Quest Magazine

Printed in the  Fall 2017   issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "Justice and Mercy: An Interview with Rabbi Rami Shapiro" Quest 105:4(Fall 2017) pg. 10-15, 40

By Richard Smoley 

Rabbi Rami Shapiro has an impressive array of credentials. In the past he has earned rabbinic ordination from Hebrew Union College and a Ph.D. from Union Graduate School, created a synagogue, worked as a management consultant for Fortune 500 companies, and been initiated into the Ramakrishna Order of Vedanta Hinduism. “Today,” he writes on his website,“I am a freelance theologian making my living writing and talking. I know. I can’t believe it either.” In addition, he has been a longtime student of the Ancient Wisdom.

            He is the author of thirty books, including Recovery: The Sacred Art; The Twelve Steps as Spiritual Practice; The Sacred Art of Lovingkindness: Preparing to Practice; Perennial Wisdom for the Spiritually Independent; and the forthcoming Holy Rascals: Advice for Spiritual Revolutionaries. He is also the editor of The World Wisdom Bible: A New Testament for a Global Spirituality.

            Rabbi Rami came to the TS’s Olcott headquarters in May 2017 to do a lecture and workshop on compassion, and I had the opportunity to interview him during his visit. I was particularly interested in his views on the balance between justice and mercy—a central theme of Jewish spirituality. When we were finished, I took him for a very pleasant drive around the area, including a visit to the nearby BAPS Swaminarayan Sanstha Hindu temple and the center for the Jain Society of Metropolitan Chicago, which was just up the road in Bartlett, Illinois—two of the most impressive religious sites in the vicinity of Olcott.

            Chris Bolger, head of IT at Olcott, recorded the interview and contributed a question at the end. 

Richard: Could you tell us how you became interested in the perennial wisdom?

Rabbi Rami: Since I was sixteen, I was interested in comparative religion. I was always studying Buddhism and Hinduism as well as growing up in an Orthodox Jewish household, but when I found my rebbe, my Jewish rabbinic guru, who was Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, he at one point said to me that I am a Jewish practitioner of perennial wisdom, and I resonated with that as well. I look at religion as language, and my mother tongue is Judaism, but I am—at least I desire to be—as fluent as possible in a variety of religions.

I’ve been doing that since I was a teenager, because I think the greater my understanding of the world’s religions becomes, the more nuanced my understanding of reality is, because my vocabulary expands.

Richard: People sometimes criticize this approach for blurring over significant differences between traditions. Do you consider that a problem?

Rabbi Rami: I think it’s an issue. So, for example, Stephen Prothero from Boston University has a book called God Is Not One, and he tries to make the case, and he does it really effectively, that each religion is a unique language. It has its own theology: salvation in Christianity is not enlightenment in Buddhism. You can’t just flip those terms and imagine them to be synonymous. He says each religion has its own unique stance and needs to be honored in its uniqueness.

I have no problem with that. What I’m interested in is the core teaching of the mystics, and then I don’t think there is a difference. There’s language differences, but the mystics know that the language is just a finger pointing to the moon, to use a Zen phrase.

 In 1984, Father Thomas Keating invited me to be part of the inaugural Snowmass Group, where he brought twelve contemplatives from twelve different traditions together to live with him at Saint Benedict’s Monastery in Snowmass, Colorado.

Our days were structured. We followed the prayer life of the monks who were living in the monastery, but when they were working, we were meditating together and discussing different things. Father Keating had only one rule. He said you cannot talk for your tradition. You can only talk from your tradition, because that’s your language. That’s what you’re steeped in. It didn’t take very long to realize that, even though each of us was following her or his own meditative practice, something was happening, and whatever that something was seemed to be the same for all of us.

When we came back to our normal, waking state of consciousness, we’d all feel lighter, more loving, more compassionate. We lived a more just existence, and we took our own religious traditions less and less literally, and even less and less seriously. We knew they were languages, and we weren’t going to get hung up on semantics, because ultimately we were dealing with something that was ineffable.

Richard: One common theme in many traditions is the problematic nature of human existence. Something is wrong, whether that’s considered to be original sin or dukkha or maya or delusion. All of these point to something that seems to be problematic or defective in the human condition. Where does this come from?

Rabbi Rami: Well, Prothero again takes that model, and it’s sort of a medical model. The religion says you have a disease, or dis-ease, and then it sells you the cure. On one level, that to me is just marketing. If you want me to be a Christian, you’re going to have to convince me I have original sin first. In a sense religion at that level is iatrogenic. You go for the cure, but they give you a disease first. So every religion has its disease, and then it sells you the cure.

 My own sense of it is it’s not a disease. It’s not a bug; it’s part of the software itself. We are broken, we do suffer. Our lives are fundamentally unsatisfactory, in dukkha, when we live the uncontrollable drives of hunger and desires. So we’re all broken, but that’s just part of the system. It’s not a problem. It’s just the nature of our reality.

 So can we embrace our own brokenness and see the greater wholeness of which it is a part? That, to me, is the spiritual work—not to stop being broken.

