nothing but the foam on top of sleep, but that is not quite accurate. It is true that many dreams are just fluff, but some dreams come from a greater reality that can lead us back to their source.

The river of dreams shows a way to the imaginal realm. In our dreaming life, we encounter images and ideas without physical form. At first, it is difficult for our minds to grasp these dream images; however, after we learn to focus our attention, the contents of the imaginal realm become palpable and real. How do we accomplish this manner of mindful focus? We learn by paying attention, encouraging, and not censoring the flow of images, emotions, of all the senses that pass through us in dreams and meditation. The ebb and flow, the energy arising, the running and returning of the images, feelings, and intuitions are important signposts in this training. At times I speak to people about dreams, and I ask them how their religious commitment and spiritual work manifests in their dreams. Very often people respond with a blank stare. Most people dream about work, friends, or relationships. Some of these dreams are pleasant and others are like nightmares. But few people perform spiritual work in their dreams. Working on our dreams — watching and actively entering and directing our dreams in order to affect change in the physical planes — has been a strong focus of many esoteric traditions. People who have done spiritual work in their dreams have found that there are some dreams that, in themselves, contain healing properties. One example is dreams of inclusion, where opposing forces or competing heroes reconcile or work together for a common larger purpose. We need to encourage, focus and amplify such dreams.

It is long overdue that we, the dwellers on planet Earth, see the diversity of people’s talents as complementing and supporting each other. The image I use is an organic model of each nation. Each tradition on the Earth functions as a distinct vital organ that supports the overall health of the planet. Note that the full set of organs is needed in order for the organism to function properly. Also note that the failure of even a single vital organ can result in the cessation of life for the organism. The fundamental importance of getting along together cannot be overemphasized.

Our planet is currently gravely ill and needs healthy dreams. It therefore becomes very necessary that those of us who meditate, contemplate, and are involved in spiritual practice produce healing dreams for our planet. For example, given that the increasing levels of pollution in the earth’s environment are impacting the future ability of various plant and animal species to survive is a long term threat for the health of the planet, we need to “see” the healing effect of less pollution and better waste management in order to clear the channels of the planet’s energy flows. We cannot just sit and consciously design dreams, however. Dreams have to arise from the deep place within us. We cannot manipulate their content. Nevertheless, we need to be able to dream healing dreams. But how?

Today, there are many people who are able to speak about the imaginal realm. People in the New Age movement, the Course in Miracles, books on tantra and shamanism, all speak about this subtle world. However, the number of adepts who are able to actually enter into those regions is smaller than in earlier times; and while there are many workshops, courses and books available, we lack the empirical know-how to enter these regions and to bring healing to them.

We need people, adepts, who might guide us to learn more about the subtle realm. Our traditions report of people who were able to enter these subtle regions and work in them. There were Sufi shaykhs and dervishes, shamans and yogis, lamas and other adepts who were able to enter the subtle regions and work within them. For many Hasidic masters, the entrance into the olam hamashal was a precise art. They would enter the imaginal realm to seek deep wisdom — from which they derived sermons and teachings — and also to draw down healings and blessings for their flock.

There are methods in the esoteric recesses of our spiritual lineages that adepts and intuitive geniuses have used in the past. I believe that some such people exist among us even now. They are spiritual pathfinders — psychonauts — who manage to enter into other territories of consciousness. I believe that there are still some such adepts who could be brought together in order to hold the planet in a healing field.

In the past, those who did deep inner work were less interested than other people were in the mundane affairs of the world. Hermits and yogis sought to go beyond the activities of mere house-holding mortals. They performed their sacred duties while others maintained life in the here and now. But now our nest is becoming so fouled that all of us may lose the world we inhabit. The universe has toiled millions of years to produce our conscious life, and conscious life is in great peril. If the esoteric disciplines have any answers, it is urgent that they be put in the service of healing the planet. We need to create the field in which the adepts can work right now. Can we support the formation of a seed group that takes on the task of entering the imaginal realm at an appointed time and leads us to new visions and icons for healing the planet? Can we also find adepts to train apprentices who can continue the adepts’ work and refine it further?

But what are we to make happen and how? We don’t have a shared reality map for our work. We have deep urges and wishes to work for the common good without the functional know-how needed to make the important difference. If some of us are put together, we begin to joust for our own specific assumptions and theories to prevail. We need a common purpose and methodology for those of us who would dedicate ourselves to this work.

Consider, for example, the complex confluence of know-how and skills required to build intricate “defense” machinery. The social coherence and implicit collaboration of scientists and technicians is astonishing. Now compare this confluence to the lack of sophistication, precision, communication, and cooperation among those who wish to work for peace and healing, and how primitive the state of awareness and skills is becomes apparent.

We must be able to work with each other on a more subtle and sensitive level in order to be able to enter the imaginal realm. Partnering and working on the subtle planes is difficult. We will need those who have served as leaders, directors, and guides, as well as others; but the imaginal realm has been neglected since the end of the Renaissance. Until fairly recently, only mystics, Sufis, Hasidic rebbes and Vedantists have paid attention to it. Reclaiming this sacred treasure and developing this technology in a modern context, including other disciplines such as therapy and art, is essential.

