Stories

Girl on Horse
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

This morning as I did my asanas I listened to Rachel Naomi Remen being interviewed on Speaking of Faith. The program closed with this story.

The most important questions don't seem to have ready answers, but the questions themselves have healing power when they are shared. An answer is an invitation to stop thinking about something, to stop wondering. Life has no such stopping places, life is a process whose every event is connected to the moment that just went by. An unanswered question is a fine traveling companion. It sharpens your eye for the road.

In some fairytales, there is a magic word which has the power to undo the spell that has imprisoned someone and free them. When I was small, I would wait anxiously until the prince or the princess stumbled on the formula and said the healing words that would release them into life. Usually the words were some sort of nonsense like "Shazam." My magic words have turned out to be "I don't know."
Rachel Naomi Remen, Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories That Heal

I’ve posted here some teachings regarding stories. Byron Katie is huge on how they hide us from the Truth about ourselves. We tell ourselves stories and make the situation worse. She encourages us to look closely at what we say and ask, “Is that true?” Usually, we must reply, “I don’t know.”

Well, Rachel Naomi Remen takes just about the exact opposite approach. But, it doesn’t mean she comes out in so very different a place.

Here is a story regarding tikkun olam, “restoration of the world.” I have also posted about tikkun before.

In the beginning there was only the holy darkness, the Ein Sof, the source of life. And then, in the course of history, at a moment in time, this world, the world of a thousand thousand things, emerged from the heart of the holy darkness as a great ray of light. And then, perhaps because this is a Jewish story, there was an accident, and the vessels containing the light of the world, the wholeness of the world, broke. And the wholeness of the world, the light of the world was scattered into a thousand thousand fragments of light, and they fell into all events and all people, where they remain deeply hidden until this very day.

Now, according to my grandfather, the whole human race is a response to this accident. We are here because we are born with the capacity to find the hidden light in all events and all people, to lift it up and make it visible once again and thereby to restore the innate wholeness of the world. It's a very important story for our times. And this task is called tikkun olam in Hebrew. It's the restoration of the world.

It's a very old story, comes from the 14th century, and it's a different way of looking at our power. And I suspect it has a key for us in our present situation, a very important key. I'm not a person who is a political person in the usual sense of that word, but I think that we all feel that we're not enough to make a difference, that we need to be more somehow, either wealthier or more educated or somehow or other different than the people we are. And according to this story, we are exactly what's needed. And to just wonder about that a little, what if we were exactly what's needed? What then? How would I live if I was exactly what's needed to heal the world?

You can find the complete transcript of the interview with Dr. Remen here. It’s good.

What Was it Pogo Said?

VPI 1915
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

We have met the enemy and he is us.
Pogo

Last week, I submitted the painting you see here to qarrtisluni for their issue on “Transformation.”
I explained that the painting is based upon a photograph my grandfather took in 1915.
(He was a student at Virginia Polytechnic and these are his fellow students in the snow.)
All I did was add a bit of asemic calligraphy and stamped a couple chops.
I also attempted to explain how the inking transformed the image.

The transformation simply amazed me.
Before I set my brush upon the picture,
I never knew that Virginia contained Asia within its energy.
But there before my eyes, I saw the Cadets of grandfather’s world,
Just Like That,
become “Soldiers of the Sun.”
Just Like That,
Western hero became Asian warrior.

I called the painting, “Transformation as a Just So Story”
because I didn’t believe such transformations could ultimately be True.
Really True, I meant.

The editors quickly declined with a polite, “No, thank you.”
I think perhaps they wanted transformations that were Real beyond dispute:
water into ice,
youth into old age.
In short, they were looking for the transformations that happen everyday.

I was addressing something of a different sort.
I was talking about the Other transformation that happens everyday,
but it is not of Nature, but rather, Man.
Everyday our minds take the One and break it into pieces.
Everyday we turn This into That.

I was talking about the transformation pulled off by Maya – that most skillful of Illusionists.
The unreal really happens everyday.
We take our fellow human beings and turn them into other and often enemy.

And we do it Just Like That,
just as easy as the squiggle of a paintbrush.
My calligraphy wasn’t even words. It was asemic and thus by definition without semantics.
Yet, obviously, below the words meaning got conveyed.
How else could I ever make warriors out of boys playing in the snow?

I have been dancing round here for a while now,
writing about labeling, and Dick and Jane, and taking life “simply as it is.”
Now, perhaps we’re getting to practical applications for what so often seems nothing short of the self indulgent ramblings of “Absorbed-in-Self.Com.”

