Beltane Mountain Moon
Rabbi Rami Shapiro is here from middle Tennessee. He’s a prolific author, 36 books, and funny. Kate and I heard him at mussar on Thursday. He offered a paradigm from somebody whose name I didn’t catch, but it represents the human as living on five levels simultaneously. If you imagine a spiral spun out at least five whorls, he puts the body at the center, then the heart, the mind, the soul and spirit.
The first two operate below the level of consciousness. He referred mostly to the autonomic functions of the body: breathing, heart beating, all those things the body does on its own, that we couldn’t control even if we decided we wanted to. The heart in this model is two emotions love and fear, both of which arise unbidden and with which we then have to contend at the level of mind.
The mind, the ego, focuses on survival, on navigating the body and the heart through the visible world. The mind, in this paradigm, wears masks (but not in a pejorative sense) as it expresses itself to the world. Soul and spirit are, like body and heart, operating out of the realm of usual consciousness, but they can be accessed. In meditation we can reach soul as we are living it right now.
As soul we become aware of our direct links to other people, to the world we live in and we understand them as part of us and ourselves as part of them. Shapiro says that such dictums as love thy neighbor as thyself become axiomatic at the soul level. When we know the true face of the other, which we can do at soul level, then we have to treat them with loving kindness. This includes the earth.
Spirit is inaccessible through our actions, but in meditation we can come right up to it. Grace has to pull us over the boundary. Once in the realm of spirit our sense of connection becomes total. We know, without effort, the interconnection and interdependence of all things, from the tiniest fly to the furthest galaxy and beyond.
It’s an interesting paradigm in its insistence that we live on all five of these levels all the time. We are always, then, in the realm of the spirit, accessing universal bonds, and the level of soul where we know the true faces of all around us.
Something about it seems a little hinky to me though and I can’t quite identify it. As a heuristic, I believe it has a great deal of value since I do believe we live on several levels all the time. At a minimum it reminds us of that.
He refers to himself as a perennialist. Here’s what that means:
“I am a Jewish practitioner of Perennial Wisdom, the fourfold teaching at the mystic heart of the world’s religions:
1. all life is a manifesting of a single Reality called by many names: God, Tao. Mother, Allah, Nature, YHVH, Dharmakaya, Brahman, and Great Spirit among others;
2. human beings have an innate capacity to know the One in, with, and as all life;
3. knowing the One carries a universal ethic of compassion and justice toward all beings; and
4. knowing the one and living this ethic is the highest human calling.”
