These questions are pulled from a Roundtable at a Vancouver, BC gathering in which Reb Zalman participated along with  Professor Shirin Ebadi, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Dr. Jo-ann Archibald.   You can see a description of the gathering by clicking here.  You can see the video by then clicking webcast, and then roundtable video.  To skip to Reb Zalman, Fast Forward to 01:06:15.

Gabbai Seth Fishman, BLOG Editor

Reb Zalman says:

We want to amplify an urge from above and from below that wants to birth itself, a push of our Earth’s need of healing and a pull of a vision of organismic health.  We want to wake up others and wake up ourselves to even more awareness.  We need to break the habit of only finding easy or immediate answers and instead, we need to learn to sit with the questions, to deal with the anxiety they may produce.  Easy, immediate answers won’t stave off the impending disaster of the ever accelerating global dying.

These are some of the questions with which we need to sit:

• What ideas of cosmology do we have to have in order to approach the healing of the planet?
  • We need new blueprints of the mind, reality maps pointing to possible harmonious life-matrix points.  We must be creative in such a way that we do not repeat precedent, in ways that are daring, playing with the least probable possibilities, to be open to ways that are more weird and spiritual where we might find answers, a new way to understand the map of reality.  We need to co-create with the integral planetary mind, the cosmology we have to have in order to approach the healing of the planet.
• What is the basic health ethic arising from that new cosmology?
  • The cosmology we seek to find should produce, first and foremost, an ethos that honors harmonious biological health in the individual and in the matrix of our environment.  In order to create this cosmology, we can no longer rely on an individual mind.  The complexity, and with it, the responsibility of what we have to mind in the world and in life is far too great to be left to one person.  The only way to get it together is together.
• What are the uppaya the skillful means which are needed to lift the cultural trance and launch the awareness of this emerging cosmology?
  • We must do the miraculous work of altering the awareness of millions of people by going deeper and deeper into regions where we cannot use the effort of muscles or of logic, regions where only awareness can shift awareness.  We need to update the inner resources of our spiritual traditions that once worked well, but which were associated with flesh-rejecting monastic asceticism. We need to look for that which works of the old techniques and enhance their yield by learning to attune our consciousness to optimal transformational power.  We need to hear the choral symphonic music of a sacred common dream.  We must figure out how to access it, how we could empower it, how it can empower us.  We are not on the top of the chain of being.  We need to have a means as spiritual people for accessing the waiting helpers from higher planes.  We need to design the needed education of heart and spirit.
• What advancements in psychology, anthropology, biology, physics, medicine, philosophy, political science, theology, spiritual technologies, economics, the arts, communications and most of all, the ethics that we need in order to heal the planet?
  • The current state of the disciplines of transpersonal psychology and transpersonal sociology are too primitive to handle our crisis.

For a complete transcript of Reb Zalman’s remarks, click the link to view the rest of this entry below.  You are invited to share your comments at the end.

Gabbai Seth Fishman, BLOG Editor

“All honor to the chain of transmission of our tradition; to the elders of the first nations here; all honor to the Dharma bearers that produced his holiness the Dalai lama; all honor to the epistolic transmission, that tradition that produced Bishop TuTu; and all honors to the silsila / spiritual lineage of Professor Shirin Ebadi, salaam salaam.

“I begin with a prayer:  Source of time and space, Avinu Malkenu, from infinity, draw down to us the Great Renewal, and attune us to Your intent so that Wisdom, Your daughter, flows into our awareness, to awaken us to see ahead so that we help instead of harm.  May all the devices we make and use be sparing and protecting of your creation.  Help us, God, to set right what we have debased, to heal what we have made ill, to care for and to restore what we have injured.  Bless our Earth, our home, and show us all how to care for her, so that we might live Your promise, given to our forebears, to live heavenly days right here on this Earth.  May all the beings You have fashioned become aware that it is You who has given them being.  May we realize that You shape our lives, and may each one who breathes join with others who breathe in the delight of shared knowing of the Great Breath.  Assist us in learning how to partner with family, neighbors and friends.  Aid us in dissolving old enmities.  May we come to honor, even in those whom we fear, Your image and form, Your light dwelling in their hearts.  We pray for Vaclav Havel, who couldn’t be with us today.  May his health be restored.  May he be able to teach and continue to share with people a vision of enlightened government that we could use on both sides of the Atlantic at this time.  (applause)  May we soon see the day when Your house will indeed be the house of prayer for all peoples, named, and celebrated in every tongue and speech and on that day, You will be one, and one with all of cosmic life, Amen.