The impulse to help Earth heal is impacting many people sensitive to the planet’s current plight. In various ways, these people have agreed to be deployed in Earth’s service. They have come to agree that no single individual can do this work alone, that it will take the talents and experience of a group of people who have some experience in such work and are willing to work as an ensemble. It is important to be aware that we are not alone in this vital task. Intelligent entities are urging us on and are eager to help us. We are being aided in the subtle realm. Each of the realms of existence has messengers or angels who mitigate the actions and information necessary for communication in that realm as well as with the other realms. The more we reach out, the more access to these helpers we develop. By recognizing this and utilizing their help, we can make a profound impact on the future of the planet.

Do you recall the photo image of the earth from space, that beautiful blue and white jeweled globe glistening against the black background of cosmic space. Can we do something to sustain that beauty? The challenges of this moment defy us to respond!

Reprinted from Elixir: Consciousness, Conscience and Culture, No. 1, Autumn 2005.

Eventually Joel’s and Nancy’s intellectual interests converged and joint papers began to appear in the 1990s. Joel’s professional research turned to cosmology, which led to the discovery of Cold Dark Matter in the universe. Their ideas on cosmology, mythology, philosophy and the view from the center later became an undergraduate course at UCSC in 1996. Originally it was taught jointly with Prof. Loki Pandey, a professor of anthropology well versed in Hinduism. Together they established a broad interdisciplinary picture and this evolved into Joel’s and Nancy’s groundbreaking book, The View from the Center of the Universe (Riverhead Books, 2006).

The book presents a revolutionary view of cosmology and the present paradigm of astrophysics integrated with world cultural history, mythology and spirituality. It also offers spectacular pedagogical devices for helping the reader and students in a classroom to shift their personal point of reference and experience themselves, our planet and the moment in history in which we live towards the center of the universe itself.

In this interview moderated by Ashok Gangadean, Professor of Philosophy at Haverford College, they delve deeply into their shared concerns about the future of humanity and the Earth, and explore the interface between cosmology and culture ushering in a new cosmological consciousness.

Ashok Gangadean: I have been deeply immersed in your book The View from the Center of the Universe, which I feel is at the frontier as your subtitle indicates, “discovering our extraordinary place in the cosmos.” It has revolutionary implications. Joel, you have done incredible foundational work in helping to bring forth this new cosmology. And Nancy, as an accomplished lawyer, writer, and scholar in cultural history, you bring an important cultural dimension to this work. So I would like to open our dialogue on this important link you present between cosmology and culture, and invite each of you to offer an opening comment about the importance of this new cosmological science.

Nancy Abrams: A new picture of the Universe is an extremely rare event. There have only been two great cosmological revolutions before today: the shift from the flat earth to the spherical earth at the center of the universe, and then the Copernican Revolution, which ushered in an end to the medieval view of Earth as the stable center of the Universe. That was the revolution that brought people into the modern, scientific age. Now we are in a third revolution on that same scale, where we are discovering the Universe is not merely an extrapolation of Newtonian physics. Instead the Universe has many different size scales and size structures. For the first time we not only understand something about all those many structures and how they fit together but we also understand the substances that most of the Universe is made of. Then we are also beginning to understand how we, as intelligent life, fit into this immense adventure. When we speak of the new Universe, we don’t mean the picture that Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry described in The Universe Story. That book was very important as the first modern attempt to mythologize the Universe, but much of the modern picture was not known then. Scientific cosmology has taken a quantum leap since the early 1990s. What we are speaking about here is what we now call the Double Dark picture of the Universe, based on dark matter and dark energy.

Ashok: We know the Copernican revolution was a bombshell on culture and it changed our entire way of understanding ourselves. So now there’s another deep shift taking place. Joel, as a contributor to this new frontier, would you elaborate on Nancy’s comments and explain what this shift is?

Joel Primack: There are two points I would like to make. First, as a consequence of the Copernican-Newtonian revolution, which basically began the Era of Enlightenment and modern science, both the collective picture of the larger Universe and the nature of reality itself dissolved. For over a thousand years, the peoples of the Mediterranean and Europe shared the same picture of the cosmos. Basically it was the Greek image of the Earth as a sphere surrounded by nested spheres carrying the Sun, Moon, and other planets, and an outer sphere holding the stars and then heaven beyond that. When that picture was shattered by the discoveries of Galileo, Kepler and their contemporaries nothing replaced it. While the Newtonian picture applied to the Solar System, it was very unclear what lay beyond. And this has been pretty much the situation up until now.

During the 20th century there were many revolutions throughout most sciences, and they’re now the foundation for our modern picture. But they’re not popularly appreciated and they’re certainly not part of our collective understanding. But they could be. The modern scientific picture is being created by scientists all over the world. So it’s neither Western nor Eastern. It’s a shared picture.

Ashok: Could you kindly be a little more precise for our readers about what is at the heart of this shift?

Joel: That is the second point I want to make. The title of our book, The View from the Center of the Universe, emphasizes the remarkable centrality emerging from our modern understanding of the cosmos. Centrality is one way of interpreting these new discoveries. But what is most important is interpreting them in a manner that makes the Universe friendlier and less alienating. For example, one of the most striking things we’ve discovered is that 99.5 percent of the Universe is invisible. When we use our best telescopes using not only visible light but all the frequencies of the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio to gamma rays, everything we see—all the stars, all the galaxies, all the dust, gas, planets, comets and everything you have ever seen in photos—all of this represents only about a half of a percent!

