Ep. 19 - Mystic Scholar and Author Mirabai Starr

This is synchronicity. - This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity. - This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity. - This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity. - This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity. - This is synchronicity.

This is synchronicity. - This is synchronicity. (upbeat music)

Hello and welcome to episode 19 of Synchronicity. My guest today is Mirabai Star. Mirabai is amazing. You will hear that in this episode before I get to Mirabai though. I wanna talk about a few things that are going on in the world. Well, they're going on right now as I'm recording this, but it's quite possible you would hear this at a time where this is all irrelevant, but still, fair with me. One of these things will be relevant forever, I think though. Okay, let's start with Bernie Sanders, huh? This guy won Michigan last night in the Democratic primary, which I know doesn't actually mean as much as maybe I would like it to 'cause the delegates were pretty much split anyway and it looks like Hillary's got kind of a clear path, but outside of all the political wonk stuff there, I like what I donated to Bernie Sanders campaign.

I never have donated to any political campaign before, and I'm not hopefully not being naive or idealistic in thinking that, you know, I like Bernie, I do. I, he is a guy who is saying things that truly resonate with how I feel, whether those things are actionable, whether they're pie in the sky type thinking, pipe dream, however you want to phrase it. I don't know, I don't know how easy it is to get change or change massive institutions like government, but I think someone like him as president would be a cool thing. And it's not that I don't like Hillary, I can't say that I love Hillary in one way, but I can't say that I find our campaign the most compelling for me.

So I thought it was cool that he won Michigan. I hope he continues to win. I think at the very least he's injecting some clear, he's making these issues come to the forefront where maybe they wouldn't have if it was just Hillary from the beginning and going against what are clearly deranged people on the GOP side. I mean, regardless of your politics, we agree. Like these people are kind of insane, right? You can even like them if you want. You want to be a Trump person, you know, and like him for whatever reason. They're clearly deranged, right? We're all on the same page with that, okay, good.

So yeah, politics, politics, politics. Oh, interesting thing. This is time oriented on March 20th at Flash in DC, Washington DC people. There's going to be a fundraiser burning down the house. B-E-R-N for it's a fundraiser for Bernie Sanders, but it's also like house music. It's going to be techno, techno music, but real techno. None of this EDM moniker stuff, you know what I'm talking about. And it's all the profits are going to Bernie Sanders campaign. So that's on March 20th at Flash. I'm going to have details to that on this podcast page. It's there's a Facebook event. If you're in the DC area, I'll most likely be at that.

So if you want to say hi, come say hi. Okay, the other thing is I saw something this morning, which was incredible. I don't know if you guys have heard of this, this movie called "Human." I think it's actually a three part series, but I saw someone posted a Facebook clip and oh, it was actually Sarah Myers who is throwing the burning down the house. Look at that, there's a common thread. She posted this video on Facebook and it was of this woman named Francine who was a French woman who had survived the Holocaust and she was in concentration camps when she was eight. And she tells this wonderful story about a baby and a piece of chocolate.

I'm not going to ruin the story for you. I will have a link to it on this page again. There's a lot of good stuff on this page. But it was awesome, incredibly awesome. So I found that it was actually from a larger documentary called "Human," the movie, which is on YouTube. Again, another link on this page to that free, which, oh man, I don't know what to say. I just started watching the first 20 minutes today, but incredibly powerful, really, really cool stuff. They just open it up. I think the first person is this guy who's in prison for killing a woman and a child and he's talking about what the definition of love means to him, it's pretty incredible stuff.

So definitely check that out. Okay, that's kind of a good segue going into Mirabai. Mirabai star. Oh man, this is truthfully, I may say this a lot, but it's true. This is one of my most favorite conversations. Mirabai star is an author. She is a student of mystics throughout culture, is a comparative philosopher, I would say. She's done translations of religious Christian texts that are mystical texts that are awesome. She also personally has endured a tremendous amount of kind of tragedy and suffering, deaths, abuse, very, very difficult things, but as a testament to her and whatever else is out there, she's come out of it amazingly, amazingly, just such a great and genuine person.

It was really, really a pleasure to be able to speak with her. Things we discussed in this episode, you'll hear, but one of the key parts of it is transforming suffering into some type of positive, some type of understanding experience, transforming very difficult experiences and growing through those and learning from them. She is an expert at the hat, I would say. She also has a new book called "Caravan of No Despair", which is her memoir, and I have it, and it's awesome. I just started reading it, but what I would like to do, this is the first little thing I'm gonna try out. I did this with the Phil Jackson book, by the way, and congrats to Brian.

