Torah-Veda

An Interspiritual Journey
Find Your Inspiration and Follow It

WELCOME TO TORAH-VEDA

Torah and Veda are two ancient sources of spirituality still vibrant today. Torah is conveyed through the sacred language of Hebrew and Veda is conveyed through the sacred language of Sanskrit. The focus here is on meditation, mysticism, philosophy, psychology and the underlying spirituality that has been incorporated into religions, and not as much on the religions themselves. Your comments and posts are welcome.


Quote of the Week 419 - Listend/Hearing for Non-material Sustenance

Quote of the Week 419 - Listening/Hearing for Non-material Sustenance


Every one who is thirsty, come and drink. He who has no money, come, buy and eat. Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to Me, and eat what is good. Let your soul delight in abundance. Incline your ear, and come to Me. Hear, that your soul will live…


--Isaiah 55:1-3, The Living Torah translation by Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan

CURRENT TEACHING SESSIONS




Interfaith/Inter-Spiritual Contemplative Groups


Please check out the following, which is an ongoing activity that may be of interest:


https://www.zgatl.org/contemplative-group.html


https://www.zgatl.org/ongoing-groups.html


http://www.interfaithci.org/contemplative.html


https://faithallianceofmetroatlanta.org/recent-events/programs-events/ongoing-programs/











Friday, November 21, 2008

Quote of the Week 71 - The Orchard

As you seek to learn how to enter the Orchard, seek also to learn how to leave the Orchard and return. For the mystery lies not only in the entering, but as much in the leaving.

Rabbi Chayyim Vital, student of Rabbi Isaac Luria, as quoted by Rabbi Gershon Winkler

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Quote of the Week 70 - Amrita-Bindu-Upanishad

The mind is said to be twofold; pure and impure. The impure mind is driven by desire and volition; the pure mind is devoid of desire.
The mind alone is the cause of bondage and liberation to humans. Attached to objects, it leads to bondage; freed from objects, it leads to emancipation.
The mind should always be made devoid of objects by the seeker of liberation, since the liberation of the mind devoid of objects is desirable.
When the mind, freed from contact with objects and confined in the heart, reaches nonbeing, then that is the Supreme State.
The mind should be checked until it meets with destruction in the heart. This is gnosis, this is meditation. The rest is diffuse speculation.

Amrita-Bindu-Upanishad, as presented in The Yoga Tradition; Its History, Literature, Philosophy and Practice by Georg Feuerstein, PhD

Monday, November 10, 2008

Curious Canaan: The Curse of Noah, The Mission of Abram

Many people are familiar with the biblical story of Noah and his Ark. Not as many are familiar with an incident involving Noah and his sons and grandson, Canaan, after The Flood, when they had once again settled on the dry land. One day, Noah imbibes in a little too much of his favorite beverage, the fruit of the vine. One of his three sons, Ham, happens upon Noah lying naked and inebriated in his tent and apparently does something to his father to humiliate him. It is not clear exactly what was the form or nature of this humiliating act, but there are various speculations about it, including castration. He then gloatingly reports this to his two other brothers, Shem and Japtheth, who gingerly approach Noah in his naked, inebriated, humiliated state, and cover him with a blanket. When Noah eventually awakens, he becomes immediately aware of his humiliation and its perpetrator, and curses not Ham, but Canaan, the youngest of Ham’s four sons. There are various explanations/speculations about why Canaan, and not Ham, was the recipient of Noah’s hangover wrath.

Soon after the above story (after one significant aside, relating the tale of the Tower of Babel), the Torah narrative proceeds on to the beginning of the story of the husband and wife pair of Abram/Abraham and Sarai/Sarah, considered to be the first Jews and first Jewish Patriarch and Matriarch. It is clear early on that young Abram is a person of significant spiritual sensitivity with a mission/destiny both personal and communal. An important early initiatory phase to fulfilling his mission (along with his wife, Sarai) is to leave his father’s household, his homeland, and everything that is familiar to him in order to discover his true Self and thus be better equipped to fulfill his destiny. Spurred on by his father, who begins, but does not finish the journey, Abram receives further Divine guidance that leads him, most curiously, to the land of Canaan, the land of Noah’s cursed grandson and his descendants, to accomplish this. So we have here, soon after the story of The Flood, yet another story of waywardness and redemption. That which has been cursed must now be redeemed and serve as a vehicle for self-transformation. Indeed, the processes of redemption and self-transformation seem to go hand-in-hand.