There’s an interesting teaching on this, in Leviticus 19:18, where it says, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” In the early 1800s, Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav, one of the great Jewish mystics, said, “Don’t read, love your neighbor, rea, as yourself. Read ra, evil.* You shall love your evil, your brokenness, your dark side as yourself because it’s a part of yourself.”

 So you don’t have to fix it. You have to embrace it. The ancient rabbis said that you have to channel that negative energy into something good, but there’s no need to fix yourself, simply to radically accept yourself and everyone else, and then move beyond that.

Richard: That does make a lot of sense, but at the same time, so many religions seem to be focused on sin, as in the Hebrew Bible: sacrificing animals to atone for sin. Again, there’s something wrong that needs to be repaired with the divine. Does that idea make any sense to you?

Rabbi Rami: I think it’s Iron Age BS. It’s the theology of that time. What’s interesting to me is this notion that God in and of God’s own self is somehow broken, and that’s a Kabbalistic notion from the 1500s.

Rabbi Isaac Luria taught that when God created the world, God didn’t know how to do it. It was the first time, he was definitely a novice, and the way it was done, God shattered in the process like Humpty Dumpty.

The notion that God is broken was very compelling, not just to Jewish mystics, but to lay people. They really caught on that God is broken, the universe is broken, and it’s the Jews’ job to try to repair it with justice and compassion.

Isaac Luria came up with this after the Jews were exiled from Spain and Portugal in 1492, and it explained why we were kicked out. His answer was, you healed Spain. You have to leave. You don’t want to leave. You’ve been there a thousand years, you’re comfortable, so the only way I can get you out to the next job site to put together the next piece of brokenness in the divine nature is to have you kicked out. That’s how they understood it. It was no longer a punishment from God. It was part of the job description. We have to keep moving.

The way they would heal the world is not just through ritual, but through a very high level of interaction with animate and inanimate objects and beings. You’d kiss a book, and that was the way of honoring a book. You didn’t waste food, and you treated animals a certain way, and all of this was considered a methodology for healing the universe, which is fundamentally broken.

When you get to the 1700s and the Hasidic movement comes in, the Baal Shem Tov and his early disciples basically said what we’re taking as ontology, as some kind of true scientific fact, is not that—God cannot be broken; God includes the whole and broken and transcends it—but that you and I psychologically are misreading the whole thing.

Richard: What you say brings up a certain dichotomy in the world’s religious traditions. I will oversimplify it greatly here: It would seem that the Abrahamic traditions have conceived of this problematic nature of the universe in terms of a moral error of some sort—sin. Whereas in the East, much of the time, it seems to be a problem of a cognitive error—avidya, ignorance, which is more what you’re pointing toward. So insofar as human existence is problematic, do you see it more as a cognitive problem, so to speak?

Rabbi Rami: Yes, I think it’s a cognitive problem. When the mystics read the Garden of Eden story from the mystical point of view, they notice some things that we miss when we get the Sunday School point of view.

 We imagine that eating from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil is a sin, but in fact, in the mystical tradition, it’s what God wants you to do. That’s why the serpent is sent, and without getting into the weeds of Jewish Kabbalistic stuff, the serpent is often understood
(because of numerology) to be the Messiah in snake’s clothing.

So God sends the Messiah, puts the forbidden tree in the middle, points it out—sort of reverse psychology. “Don’t do this,” hoping they’ll do it. When they don’t do it, then the snake/Messiah goes to the woman to get her to do it. Why the woman rather than the man?

By conventional thinking, it’s because women are weak, but in the mystical reading—and it comes right out of the Torah itself—the woman is superior to the man in her capacity to become wise.

She saw the tree looked like it would be tasty, but she doesn’t eat it. She saw that it was beautiful just to possess it, but she doesn’t grab it. Only when she sees that it’s wise is she willing to risk her life (because God says, I’ll kill you if you do this). She’s like a Hebrew Prometheus character. She steals wisdom—if, in fact, it’s stealing.

The mystics said we should read this as three different encounters with the tree. The first time she’s wrestling with her natural hungers. It’s delicious-looking, but she masters her physical hunger. The second time she’s attracted to beauty, so it’s more of an emotional thing, but she resists that and masters her emotion. The third time, she’s experiencing an awareness that this is going to transform her intellectually, psychologically, and spiritually, and then she eats it.

Then it says she gave to the man who was with her also, and he ate. Adam eats without any process. She masters the physical, masters the emotional, and takes the risk for the spiritual. Adam just eats it, like Homer Simpson with a donut.

From that point on, we get the punishments. After those punishments are laid out, the language shifts to completely masculine singular language. When God says now that the man—and it excludes her completely—now that the man has taken from the Tree of Knowledge, lest he now reach out and take from the Tree of Life also, we’re going to kick him out of the garden, and only Adam is kicked out of the garden.

The woman is never kicked out. She’s never forbidden from eating from the Tree of Life.

According to the mystics, Adam did not possess wisdom. He got a little more smart, but he’s still spiritually dumb, and if he eats from the Tree of Life, he will be frozen in that state for all eternity.

The woman has processed it. She’s now awake, enlightened, and if she ate from the tree, she could stay in that state forever. So he’s kicked out, and in the next chapter, she is out. The assumption is that she realizes that she now has to guide this guy so that he can become wise also.