Approximately 4.5 percent of the entire Universe’s content is made of atoms. Astronomers are now fully confident that this is the correct accounting. As I mentioned, only a half of one percent is the visible stuff. The rest of the atoms appear to be between galaxies, but not the stars or the matter lit up by stars. We are sure this atomic matter is there because we can detect it at earlier stages of the Universe as well as by various indirect methods.

The vast majority of matter in the Universe is something quite mysterious. We call it Cold Dark Matter, a term I introduced back in 1983, because it describes the essential property that this type of matter must have. We call it “cold” because it moved very sluggishly during the early stages of the Universe. Contrarily, the hypothetical Hot Dark Matter would have moved nearly at the speed of light. However, now we know that most of the Universe is made up of this Cold Dark Matter.

There are numerous experiments taking place in laboratories around the world and Dark Matter—whatever it is—may be detected sometime soon. But the point is, about 25 percent of the Universe’s mass is some sort of mysterious stuff moving sluggishly in the early Universe, and that holds the galaxies together. And most of the mass in our galaxy, as well as in all other galaxies, is Cold Dark Matter. The important thing I want to emphasize is that we have only accounted for about 30 percent of the Universe’s contents: roughly 4.5 percent ordinary atoms of which 0.5 percent is actually visible, about 0.5 percent neutrinos and the heat radiation from the Big Bang and all the energy in starlight, and then 25 percent of Cold Dark Matter. That leaves the remaining 70 percent that is mysterious.

Cosmic Density Pyramid (Illustration by Nicolle Rager Fuller. © 2006 Abrams and Primack Inc).

Ashok: So what are astrophysicists saying about what this mysterious 70 percent might be?

Joel: It's called Dark Energy. We know some of its properties but the crucial question is: what is it? Is it just a property of space? If so, then it would be what Einstein called the cosmological constant—just an unchanging property of the Universe.

Or is it some kind of dynamic quantum field? For example, the kind of energy that presumably caused cosmic inflation during the very earliest moments of the Universe. Astrophysicists think that cosmic inflation created the conditions for the Big Bang. And now the Universe seems to be entering a kind of slow inflation under the control of this Dark Energy. The original inflation process turned off. So for billions of years, the Universe evolved under the control of Dark Matter by slowing down expansion. But then a few billion years ago, the Universe started to speed up its expansion because now the Dark Energy is the dominant component of the Universe.

We know enough about the crucial properties of Dark Matter and Dark Energy to determine the basic outlines of the history of the Universe. One reason why we are becoming confident in this determination is because there are many independent observations all confirming these basic ideas. For example, there are different ways to measure the rate of the Universe’s expansion and they all give the same results. So for the first time we have a scientifically correct picture of its history.

Now, how do we humans fit into this? We are made of the rarest stuff in the Universe. This must be true of all intelligent life. Not only are we made from the half percent of visible matter, we are also made from something much rarer: stardust! We're made of the heavy elements that were forged in the stars: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and iron. Of course, hydrogen is also a major constituent of our bodies and hydrogen came right out of the Big Bang. But hydrogen only represents about 10 percent of a person’s weight. The largest component is oxygen and then carbon. Incidentally, that's also true for the Universe as a whole; among the heavy atoms, oxygen is the most common followed by carbon. So in this respect our bodies reflect the atomic constituents of the Universe.

Ashok: Wow! So we really are rare creatures!

Joel: Yes, we are made of the rarest stuff in the Universe. And the Earth is made of the same stuff. Since we are surrounded by Earth, we tend to take it for granted and fail to appreciate that Earth is an extraordinarily rare chunk of the Universe. The stars are almost entirely made of helium and hydrogen. It's only the very special places, these rocky planets with liquid water on their surfaces, close enough to their stars, which could be abodes for life. But these represent just the tiniest fraction of all the stuff of the universe.

Another aspect of human’s centrality is that we are in the middle of all possible size scales. In modern physics, the smallest scale we can say anything meaningful about is a tiny distance called the Planck length, ten to the minus 33 (10^–33) centimeters, which is almost infinitesimally tiny. The largest scale that we know is the entire visible universe, or about 10²⁹ cm. And we humans—about a meter in size—are more or less in the middle of these two extremes. Moreover this is the only size scale where intelligent life can exist. Intelligent life can’t be much larger than this because of the slow speed of communications. And we can’t be much smaller because we have to be composed of lots of atoms. So we’re in the middle of all possible size scales, and in that sense we are also central in the Universe.

Ashok: As an outsider, I would like to present a view from philosophy and ontology. Granted that we are rare and yet there is so much Dark Matter, but I would like to address the question of meaning in our lives and our own personal discovery of our centrality. I can still see a shift whereby we have been displaced by earlier paradigms and we become random events. For example, we are mere specks in the Universe without meaning. Not just materially in terms of the stuff we are made of, but also from the point of view of warm human feelings and meaning. This could seem to support existentialist philosophers like Albert Camus seeing the Universe as meaningless. So how can we affirm life? Why not just consider the question of suicide or the futility of life as in the myth of Sisyphus? Nancy, I’d like you to pick up here and speak about this meaning and relocating human life in this new picture.