Brian won the giveaway, I don't know, he just, you'll hear what this is. So I have a copy of "Caravan of No Despair", and I wanted to send it to one of you. So all you have to do is email me at nlampert@minepodnetwork.com, and I will pick from a random, I'm gonna random it, like I'll play favorites, and if you're the winner, I'll send you the book, 'cause I really think you're gonna enjoy it, and especially if you listen to this episode, I think you're really gonna like it. So, yeah, I don't got anything else to say. This is a really powerful episode. I'm honored, I'm grateful that I got a chance to speak with MiraBye, and I hope you enjoy it.

Here is MiraBye's star. (gentle music) So, there's a lot of places we can start, and we'll just jump into it. But can you talk a little bit about how you were raised, where you were raised, and just kind of how that shaped your perspective on the world at large, and just kind of everything, and your life going from there.

Sure, yeah. So are we recording already, you wanna see?

Yeah, yeah.

And you'll just edit out that first.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Okay, I see how it works. (both laughing) Good, let me just take a sip of water.

Yeah, yeah, take your time. I catch people off guard with that, so that just flows from natural conversation into the episode, so yeah.

Yeah, okay. Now, Noah, if I look at my camera, which is what I'm doing now, is that better for you?

It's perfect.

Okay. - Yeah.

So I realized that the way I was raised is different from the way that most people in mainstream America were raised, although I think everybody, of course, as a unique story and a special childhood. But I was part, I was actually a child in the early phases of the counterculture movement in the 1960s, so my parents were older hippies. And in the early '70s, they uprooted us from our suburban Long Island, New York lifestyle. They were non-religious Jews.

Yeah.

And kind of intellectual, social justice oriented. So it was like the height of the Vietnam War, and they were so passionately engaged in the anti-war movement, and I think they just came to realize that protesting the war wasn't enough. They had to radically change their lifestyle. And my mother had gone back to college. My older brother had recently died of a brain tumor when he was 10 and I was seven, and which really shook up the whole family. It was like an earthquake, yeah. And it was something about the earthquake of losing a child, the oldest of four, and the seismic activity that was happening in the culture contributed to this upheaval that just uprooted us.

And even though my parents had been living kind of an alternative lifestyle in New York for a number of years, we had people living with us, communally, a lot of college students, and my mother was really involved in art and had a gallery. It was still, we were still somehow entrenched in the system as they thought of it. So off we went in 1972 on this odyssey, and we traveled around the US for a couple of months, and then ended up living in Mexico on an isolated Caribbean beach, which is now known as Cancun for many months. And then it was time to kind of come back, but it was like, where do we go?

And they were scanning around for a place that had a good school, in those days, they called them free schools. They wanted an alternative school for us kids. We hadn't been in school for a year, and they heard about this great school in Taos, New Mexico, and they also had their hands on a copy of Be Here Now, by Ram Das, and they heard that he wrote that book at the Llama Foundation, which is outside of Taos. And so that's where we ended up. Not at Llama Foundation, interestingly, when we got to Llama, which is the first place we went when we came to Taos, my parents thought it was very elitist and sloppy and holier than thou.

So we ended up in Taos, living communally, raising food, building our own homes without water or electricity, and really doing that back to the land thing.

So what did you learn growing up in that environment? Did you know, I mean, so you lived somewhere else before, right? So you had the juxtaposition of living in on Long Island and then communally as a kid, what was that like? Like, what do you remember from that period of time? I mean, also to weave this in, 'cause I don't want this to get lost, like losing your brother and your parents losing their son, like that clearly is still affecting consciousness as you're going kind of this transition period. So what was it like for you back then from what you can remember?

Yeah, it was, gosh, no, it was such a combination of magical factors. For one thing, being seven, actually almost eight when my brother died, it was like it blew the veil off of what had crystallized around reality by seven years old. Children have access to those magical realms anyway, but it was like, that was gone. I mean, what was gone was any semblance of normalcy. And I had this, I was sort of catapulted into this deep connection with the mystery is the only way I could describe it. Nobody had language for it, so I was kind of on my own with all that we were completely non-religious. So there wasn't even religious language to support this kind of otherworldly experience that I was having, communion with the soul of my brother.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I can only imagine, I mean, I've had a fair number of mystic experiences myself and the hardest part I have always found is trying to communicate those experiences in a way that makes sense to other people, but while realizing they're having a tremendously significant impact on my life and my outlook and how I relate to the world, which is why I love people like you who actually seem to be able to do it in a real way. And I think, can you talk about a little bit of the path of how, like, so clearly death is a big central concept here because like you said, it forced you into this missed relationship with the mystery.