Then it says that God places a cherub with a flaming sword to guard the way. Again, the way we’re taught in Sunday School is it means to keep them out. But the Hebrew is ambiguous. The Hebrew simply says to keep the way safe, and the idea is it’s safe for them to come back when she’s finally taught him to process it and become wise on his own, and they can both come back together.

That’s when he names her the mother of all the living. At that point, in a sense, the jig is up, and you realize we’re talking about the Divine Mother, the divine feminine. She exists in every religious tradition.

Richard: Where does evil fit in with the whole picture?

Rabbi Rami: I think there’s palpable evil in the world. Is it simply part of the structure, the way the brokenness is part of the greater whole? I tend to think that’s what it is, that you can’t have evil without good, you can’t have good without evil.

Isaiah 45:7 has God say, “I create good, I create evil, light, darkness, I do all these things.” So I think it’s just built into the pie.

The rabbis say that humanity is born with a capacity for good and a capacity for evil. They say without the capacity for evil, you wouldn’t get married, you wouldn’t build a business, you wouldn’t have children. They’re really talking about concern with the self.

My understanding of it from the rabbinic model is that we have this capacity for self that can go into selfishness, but also a capacity for self that could go to selflessness. You want to stay somehow fluid and be appropriate on that spectrum, depending on the situation that you’re in.

I don’t see evil as a separate, conscious devil character. I think that’s just something we made up. Evil is our capacity to go so far towards selfishness that we do great harm to other people, and then even so far towards selflessness that we are either irrelevant to the world or maybe even do harm to ourselves.

Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, in the 1700s, had this notion—this is way before we had bell curve, but he had the notion of the bell curve. He said that people are born on a spectrum.

On one end you have what he called the rasha. That was the evil person. That person could not do a good thing. It would never even occur to them to do something that wasn’t evil.

Right next to them was the almost-evil  person, and that was someone who thought about doing something good and then said, “Nah,” and did something evil. At the opposite end, you had the tzaddik, who was the pure saint. Next to that was the near-saint, who would say, “I could do something bad—nah, I can’t do it.”

He said those extremes get no demerits, if you’re on the rasha, evil, side, and no points, if you’re on the saintly side, because you have no choice. God has to manifest infinite possibility, those are the extremes, so if you’re a sociopath, a psychopath, we want to put you away because you’re dangerous, but you can’t damn them to hell, because it’s just the way they were made. The same on the saintly side.

So, he said, most of us—and this is where the bell curve comes in—he called them the beinoni, the “in-betweeners.” That’s where we can be selfish, we can be selfless, and we have to ask the question of what’s appropriate at the moment.

You can link it back to Ecclesiastes: there’s a time for everything under heaven, so one of the practices is to basically ask yourself, what time is it? Is it a time for gathering stones? Is it a time for throwing stones? A time for joy, a time for weeping? Whatever it is, the key is to know what time it is and how to respond to that.

Richard: You obviously feel a strong connection with the divine feminine, and you obviously feel that this divine feminine is returning or making herself more manifest in the world. How do you see that happening?

Rabbi Rami: Is there actually a divine feminine, or are we as a species, humans, returning to a level where we can be more aware of that quality? I think it’s the second. I have a hard time imagining volitional beings out there that are consciously doing all these things.

I tend to think that human consciousness is on a spiral going up. It could go down, and sometimes I look at the newspapers and say, “Oh, it’s going down,” but that it’s on a spiral, so we keep going around. We keep hitting the same perennial issues, but maybe at a higher, more conscious level as we do.

The Divine Mother starts to reappear in the late 1800s. Carl Jung, when he died, said the most important thing is the return of the divine feminine. Bede Griffith, I think, said that pretty much on his deathbed.

We’re more aware of her presence in our traditions. Hinduism never lost her, but Judaism, despite having so much feminine language, lost that whole dimension, but it’s returning. So I see that as a hopeful sign. I think it’s us experiencing this feminine dimension, and by feminine dimension I don’t mean it’s all love. It’s more like Kali. It’s a fierce love.

My own experience is of the Divine Mother, whose searing love, for me, or everybody, manifests by burning away everything I’m holding dear, everything I’m clinging to spiritually, theologically, psychologically. Every time I get a grasp on something, then the grace of the Divine Mother takes it away from me.

Richard: I have a question about this view of the return of the Divine Mother. At this point, any value that was traditionally considered as feminine in a positive sense—giving, caring, nurturing, being compassionate—these are the very virtues that seem to be withering away in the world. We see fewer feminine values in this country now than we did fifty years ago. How do you reconcile those two facts?

Rabbi Rami: This is the way I understand it for myself. The more we are opening to her on the one hand, on the other hand we are shutting down because we’re so frightened. We’re so afraid of what might happen.

Just read the newspaper in the United States, and you read about all the horrible things that the government wants to do, and there are millions of women who voted for the current government. So the fact that they’re going to take away health care for millions and millions of people would seem like not a loving, compassionate thing to do, but both men and women are willing to do it.

My argument is simply that when a portion of the population is becoming more open to the divine feminine and the values you’re talking about, another portion is seeing it, being frightened by it, and shutting down.