Anyway.

A couple days went by.

Mom sent me this email.
It was a long editorial by Rabbi Michael Lerner, the editor of Tikkun magazine.
Tikkun translates as “to heal, repair, and transform the world.”
Rabbi Lerner was describing his experience at the World Conference on Dialogue convened by the King of Saudi Arabia, July 16-18 in Madrid, Spain.

God's will, praise be to Him, was that people should differ in their faiths.
If the Almighty had so desired, all mankind would have shared the same religion. We are meeting today to affirm that the religions that God Almighty desired for the happiness of man, should be a means to ensure that happiness.
King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud

Now, Rabbi Lerner is no fan of the King,
and I too am pretty skeptical of the King and his government.
Still, the conference brought together representatives of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism and Confucianism.

And some of Rabbi Lerner’s points really got me thinking:
… this didn't sound like the King I had come to expect from Western media.
This was obviously a new direction being articulated by the King of Saudi Arabia. Moreover, it was not just being articulated for a Western audience.
The King had convened a similar meeting of Islamic scholars and thinkers in Saudi Arabia six weeks before…
what the King of Saudi Arabia was doing was …of historic significance….

[I] find myself amazed at the humanity, intelligence, and shared commitment to rationality among all these leaders of the Saudi regime.
NO, I'm not giving up my skepticism, and no, I have not forgotten the barbarism…

I see the fundamental decency of some who are engaged in an effort to "reform from within," and am reminded once again of how ridiculous it is to talk about a whole society as though it represented a single perspective or shared a single worldview….

[T]his conference is a front page story in most of the world,
but is being largely ignored in the US media
who were notably absent from the hundreds of media covering this event.
This is a willed ignorance about the world…

What was also clear to me in this conversation was that these very enlightened Saudis had NEVER met or been in a conversation with Jews who held progressive values and took those values seriously.
For them, it was an exciting revelation that there were Jews who were both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine, who could hold both narratives as having elements of truth and elements of goodness...
They too had fallen for the media distortions…

They too had fallen for that squiggle of the brush that can transform,
-Just Like That-
the Virginia boys of the First War into the Kamakazi of the Second War.
And Rabbi Lerner wrote of those who are now calling for a Fourth War…

With sincere apologies for my over simplifications.

To really get a feel of the intricate and insane swirlings that go on upon the surface politic:
You can find Rabbi Lerner’s complete comments here (a site organized under the auspices of Deepka Chopra).
You can find the Network of Spiritual Progressive here.
NPR’s brief comments are here. (It’s true the story was largely ignored. I had not heard a word until I got Mom’s email.)
And the press release of the Royal Saudi Embassy in Washington is here. (Well, actually back there. Ain't illusion grand?)

Namaste.

Tikkun Olam and Obama

blue on blue
Originally uploaded by JKonig

Tikkun (“tee kun”) comes from the mystical Hebrew idea of tikkun olam which describes humanity's shared responsibility, along with God, "to heal, repair and transform the world."

There is a magazine by this name, the voice the of the “Tikkun community” which is composed of people of many faiths.
Editor Rabbi Michael Lerner has an article in this month’s issue entitled, “The Obama Phenomenon.”

To entice you to read it in it’s entirety, I have excerpted a portion here:

…this editorial is not about Obama as much as about what he elicits in others, and should not be read as an endorsement of him.

The energy, hopefulness, and excitement that manifests in Obama’s campaign has shown up before in the last fifty years…

It was there in the 1960s and 1970s in the Civil Rights movement, the anti-war movement, the women’s movement, the environmental movement, and the movement for gay liberation.

One felt it flowing at rallies and demonstrations at which Robert Kennedy, Cesar Chavez, Betty Friedan, Isaac Deutscher, Joan Baez, and Martin Luther King, Jr. articulated their visions.

It was there again in Earth Day, in the anti-nuclear movement, and in the movement against the war with the Contras.

It was there during the campaign of Jesse Jackson in 1988 and the Clintons’ campaign in 1992. And it has been there—dare we say it—in the growth of the religious right and the Campus Crusade for Christ.

What is that energy and excitement, and why does it touch people so deeply?...

The phenomenon in question is this:

the intense desire of every human being on this planet to overcome and transcend
the materialism and selfishness that shape the global economic arrangements
and permeate the consciousness of all people,

to overcome the looking-out-for-number one consciousness that divides us…

and to overcome the alienation from each other that this way of being has created
so that we might once again recognize each other as embodiments of God or Spirit…

We Avert Our Eyes from One Another

Every gesture, every word, every deed …
every message we give ourselves
all combine to either reinforce our separation and estrangement from each other
or to reconnect us in a deep way that allows genuine mutual recognition,
the seeing and hearing of who we really are,
the contact we have with the sacred in ourselves, in each other, and in the world.