Nancy: Let me first address this idea about there being so much Dark stuff in the Universe in the context of our historical lives and then this idea of Camus’ existential despair.

The ancient Egyptians believed that the world was surrounded by a strange, mysterious substance, present at the beginning, called the Primeval Water. Egyptian civilization and life were largely geared toward maintaining order against this chaos. They believed this dark chaos was always out there and would always threaten the world unless they performed rituals to sustain their religion and convince the deities to preserve order.

During the Middle Ages, the Universe was regarded as a set of nested spheres surrounding Earth, made of something otherworldly called Quintessence. Quintessence was not the elements—earth, air, fire and water—but something perfect. Beyond the spheres was God. So Earth was not surrounded by Primeval Water but by things equally mysterious to which people were nevertheless mythologically connected. These cultures found meaning in their cosmos because they saw themselves immersed in it.

Then the Copernican Revolution came along and by the end of it, with Newton’s laws, people said, “Okay, we now know how physics works on Earth and it’s got to be like this forever.” The entire idea of our world and our lives being surrounded by something strange, which nevertheless affects our lives and gives them meaning, was abolished. People now assumed that what we see here on Earth is just the way it is and it will be that way forever and ever, regardless of how large the Universe is.

Ashok: That was a really cold, dark Universe!

Nancy: That's it! That’s the real darkness. The darkness is when it's the same old thing for ever and ever. There is no spirit to it. No otherness. There is no excitement or enchantment.

Joel: And no change and no evolution.

Nancy: It is just dull, dead! That is the basis of the existentialist picture. It is grounded on the assumption that the Universe is just the same old thing for ever and ever. So what's the point?

Now, what we've discovered is that it is not the same-old-same-old but, as we reach larger size scales, the Universe is completely different from the way it is here on Earth. Not only is it made of different substances—this Dark Matter and Dark Energy—but on a large size scale that is all that really matters. So we are right back to being surrounded by the Primeval Water or Quintessence or something completely other. Beyond that, even beyond our Big Bang, we're surrounded by something possibly even weirder—Eternal Inflation—which is described in our book. We now know from the laws of physics which control events on these size scales, that there are different laws functioning on size scales different than the middle size scales we live on. It is so different out there in the Universe from how it is here. Yet we are all seamlessly connected and we are again back to a place where the Universe can indeed be seen as enchanted.

Now, how did earlier cultures relate to this “otherness” that was out there? That was the basis of their spirituality. You don’t just feel spiritual about ordinary objects. You feel spiritual when you look through the ordinary objects and discover meaning that lies beyond them, in a world you think of as spiritual.

Ashok: Well, in the Classical world, the Tao or Hindu Aum, the shunyata or emptiness of Buddhism, or Yahweh or Allah, whatever the name for this primal, infinite force, regardless whether you call it God or not, we are surrounded by that. In ancient cultures, it was the source of their mystery that provided the source of life.

Nancy: It is the mystery that is the source of everything. Now, we don't have to think of Dark Energy and Dark Matter as God. In fact, it doesn't really make sense to think of them that way. Nor do we need to think of Eternal Inflation as God. But we need to start realizing that we come from a mysterious source. It will not be figured out intuitively and it’s not going to come to us through revelation. The only way we can begin to relate to it is through science.

Throughout the history of humanity, including all of the great religious teachers, nobody ever intuited Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Nobody ever understood how the Universe formed. Science unveiled this “otherness.” However, that alone is very intellectual. So for us to be able to access it, actually feel ourselves part of it, this is where our spirituality comes in. Yet it's a new kind of spirituality. It isn't tied to a religion. Rather it's tied to a direct connection between us and our source.

Ashok: I would love to explore this. This is a key point in your vision and it certainly resonates among the circles I move in, such as the World Commission on Global Spirituality, which are trying to get away from the old religious ways of looking at life and are exploring new frontiers. This seems to be a high point for where we are on the planet at this time in our evolution. So please, either one of you, please take this further in terms of a new spirituality grounded in science.

Joel: Let me offer a different aspect of this, which is time. One feature Nancy mentioned about the post-Newtonian conception is that there was no clear concept of time. For all that Newton knew, the Universe has been the same forever.

What we are now learning is that the Universe has undergone many fundamental transitions and it will continue to go through other transitions. The future is going to be very different from the present just as the present is very different from the past. There is a way to think symbolically about how we fit into the past and future, which we have attempted to define and outline. For example, one of these symbols is the Cosmic Spheres of Time. The medieval image has humans and the Earth at the center of a spherical Universe. And from the modern physical conception, we are at this center. When we gaze out, we are surrounded by spheres of time, containing galaxies at earlier and earlier stages of the evolution of the Universe. In fact, looking out into space is looking back in time, because the further you look out into space, the more time light has traveled before reaching us. So these pictures of galaxies are really light that left those galaxies long ago and therefore their pictures are capturing a much earlier time. So for us astronomers, the past is very much alive. We are seeing the past all the time, different eras all the way back to the Big Bang.