“I look like somebody from Fiddler on the Roof.  (Laughter)  (Reb Z sings) To life, to life, l’chayim.  (applause)

“The problems we face at this time don’t seem to yield to solutions from traditions and lineages as had been the case with other problems in other times.

“I’ve honored the traditions and the lineages; and at the same time, when I look back, I see that each one of our traditions built a high degree of surface tension and saw itself sharply separate from others.  Often, when they made universalistic statements, they made them in subtle and not so subtle ways, in ways that people now call inclusivisitic.  That is as if to say, “If they come under our umbrella as a lesser adjunct, as a minor satellite, we will legitimize them.”  Still the attitude is basically triumphalistic:  When the Meshiach comes…  When Christ appears…  When the Mahdi comes back…  When the Avatar shows up…  When Maitreya comes…, then we will be proven right, and you will end up on a lesser plane than we.  (laughter).

“Then came Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the moon walk, the Internet, and now, we can no longer afford any reality map that doesn’t base itself on organismic life, a view that sees us part of this living Gaia, this living planet.

“Our traditional theologians, in order to defend themselves against existential terror and high anxiety and the spiritual vacuum in which they have to preach have by and large been co-opted by the haves who have deep pockets, who like to hold on to the status quo or by the have-nots, who want to return to implausible security, give-me-that-old-time-religion.

“More and more we have deep thinking eco-theologians who come to the conclusion that each religion is a vital organ of the planet and that we, for the planet’s sake need, each one of us, in order to stay alive, to become devout in the most healthy way we can manage.

“Hence, for all my universalism, I need to be the healthiest Jew I can be, and urge my co-religionists to become the best and healthiest Jews they can be in order to contribute to the healing of the planet.

“While I’ve gained much help from our tradition which provided me with sacred tools and means to higher consciousness, many of them seem  not to be immediately applicable to our current situation.

“However, there is a revelation coming down to us from helpers above our ken, as well as the result of the chthonic push from below from our mother the earth.  This leads me not so much to offer answers as to raise questions.  Therefore, my contribution will be to raise questions, and all these questions are intertwined.

“As each generation comes, it needs answers for the problems which the old answers have created.  Example:  We figured nuclear fuel is going to be great.  Yes?  Pesticides will be good.  Herbicides will be good.  Soon, we will have to deal with questions of genetic engineering, which is creating bio-engineered plants and who knows how soon we will have to be  troubled by deviations in human genetic stock.  The urge we experience to grow in awareness is often blocked and opposed by forces that want to cut us off from that urge that comes from above and from below, as our native people are saying, from Father Sky and Mother Earth and they want to addict us with mind-deadening distractions.  Look at the media.

“Yet at a meeting like this one, we want to amplify that urge that comes from above and from below, that push of our Earth’s need of healing as well as the pull of a  vision of organismic health that wants to birth itself.  Here, we want to wake up others and wake up ourselves to even more awakeness.  My daughter once asked me the question, “Abba when you’re asleep you can wake up even more, yes? And when you’re awake, can you wake up even more?  This is what we need to do here, to wake up even more.  We have been habituated to find the easiest and most immediate answers so that we don’t stay in the anxiety of holding onto questions.  But the answers that are easily available don’t work to stave off the impending disaster of the ever accelerating global dying.
So, what are some of  the questions?

“First:  What ideas of cosmology do we have to have in order to approach the healing of the planet?  None of us yet has a blueprint of the mind that helps us deal with the need to heal the planet.  Apparently, the reality map we have at this time is not correct. Our sense of the direction to which the possible harmonious life-matrix points, demands that we change that map.  But creativity does not reside in the way we are imprisoned to repeat precedent. Creativity is daring.  It wants us to be outrageous to play with the least probable possibilities, the ones more weird and spiritual  where we might find answers.  These possibility-forms dance before the mind’s eye and from that vision there emerges an unexpected form with its creative proposal; and therefore, a new way to understand the map of reality.  We need to learn this process of questing in order to discover, (and this is urgent), to co-create with the integral planetary mind, the cosmology we have to have in order to approach the healing of the planet.