So now there’s something crazy going on. I’m hoping it’s simply a reaction to the elevation of consciousness; the group that wants to go the other way, it’s their last gasp in this cycle. I have no idea if that’s true, but if not, I can believe it’s the Kali Yuga and the whole thing’s going to hell anyway, so it won’t matter because then we’ll have another Golden Age.

But I’m hoping that that’s not going to happen, and that this is just a reaction to what maybe is the deeper transformation. There’s no guarantee. You can’t sit back and simply say don’t worry about it, God will take care of things.

Richard: One of the main themes of the Kabbalah is a balance between Hesed (mercy) and Din (judgment). A lot of your work has to do with teaching compassion and lovingkindness, so what do you see as the best way to balance these two forces?

Rabbi Rami:  Yes, in the Kabbalah, they are two opposing forces, and only when they’re balanced is there health in the system. The whole Kabbalistic Tree of Life is about balancing these opposing systems. Reb Zalman used to have this thing where you’d stand, and he would look at you, and he was like a spiritual chiropractor. He’d say, “There’s too much Din, too much judgment, not enough compassion. Work on compassion.” The idea was to balance that always.

My own sense is that justice and compassion really are flip sides of the same coin. It’s not that they’re opposing forces. You really can’t be compassionate if you’re not also just, and you can’t really be just if you can’t have compassion. Justice without compassion is violent, and compassion without justice is just wimpiness. So it’s a matter of what the Buddhists would call upaya, skillful means, knowing what’s really necessary here. I don’t think it’s ever just compassion or just justice, as if they were separate, but compassion and justice.

Richard: I have had any number of sincere, practicing, intelligent, educated Jewish friends say that Judaism has no teachings about the afterlife. Could you respond to that?

Rabbi Rami: Judaism has no official teachings about the afterlife. We don’t have a theology. We don’t even have official teachings about God. Really, it’s pretty wide open, but we have a variety of possibilities that different Jewish teachers have entertained. So, for some, and maybe most Jews, the answer is there is no afterlife. You die. That’s it. You’re finished.

Then there are some strands of Kabbalah that say, no, we believe in reincarnation. Some who believe in reincarnation say you get three shots at fulfilling your destiny, and if you don’t do it the first time, you come back, and if not the second, you come back again. If after three chances, you’re still not an awake, aware, loving, caring human being, then you come back as a rock. Not a little rock, but a rock that someone could sit on, and you’ll be a rock until a wise sage sits on you, at which point you enter the reincarnation cycle and you can try again.

There’s a teaching that says when you die, you, the Bible says everyone, goes to a place called Sheol, which is like a Motel 6 where they don’t leave the light on for you. It’s this gray area. Everybody’s there until the resurrection, and then everybody gets out.

We don’t have a notion of eternal damnation. That Judaism just doesn’t have. What speaks to me more powerfully than any of those is the notion that the nondual Jewish mystics have that you arise in the divine and then you simply return to the divine. Then, the question is, is there a personality that survives death? I’m of the school that says no.

What happens to all my experiences? Who knows? I haven’t died that I know of, but one theory says they just go into Rupert Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields. They just go into that, and they enter into the human consciousness pool, so people can learn from your experience forever. Some people say it’s that way. Some people say nothing remains, it’s all gone. I have no idea. I find very comforting the idea that I arise from this infinite divinity, and then I return to that.  So that’s my afterlife scenario. You go back to being what you already and always are: the divine, the energy, the universe, whatever you want to call it.

Richard: That’s very powerful and very beautiful. Is there anything else you might add?

Rabbi Rami: Here’s my plea to people of any religious tradition. Lots of people don’t have one, but if you do have one, don’t let them dumb it down for you. There’s this deep, mystical core in every religion that we talked earlier about—this perennial wisdom that everything arises from the one thing, and you can know that directly.

That’s at the core of every religion, and we let our clergy just ignore it and teach us the surface. We should not be satisfied with the surface. We let religion off the hook. We shouldn’t let it off the hook. Whatever your religion is, you’re at the tip of the iceberg, and there’s so much more that, for whatever reason, you’re not being taught.

So my plea is go to the heart of it. Go to the depths of it, and when you’re there, you’ll discover that everyone is at that same deep point. We’ve transcended religion, we’ve transcended language, and now we’re in this spiritual deep point where we gather in silence in the face of or as manifestations of the ineffable.

Chris Bolger: Would you talk a little bit about your thoughts on the Theosophical Society?

Rabbi Rami: I became aware of the Theosophical Society in my teens, and I didn’t even know what it was. I used to spend a lot of time at a used bookstore in Springfield, Massachusetts, Johnson’s Bookstore. It was a huge loft with all these books, and there was a lot of stuff from Annie Besant and Mme. Blavatsky and Theosophy.

 At the time, I was just getting into this comparative study of world religions, which is one of the Three Objects of the Theosophical Society. Here was a group that’s been around since the 1870s, I guess, that had been doing this all along, and I was like, “Wow. These people have done the hard lifting. All I have to do is now learn from them.” It was very eye-opening.

Then I lost track of it. It fell off my radar. I went to the university. I got degrees in different religions, but when I rediscovered Theosophy, and I first came across it just a few years ago at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Salt Lake City, and they had a booth. I said, “You’re still here. How amazing.”