What have you noticed throughout your life because you've had other tragic things happen to you too? How is that, what is the relationship do you think between death and the mystery? Obviously, death is a mystery, but for those of us who are still here who experience deaths with other people, what is the connection there? Like, what have you noticed?

Yeah, beautiful question, Noah. For me, it's like when the death of someone whose life is intertwined with mine happens. There, even if it's expected, and in my case, most of the deaths were not.

Right.

But then, it's like that veil that I spoke of is torn. And we have access, it grants us, it blesses us with this kind of encounter with the mystery because the ordinary separations are stripped by virtue of the intensity of the experience.

Yes.

I think birth also does that. Falling in love can do that. Those radical life experiences, but nothing does it quite like death does. It's like there's a fragrance of the sacred that infuses the landscape when a death happens. And most of us are conditioned to see that as, to see death as simply a loss and therefore a terrible thing. And in my case, some of the losses have been truly terrible. The loss of my child, it doesn't get more terrible really than that, but that did not preclude my encounter with this holiness that I was invited into through the very power of the experience. And somehow, because of my spiritual path so far, although none of my practices particularly served me when I needed the most.

Oh, really?

But I did know enough to just say, okay, I am going to be present for this, no matter how horrific, there's more to it than the horror. There's something else and I'm going to show up.

Wow, that's beautifully put too. I mean, I have admittedly not experienced a tremendous amount of personal death in my life. A couple grandparents have died and I was older. I was at one point, I was 18, 19, 20, other times I was far too young. And I always think about spirituality related, all these concepts and things that I know and I've learned in wisdom, practical wisdom, I always wonder how it's going to actually shape up when I experience a very really personal loss. Like it's going to happen, like we know, this is life. So it's interesting to hear you say that yours actually didn't really in the grip of it, but it sounds like you latched onto some concept, a spiritual concept where you leaned in a little bit, you didn't run away from it.

And I think that's, can you talk about how important that was for you or why that was important, that aspect of it?

Yeah, can I read you something?

Yes, yes, of course. Oh, yes, I'm carefully, please, please.

Okay, so as you know, my newest book is the first book in my own voice, really, completely. And it's the first time I've really told my story after years of writing about the mystics. So in the opening of part three, which is the third part of my memoir about the death of my daughter and how it coincided with the publication of my first book, A Translation of Dark Knight of the Soul by the 16th century Spanish mystic, John of the Cross. So this is about a page, okay, no?

Sure, sure, of course.

With reticence at first and then with mounting courage, I dared to mourn my child. From the very beginning, I suspected that something holy was happening and that if I were to push it away, I would regret it for the rest of my life. There was this sense of urgency as if turning from death meant turning from my child. I wanted to offer Jenny the gift of my commitment to accompany her on her journey away from me. Even if to do so, simply meant dedicating my heartbeat and my breath to her and paying attention. And so I showed up. When a feeling I did not think I could survive would threaten to engulf me, I'd practice turning toward it with the arms of my soul outstretched and then my heart would unclench a little and make space for the pain.

Years of contemplative practice had taught me just enough to know better than to believe everything I think. How to shift from regretting the past and fearing the future to abiding with what is. In this case, a totally fucked up thing, the ultimate fucked up thing. I sat with that. I did not engage in this practice to prove something to myself or anyone else. I was not interested in flexing my spiritual muscles. I did it for Jenny. My willingness to stay present through this process was an act of devotion by leaning into the horror and yielding to the sorrow, by standing in the fire of emptiness and saying yes to the mystery.

I was honoring my child and expressing my ongoing love for her. It was not mere mindfulness practice. It was heartfulness practice.

I love that's amazing. Oh my God, that's really awesome. I haven't read the book, so I am definitely getting the book and going to read it 'cause that's, I mean, you're dealing with, like you said, it's hard to imagine. I'm about to become a father for the first time.

You are?

Yeah, yeah, in May.

You also talk that very soon.

Yeah, it is really soon. It's getting to the point of soon where like, oh my God. But, you know, with that comes, we have a dog, right? And we get freaked out when the dog gets a cough and we got to take him to the vet. Like, I can just only imagine what could be harder than losing a child, but hearing you read something like that, it's like this, you're getting basically like smashed with these spiritual practices and finding a way to get to the essence of it because what I've found too is when you're not engaging with spiritual practices from kind of like, oh, well, what benefits am I gonna get?