Another way of looking at time is to appreciate that we are in the middle of time. Just recently the expansion of the Universe transitioned from slowing down to speeding up. That will change the nature of the Universe on large size scales. The most distant galaxies are disappearing over the cosmic horizon. And we are living right near the middle of that epoch. So, in some ways, we have the best possible view of the distant Universe. But it is still a multi-billion year process.

Ashok: Yeah, but we still have to hurry to see it!

Joel: Absolutely! Next, we also live at the middle of our solar system’s lifetime. The Sun and all the planets formed about four and a half billion years ago. In another five or six billion years, our Sun will turn into a red giant star and swallow the inner planets. If the Earth happens to survive, it will be baked to a crisp. Then the Sun will turn into a white dwarf star and finally just fade away.

So, we‘re living in the middle of this grand ten billion year process. At its present distance from the Sun, the Earth will probably be uninhabitable for large creatures in another half billion years. The Sun is in middle age, and like all other stars of this type, its temperature is slowly increasing. So in that sense, we are also living in the middle of the best period of the Sun and the solar system we are part of.

But we have more important things to worry about, which bring us to the most pressing aspect of our time. We live at the end of exponential human expansion on Earth. Our population exploded during the last century. It’s the only time in human history that the population increased by a factor of four in a century. This can’t happen again. Earth can’t possibly support another doubling of its population. Although the growth rate has been slowing since the mid 1970s, our use of resources and our impact on the planet have not slowed at all. So this has to be brought under control during the next several decades or else we are doomed.

Nancy: As an aside, it is important to realize that when growth rates slow down it doesn’t mean that growth shuts down. There is still growth, but it is slower.

Joel: Yes. So we need to bring the growth rate of resource use under control. This is a tremendous challenge. And I believe it takes a cosmic perspective—thinking about the evolution of the planetary system and the Universe as a whole—in order to appreciate what a remarkable moment we are in.

The whole future, not only of our planet, but also of our galaxy and possibly of our entire visible Universe, can depend on what we do in the next few decades. We have a very difficult challenge ahead: change the whole nature of our interaction with our planet, switch from mindless exploitation to what we hope will be sustainable prosperity. But the possibility of achieving sustainable prosperity will recede rapidly unless important steps are taken soon. So Nancy and I believe it is of utmost importance for people to try to understand the Universe on the big size scales, to recognize our special place in history, and to realize the special challenge facing us.

Ashok: This is very helpful. What you have both outlined about time, the accessibility of “otherness” and the centrality of humanity and the Earth in the universal scheme, builds a bridge from this new cosmology to modern culture. When Nancy said that we need science to access this new “otherness” that surrounds us, and that the older religions can’t provide that connection, there is still this new spirituality touching a nerve of meaning. As Joel noted, what we do matters. We have to change our mindless ways in order to move into a sustainable civilization. So I would like to explore this new spirituality more.

Nancy: Let me begin by defining how Joel and I are using the term spirituality. For us, it means the way that we experience our personal connection to the Universe. That is all. It doesn’t have anything to do with any religion. It is not studying the Universe; that is science’s role. We are all inevitably connected with it. We are the Universe on our particular size scale. You are the Universe sitting on your chair at this moment. So there is no question about our definite connection to the Universe.

The important question then is: do we experience that connection or do we completely ignore it? Spirituality would be the extent to which we experience the Universe and then cultivate that experience. It is not the same as science; however, science can be a great path leading to that. Obviously there is no way to experience a Universe that you aren’t aware even exists. If you know nothing about the Universe emerging from modern science then you can only experience the imaginary Universe you inherited and that’s based on the notions of a prior era.

Ashok: This is a great point. This is the link for why science and a kind of new scientific spirituality are so vital today. How do we experience this now? Although we should not return to older cultural ways, and we are not speaking about an infinite God-based spirituality, still you see meaning as we discover our centrality in the Universe.

Nancy: Absolutely. But I will return to what Joel stated. We have a huge responsibility to turn things around during the next few decades. Actually, it is not just a responsibility, it is an opportunity. If we realize how we fit into this Universe, we then realize we are much greater, deeper, and more interesting beings than we could ever have imagined before. We aren’t simply little packages of skin, bones and organs walking on the Earth’s surface. Rather each of us is the tip of an iceberg of an enormous cosmic and cultural history that is coalescing in us.

It took billions of years, lots of luck, and many chance events for evolution to arrive at human beings. We are the apex of all those events. It is not necessary that we were intended. Nevertheless we are extremely precious and totally unique beings. What we do know is that we embody our cosmic history in our cells. Not only are our bodies comprised of cosmic stardust but every atom in our body has an immense story of journeying behind it, perhaps from some exploding star far across the Galaxy. Yet all of these far-flung particles amazingly came together to form us. When we can start to realize that, and how our decisions now will affect future millions of our descendents, we can acknowledge that we are tremendously important.

Ashok: This is very important to pursue further. Because what you have beautifully elucidated is that we are not just a center, not just central to time and size scales in the cosmic drama as if we are spectators, but we are in fact the locus of the cosmic drama in our bodies. That is an amazing thought. So how we use our minds and make decisions will make a profound difference for the future. We are not just victims on a speck of dust in a dark Universe. Instead we are empowered beings.

Nancy: Those people who see humans as victims are largely functioning in an obsolete picture of the Universe. That is why Joel and I are saying cosmology is so important because once we realize how the Universe works and how we fit into it integrally, we find that we have powers we never realized before.