Then, when I was invited  to come and speak here, I really felt this was an opportunity to go back to that period in my life when I first found it, but come to it at a much higher level. I am very, very excited that it’s still thriving and that there are still people out there who don’t have to be convinced that there’s a deeper, shared, esoteric perennial wisdom that the religions have, and they don’t have to be convinced that we should study from all of these different religious traditions. Here’s a group that’s been doing this forever, and it’s already inclined to go as deep as they can go with it.

So, my own sense of it is A, hallelujah, and B, it needs a bigger megaphone. I go to places, interfaith conferences, but only at the Parliament did I see the Theosophical Society represented.

So I’m trying to reinvent the wheel. You have the wheel, and it’s not rolling. My concern is that there’s been a disconnect between the gift that the Theosophical Society has and the people who need it. Somehow people have to become reacquainted or acquainted for the first time with the work that the Theosophical Society is doing and has been doing for so long. This is a gift that has to be sent out again so people unwrap the genius that it has to offer. I guess being here now is such a gift for me personally.

[*] In Hebrew, these two words are spelled exactly the same.

Printed in the  Fall 2017  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Bruce, David, "Vengeance or Justice?" Quest 105:4(Fall 2017) pg. 16-19

By David Bruce

A father learns how to forgive his son’s murderer.

Theosophical literature has much to say on the subject of karma, the universal law of cause and effect, which is closely related to the concepts of justice and fairness. As a child, I had the wonderful opportunity to come into contact with teachings of the Ageless Wisdom tradition through my parents, both of whom were members of the Theosophical Society in America. Consequently, my worldview was shaped and influenced in large part by them, as well as by the many Theosophical books in their home library. The conversations I had with my mother, a teacher by profession, and the knowledge I absorbed from my parents’ Theosophical library became a part of me and informed my outlook on life.

Then, as an adult many years later, I found my Theosophical worldview put to the test. It was the evening of September 26, 1996. At that time I was married, with one child, a boy named Robert, who was a month shy of his nineteenth birthday.

I had met my first wife, Chong, while serving in the U.S. Army in South Korea. When my tour of duty was completed in 1971, I brought my wife-to-be home with me to Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She found a job making printed circuit boards in an assembly plant that contracted with the military, while I enrolled at the University of Wisconsin to pursue my teaching degree in musical education. Within five years we had our first and only child, a handsome lad with distinct Asian facial features and a gentle temperament. When Robert was a teenager, I enrolled him in a martial-arts school where we both eventually achieved our black belts in the Korean style known as Tae Kwon Do. As an adult black belt, I was expected to teach the colored-belt class, which generally consisted of younger students, and that is what I was doing on the fateful night of September 26, 1996. On the way home, I received a panic-stricken call from Chong: one of Robert’s friends had called her and told her that Robert was hurt and was taken to the hospital. We had no more details at that time, but it was enough to send my wife and me into a state of alarm.

When I heard the news, a cold chill went down my back, and I felt sick in the pit of my stomach. I hurried home, picked up Chong, and sped to the hospital, not caring that I was exceeding the speed limit by at least twenty miles per hour. Having arrived safely at the hospital, we were ushered into a small room, where we were greeted by a detective from the Milwaukee police department. He had that no-nonsense, weary look that is often found on those who see death on a daily basis. He informed us that Robert had been shot and unfortunately had died before the ambulance could get him to the hospital.

I felt as if something had snapped inside of me. A few hours ago, Robert was alive and well, intending to play basketball with his friends at one of the school playgrounds. Now my wife and I were told that we would never again see Robert’s smile, never again hear his laughter, or feel the touch of his hand or his warm embrace. How do you process something like that? It’s like having the bottom of your world suddenly yanked out from under you, violently, irrevocably. As a parent, how do you deal with this sudden, brutal reality of knowing that your only child is gone—forever?

I have watched enough detective shows to know that people process grief in different ways. My wife’s reaction was immediate—tears, uncontrollable sobbing, outright hysteria. My reaction was also immediate, but with far different emotions. An uncontrollable rage swept over me. “Anger” is too weak a word to describe the powerful intensity of my emotions at that time, which were an eruption of white-hot, seething rage, the likes of which I had never before experienced. I kept it contained while talking to the detective, but just barely. The rage was there, under the surface, gaining strength and just waiting to explode. The tears and sorrow came later in the days that followed, but at that fateful moment I was a keg of dynamite. I wanted to get my hands on whoever was responsible for killing our son. I remember feeling an irresistible and overwhelming urge to inflict severe bodily harm on whoever had done this. Put me in a room with them—alone—for just five minutes. I was primed for retribution!

After the detective had finished asking us questions, we drove home from the hospital, our world shattered, Chong sobbing uncontrollably, my desire for righteous vengeance still churning inside, building in its power and intensity. Somebody had to pay!

But what happened to me that night as we lay in bed, hoping in vain that sleep would wash away this horrible nightmare, was quite remarkable. After I lay in bed for hours, still not able to fall asleep, the cyclone of emotions tapered off, leaving me in a state of exhaustion. Just as I was about to drift into sleep, a distinct voice, seemingly out of nowhere, spoke words to this effect: “You’ve been studying Theosophy all your life and this is how you’re going to react?”