“Secondly, what is the basic health ethic arising from that new cosmology?  The cosmology of the Industrial Revolution gave us an ethos to productivity at any cost.  The cosmology of corporate capitalism pushes an ethos of the consumption at any cost.  The cosmology we seek to find should produce, first and foremost, an ethos that honors harmonious biological health in the individual and in the matrix of our environment.  In order to create this cosmology, we can no longer rely on an individual mind.  The complexity, and with it, the responsibility of what we have to mind in the world and in life is far too great to be left to one person.  The only way to get it together is together. I plead for research that would discover what it takes to enable us to operate in webs of consciousness, of mind-networks, at least for a small group of prepared minds to seek to merge dreams and behold visions.  These people would serve as our psychonauts and contact minds of much higher regions.  We are quite underdeveloped in this area.  We have very low ideas of how groups really work.  While there is immense sophistication in the technological area of military systems and lethal weapons of mass destruction, we are very low in our understanding of how to handle conflict resolution.  Much research needs to be done to help us to be optimal in social and political harmony, and this cannot wait; this research cannot wait.  What do we need to do in order that there be this cultural revolution that’s now urgently needed?  I’ve often challenged educators to plan curricula for handling information with ecological wisdom.  We have lots of information and very little wisdom.  I’ve challenged them for formation of character, for educating the heart, for raising the emotional IQ, for teaching skills of cooperation that would produce the adepts, the Saints, the Arhants, the Tzadikim, the Rishis, the Bodisatras, the Shamans whom we will need at this time.

“Thirdly, What are the upaya / the skillful means which are needed to lift the cultural trance and launch the awareness of this emerging cosmology?  Current consensus mind leads us to ever greater crisis.  We must do the miraculous work of altering the awareness of millions of people.  We must go deeper and deeper into regions where we cannot use the effort of muscles or of logic.  Regions where only awareness can shift awareness, which is, as one of my friends remarked, “Changing the tires while the car is running and at such great speed.”  We need to update the inner resources of our spiritual traditions that once worked well, but which were associated with flesh-rejecting monastic asceticism.  If your suggestion to me is beyond twenty minutes in the morning and twenty minutes in the evening for spiritual practice, I can’t do it; I won’t do it.  And the old traditions demand  more time than I can afford.  So we need to look for what works of the old techniques and enhance their yield by learning to attune our consciousness to optimal transformational power.  These actions take place in other regions than the mind of the shopping mall.  When I think of the turbulent mind-space that we inhabit, I get close to schizophrenia.  I cannot hear the choral symphonic music of a sacred common dream.  Just as people once lamented about the twilight of Gods, we now experience the twilight of life-affirming archetypes.  How could we access that, how could we empower them, how can they empower us.  We have come to realize that we are not on the top of the chain of being.  What do we as spiritual people have as a means for accessing the waiting helpers from higher planes.  What do we need to do to address the matrix of the life process on the subtle plane to gain understanding of the deeper life processes.  Only then can we embark on designing the needed education of heart and spirit.

“Last.  What advancements in psychology, anthropology, biology, physics, medicine, philosophy, political science, theology, spiritual technologies, economics, the arts, communications and, most of all, in the ethics do we need in order to heal the planet?  So the big question remains, [what to do]?  And the current state of the disciplines of transpersonal psychology and transpersonal sociology are too primitive to handle our crisis.

“You who are here, my colleagues on the dais as well as you in the audience, I invite you to help find the answers to the questions I raised.

“We need to relearn the technology of blessings.  May the people who organized this event, the people who contributed with effort and finances, may we who spoke and you who listened be blessed with energy, vigor, resourcefulness, joy, health and well-being,  harmony in your family-life and work-life to actualize the new hope.  And may the words of my mouth and the concerns in our hearts be received and responded to by the One in Whom we find refuge and redemption, amen.”

Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, April 2004, Vancouver, BC

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