Mindrolling Ep. 638 – Zen Mind Jewish Mind with Rabbi Rami Shapiro & Raghu Markus

In this rich conversation bridging Zen and Jewish mysticism, Rabbi Rami Shapiro and Raghu Markus navigate nonduality, the shadow, and the living experience of the divine. This time on Mindrolling, Raghu and Rabbi Rami discuss: - Veering off from traditional Judaism and into Jewish mysticism - Nondual awareness as the realm of divine consciousness - Going beyond the dead word and into the living word - Inspiration from Shunryu Suzuki Roshi’s classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and Thich Nhat Hanh’s series on How to Live - Koan: the Zen practice of exhausting the logical mind to provoke direct, intuitive insight into reality and one's own nature - Recognizing our own shadow rather than pretending it does not exist - Holding multiple truths at once: there is no other, we are all part of a whole, and we do have differences - How the Kabbalah expresses the name of God in an embodied way - Seeing the divine in all humans and everything in front of us - Special moments with Ram Dass, accepting silence and accepting the moment for what it is "The Jewish meditation practices, the spirituality within Judaism, never or at least rarely gets beyond or slips into the nondual to the extent that you drop the labels, that you drop the tribal. You get Saint Paul saying there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, in Christ. To me, that's Christ consciousness, that's Buddha mind. When you reach that level of consciousness, all the labels fall away, your sense of separate self is gone.” –Rabbi Rami Shapiro About Rabbi Rami Shapiro: Rabbi Rami Shapiro is an award-winning author of over two dozen books on religion and spirituality. He received rabbinical ordination from the Hebrew Union College: Jewish Institute of Religion, and holds a PH.D. from Union Graduate School. A congregational rabbi for 20 years, Rabbi Rami currently co–directs One River Wisdom School, blogs at r writes the foundation’s newsletter, Ask Rabbi Rami, and hosts the foundation’s podcast, Explore Spirituality with Rabbi Rami. “In Kabbalah, every atom of creation has the same divine shape even though you can't see it with a microscope. Everything in the universe is actually a variation of the divine name. Everything has that shape if you can see it properly." –Rabbi Rami Shapiro