That was the turning point. I remembered that it was wrong to return evil for evil, to react to violence with more violence; that it was wrong to take the law into my own hands. As a Theosophist, I knew that I should trust the divine law of karma to hold the perpetrator, or perpetrators, accountable for what happened. It also became crystal-clear that harboring anger would poison my soul and turn me into something I didn’t want to be. Moreover, how could I possibly support and care for my grieving wife if I allowed myself to be consumed by rage and hatred? So, in light of these realizations, I did the only thing that I could do, and I did it in a heartbeat: I simply let go of my anger—just like that—in an instant.

How was it possible to turn on a dime, going from an emotional cyclone to a state of mind that was calm, resolute, and devoid of anger? It had to be on account of my many years of meditation practice and Theosophical study. It was as though my higher Self had issued a mandate to trust in divine justice (karma) and remember that everything happens for a reason. Repeatedly, over the weeks and months that followed, I reminded myself of these things, and the anger never returned—not even once. I say this not for the purpose of self-congratulation, but as a simple fact illustrating the power of Theosophy.

While my anger never returned―not even when I was seated in the courtroom months later facing the murderers―a profound sense of grief and unspeakable sorrow soon filled the emotional vacuum. My wife, Chong, was hit particularly hard, as would be the case with any parent. Her whole life had revolved largely around her son, and without having the support of a religious or philosophical background, she soon drifted into chronic depression, which was only relieved by her covert trips to the local gambling casino in the months and years that followed. As for me, I relied heavily upon Theosophical teachings in order to bear the ordeal. I knew that the death of the body did not mean the death of the soul, and in fact I had several meditation sessions in the days that followed where I detected the presence of Robert. Another thing that helped me was the fact that each day, each week, hundreds of other parents in this country lose a child. The knowledge that many others had experienced what Chong and I were experiencing somehow made my sorrow easier to bear. However, we both wanted the perpetrators to be caught and face justice in a court of law. Our hopes were soon answered.

Within a few days of Robert’s murder, we learned from the police what had happened. Robert had driven his car into the driveway of his friend Jose, stopping there only to pick him up in order to go play basketball. It was a rough neighborhood on the south side of Milwaukee, an area known for gang activity. I was never comfortable with Robert driving around that part of town. Earlier that week there had been a shooting on the street where Jose lived, and consequently members of the Spanish Cobras, a gang on the south side of Milwaukee, were on full alert. Two of them observed Robert pull into the driveway with two of his friends with him in the car. One of the gang members asked Robert, who by this time was getting out of the car, what the hell he was doing in their neighborhood. My son, a second-degree black belt and not knowing who they were, told them to buzz off. The two gang members responded by pulling out their nine-millimeter handguns and shooting in Robert’s direction. Bullets flew through the back windshield as shattered glass showered over the passenger in the back seat. Robert turned away and tried to run, but a bullet caught him in the back of the neck, severing his carotenoid artery. The other passenger in Robert’s car, having stepped out of the car with him, was hit in the leg by a bullet, which cut through an artery. The ambulance managed to get him to the hospital before he bled to death, but Robert died en route. Jose was about to walk out the side door of his apartment when stray bullets pierced the wooden door, mere inches in front of him. Had he stepped outside, Jose might have been a casualty too. During the investigation, the police found bullets in the kitchen wall of a house located a block away. It was total mayhem for a few fatal seconds, leaving one person dead, another severely wounded, and friends and family in shock.

Within days, the police had identified the two shooters. Within two months, the suspects were apprehended and brought into custody. One was a fifteen-year-old boy named Adam Procell, who had once been on the school honor roll, but was now a member of the Spanish Cobras. The other was a twenty-one-year-old named Victor Cruz. During Victor’s trial, I wondered how his parents felt: their only other child was already incarcerated and serving a lengthy sentence. The police also arrested the leader of the Spanish Cobras, assuming that he may have ordered the hit. A jury later acquitted him on the grounds of insufficient evidence, but the two shooters were found guilty and were both sentenced to forty years, the maximum allowed in Wisconsin. But before we reached that point, Chong and I had to endure the long, painful ordeal of the legal system at work, which meant sitting through three separate trials, one for each of the youths. Over and over we had to return to the courthouse. Again and again, we had to relive the circumstances of Robert’s murder. It was not easy. At times we even feared for our safety because of the presence of other gang members attending the trials. Fortunately, none of them ever did more than glance at us with their arrogant and intimidating sneers.

During the sentencing phase, the judge gave me a chance to speak before the court. This would have been my opportunity to get on the soapbox and tell those two kids what despicable human beings they were, and that I hoped they would rot in hell. As a Theosophist, I could not do that. I did not want to be an instrument of hatred and bitterness. Instead, I spoke quietly, soberly, telling each of them that what they had done was so very wrong, and that now they were about to face the consequences. I implored each of them to use their time in prison wisely, to reflect upon their actions and try to be a better person. After my remarks, the judge said that she’d never heard such a remarkable statement from a member of a victim’s family before.