But lo and behold! We are told later on in the narrative that Abraham and his entourage are not the first to come to Canaan for such purposes. Shem (from whose name originates the term “Semite”), the oldest and most favored son of Noah, and a direct lineal ancestor of Abraham (with whom Abraham has already studied, along with Eber, another teacher in the direct bloodline between Shem and Abraham, and the originator of the Hebrew language), has preceded Abraham there and established the first priesthood at Salem (later Jerusalem). When Abraham is ready, after enduring further trials and tribulations, Shem (referred to here as Malchizedek) passes on the yoke/mantle of messiah/priest/prophet to Abraham, which is later successively passed on to the two other Patriarchs, Isaac and Jacob.

Many years later, the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, whom had left this land due to famine, only to become enslaved in another land which they hoped would bring them relief and salvation, return from their slavery in Egypt once again to the curious land of the cursed Canaan and the blessed Shem and Abraham; to the Promised Land of transgression, redemption and self-transformation, of blessing and of curse. This time it is not merely an individual or small clan or two as in the past, but rather a large multitude consisting of many tribes and others united as a fledgling people and emerging nation. They take up, once again, the yoke/mantle of messiah/priest/prophet of old through Moses, Aaron and Miriam and the succeeding priests and prophets in the land that we now know as Israel/Palestine.

Thursday, November 6, 2008

Quotes of the Week 69 - From Our Youth

Ruminations by a seven-year-old on humans being created in God’s image:
"That’s strange. God is invisible. How could there be an image of God? Maybe it’s more like the other way around, God is in the image of human beings. Only it couldn’t be just one human being, it would have to be lots. And they would all be different from each other. Each one would be like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Then you would have to fit all the pieces together. Then they would be a community, and a community is more like God."
-- from a conversation between Rabbi Arthur Waskow and his seven-year-old granddaughter, Yonit Slater

"If you don’t know how to fix it, don’t break it."
"What you do makes me cry at night."
--from a speech by Severn Suzuki, a 12-year-old girl from Vancouver, BC addressing a UN conference on the environment

Tuesday, November 4, 2008

You Cannot Desire Desirelessness

"I’m not teaching to transmit a tradition or carry on a lineage; I’m teaching to awaken whoever may be interested in awakening." Adya calls himself a "closer" because awakening is his starting point. "For me as a teacher, waking up to the absolute nature of reality is step one. For a lot of other systems, they’re working up to that and it’s almost the culmination. To me, that’s the entry point. Until you’ve done that, we don’t have much more to talk about. Wake up first, and then we’ll see what you need to deal with. We’ll see what’s left, in other words."
Adya’s "formlessness" calls for a different spiritual relationship, one that initially puts a lot more responsibility on the student. With Adya there is no guidance in the classic sense, no teaching of methods to attain a goal, no graded steps. He’s interested only in stopping seekers in their tracks. And if there is nothing left to seek, then what? "If you look at your life, almost everything is in some way a subtle goal," Adya said. "You are always psychologically moving toward something, and when consciousness is no longer moving toward anything, then there is a whole different something that moves you. It’s completely different from the personal, and it’s not always immediately obvious to people. Very often it confuses them."
Contrary to common belief, awakening is not the end of the journey…"Awakening is the end of seeking, the end of the seeker, but it is the beginning of life lived from your true nature. That’s a whole other discovery – life lived from oneness. Embodying what you are; being a human expression of oneness." There is awakening and then there is embodying that awakening, making it real and integrating it into the world. These are Adya’s "two things."
--From A Rare and Precious Thing, by John Kain, chapter on Adyashanti, aka Steven Gray, a contemporary American spiritual teacher