Or now I'm so spiritual and I'm doing that, when you're doing it out of a sense of necessity or need, it's like the difference between praying like, oh, well, you know, I hope I get that new job, instead of praying like, please let my family be okay, like the difference there, like, that is what I think is the essence of the spirit, right? The real, I don't know what the term, the essence of what it is though. So what, I mean, what was it like during your, the dark night of the soul, talk about the concept of what that means for the listeners who are gonna hear this and then having to go through what I imagine is the most dark night of your soul?

Like the death of a child? Like, what was, what did that feel like and how did you process it outside of just conceptually? Like, what was going on?

Yeah, so as I mentioned Jenny's death, my daughter's death in a car accident when she was 14 in 2001, coincided to the very day with the release of my first book, which was this new kind of literary translation and contemporary lyrical accessible, I hope a translation of this ancient wisdom teaching dark night of the soul. And I have been paying attention ever since to the fact that these two events collided.

Yeah, yeah.

But to give you a little background on that teaching, which I consider to be the quintessential understanding of the transformational power of suffering, what John F. Cross was talking about was not actually a difficult life circumstance, like the death of a loved one or a breakup of a relationship or those other kind of harrowing, circumstantial situations. But his teachings do apply beautifully, as it turns out, to those times when we are plunged into those traumas and tragedies. So what he was talking about though, John F. Cross is a spiritual crisis. And it's very personal and often invisible to anyone else.

In fact, it's kind of invisible to ourselves when we're going through a dark night of the soul, because we don't know what the hell is going on.

You just lost your set, yeah, yeah.

All we know is that those juicy spiritual feelings that we had relied upon, like say, when we chant kirta and our hearts just fill to overflowing. And we feel that deep connection with love. Or in church, singing sacred music music is of course the number one way to get connected. With the felt sense of the sacred. But other spiritual practices, a deep meditation can give us that sweet sense of connectedness to the sacred, to the beloved, as they call in many traditions. And as I conceive of God. And even if you weren't, if you didn't believe in a personified deity, which I only do every once in a while, the rest of the time I don't, there are other experiences of the sacred that are really tangible.

So it's that tangible thing that goes away in a dark night of the soul. It dries up and it falls away. And we're no longer feeling that juiciness, that sweetness, that connectedness. So actually dark night of the soul, according to John of the Cross has two parts. So the first part is when the sensory experience goes away. And the second part, which he calls way more harrowing than the first, is when our concepts crumble and unravel. And we no longer have, and we can't really make sense of the spiritual life anymore. All theology, all dogma, all belief systems just disintegrate. And we can't even, we think we're having a crisis of faith that we don't believe in God anymore, or that God's giving up on us.

And John of the Cross says that when all of this unraveling happens, it's a sign that we are maturing. It's like a baby being weaned from the divine breast. He actually uses that analogy and is ready to stand on her own two feet. And what's the baby doing? Well, he gives this example of Abraham and Sarah when they wean Isaac and he's screaming over in the corner and they're throwing a feast, which is what you do when babies are weaned in the ancient culture. And so that's what we do. We throw a spiritual tantrum. But it's really a cause, John says, for celebration and that darkness we experience, that conceptual darkness and that sensory darkness is actually just an artifact of radiance that's blinding.

Because the light of God comes pouring into the chamber of our souls that are now ready.

Wow, wow, wow.

Takes a while to be able to see. Oh, you're getting it.

I am totally getting it. And also I'm thinking I am a huge Carl Jung fan. So I just love just his theories about the collective unconscious, symbolism, archetypes, all these things. And one of the theories and things I really enjoy about him is the concept of the shadow and how everyone has an individual shadow and collectively we have a shadow. And I like hearing your description of the dark night of the soul because in those moments and with those experiences, feelings, the shadow aspects, that's where transformation is. It's not like it's some bad evil thing that we wanna push away and stay away from, but it actually has potential to actually transform us and kind of like come out of the cocoon, so to speak.

But I read something you wrote that was actually really, really, I thought was poignant where you said how difficult situations by themselves, whether of the spirit or just in the world, don't actually promote necessarily spiritual transformation or evolution, it's something else. Can you talk about what that's something else, potentially is and how to take difficult situations and actually transform from them?