During Adam’s sentencing phase, I actually felt a bit sorry for this fifteen-year-old youth who came from a broken home. Neither of his parents showed during trial or for the sentencing, which I found to be incomprehensible and profoundly pathetic. Yes, I still wanted Adam to face justice, but I couldn’t help wondering how lonely and abandoned he must feel. None of the gang members showed up for his sentencing, which tells you something about gang loyalty. The only person who was there for Adam was a scrawny girl, who appeared to be no more than thirteen or fourteen years old and looked as clueless as he did.

Immediately after Robert’s murder, my wife and I took a leave of absence from work, very much needing the opportunity to grieve with family and friends, all of whom were very supportive. Within ten days, I made the decision to return to my normal routine, which meant returning to work, resuming my martial-arts classes, and attending the meetings of the Theosophical Society in Milwaukee. My attitude was that although somebody had snuffed out the life of our son, I was not about to let them destroy mine! I’ve seen plenty of parents who, having lost a child to violence, continue to carry the anger and bitterness around with them for years and years. They are never quite the same. It’s very understandable, and I’m not judging those who react in this manner, but I was fiercely resolved not to let that happen to me. For me, the best way to deal with grief is to immerse myself in my work, not to sit at home and wallow in misery and self-pity. I returned to my Tae Kwon Do classes and passed my third-degree black-belt examination in November. Returning to my sales job and talking to customers over the phone was difficult, but when the tears welled up without warning, I discreetly disappeared into the men’s room, where I would remain until I regained my composure.

One person that helped me through this time of grieving was Dora Kunz, a noted clairvoyant and former president of the TSA. Ed Abdill, another member, had suggested that I give her a call and ask her if she could tell me anything about Robert’s condition on the other side. I hesitated for several days, not knowing Dora personally. Eventually I found the nerve to call her. After listening to my request, she paused for no more than a few seconds and then gave me a detailed report on Robert’s situation. I don’t know how she did this; she had never met Robert and she really didn’t know me, although I had passed her in the hallway a few times when attending programs at Olcott. Dora informed me that Robert was on the astral plane with other youngsters who had recently lost their lives. They were all being watched over by an older and wiser being, and she assured me that they were in good hands.  I had no way of verifying this, but I wanted it to be true, and it certainly provided me with a measure of solace during the darkest period of my life.

Sadly, my wife was not able to process Robert’s death very well. She became another person, almost a stranger, one who had lost the zest for life and who succumbed to long bouts of depression. She closed the living-room curtains, shutting out the sunlight, and drifted off into a gambling addiction that lasted for years before I knew about it, and which resulted in eventual bankruptcy and the loss of our home and marriage.

Three years later my mother gave me a newspaper clipping from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The story was about the youngest male ever to be sent to the “supermax” prison in Boscobel, Wisconsin. It was Adam Procell, the boy who had murdered my son. Adam had been fighting with guards and other prisoners, so the authorities sent him to a maximum-security prison, where he would be held in an isolation cell all day except for one hour of solitary exercise.

By August 2007, I was working at the national center of the Theosophical Society when my mother mailed me another newspaper clipping. Again, it was about Adam, but this time the article was upbeat, describing how Adam had turned his life around after a few rebellious years in prison, and was now tutoring other prisoners and counseling them to stay out of gangs. This impressed me so much that I sent Adam a short note of encouragement. He returned the favor with a long and moving letter, expressing his sorrow and regret for his actions on the night of September 26.

In October 2011, I received an official apology letter from Adam, a step that was necessary as part of his parole process. It was a sincere and heartfelt letter, expressing profound regret for his past actions and the pain he had caused. Four more years passed, and in June 2015 a package was delivered to my apartment. It was a book written by Adam and sent to me by his uncle, who lived in Colorado. The book, Anatomizing the Gang Culture, was Adam’s 552-page effort at atonement, the express purpose of the book being to discourage young men from joining gangs. Again, I was favorably impressed with this young man’s effort to turn his life around, so I wrote him a letter of appreciation, letting him know that I held no malice in my heart for what he had done some nineteen years ago, and that I hoped he would continue his good work while in prison.

What is justice? To some people, justice is an eye for an eye, tit for tat. You took a life, therefore you do not deserve to live. This view sees justice as a form of revenge, of retribution. Others see it in strictly legal terms, where a criminal must be held accountable and serve the appropriate amount of time in prison. But a prisoner can serve thirty or forty years and emerge from prison worse off than he was before entry. Or a prisoner can use the experience of incarceration as a wake-up call and take steps to change the direction of his life. As a Theosophist, I naturally think in terms of karma and the evolution of the soul. It is said that life is a great school to which we return again and again. We make mistakes, some of them quite serious and life-changing. Don’t get me wrong. There are some criminals who need to stay behind bars, because they have been and continue to be a menace to society. But there are others who wake up and begin to change their lives, something that is quite possible with younger prisoners who have not yet become hardened. Adam Procell is a case in point. His crime was committed when he was a mere fifteen years old. Today, twenty-one years later, he is no longer a boy, but a man, one who has done intense soul searching and found the strength not only to express regret for his crime, but to reach out to other prisoners and help them set their feet upon a better path. I have written twice to the Wisconsin parole board, telling them that I feel Adam has served enough time (twenty-one years to date) and that he should be given another chance at returning to society.