"At that moment, when the world around him melted away, when he stood alone like a star in the heavens, he was overwhelmed by a feeling of icy despair, but he was more firmly himself than ever."
-I believe this is from Siddhartha by Herman Hesse

"…within you there is a stillness and sanctuary to which you can retreat at any time and be yourself…Few people have that capacity and yet everyone could have it."
- Source Forgotten

"Desire is a trap,
Desirelessness is liberation.
Desire is the creator, the destroyer, the universe."
-Source Forgotten, but certainly Buddhist oriented. The paradox is that you can’t desire desirelessness! I remember once a long time ago being accosted on the street in Boston by an aggressive Scientologist. I just looked her square in the eye and stated emphatically (possibly with a slight twinge of insanity) that you cannot desire desirelessness. "What?" she queried. I repeated the statement. She slowly backed away with a quizzical look and left me alone.

"Rejoice, rejoice
We have no choice, but to carry on.
Carry on
Love is coming
Love is coming to us all."
-Crosby, Stills and Nash

"Without love,
Where would we be right now?"
-Doobie Brothers

"Don’t worry,
Be happy."
-Meher Baba/Bobbie McFerrin

What most spiritual traditions have always taught is not only that love is coming, but love and grace are here now all of the time and always available. As one of my mentors put it, the Divine Condition is "always already the case". As another put it, "There is Only God". For such folk, there is really nowhere to go and nothing to do except express and serve. If a person does not have a sensation of this or access to this Divine Benevolence, then the spiritual traditions proceed to prescribe methods/techniques/paths to open up avenues of access to this Divine Love. I would disagree with the semantics of the one quote cited above that few people have this capacity, in that I believe that all people have the capacity or potential to access inner peace, but there is something within them that is obstructing them from actualizing that potential. So the spiritual traditions concoct these various methods that focus on breaking through the inner obstructions to allow the potential that is already there to come forth and express. The semantics often take on nomenclature such as "seekers", "aspirants", etc., and couch things in terms of paths to be trod, goals to be attained, and steps that can be taken to attain the goal. My primary spiritual mentor, Swami Rama, as part of his mission to establish the scientific basis for spiritual practices, always maintained that the traditional yoga and meditation practices that he taught were grounded in scientific method, because he maintained that if the practices were performed properly as prescribed, they would inevitably result in the benefit described. But the benefits are not really newly created modes or states of consciousness, but rather arise as the result of the prescribed spiritual practices that are processes designed for two purposes: (1) to eliminate or minimize obstructions that prevent access to the enlightenment that has always been there all along, and (2) to increase one’s capacity to safely conduct and express higher energy levels that are accessed through the practices in a balanced manner. At the same time, Swami Rama, in accord with most of these same spiritual systems, also acknowledged that ultimately, enlightenment was an act of grace totally beyond any mortal effort or manipulation, but that the grace would inevitably eventually occur, and could be hastened by the sincere efforts of aspirants. And thus, part of the spiritual search also inevitably involves passing through the "Dark Night of the Soul", a profound feeling of despair. There is a realization that true peace and happiness is beyond all effort, which hopefully is followed by a recognition of deep cosmic humor, a sense of awesomeness, and profound humility and thankfulness.

As one controversial Buddhist teacher said, "Enlightenment is kind of a gyp." As indicated in the quote at the beginning of this entry about Adyshanti, enlightenment is not some happily ever after be-all and end-all. Life goes on with its challenges and struggles. There is just a different orientation and perspective. I disagree with some assertions that you are either enlightened or you’re not, and that there are no degrees of enlightenment. I believe that most of us have some sense of inner peace, and the degree of spiritual development is a matter of how often and easily we can access it, and how magnified and expressed it is in our inner and outer being.

Mystical Judaism connects two of our basic bodily systems to more subtle energetic functionings: our circulatory system relates primarily to our lower animal nature, drives and instincts (our inner plumbing system, circulating liquid/blood); and our nervous system relates primarily to our higher Divine nature (our internal wiring, conducting inner electrical impulses). Consistent with this view, when I teach meditation, I often use metaphors concerning our inner plumbing and wiring, and that what meditation and spiritual development is all about is to cleanse, improve, our inner plumbing and wiring so that they have greater capacities to circulate the energies they are supposed to circulate, with less obstructions.

