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#2605 - Friday, October 6, 2006 - Editor:
Jerry Katz
This issue features an interview with Jason Shulman, author of a new book, The Instruction Manual for Receiving God. You may read more about the book at the Amazon web page: http://snipurl.com/yey2
An interview with Jason Shulman,
author of ‘The
Instruction Manual for Receiving God’
The book is published by Sounds True.
Publication date: October 2006
A wide-ranging conversation with Jason
Shulman as he answers questions from readers and students
Each religion offers its own truth
to its followers and the differences between them seem more
marked now than ever before. How could your book, or any book,
speak to all of them?
The truth is that this cannot be a book for everyone
if what everyone demands is that it conform to all thinking they
have already done regarding life and God.
Religions arise because we all born with a spiritual
urge; the urge to find the truth of existence. Life is set up
that way, we are set up that way; we were made to do this. Religions
are attempts, based on different ideas, revelations, and
understandings, to answer that urge.
So this book is pre-religious in a sense, and
speaks to the inborn spiritual core we all have within us no
matter how have chosen to express it, or which revelation we were
drawn to.
‘The Instruction Manual for Receiving God’
is not about reconciling the differences in theological
approaches or even discussing the concept of “difference”
per se. It is about¾and for¾every human being who is
interested in connecting to this Wholeness they feel inside. It
is a map, if you will, of what every human being who wants to
connect to reality on this level we call “Divine” must
go through, no matter what the outer religious garb looks like.
Dark nights of the soul, moments of surrender and knowing God’s
will and the ecstasy¾and plainness¾ of meeting God are not the
province of a single approach.
In a sense, ‘The Instruction Manual for
Receiving God’, respectful of all paths and revelations,
should make you a better Jew, a better Christian or Buddhist or
Moslem. It should even make you a better agnostic or atheist
because it is about fulfilling our complete human potential. That
achievement is the holy thing that all faiths, secular or
religious, share. It is the root cause of the word “faith”
itself.
What do you mean by God?
God is the individual, personal sense of the Deity I
turn to when I believe I am a personality-only, that is,
only my personal self. When I know that I am more than
personality-only and see my true nature, God is all that
is. Because I am human, both are needed.
As a Buddhist and Dharma teacher,
how and where do you give God a place?
One of the problems that Buddhists have with the
word God is that Buddhism¾at least on the surface¾tends to
de-emphasize the personal side of things and the word ‘God’
as is commonly used posits a completely separate being of some
sort who created the universe, somehow separate from his
creations.
From my perspective, this is a limited view of both
nondualism and theistic religion and sets up an opposition where
none is truly called for.
The confusion arises because many people¾including
Buddhists, other non-dual paths and even theistic ones¾often
believe that the personal self is an illusion, or that it is not
important in some manner but only the cause of suffering; that it
needs to be transcended or overcome in some manner.
However, my experience is that the personal self
still exists quite nicely after enlightening or awakening
experiences. It exists, but in a new form and for a different
purpose. And even more interestingly, God still exists as well.
Not the God of our childhood, but the Personal Intelligence that
the heart of the universe presents to the individual who is ready
to surrender to the great What Is.
For the personal self, God is the proper teacher. As
a human being, we are many things at once, sometimes a personal
self and sometimes an impersonal, transcendent Self. Actually,
both of these states are going on continuously and
simultaneously. It comes down to both a matter of skillful means
and the courage to lead a non-conceptualized life, a life of
freedom. If the aim of a student’s meditation is to feel
always transcendently one with the universe, this is a limited
view. Likewise, if a person only seeks to be taken care of by a
separate Deity, and never answers the invitation to come closer,
to see the transcendent view, this too is limited. For the
separate self, God invites union and a movement toward the
transcendent Self. For the awakening self, God is What Is. The
personal is What Is and the non-personal is What Is. There is no
difference that should trap us.
What would enlightenment look like in the 21st
century? Are the traditional Eastern and Judeo-Christian models
of enlightened beings valid as prototypes for spiritual seekers
today?