 I don’t know how much weight my letters have with the board, but I have made it clear that I believe that the Adam Procell of 2017 is a far different person from that Adam Procell of 1996, and that I would certainly support their decision to grant him parole.

Today David Bruce lives happily with his wife, Donna Wimberley, who is also a longtime Theosophist and former secretary to TSA presidents Dorothy Abbenhouse, John Algeo, and Betty Bland. David works full-time at the national center of the TSA, where he serves as national secretary and supervises the TSA Prison Program.

VOLUME 105, NUMBER 4

CONTENTS

Justice and Mercy: An Interview with Rabbi Rami Shapiro
Richard Smoley

Vengeance or Justice?
David Bruce

Memories of Yogananda
Ray Grasse

The Fetters of "Free Thought""
George Stanciu

From the Editor's Desk
Richard Smoley

Viewpoint: Transitions
Barbara Hebert

President's Diary

Printed in the  Summer 2017  issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Smoley, Richard, "From the Editor’s Desk" Quest 105:3(Summer 2017) pg. 2

Warning: you may find the material in this editorial extremely disturbing. I know I do.

Disturbing news about the earth—we have had so much of it that we have grown numb. News sources insist that climate change, pollution, and species extinction are proceeding faster than even the gloomiest pessimists had feared. The human race has had such an impact on the planet that some scientists say we live in a new geological age—the Anthropocene or “new human” age.

What, then, is our relation to nature and to the earth? Here is the standard dogma: nature, pure, pristine, innocent, was doing fine on its own until the human race began to monkey with it (starting with the Industrial Revolution). We humans are an intrusion upon nature and are ravaging it. Some even say that we would be doing the planet a favor by making ourselves extinct.

An assumption underlies this view: that there is a line. On one side of this line is something called “nature,” and on the other side of it is the human race. We humans have drawn this line ourselves. We have cut ourselves off from nature so radically that we are like a cancer growing on it.

This thinking goes back to the Greeks in the fifth century BC, who drew a distinction between nature (phúsis) and convention (nómos). In essence it draws the very line that I have just spoken of. There is the way things are naturally, and then there are the arbitrary conventions, including laws and customs, that humans set up. In other words, there is nature, and then there is us.

This idea still shapes our thinking in ways beyond our imagining. But beyond a certain point it may not be useful. Why, for example, should an anthill be considered part of nature whereas an apartment building shouldn’t?

Another, fairly new, concept is the Gaia hypothesis, which says the earth is a living, self-regulating entity. If this is true, where do we humans stand vis-à-vis Gaia? Are we an aberration, a maverick of the ecosystem that has gotten out of hand and will soon be curbed? Or do we have some other, more mysterious relation to this cosmic being?

Even slight acquaintance with geology and biology and paleontology leaves one overriding impression: that the earth’s changes over millions of years have been brought about by cataclysms: meteorites, climate change, the rise and subsidence of major land masses.

If this is the case, and if Gaia is a self-regulating entity, it follows that cataclysms are part of this regulating process. Could it be that human-caused climate changes today are serving some purpose of the earth’s that we do not understand?

As I warned you, this is a disturbing idea. In the first place, it could serve as a license for anything: if pollution and desertification are part of a natural process, then we need do nothing about them; actually we are helping nature along.

In the second place, it would mean that we have no idea of our own ultimate role in the ecosystem. It could be that we are doing something useful from the earth’s point of view, but we are as unaware of it as a bug on a leaf.

Finally, if we view the planet’s history over the geological ages, we see that individual species are little more than blips on a screen. They come and go. They appear to serve, or reflect, some larger purpose, but they have no great value in themselves. We could be, very likely are, just one more of those species. We could be tossed aside once our job is done.

Many esoteric doctrines, including Theosophy, hold that the human race is evolving through many stages, of which physical reality is but one and by no means the most important. Similarly the earth itself is evolving: you never step on the same earth twice. What is the relation between the two? Are we merely a side-effect of the earth’s evolution? If not, do the directions of human evolution and planetary evolution converge or conflict?

It’s useful to ponder on questions of such magnitude, but probably not so useful to jump to conclusions about the answers. My own intuition is that the human race is a collective, self-regulating entity, just like Gaia. It is known under many names: Adam Kadmon, Purusha, the maximus homo or “universal human” of Emanuel Swedenborg. It is moving in a trajectory of which we have little grasp: even the Theosophical concept of Root Races and Rounds is probably only a rough and approximate schematization. At this point the human level of consciousness coincides with this plane: that of life on earth. At some future point its level of consciousness will rise above this to another one, and, for us, the earth will be no more. It is not that the earth will cease to exist. It is rather that the human race and the earth will no longer vibrate on the same frequency, and they will go their separate ways.

The Orphic hymn may be alluding to such an idea when it has the recently deceased initiate proclaim, “I am a child of earth and starry heaven; but my race is of heaven.”

Of course, none of this has any bearing on current realities, including the need to cultivate our earthly garden while we are living in it. I often think that what the human race really needs right now is simply a Big Momma who says, “This place is a pigsty. Clean it up.”

Richard Smoley