Yes, that's a wonderful next step to this dark night background because, so for years actually I kind of thought that John of the Cross really wasn't speaking about difficult circumstances and that people were misusing that term in the culture and popular culture. I'm having a dark night at the soul because I lost my job and my cat died and I had a fight with my boyfriend all at the same time. So yes, it is often used as a misnomer in the culture, the term dark night of the soul. But what I do find is that when we have painful life experiences, if we are to show up for them, be present for them, say yes to the mystery, not say yes, I'm gonna go ahead and burn to death, although there is some elements of surrender to that, to the annihilation.

I mean, we are surrendering to annihilation when we do this, no doubt. But it's not with an agenda. It's not with if I grit my teeth and put up with this pain that I will get transformed. It's more about letting go than making a deal with the universe. And when we let go, when we let ourselves down into the arms of radical unknowingness, then there is the potential, not the guarantee, but the potential for transformation because fire, the fire of painful experiences, for instance, has a way of transforming everything, transfiguring the landscape of the soul that burns to the ground in many ways.

I mean, what happens when we experience a trauma is that we are stripped, right? We don't, the things we used to care about don't matter anymore. Our priorities radically reorient and most of them actually disappear when we're experiencing really difficult times and that nakedness that comes when we're stripped of all of those extraneous concerns is a spiritual nakedness. And it's a readiness. It's a preparedness to receive the gifts of spirit.

Man, this is, this is easily becoming one of my favorite conversations ever. This is great. This is plunging into this stuff that I feel like most people don't really talk about often. So this is one of the reasons I have this show and this podcast is to talk about these things. Not to shift gears too much, but can you, something else that's been important for you and in your writings and what you've studied is number. And I, the mystical aspect of number, and I told the story, I'm gonna tell it again. So sorry listeners for hearing it. I was interviewing David Nickton, Buddhist, and we were talking about the qualitative aspects of number rather than the quantitative.

And the story I told was, is there was a ancient Chinese dynasty and there were debating whether to go to war with a neighboring dynasty. So they took a vote and there was 11 of them and the vote was eight to three to go to war. So they retreated. And the reason is, is qualitatively three has much more significance and is a number of harmony. So the actual quantitative difference didn't actually mean anything. It's like, oh, three came up, we gotta pull back. Can you talk about in your studies and kind of investigation into the mystery, like what, what role does number? What, what, what have you noticed with number coming up?

Huh, that's interesting. It's like great story by the way.

It's cool, right? Yeah, that's why it's all this.

Yeah, that really speaks to me. Well, you know, I'm not much of a numerologist although my father was. My father was really interested in Western esoteric studies and he was a serious numerologist and reader of, of the cards, but what I do notice in my own situation is there are a number of, a number of strange coincidences with number. So for instance, Jenny was 14 when she died. My, and that was, as we know the day that Dark Knight of the Soul came out. 14 years later, Caravan of no despair, my memoir about her came out. It actually came out on the 14th anniversary of her death. That was not planned.

And it was my 14th book. I know it sounds like a lot to do a book a year but there were six of them that I did in one, one year, it was a series. So, you know, there was this, this thing about 14. My brother died when I was seven. My first love died when I was 14 and cycles of seven and 14 have always been big in my life. And then I had my first child at 28. It's, so there's that. There's also nine. Nine in the, in numerology is the number of completion. And when Jenny was little, we always had planned to go, we, I was gonna say I, but we have a relationship with named Kurali Baba. And we, we live in Taos, New Mexico where there's the only name Kurali Baba Ashram in America.

And Jenny grew up in that ashram. And so we had always planned that, that one day we would go visit Maharaj's ashram in India, his ashrams in India but particularly Kenchi ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas, his main one. And we were gonna, finally we decided that we would do it when Jenny graduated from high school. 'Cause I mean, we don't have money and it took a lot of time to raise the funds. But Jenny died in her freshman year. And so I thought, okay, I will go when, when she would have graduated. But I still, it just didn't happen. Time passed and it didn't work out. And then finally, I had the opportunity to go.

And when I showed up at Kenchi ashram, it was the ninth anniversary of Jenny's staff. And that is a number of completion. And there was something that happened in that moment. It's, my story about that is on Ramdassa's website, as you know, I was the featured teacher for Ramdassa a few months ago. And that's, and I told that story on that website.