The neo-Advaitists and their like take pot shots at the spiritual traditions that speak in terms of attainments and goals as being delusional and misleading, because you can’t desire desirelessness. You can’t work towards the goal of desirelessness, and if you attempt to do so, you inevitably achieve the opposite, distancing yourself from it and undermining your ability to be that which you want to be. But if spiritual practice is approached from the kind of orientation I have described above, it has its proper place and benefit in spiritual development. It is always great to begin with the attitude and reality that one already has access to inner peace, and that the spiritual disciplines being engaged are for the purpose of expanding that inner peace and expressing it more powerfully. For those who do not have that sense of inner peace to begin with, then spiritual practices can help them discover what already exists within them, but is being concealed from them. Concealment is a significant topic in the Jewish tradition. The iteration is that even when it appears that God is absent, God is never really absent, only concealed, because one of the characteristics of God is Omnipresence. For an individual, there is a big turning point when a sense of vague groping in the darkness (period of God’s concealment) begins to be replaced by a sense of feeling your way through the light (period of God being revealed). As one of my teachers has put it, "I do not feel full or fulfilled, I am lost in the Fullness." And as one of my dear friends, who has been engaged in spiritual practices for many years, has put it, "Sometimes I feel like I have swallowed the sun".

In her book, That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Buddhist, Sylvia Boorstein describes a kundalini-type of experience that was at first pleasant, but then created discomfort and difficulties for many years until it thankfully dissolved. She remembered reading something by a person named Gopi Krishna (with whom I am familiar, but that’s another story!), who had an intense kundalini awakening that resulted in major disorientation and discomfort until it finally stabilized. There are times when folks may encounter such increases in inner energy, and if they are not adequately prepared, this heightened energy level can create havoc and an intense "spiritual cleansing" crisis. Folks who have engaged in spiritual practices regularly will be more capable of handling such power surges, because they have been working on improving the capacities of their inner plumbing and wiring, so that when the power surge occurs, there is not an overload situation. Although I earlier referred to this as metaphor, it is actually close to being literal. I once expressed to one of my early teachers years ago my yearning to want to be able to more fully experience and express Divine Love. His response was to pray that it did not happen before I was ready for it.

Meditation and spiritual practice should be approached more like the way we approach sleeping, rather than like eating. Eating and sleeping are two essential life activities that are quite qualitatively different. In order to eat, there are many things that we have to undertake and actively engage in to accomplish this task. We have to consciously and intentionally obtain, cook and eat the food. There is a clear goal and procedures for accomplishing that goal involving active participation. Sleeping is of a very different nature. We can say that we go to sleep, but it is more like we set up conditions favorable to sleep and eliminate conditions disruptive to sleep. We then allow sleep to happen of its own accord. So our effort in going to sleep ultimately is more passive and receptive. The preliminaries involve activities conducive to receiving sleep, to allowing that state to happen. I think the real basis for the argument that spiritual practices are useless concerns approaching spiritual practice with a mindset similar to the way we approach eating and comparable external activities. This would be limiting, and unfortunately, many people may approach it in this way, as another consumer product that needs to fit in with their schedules, that they partake of at their convenience. Spiritual practices need to be approached more in the manner in which we approach going to sleep: we set up conditions conducive to allowing them to happen, eliminating conditions that might be distracting. Then it is much more a process of allowing it to happen. It is not so much that we are meditating as it is that we are being meditated; we allow meditation that is already there in the background to come front and center. We don’t do sleep, we allow sleep to happen. What we can do is work on eliminating obstacles to meditation, but we can’t actually do meditation itself.

If you can truly practice in your daily life the simple edict, "Don’t worry, be happy", then you might not need a lot of spiritual development or exercises. Congratulations. Go forth and prosper. For the rest of us, perhaps we should carry on.