Because we have minds that compare one thing to
another, when we begin thinking about self-realization, we all
look for models of how enlightenment or God-realization should
look and behave. On one hand, this is not a bad idea. Receiving
wisdom from the past is an important part of our learning.
Whether it is something Rav Nachman wrote in the early 1800s or
an ancient Buddhist sutra from a thousand years ago, we want¾and
need¾to read and consider the wisdom that has been handed down
to us.
On the other hand, God-realization, awakening and
enlightenment, have nothing to do with the past. Our encounter
with God happens when we clear away the obstacles to being
present-centered. So we need to look to ourselves as well to find
out who we are and why we are here and not scan the horizon for
smoke signals or signs.
People also seem to believe that enlightenment,
awakening, and so on, are not culturally-bound. That these states
are “beyond” history, are “eternal” in some
way. Again, there is some truth to this and something that
will also lead you astray. When we read 12th century
writing by Dogen, or 19th century writing by Reb
Nachman, we are one with their mind and heart. We can feel the
connection. We join their lineage because they are us and we are
them. We are Absolutely in connection.
At the same time, the featureless and timeless plain
of the Absolute is not only what enlightenment is about. It is
also about being in your own time and place: connected to the
unchanging All and connected to the transitory, historical
moment. It is about meeting God and then returning to the
marketplace, the affairs of this place of red dust. In other
words, enlightenment and awakening and surrendering to God must
also have a relative aspect. Without these aspects, these
so-called vaunted conditions remain stone monuments, deceptions
of a living enlightenment that “might have been.”
Our conditions on earth are now different than at
any other time. This is going to call forth a type of
enlightenment that will differ in the dualistic sense from those
that have gone before. Bodhidharma needed to bring Buddhism
from
What do we need to do now, in this wonderful
world of instant communication and even faster and more dangerous
re-action? What is our eternal purpose and what is our “marketplace”
purpose? After all, enlightenment, God and awakening are of no
consequence without other people.
So the question is not a choice between an old model
and a new one. It’s realizing that everyone who ever walked
the road to God or truth throughout history, had to come to this
same question and answer it as best they could from their own
undeniable heart. What does your heart tell you to do? And can
you trust your heart? Have you done enough work on your past
wounding so that your heart shines within you because it is free
to be in the present? What will you and I do with our time here?
This is the question before us: How will we deal with the
suffering within ourselves and which we see all around us?
Your book offers practical steps
one can take to actually experience God. What might that feel
like? How would one know that is what is happening?
As far as experiences go, the earlier ones are
always more dramatic: falling off horses like Paul in
A number of spiritual teachings
identify ego as an enemy and seek to overcome, dissolve, or
transcend it. Yet you say that a strong sense of self—a
healthy ego—is necessary to our spiritual awakening. Why is
that so?
Who is it who bows to Buddha? Or says the Standing
Prayer of Judaism? Or prays five times a day to Allah?
It is a person, a concentrated whirl of
consciousness, temporary though it may be, that answers to a name
and looks out of eyes and has a heart and mind; that knows
suffering and can also know joy.
There is nothing wrong with being a person, in fact,
very few people on this earth are actually complete and real
“persons.” It takes hard work, guidance and the right
circumstances to begin to heal into our true humanity. The ego is
our sense of self, and usually is the hull of the ship to which
the barnacles of our suffering and the flotsam of our neuroses
attach.
But there is another type of ego we could call the
“personal with no history.” It’s not that all the
barnacles picked up on the voyage disappear¾some do and some do
not¾but that we are free of their influence to some degree.
There are no absolutes. There is no “completely
pure.” Instead, for full awakening to occur, the ego needs a
respectable home, a good and kind home, where it can do its job
without having to be king of the world. Then we are a person who
can peer into the mystery where there are no eyes, no nose, no
tongue as the sutra says. If we don’t heal the ego,
accepting its nature as our own, we build our enlightenment and
surrender to God on a foundation of sand.