Ashok: I can’t resist asking a question from a philosophical point of view. Throughout the centuries, philosophers have struggled over the question of mind or consciousness versus matter and have seen a disconnection between them. The story you are developing, that we are precious and integral to the Universe, seems to address this struggle. So is consciousness still a mystery?

Joel: Simply, we don’t know how consciousness arises. We have this sense of ourselves as inhabiting our bodies and being distinct individuals. But cognitive neuroscience tells us that at least some aspects of this are illusory. The way the brain constructs the ego is still mysterious. But let me address the more fundamental concept of dualism that you refer to.

Of course, Plato was one of the great proponents of the distinction between form and matter. Then Rene Descartes spoke about the soul-body dualism. Consciously or unconsciously, these are the dualisms we moderns tend to have in mind. But what Nancy and I argue is that both of these dualisms—Platonic and Cartesian—are in direct conflict with our modern scientific understanding. Now one of the qualities of quantum theory that people note is how weird it is. If you try to understand quantum ideas according to everyday human language, you run into contradictions. For example, how can an electron be both a particle and a wave? But once a person understands quantum ideas in their proper mathematical language, all these apparent contradictions disappear. The beautiful simplicity of the theory shines forth.

Matter is really far more complicated than Plato and Descartes realized. Neither of them gave matter nearly enough credit. But as far as we can tell, the Universe appears to be One, in the sense that there is no fundamental distinction between soul or spirit on the one hand and the material Universe on the other. Rather there is a process of emergence, where consciousness is some sort of emergent property.

I think we have all suffered from this divided Universe, trying to separate the spiritual from the material. But if we can start to understand the spiritual as something intimately connected with the material, then this enters the domain where scientists think. Incidentally, I feel this realm is much closer to traditional or indigenous religion, the kind that native peoples practice around the world.

Ashok: You mean those cultures and traditions that understand nature as sacred?

Joel: Yes. But also with the understanding that nature comes out of the world. For example, in the creation stories among the Southwest Native Americans, human beings emerged from holes in the ground. In the kiva ceremonies among the Pueblo, there is a sacred spot representing their people’s emergence from the Earth. They don’t see themselves as having been placed on Earth by some kind of sky god. Well, the fact is that we humans did emerge from the Earth itself. We are made of the same heavy elements that are products of the Universe. Seeing ourselves in that way is also a whole lot healthier. It may help us treat the Earth with respect and as something absolutely extraordinary.

Ashok: Yes, I agree. And it is also very timely for the crises we are facing on the planet today. Nancy, returning to your beautiful explanation of our accessibility to the “otherness,” how are you proposing that humans can actually experience this new connection to the Universe? Do we need a new mythology, a new story?

Nancy: Yes, we do need a new story. But the wonderful thing is that it is being handed to us on a silver platter.

Ashok: In what way?

Nancy: By the scientists, like Joel and his colleagues. It is true this new story is not yet in a very accessible form—the way the scientists give it to us non-scientists. That is because their stories are largely about the Universe “out there,” and we are supposed to figure out what it means for us here.

Throughout all of human history, people have invented mythologies to connect them to whatever Universe they believed existed. But they had no scientific theories nor data to know what Universe existed—until literally right now. Today our picture of the Universe is coherent. For the first time we have data taking us back to the beginning, all the way to the Big Bang, and forward, explaining how the Universe evolved. The challenge then becomes: how do I experience my connection to that? I know I am connected but how do I experience it? As Joel said, we can learn from how other peoples have done this. What is most important is to feel connected to the Big Bang, because it continues in us. We need new metaphors to realize that the forces of nature are in us and really are in a sense our ancestors.

Ashok: To build upon that, one of the great crises of the twenty-first century, as we enter this so called “global village,” is these intense interactions between cultures and world views and conflicting perspectives leading to violence and clashes like 9/11. So I wonder whether this new story—our connection with the environment, with nature and with the cosmos—would help connect us with each other.

Nancy: Certainly, because all of these fights are over very recent differences. If you go far enough back, we are actually all children of the exact same woman, Eve. I don’t mean Eve from the Bible, but the Eve who lived about 150,000 years ago and from whom all humans are genetically descended.

Ashok: Yes, that was big news!

Nancy: Yes, that is amazing. But going further back, every one of us has the same cosmic genealogy. We all evolved out of this Earth together. But all these small, minor differences that have arisen in recent history are the causes for killing each other. We don’t stop to take notice that we could be the only intelligent creatures in the Universe nor consider how each one of us is incredibly precious from the vantage point of the Universe. There may be other intelligent life on many other worlds, but compared to everything else in the Universe—all the Dark Matter and Dark Energy and all the vast reaches of the Universe—every intelligent being is remarkably rare and incredibly precious.

We also need to see ourselves as ancestors. It is not sufficient to just think of the forces of Nature as our ancestors. Rather we need to see ourselves fitting into this long flow of billions of years of life on this planet, which could go on for billions more years. So we can play this crucial role in preserving Earth and create something fabulous for the future, or in the next several years we can equally destroy the whole thing.

Ashok: This is remarkable, because for the circles I work with, part of them being devoted to interfaith dialogue, people realize that we need to find common ground.