Yeah, and also freshman year is ninth grade. I mean, yeah, it's always fascinating to me because what you described is kind of these, the dropping of the veil. The name of this podcast is synchronicity. And what I've noticed is around synchronous, synchronicity fueled moments. These numbers can pop in as like kind of a hallmark of them. I've seen it a lot, just a lot in my life. And it was always, there was a point in my life where I was very, very much into numbers and thought you could actually get to the root of everything through numbers. And there's clearly some primordial relationship there that missus have spoken about for a long time.

That's fascinating, fascinating. 'Cause I don't know, I don't know if I love the term, I use it sometimes, but Maslow's conception of peak experiences, these kind of transcendental experiences, which I think is similar to synchronicity and kind of these, you know, death can be a doorway to one. But I don't, I don't know if I love that exact phrase because sometimes there's a qualitative feeling to the mystical aspect of it that feels a little bit different than kind of what maybe what a peak experience is can be objectively described as shifting a little bit again. Can you talk about some of your favorite mystics and then also the concept of inter-spirituality?

So kind of this concept of all one, you know, many paths up the mountain, but the views the same. Can you talk a little bit about that?

I'd love to, so yes, it's sort of a strange little package over here with Mino in a sense that I'm a Jew, with a Hindu guru, Hindu ask.

I can relate.

Right?

Right?

Since I'm 14 and a lifelong Buddhist meditation practice by myself, you too, see? And I also have this deep connection with Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam.

How's right, any Akon?

Oh.

Couldn't be more of a fan.

Oh yeah.

They're relative, you and I. And so interestingly, the one religion that was kind of missing from this melting pot of religions that has been my spiritual formation since I'm a kid was Christianity, because it was almost like Jesus' language was not okay in my family for all kinds of reasons, you know, there's that sort of visceral sense of being unsafe that I think of Jews, of our parents' generation have. So, but when I was in, when I was around 20, I encountered the poetry of John of the Cross. And even though this teaching of the Dark Knight of the Soul that I've just described to you is a mystical teaching, he actually was an incredible poet and has a vast collection of mystical poems, which I really love songs to God, very much like Rumi.

And so when I encountered John of the Cross at age, I was 20, I had already been a Sufi for like four years and I recognized the Sufi in him, that ecstatic lover beloved longing thing.

Yeah, yeah.

So I fell in love with John of the Cross. And years later, I was teaching Philosophy in Religious Studies. I earned a graduate degree in Philosophy in Religious Studies. So I was teaching at a community college here in-house for a long time and I kept trying to teach John of the Cross and my students just weren't getting it. So I had a friend, a colleague, who said, why don't you try translating it? This was at a time when there were a lot of new fresh translations coming out of mystics, with Coleman Bark's translations of Rumi and Stephen Mitchell and Robert Bly and many others. So I did. And it sold immediately to a big press, Riverhead.

And then one book came after another. Then I kept being invited to write about the Christian mystics. We'll translate first the Spanish mystics, including Teresa of Abilah, John of the Cross's Guru. And then other Christian mystics. So next thing I know years had gone by, and I had written like a dozen books on the Christian mystics as a Jewish, Zippy, Buddhist, Tindu, pagan. And so I don't know how this all happened, except that when I was 11, 12, 13, that whole period, I was living here in Taos and going to a school that was run by the Lama Foundation, which is where Rambas did be here now. And Lama is a place where spiritual teachers from all traditions have always gathered and offered teachings, not just conceptually, not just the scriptures, but practices in it.

Where we get to experience directly the heart of the lineage, which is usually, as you pointed out, the beginning, the mystical aspects. So my spiritual formation happened in this inter-spiritual context, and that really informs the way I live my life. And so really for me, it's not a conflict that I have all of these books on the Christian mystics, because they transcend religiosity completely. The mystics all do, of all tradition. And they meet in the heart.

That's why I love them. I mean, I've had specific experiences where my first real conception of Christianity, I like you, I was raised Jewish, not totally Jewish parents, but I was born Mitzvah, I actually got confirmed, but I pretty much related as an outsider, friends who are Christian, there's Christmas, it's a thing. But I had an experience, it was psychodelically induced, actually, on mushrooms, but I had an experience where I'm very, very, very certain I experienced what Christ consciousness is. And I got a direct download into what that feels like. And to me, it's now looking back, it's like, oh yeah, it's of course Maharashi said Hanuman and Christ are one.