Recently, some columnists have compared Obama to a rock star because his supporters seem to treat him more like that than like a politician.
They are only partially mistaken.

What the best and most fulfilling rock concerts of the past several decades have offered one generation is what other multi-generational mega-churches or Super Bowls and World Series’ offer to others:

a chance to momentarily experience a transcendence of all those feelings of loneliness and alienation…

The Effectiveness of Not Demonizing

Obama’s appeal starts from his insistence on not demonizing the Other…

Obama knows that most people want a very different world,
but don’t believe it is possible unless someone else makes it happen.

He challenges his audience by telling them that there is no one else,
that they themselves are the people who must make the world different.

To quote Obama from his Super Tuesday speech:
So many of us have been waiting so long for the time when we could finally expect more from our politics, when we could give more of ourselves and feel truly invested in something bigger than a particular candidate or cause.
This is it.
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
We are the change that we seek.

This is About Us, Not About Obama

…no matter how spiritually and emotionally dead the majority of people on the planet may appear to be,
no matter how lost in their pursuit of money and fame and sexual conquest and me-first-ism and don’t-bother-me-ism,

the truth is that the resurrection of the dead is always at hand, always a possibility.
Human beings can always be awakened again to choose life,
to choose love,
to choose kindness, generosity, ecological sensitivity, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of creation.

That capacity of human beings is what it means to have a soul…

I hope you take the time to read more of this essay. (I left out some interesting details.)

Tikkun Olam

He sees you
Originally uploaded by Seeking Tao

This Sunday morning, 7 a.m., found me in my usual place,
on my yoga mat, in front of my altar,
doing a combination of asanas, back exercises, calisthenics
and wrestling with Bennie.

On the radio, Christa Tippett was speaking with Dr. Rachael Naomi Remen, in a program entitled Listening Generously.

DR. REMEN: [My grandfather] was a flaming mystic, and he was also a magnificent storyteller.

MS. TIPPETT: What do you mean when you say he was a flaming mystic?

DR. REMEN: …it means many different things. It can mean a scholarly thing, like the study of a school of mysticism like Kabbalah, but it's also a way of seeing the world.
My grandfather felt that the world was in constant communication with him,
that there was a spirit in the world,
a God in the world that could be spoken to and could respond at all times,
that there was a presence in the world that was holy and sacred and that he was in constant dialogue with this as he went through the events of his day.

I think mysticism can be defined in many different ways.
I didn't know that my grandfather was a mystic.
… I just knew that the world that he lived in was the world I wanted to live in, too.

MS. TIPPETT: You recount this idea of the Kabbalah,… that at the beginning of the creation, the holy was broken up…

DR. REMEN: …this was my fourth birthday present, this story.

In the beginning there was only the holy darkness, the Ein Sof, the source of life. And then, in the course of history, at a moment in time, this world, the world of a thousand thousand things, emerged from the heart of the holy darkness as a great ray of light.
And then, perhaps because this is a Jewish story, there was an accident, and the vessels containing the light of the world, the wholeness of the world, broke.
And the wholeness of the world, the light of the world was scattered into a thousand thousand fragments of light, and they fell into all events and all people, where they remain deeply hidden until this very day.

Now, according to my grandfather, the whole human race is a response to this accident. We are here because we are born with the capacity to find the hidden light in all events and all people, to lift it up and make it visible once again and thereby to restore the innate wholeness of the world.
It's a very important story for our times.
And this task is called tikkun olam in Hebrew.
It's the restoration of the world.

…And this is, of course, a collective task.
It involves all people who have ever been born, all people presently alive, all people yet to be born.
We are all healers of the world.
And that story opens a sense of possibility.
It's not about healing the world by making a huge difference.
It's about healing the world that touches you, that's around you….

It's a very old story, comes from the 14th century, and it's a different way of looking at our power… I'm not a person who is a political person in the usual sense of that word,
but I think that we all feel that we're not enough to make a difference,
that we need to be more somehow,
either wealthier or more educated or somehow or other different than the people we are.

And according to this story, we are exactly what's needed.
And to just wonder about that a little,
what if we were exactly what's needed?
What then?
How would I live if I was exactly what's needed to heal the world?