Nancy: Yes, it can be found. But the common ground among religions is a small patch of morality that works on a small size scale. No religion has a global solution. We need something much larger, much grander. We need something that is shared by everybody on this planet. We need an accurate map of reality.

Ashok: So you are saying that reality is the common ground?

Nancy: Absolutely. We need a map of reality that shows how all of us fit in and that treats everyone as equal, which we are from the perspective of our planet.

Ashok: I would like to hear each of your comments on the last part of your book—The Meaning of the Universe: Think Cosmically, Act Globally. Given the crises facing humanity and the Earth, you offer a wonderful, optimistic picture of us as children of the cosmos now emerging from this new science. As this becomes better known, and as we begin to experience our connection to the Universe, do you have any prognosis for our crises?

Nancy: Many people who have read our book or heard us speak say, “Oh, but so many people will never buy this idea. So how do you think this is going to change anything?” This is a very long-term project. We are not attempting to convert all Americans to believe the way we do or to see the Universe the way we see it. We are simply planting seeds. On the other hand, it doesn’t need to take hold on a broad scale. All it needs to do is affect a certain percentage of people who are the leaders of culture. Those are the people who will really make a difference.

Joel: We are trying to emphasize the challenges we face in the context of the exponential increasing impact of technology. One that we are constantly being reminded of is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which is now more than it has been for the last six hundred thousand years, based on the analyses of ancient atmospheres trapped in tiny bubbles in the ice cores of Antarctica and Greenland. So we know for certain that humanity is now in new territory. Furthermore, the rate at which carbon dioxide is increasing is so great that around the middle of the century we will have doubled its amount in the entire atmosphere!

Nancy: Although Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, convincingly shows humans as responsible for much of global warming and morally responsible for doing something to stop it, the film didn’t tell us how we acquire the motivation to deal with it. Joel and I feel a new shared cosmology could give us all a real motivation. It will connect us to something larger—and real—to belong to. Something to stand for in our lives.

Joel: In order to see the Earth in its proper context we must see it in the context of the Universe. In some sense that is the big message we’re trying to convey. The little messages concern the creation and use of new cosmic metaphors in order to help us see our problems in a different light. By looking at our situation both from the viewpoint of other historical eras and from other cultural worldviews, we will be able to see our current situation more clearly.

Nancy: And it can also make us happier. It can make us feel at home and discover more meaning in our lives. It can also help us create real community among like-minded people, which extends around the world. This would be a community of people who realize that we humans really matter and that we are actually important cosmically. When we reflect on the effects of that realization on earlier cultures, we conclude it was a good thing. It is what allowed many earlier cultures to build great civilizations. So it’s tremendously motivating. But it is also a little scary. For example, Egyptians must have been petrified by the thought that if they discontinued their traditions, the order of the Universe could collapse at any moment and chaos could return. On the other hand, it kept their civilization going for three thousand years. And we could go on for thousands more years too, if we realize the uniqueness of our central place in the Double Dark Universe and that everything we do at this cosmically pivotal moment really does matter.

Ashok: Well, that’s a wonderful way to conclude our conversation: realizing that matter is sacred and much more remarkable and important than we ever thought. As you said Joel, there is a great need to get this message out given the urgent state of this planet and the need for us to find our common humanity in a common cosmos. Opening up our lenses, shifting our perspectives to a larger scale, is so important and timely.

I want to end by thanking you both. You are a model of a wonderful couple, the way your voices dance together and augment each other. You set a great standard and your book is surely a breakthrough. So I want to congratulate you both and thank you for joining us in this dialogue. I learned so much from you.

The Perfection of Love, Harmony, and Beauty,

The Only Being,

United with All the Illuminated Souls,

Who Form the Embodiment of the Master,

The Spirit of Guidance.

Years ago, when I first began saying the Toward the One prayer of the Sufi Master Hazrat Inayat Khan, I found that I was often unable to get beyond the opening words. For even as I was speaking, I would be lifted “Toward the One” to regions of “Love, Harmony, and Beauty” where my feet no longer touched the ground of materiality, but instead were grounded in “The Only Being.” I was overwhelmed by the energetic qurb—‘proximity’ to the One—in the words themselves. There was such holy precision in them and manifest spiritual energy that my heart could not fail to respond to them. And, as with other things that touched me powerfully from outside of the Jewish tradition, I immediately wanted to translate it into Hebrew, the language of my spiritual upbringing.¹

In the years since I originally made this little translation for myself in the 1970’s, other Hebrew translations of Toward the One have appeared in various places. This is in no way meant to imply criticism of other Hebrew translations, but only to offer another version. The beauty of a translation is the access it gives to a ‘message’ originally given in another language, but we must always understand that it is an interpretation of that ‘message.’ For each language has a beauty and sophistication of its own which resists translation. There is no one-to-one equivalence for the cultural understandings of words translated from one language into another. Thus, there is a practical truth to what Muslims say when they speak of the miraculous ijaz (‘inimitability’) of the Arabic Qur’an. And when they say that a Qur’an in English is not the Qur’an, they are also right. It is an interpretation.

This is not to say that the spirit of the ‘message’ is not conveyed in the translation, only that there is variation between one and the other. And just as a translation is an interpretation of the original, different translations sometimes yield quite different interpretations. Thus, it is possible that there will be some who will find value in my particular Hebrew interpretation of Toward the One.