What is spiritual awakening? Is
this different from enlightenment? What, then, is enlightenment
and why does its achievement matter so much to so many spiritual
seekers?
All of these words are both the whip that drives us
through this very, very hard work of waking up, and the greatest
obstacles to achieving that goal.
The ego needs to be enticed into the suffering that
the search for enlightenment will bring. Eventually though, we
have to change horses. “Why do we meditate?” asks one
Zen koan. “To grow weary and tired,” it answers.
Enlightenment starts as awakening begins to be less important.
Actually, the ego is very intelligent: It won’t
settle for awakening and satori experiences. It always spurs us
onward to something simpler and more profound, something that is
beyond experiences. I would say that awakening is somewhat more
akin to satori in the Zen tradition than it is to enlightenment.
Enlightenment, or God-realization to use another term, happens
when the flash of understanding that awakening brings is
integrated into the whole self. The ego is healed and given a
home. Our imperfections and the impossibility of being perfect
are given a home. The Absolute and the relative are given a home.
Awakening is just the first, important signal that
we are on the right path. It is an experience in time. It alerts
us to that fact that everything we believed to be true has
shifted; that another truth is trying to appear. These first
steps, of seeing the new light, the new territory, are very
important. The next step, of integration, goes on forever. It is
no longer time-bound. That is what unites the heaven of spiritual
experiences with the earth of our daily life.
Where do practices like prayer and
meditation fit in?
We all need to practice, not only to “get
better at what we are trying to do,” but to give ourselves a
home. In the beginning, there is a separation between our
practice and our self. We practice to achieve something for this
self we have. Eventually however, practice and self become the
same thing.
One of the ways we do this in A Society of Souls is
through prayer. In the way we have learned to pray, we understand
that eventually the
pray-ing session becomes goal-less in the sense that
what we are praying for is for the moment, and our relationship
with God in that moment, to be revealed. When we have reached
that level, everything is ki tov or “good.”
We cannot make real spiritual progress without a
practice of some sort. That practice might be having therapy
sessions or sitting facing a wall or chanting or dancing. But
when it is approached as a practice, which means we are willing
to have it lead us anywhere, practice and life become the same
thing.
Like yourself, a number of people
have found deeper understanding in a synthesis of more than one—and
sometimes seemingly contradictory—courses of study and
practice. Why is this? Does such exploration better suit today’s
spiritual seeker, or is it better to dedicate oneself to only one
practice?
We usually associate dedication with staying on one
path; with putting our nose to one grindstone. There is truth in
this: if we switch horses each time we run into what we believe
is an obstacle, we never find out the hidden secret each obstacle
brings, the small and great enlightenment it offers.
At the same time, since I believe that true
non-dualism must include the relative, personal plane as well as
the impersonal or transcendent basis for existence, we must also
look to what is needed in the moment. Responding to the moment is
part of enlightenment or God-realization.
The concept of “one-thing, one way,” has
been perverted in our world, transformed into a weapon of hate
rather than a tool of love. In this distortion, people either
work solely on personal empowerment or transcendent realization.
Both of these distortions can lead to the ability to see others,
who work and live in different ways, as somehow “less than.”
If you don’t practice our revelation you are less than; if
you don’t sit and meditate our way, you are less than; if
you don’t believe in a separate God, you are less then….and
so on.
So when I say we are looking for a new form of enlightenment I simply mean that work on the personality and work on the transcendent aspect of reality must, must, must go on together. To split them is to make believe that we need to be less than we are; less than human. How we walk into the dry cleaners or pass the mustard at the table is just as important as understanding the Torah or a sutra. It’s not that we have to be perfect in either case: it’s that we need understand that both the personal and the impersonal are part of the unity of God.
The Instruction Manual for Receiving God
Jason Shulman
http://snipurl.com/yey2
For more information, please contact:
Sharadha Bain, Director of Communications,
A Society of Souls, Tel: (
or Email: sharadhabain@yahoo.com