It's the exact same feeling. Like these are the same essence, whether it's a monkey god or Jesus, it doesn't matter. But I also find myself in the position of being a Jewish person or raised Jewish where I love Christianity. And I think the mystic aspect of Christianity has so much to offer, like it shouldn't be a surprise, there are so many Christians in the world and it's so popular, like there is something, the essence of what Christianity is and what Jesus taught. I mean, it's hard to find anything more beautiful than that. It's really, it's incredible. So I can relate on that too. Well, can you talk about another, I didn't, I don't know this mystic.

I know Avilla and John of the Cross, but Julian of Norwich, can you talk about, I've never seen this name before, and can you tell me a little bit about that? Yeah.

Yeah, so right, so my mystics are, today's Avilla, John of the Cross, Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, France of Assisi and others. But yes, Julian was fascinating. It was a woman that wasn't even her real name. She was just named for the church that she had an enclosure. She was a cloistered anchorist. And, but what Julian's most known for is the phrase, "All will be well, and all will be well, "and every kind of thing shall be well. "All will be well, and all will be well, "and every kind of thing shall be well." And she was a medieval English mystic, and the other thing she's most known for is that she spoke of God the mother at a time when that was heresy.

But she concluded that because Christ is the second person of the Trinity, in Christian theology or mythology, as I sometimes call it, you have the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. She said, "The Son," which is God incarnating into the body. And here on our breaking into our experience of life on earth had to be feminine because only a mother would break herself open and pour herself out to creation.

So you launched me into my next, I haven't written down, and this happens a lot on the show, but--

Synchronicity. - Synchronicity, of course. The Divine Feminine. One of my favorite mystics of all time, Ramakrishna had a very real relationship with Kali, the Divine Feminine, a manifestation of it. I have a very, my outlook on where we are as a culture and this time and place is to me. It seems like, this is not a foregone conclusion, but it seems like there is the beginning of a shift to a rebalancing of the, where we have lived primarily in a patriarchal, society, world, culture. It does seem slowly like some of these feminine concepts and Divine Femininity is starting to get in, and I think it's so incredibly important.

I love that you just said that the Christ consciousness has to be feminine in nature because that's my direct experience with it. It is absolutely feminine, but which sounds crazy, Jesus is a guy, like, what are you talking about, but it lines up so perfectly with my fundamental direct experience that I can't even tell you how happy that makes me to hear, but yeah, it's so great.

Can you talk about the concept of the Divine Feminine and how that kind of relates and just go?

Yeah.

Yeah, oh, wonderful. I'm so glad that you're relating to that. You as a man, you know, are really getting that. Yeah, I mean, because the feminine, the Divine Feminine is all about incarnation and embodiment and the imminence of God. I mean, if you see, God is both the Godhead, as both transcendent, beyond the beyond the beyond, that which is wholly other, as Rudolf Otto called it, and immanent, then the imminence of God has this feminine quality of connectedness to the earth, to community, to children, to animals, to sexuality, all of those embodied kind of qualities of the Divine and imminence.

And for instance, in the Jewish mystical tradition, we have the Shehina, which mainstream Jews don't really learn about, but she's there. And on Shabbat, when we light those candles on Friday night, when we kindle the Sabbath lights, which is actually a big part of my practice every week, I do observe Shabbat and keep it over.

I see you do it on social media. I always like and emotional, but it happens. It's awesome.

Oh, thank you. So when we kindle those Sabbath lights, what we're doing is we're calling in the Shehina. We're welcoming her because she infuses the Sabbath with her unique holiness, that the Shehina is the indwelling feminine presence of God in Judaism. And so that indwellingness is what I'm interested in. Why the feminine has this quality of accessibility, of embodiment, it's practical, it's grounded. It's not about, you know, that masculine ladder like, what's that vertical ascension of let's get up and out of this world, because this world hurts. The fem, and it does. And there is something to be said for those transcendent states of consciousness.

I love them.

But we're still here. Yeah, we're slowly--

And why? Because while we're here, the divine feminine invites us to fully inhabit this place, this body, with all of its beauty and all of its brokenness. And to feel, therefore, the pain of the world in our own bodies. There's something about the sacred feminine that holds the suffering of the world. It doesn't analyze it and doesn't treat it as a broken thing that needs to be repaired, but actually listens and holds it tenderly and our hearts break, even as we do so.

Well, it sounds like, to me, also a lot of the guiding concepts of mindfulness too, right? Like we're trying to create space and presence to not push away the negative mind states or thoughts that we don't want, but to hold and bear witness to them and be like, oh, okay. I just, I know there, I, my guru is named Karole Baba Maharaji, but there is clearly some other relationship I have with some feminine energy that has really guided my life, almost to the point where I really, I am grateful every day because I don't feel like I can take credit for almost anything that I do at this point. I just feel like it's happening.