This is why I am now hoping to make this translation available, for I have noticed that the Hebrew translations of the Toward the One I have seen are interpretations into modern Hebrew. This is good, and I am delighted to see them, just as I am pleased to see renderings into modern Spanish, German, French, and Arabic. But with this translation I intended to render Toward the One into a Hebrew that has a resonance with the liturgical Hebrew of the beit midrash, where Jews traditionally prayed and studied. For today, there is both a traditional Hebrew of Judaism and a secular Hebrew of social discourse.

For Israelis (who have often been raised in a secular environment), modern Hebrew obviously makes more sense and is far more palatable, but for others who are more oriented toward the Hebrew of prayer and study, there are certain words and phrases in modern Hebrew that are foreign to traditional Judaism and do not come across as authentically Jewish. Thus, I labored to translate Toward the One in such a way that those who have solid footing in Jewish tradition may add it to their prayers without it feeling like something foreign.

Here is my translation of Toward the One into traditional Hebrew:

Liqrat ha’ehad,

Ha’yahid ha’ehad v’ha’m’yuhad,

Shleymut ha’emmet, ha’tzedeq v’ha’tif’eret,

Hannimtza ha’yahid,

Ha’kolel kol hann’shamot ha’ne’orot,

Yotzrey hag’shammat harrabbi,

Ha’ruah haqqodesh.

Of course, some of the words will be the same in nearly all translations into Hebrew, but there will also be critical differences, and in this case, even additions.

First of all, the phrase Liqrat ha’ehad is a fairly direct translation of ‘Toward the One’ into Hebrew. But if we wish it to impart more of the sense intended by Hazrat Inayat Khan, and to connect with how the Jewish tradition expresses this notion, we have to include another phrase here. In Hasidism, there is a distinction between ehad ha’manuy, the number one, and ehad v’eyn sheyni, the One that has no other, no two or three. The phrase in traditional Hebrew that best expresses this notion comes from the Italian Kabbalist and hakham (‘sage’), Rabbi Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto (1707-1747), the author of the Mesillat Yesharim (‘Path of the Upright’), who gives us Ehad, yahid, u’meyuhad, ‘One Uniquely Simple Unity.’² But since this phrase cannot follow Liqrat ha’ehad in a natural way, I created a kind of echo of it with Ha’yahid ha’ehad v’ha’m’yuhad.

In the next line, we have Shleymut ha’emmet, ha’tzedeq v’ha’tif’eret, which is quite different from what we have in the English and requires some explanation. First of all, shleymut, ‘wholeness,’ is simply the word that best conveys the notion of ‘perfection’ in Hebrew,³ but ha’emmet, ha’tzedeq v’ha’tif’eret actually translates to ‘truth, righteousness, and beauty.’ Somehow, emmet, ‘truth,’ struck me as a better choice from within the Jewish tradition to put in this trilogy of words.⁴ Nevertheless, I think ahavah, ‘love,’ (ha’ahavah if put into the whole phrase) would still be acceptable here. I chose to use tzedeq, ‘righteousness’ for ‘harmony’ because ‘righteousness’ in Hebrew carries with it the sense of balanced scales.⁵ Now, tif’eret is in fact the Hebrew for ‘beauty,’ but it is also a word that is loaded with meaning in the world of Jewish mysticism (kabbalah). In a very simple sense, tif’eret is what balances and completes the forces of Love and Justice in the Universe.

The next three lines are fairly straightforward. Hannimtza ha’yahid is basically, ‘the only one who can be found,’ ‘the only existent.’ Yahid is also the One Infinite Being, the Simple Unity without separation or parts, the God without limits. Ha’kolel kol hann’shamot ha’ne’orot is ‘Who contains all the souls that have been illuminated.’ Yotzrey hag’shammat harrabbi is ‘Forming the actualization of the master,’⁶ the rebbe, in Hasidic parlance.

Finally, in the last line, I chose not to translate the words, “The Spirit of Guidance,” but to replace them with the parallel concept from the Jewish tradition, Ha’ruah haqqodesh, ‘the Spirit of Holiness,’ or Holy Spirit. This is the phrase most often used in the Talmudic and Midrashic literature to denote prophetic inspiration. And while there are statements in the tradition that say that ruah haqqodesh departed after the passing of the prophets Haggai, Zachariah and Malachi, Hasidim clearly believe that it is still available, even today.

If one were to translate this Hebrew Toward the One back into English, it would probably come out something like this:

Toward the One,

Unique, One, and Unified,

The Wholeness of Truth, Righteousness, and Beauty,

The Only One in Existence,

Who contains all the Illuminated Souls,

Forming the actualization of the Master,

The Spirit of Holiness.

As you can see, there is clear variation in the sense of the words, but I believe that the Message is still available in them. The English prayer of Hazrat Inayat Khan is so precise and beautiful that all attempts at translation will fail in one way or another. It has its own miraculous ijaz and will stand forever among the great prayer-creations of the English language. Nevertheless, I offer this rendering into Hebrew as a way for those who wish to pray in Hebrew, but who are also committed to the Message, to add this to their other prayers in a way that will feel natural in the prayer-space of Judaism.