I'm lucky enough to be here and not screw it up. Like that's basically where I'm at. But yeah, that's, that is a beautifully put too. We flew by this, we're basically at the end of the time, but nearby, will you come on again? So we can talk more about this stuff. And I want to, before we're done here, can you talk a little bit about your latest book, Caravan of No Despair because I'm gonna have links to it and everyone who's listening to this go to the page, but can you just talk about the experience of writing that and what it's meant for you personally and what hopefully you're trying to communicate with it or what people can get out of it?

Well, yeah, that's a big question.

I actually did a podcast with Tammy Simon insights at the edge that really talks about the transformational act of writing a memoir about deaf. And I'm teaching, by the way, a series of workshops this coming year, 2016. Oh, we're in 2016. So people can go to my website, nearbystar.com and you will see that because I've had so many people since this book came out saying to me, "Man, I have such a story of transformation but I don't know how to begin to tell it." So I decided, 'cause there were so many of those, I was like a flood of that energy, I would try to do some workshops and help people at least get started.

So, but the one thing I will say, Noah, is that in writing a memoir about a transformational experience, particularly an experience of loss, it is in itself a transformational experience. It changed everything and it didn't do it for free. It was painful and difficult and re-traumatizing in many ways to write this book about the death of my daughter. And it was the most marvelous thing I've ever done in my life. And I would recommend to people that if you're going to tell your story, you line up support, that you have a therapist or a spiritual director, loving family and friends, maybe a writing group or come to one of my workshops or all of the above, that you enter that fire with your eyes open and know that it's not going to be anything like you expect and be willing to show up for what it is rather than what your concept of it might be, mine was very, my reality was very different from the plan and it took me 14 years before I was ready.

Wow. So I want to, I have one more thing to ask of you. Can you give me an overview or just maybe some practical tips or tip about what has helped you on your path, particularly? Just something that someone listening could hear and be like, oh, well, maybe I could do that. That's something and realizing everyone is different and things resonate with people differently. But what has helped you personally throughout your path?

Oh good, I'm so glad you're asking. Well, I'd say three things immediately come to mind. One is the core of my life, my daily practice and that is to have some kind of contemplative practice, some kind of daily meditation and it doesn't even have to be sitting on a cushion, although that's the handiest, most direct route I find, but some way of cultivating the stillness in our lives because it really does help us to not believe everything we think to be able to be available to what is and responsive to that. Second one is writing, keeping a journal or having some kind of regular practice of writing freely, just free writing is incredibly helpful.

And it has often saved my life since I was a teenager. The other thing, what was the third thing? I should have written these terms like that's my, oh, oh, third thing is probably the other most important thing, probably the most important thing and that is service. So to find a way to show up and offer these hands to what needs to be done in this world and it's really important for people to remember that your way of being of service may be very different from somebody else's and any kind of fixed idea of what it means to be of service is likely to just promote guilt and burnout and push us away.

Service should come from a place of joy. So find what is your prophetic calling and do that.

Oh my God, this has been so awesome nearby. Thank you so much for coming on, this has been, I can't even tell you this has been so awesome for me.

Well, I, you're the most fun person I've ever done and I've many, many interviews. I would say, yeah, of course, that's a good thing. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) ♪ And that's what takes me long ♪ (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)

Well, if it isn't my good friends, the people who listen past the music. Thank you as always for listening past the music. That means you heard this whole episode. That's great. So I mentioned earlier in the intro that I was doing this book giveaway for a nearby book, "Caravan of No Despair", which is her memoir. So if you just listen to this, I'm sure you're, you know, you probably wanna read it. So here's the deal. I said in the beginning that you can email me, but that's not what's really happening. The people in the beginning, they don't know this. If they tuned out, they don't know this. There's gonna be a link on this page.

It's gonna be all the way at the bottom and it's gonna be kind of hidden. So you're the only people who know about this. And it's a link to join the synchronicity community. What's that? Oh, you will find out. But the first thing you wanna do is go to the bottom of the page, enter, click it, click it, put in your email and then you'll automatically be entered into the raffle to win a potential copy of the book. Maybe I'll give out more than one copy, who knows? But yeah, that's all I'm asking for you. As always, I would love and appreciate if you rate and review this on iTunes, Stitcher, wherever, whoever.

Yeah, that's it. So thanks again for listening and I'll see you next week.